October 9, 2022
Proper 23 – Ted Hackett
I am going to ask you to do two things this morning.
I will frame two pictures for you…
And ask you to remember them both at the same time…
I don’t think you will find it hard…
They are memorable images.
The first is an image of first century Palestine…
Imagine a little band of Jews…blue collar guys..
Walking along a dusty, hot road…
Passing through an area which was neither Samaritan nor Jewish.
They have just entered a little village…
A cluster of small, simple houses and maybe a workshop and an Inn…..
And as they go they hear tinkling bells…
It is a small group of Lepers…
They have banded together because
they cannot associate with any “clean” people…
They are “unclean”…thought to be sinners who are contagious.
They are in dirty, tattered clothes and must wear bells
to warn people to keep away from them.
O.K. …Hold that picture…
Now…picture some of the astounding images you have probably seen taken by the new James Webb telescope…
Images of things that happened a quarter of a billion light years ago…
And light travels one hundred and eighty six miles…per second!
Do the math, as they say…
There are so many zeros in that computation
that I can’t wrap my mind around it…
That’s why physicists use the letter “C”
October 2, 2022
St. Francis – George Yandell
Often our religious leaders play a game with us- “activate your faith.” They extol, berate, confront us, saying, “If you had stronger belief like others, you could do marvelous things, create peace, bring world hunger to an end,” and so on. They make religion out to be a list of do’s and don’ts, and set up hierarchies of achievement. And they insist that there is only one correct system of belief, obtained by practicing their brand of religion.
Jesus said something powerfully different. In the passage just preceding our Matthew reading, Jesus tells about the difference between John the Baptist and the powerful people John upbraided, who refused repentance: “Father, you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants, for such was your gracious will…I am gentle and humble in heart: my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus suggests a big difference between the religion of the many, & faith in the simple things.
Religion is the human group endeavor to make faith both memorable and manageable. On the other hand, faith will have none of it, is always testing religion’s boundaries. Religion wants to make molds out of which it can reproduce faithful people; religion murders faith, but the irony is the two are such as to require one another. (This definition works with any institution, eg, government and justice, marriage and love, schools and truth, hospitals and health, etc, etc.)
Religion means “to re-connect us to God”.
September 25, 2022
Proper 21C – George Yandell
Jesus tells us another parable today, immediately following last week’s parable about the dishonest steward. This one is about an unnamed rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. In this study of contrasts and reversals, Jesus denounces the abuse of power and privilege by the wealthy at the expense of the poor and marginalized. Whereas the rich man dressed in fine clothes and “feasted sumptuously every day” (v. 19), Lazarus longed to eat even the scraps from the rich man’s table. He lay outside the gate of the rich man’s home and was covered with sores instead of purple linen. The fact that dogs—unclean animals—came to lick his sores added to his wretchedness and outcast status.
But the poor man has one thing that the rich man does not- the dignity of a name. Lazarus is the only person specifically named in any of Luke’s parables. The name itself is a variant of Eleazer, which means ‘God heals’ or ‘God helps’. The rich man is often referred to as Dives, a term derived from Latin for “rich man.” He is unnamed in the parable, however.
When both men die, their situations are reversed. Whereas the poor man “was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham”, the rich man found himself tormented in Hades. Lazarus now resides in comfort, while the rich man is cast out and endures agony. Lazarus once lay alone at the gate, longing for scraps of food;
September 18, 2022
Proper 20 C – George Yandell
Amy-Jill Levine writes [in Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (N. Y.: HarperOne, 2014): “Jesus knew the best teachings come from stories that make us laugh even as they make us uncomfortable. [Parables are] not tools for shaming or inculcating guilt, but for good hard lessons learned with a sense of playfulness.” We tend to domesticate the parables in order to control their meaning. “If the interpretation does not raise for us more questions, if it does not open us up to more conversation, if it creates a neat and tidy picture, we need to go back and read it again”. Parables challenge, provoke, convict, and amuse.
Today’s parable is a doozy. It does all the above- challenges, provokes, convicts and amuses. Over the centuries followers of Jesus have scratched our heads and gone to exhaustive lengths to try to understand, or explain away, what Jesus was (or was not) saying here. One writer suggests that this parable in particular, along with numerous other passages in Scripture, is more fully understood when viewed through the lens of humor. Unfortunately, the humor of Christ is usually overlooked as an aspect of his teachings. Laughter is the sudden perception of incongruity between our ideals and the actuality before us. [Adapted from Elton Trueblood in The Humor of Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1964.]
Jesus deliberately exaggerated to point out our foibles;