Category: Commentary

To see what God is doing in our reading from 1 Kings 17:8-16, we need to start with geography. God sent a message to the prophet Elijah, telling him to go to the Zarephath, a village in the land of Sidon. Sidon is a small country situated on the coast of the Mediterranean sea, bordering the northern part of Israel. Sidon is not Jewish even though some Jewish people lived there. Sidon was a community that traced it’s history to the Phoenicians who famously battled with David and other early leaders of the Israelites. When Elijah received this message, he was sitting in a dried-up wadi to the east of the Jordan River. No rain had fallen in the area for 3 years because God was unhappy with Ahab, the King of Israel. As we will discover later, King Ahab recently married Jezebel, a princess from the land of Sidon Jezebel is not Jewish and when she arrived in Israel, she brought her religion with her. The importation of gods and idols into the royal household was something God wasn’t happy about. God brings about a drought and compels Elijah to tell King Ahab what is going on (1 Kings 17:1). Elijah, rightly, fled Israel after making this statement to the King and he kept a low profile, waiting for the next word from God to come. And when that word comes, God told Elijah that a woman in the land of Jezebel would be the one who would take care of him.

We shouldn’t separate the miracle in this story from the geography because the geography tells us who God is. God isn’t a divine being that only operates in a small geographical area. God, according to 1 Kings, has authority everywhere. This might seem obvious to us but in ancient times, gods were local. Their power was centered in specific places and people. A war between neighboring cities and kingdoms wasn’t a battle between secular rulers: it was also a war between gods. A god needed to defend their own turf or be considered beaten and weak. For the people of Sidon, God was a local deity who operated in the land Israel. God’s power was limited by geography. But 1 Kings 17 shows Elijah, the widow, Ahab and the people of Sidon that God is the God of everywhere.

Imagine, for a moment, if we lived our lives knowing our God is everywhere. What would it look like to trust Jesus is with us in church, at school and in our homes? How would our lives grow if we truly believed that the God who helped a prophet in Sidon is the same God who will help us even if we’re not feeling pretty religious today? What would you do differently today if you knew that wherever you are, Jesus is there?

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week (or about our liturgy). This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, 11/11/2018.

How do we visualize goodness, grace and extravagance without using money? Money might have showed up around 5000 years ago and, by the year 700 BCE (BC), some communities were regularly minting their own coins. The Bible is full of early examples of money. Abraham buys land with money in the book of Genesis but when the Bible talks about his wealth, it points to the number of sheep he has. Solomon gives twenty cities in Ancient Israel to the king of Tyre in exchange for the precious material needed to make the holy Temple. Gold is, by this point, measured (in talents) but only a limited number of people had access to it. There’s a chance most people in Ancient Israel rarely saw money. The few coins they collected were probably used to pay certain taxes to religious and political authorities. For the common person, money was around but it wasn’t an everyday item. It rarely enticed the imagination of the people and wasn’t something they were emotionally invested in.

People might not have cared about money but they did care about wealth. And wealth was something they wanted. Wealth, on one level, was about having enough resources to gain a bit of control over their lives. Instead of a living a life that depended on how good the harvest was every year, wealth allowed a person to survive regardless of the harvest. A wealthy person wasn’t only someone who had 120 talents of gold in their house. A wealthy person also had sheep, goats, and storehouses filled with grain. A person with abundant and extravagant resources was able to feed themselves and their family year after year. So when Isaiah 25:6-9 tried to describe what living with God would be like, he wrote about a feast of good food that never ends.

Isaiah’s feast, of course, is no normal feast. The drink is fantastic, the food is rich, and we are invited to even gnaw on the bones. That might sound a little excessive if we’re vegan but that’s sort of the point. What God offers to us is a connection to the source of all life and that connection will be over the top. This connection is also designed to feed and sustain us. Faith isn’t abstract. Faith feeds, nourishes, and shows us how much God loves us. And this love, no matter where we are in our life, is abundant, over the top, and delicious. In the moments when we feel separated from God and that faith is meant for other people, Isaiah reminds us that God is always for us. And God’s love is extravagant, over the top, and will sustain us through all things.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week (or about our liturgy). This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for All Saints’ Sunday, 11/04/2018.

The Mega-millions lottery jackpot peaked at $1.6 billion dollars this week. I didn’t win but I, and maybe you, had fun dreaming about what we’d do if we won. We planned to help friends, pay down debts, and start a hundred new non-profits to help feed the world. The big jackpot allowed me to spend the week quoting my dad (“you can’t win if you play”) and reminding everyone, if they win, to tithe. Lotteries are big business in the United States. In 2016, they generated over $72 billion in ticket sales. States used the money to pay for programs or, in the case of New Jersey, to help pay their state pension problems. The lotteries are a form of gambling even if the wager feels pretty small. And like all gambling, it can be a form of personal entertainment or grow into something destructive. Winning the lottery shouldn’t be our retirement plan but, for some, the lottery might feel like their only hope for a better future. A lotto ticket, in some ways, is like a prayer.

We sometimes believe prayer is like winning the lottery. Our words become our ticket to get God to work on our behalf. It’s a plea to God to just do something. But our prayer during worship is more than an attempt to win this “divine” lottery. Prayer is, first and foremost, rooted in our relationship with Jesus Christ. When we pray for the church, we ask God to make the Christian community as life-giving as Jesus’ own body is to us. When we pray for the earth, we ask God to renew the goodness that’s around us. When we pray for each other, we want people close to us to be made whole. And when we pray for our elected officials and other leaders, we’re not asking for their will to be done. We are asking, instead, for God to rekindle their commitment to justice, humility, and mercy. God already wants all these things. God is actively working on these things. And our prayers, spoken and unspoken, are already heard. But when we name these prayers out loud, we also remind ourselves of what the Christian life is all about. Our prayers for healing remind us of our call to heal. Our prayers for the earth are a reminder that we, as stewards, can take care of our environment. Our prayers for the church invite us to share our faith in Jesus. And our prayers for our leaders are a reminder of the ways we all promise to commit ourselves to love, honor, and help one another.

Jesus knows that prayer can be hard. There are days when we don’t want to pray and there are moments when we feel as if we can’t. Jesus wants us to pray for those it’s easy to pray for and to pray for those we don’t want to pray for. And if we can’t, that’s okay. That’s why we pray, in worship, together. Trust that the people next to you will pray the prayers you can’t. And make sure you’re here to pray the prayers that are hard for them. Our prayers are not about trying to win the lottery. Our prayers are about trying to live into the love Jesus already gave us. And unlike our really low chance at winning the lottery, prayer does more than just connect us with God. Prayer also repairs, renews, and revives our souls.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week (or about our liturgy). This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for Reformation Sunday / 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, 10/28/2018.

When my great-uncle died, I discovered my mom’s family has a family graveyard plot. It’s located in the middle of an old graveyard covered in tombs, tombstones, statues and monuments. The family plot surprised me because a 12 foot obelisk was erected on it. The obelisk is covered and is overflowing with names to the point where the last few were added on a separate stone so that they can lean against it. Compared to the tombstones around it, this monument is actually pretty modest. But compared to today, it’s a little over the top. Large stones can be a sign of a family’s wealth and status even if they didn’t have much wealth or status. There’s no history in my family of any incredible wealth but that tombstone tells a different story. It’s safe to say that this family plot is located in the “rich” part of that old cemetery. In our context, that is seen as a good thing. But as we see in our first reading, Isaiah 53:4-12, being buried with the rich is a complicated metaphor that we need to unwrap.

This reading from Isaiah is one of the texts described as “The Suffering Servant.” The Suffering Servant was the name given to parts of Isaiah 52-53 in the 19th century. They describe a “servant” who is caught in a cycle of humiliation and exaltation. For our Jewish friends, the servant is typically identified as Israel (or an unnamed one at work in ancient Israel). For Christians, we identify the Suffering Servant as Jesus. In Jesus’ time, Isaiah 52-53 was not considered a prophetic text describing the Messiah (the one who would restore Israel’s power and glory). But once Jesus died and rose from the dead, early Christians saw these texts as one that described Jesus’ life and ministry. The Jewish and Christian interpretation of these texts are different but “both Jews and Christians have seen in their own history, in quite particular ways, the capacity and willingness of . . . God to do something new through suffering” (Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66, page 144.) The Suffering Servant texts are poems inviting us to discover the God who is at work in our world. Death, suffering, and vulnerability are not dead ends. We are, through our baptism, living into the new future God is bringing about.

The Suffering Servant is utterly rejected and that rejection continues from life into death. His burial among the rich is a negative thing. The people writing these words viewed the rich as those who took advantage of others. The Suffering Servant “is grouped with despised ones whom the world thinks have succeeded” (page 147). The Suffering Servant is a nobody who is the only one who can break the cycle of violence that exists in our world. But this violence – exploitation, hatred, anger, physical and mental assaults – can’t be broken by force. Violence, according to scripture, only begets more violence. Instead, the Servant, must break this violence by embracing what makes them vulnerable. It’s through weakness that God’s power is made known. Your hurt or weakness isn’t the limit of who you are. God knows you, including what makes you vulnerable, and loves you fully. We don’t know exactly how God’s power will be made real through us. But I trust that we’ll finally see God more clearly when we embrace what we try to run away from: our vulnerability. Then God is inviting us to change.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, 10/21/2018.

The book of Amos contains among the earliest sayings from a prophet recorded in the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament). Amos’ prophetic career was centered around the year 750 BCE (BC). We know very little about Amos’ life except for what’s recorded in the book itself. He was wealthy, owning substantial herds of sheep, and raised large orchards of fig trees. He lived in the town Tekoa, located a few miles south of Jerusalem. By this point, the original kingdom of David and Solomon had been split in two for centuries. The southern kingdom, centered around Jerusalem, was named Judah while the northern (and more powerful) kingdom was called Israel. At some point in Amos’ life, God compelled him to leave Judah and preach in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Amos wasn’t a professional prophet. He didn’t belong to the many prophetic schools and organizations that existed in ancient Israel. Instead, he was a wealthy business owner that God transformed into God’s mouthpiece. Amos’ words, while spoken in the Northern Kingdom, were directed towards anyone with wealth, power, and authority in both Israel and Judah.

As Amos sees it (Amos 5:6-7,10-15), those in comfort have lost sight of Israel’s special relationship with God. The covenant God established at Mt. Sinai (i.e. the ten commandments and the law) had been broken. The practicing of their faith had been reduced to mere performative acts. Instead of loving their neighbors and helping the power, those in power had increased the wealth gap between the rich and the poor. The wealthy feel entitled to bribe judges, believing that the laws of land were something only other people had to follow. Corrupt judges were installed in the courts (in the ancient world, courtrooms were in the city gates – see 5:10) so that they could rule in favor of the powerful. Amos, in chapter 5, is pronouncing a death sentence against the people of Israel because, according to Amos, God is about to enforce the terms of the covenant. Since Israel wasn’t fulfilling their end of the bargain, God was going to respond. Yet the situation was not completely hopeless. The invitation to take God’s covenant seriously was still open. Amos’ call at the end of today’s passage is to “seek good and not evil [so] that you may live.” Even in the midst of death, resurrection can always happen.

It’s easy for us to read this passage and believe it doesn’t apply to us. We can always think of someone richer than us or that these words are meant for a so-called “elite” or “establishment” that we are not a part of it. But what if we didn’t do that? What if we let Amos’ words speak to us? As a church in Northern New Jersey, we live in one of the wealthiest areas in the world. If we own our home, know where our next meal is coming from, and have any kind of savings or wealth at all, we have a lot in common with the audience Amos was speaking to. This reading is an invitation for us to re-evaluate how our faith impacts how we live, consume, and practice any power that we have. And if our actions do not match our faith, then God is inviting us to change.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, 10/14/2018.

Our first reading today (Genesis 2:18-24) has been used for centuries to place women into subservient positions. The words man, woman, helper, and partner reinforce culturally defined expectations of what relationships and marriages should be. The word helper can be used in a diminutive way, reducing the “helper” to someone less than the person being helped. A partner, in our language, can sometimes make this person less than the person they’re partnering with. Part of this problem comes from our frame of reference. If we keep the “man” at the center of the action, we make the entire story revolve around him. But if we take a step back and place God at the center of this text, than the interpretation we commonly use to reinforce our culturally constructed gender roles begins to unravel.

This text is part of the second story of creation in our Bible. The first story (which also includes the creation of human beings – Genesis 1:26-29) involved God creating the universe and saying that many things are “good.” Today’s text is the first time when God noticed something “not good.” The “man” was alone and God viewed their loneliness as “not good.” The word “man” is a poor translation, and we should replace “man” in Genesis 2:18-22 with “human being” because the spectrum of gender hadn’t been created yet. The “human being” represents everything that a person could be. And God doesn’t like that this person was alone. God wanted people to have life-giving relationships so God invented every kind of animal, trying to give the human a compatible companion. The companion for the human should be a partner (like a co- equal partner in a law firm) and a helper. God doesn’t see helpers as something negative. Rather, the Bible calls God a “helper” over and over again (ex. Psalm 115). God wanted the human being to have a companion as life-giving to them as God is. But after failing to create an animal or bird that would work, God used the human as a template to create their life-giving companion. And since this new companion is from the human, the human (who is changed and is now Adam), is called to be a helper too. God values the relationships we create with each other and those relationships, when they give us life, are good.

Much of the commentary on this text focuses on the nouns (helper, partner, woman, man, etc.). We usually don’t spend enough time looking at verse 23 which, according to the second story of creation, was the first recorded words Adam (the man) spoke: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” This phrase is rooted in joy because they discovered who, along with God, will help them become who God is calling them to be. In this joy-filled moment, they stand before each other as they truly are. They are naked. They are vulnerable. They are unpretentious and full of possibilities. They are as God made them to be: people who can love each other because they are loved.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, 10/07/2018.

There’s a word I read this week that I found helpful while reading this text from James 5:13-20 today. That word is “speech-acts.” We know our words have power. We use them to bless and curse. The same voices that lavish praise on Jesus also swear at the person who cuts them off on the New Jersey turnpike. The words we use are more than just words. Words create actions. They make people feel joy and pain. With words, we can inspire people to great acts of beauty. And with words, we can destroy souls. Words are powerful, living things. And James, as we saw in chapter 3, knows the problems words can cause.

But James also knows who we are. We are followers of Jesus. As he wrote in 1:17-18, “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” We are God’s creatures which means we have new words to speak. Our words, like God’s love, is rooted in generosity. Our words are meant to tend and serve each other. The words we speak should create new kinds of actions that bring love, gentleness, and hope to the people around us. Our words are powerful because the Word, Jesus himself, is the center of everything we say and do.

So what should our speech-acts look like? Rev. Robert Hoch writes, “If someone is suffering, let them pray. If someone is happy, let them sing songs of praise. If someone is sick, ask the elders to come and anoint them with oil and pray for their healing. Confess your sins to one another. Be reconciled. Be renewed. Be whole. Learn from people like Elijah, who was just like us, and whose prayers were powerful and effective amid natural and political droughts. Restore one another to the community forged in God’s image.” Our words should shape our actions to clearly resemble exactly who we know Jesus Christ to be.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost, 9/30/2018.

The last verse in our James reading today 3:13-4:8 (“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you”) doesn’t sound very Lutheran. This verse seems to imply God works through transactions. If you do something for God, then God will do something for you. If you say the right prayer, donate to the right cause, or act like you are really sorry, then God will respond by showering you with grace and love. In this kind of faith scheme, God is an accountant, waiting for our move before God gives out the goods. But God isn’t into transactions and there’s nothing we can do for God to love us more. So what should we do with a verse like 4:8?

We need to remember James 1:17-18 when we read any passage in James: “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” We are, through the gift of faith, born anew. It’s through the Spirit when we finally learn to trust God. Our faith needs to come from God or else we’ll create a personal faith that always wonders what we’ll get out of it. Faith is a gift from God that awakens this truth: we truly are God’s beloved children.

Since we are beloved, God invites us to live as if we are truly loved. That isn’t always easy. The Bible isn’t a guidebook with detailed instructions on how we are supposed to act in every possible situation. Instead, God trusts us to see the gifts God gives us and respond accordingly. James in this passage, I think, doesn’t see God as an accountant waiting to give us gifts after we do the right thing. Instead, God is always there even when we fail to love like God does. Drawing near to God is an invitation to embrace our need for repentance. We need to, over and over again, admit our failures and our sin. We need to remember there is a God and we are not it. We, through worship, prayer, study, and confession, return to God as a way to embrace who we already are. We are loved. We are God’s. We are with Jesus. And so we make the conscious choice to re-engage with God knowing that God has never disengaged from us.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, 9/23/2018.

“For all of us make many mistakes” [James 3:2]

Amen.

In a commentary I heard this week, the author said James 3:2 is their theme verse. We all make mistakes because we are not God. The choices we make impacts the world in ways we can’t fully predict or control. James 3:2 isn’t at attempt by the Bible to excuse our mistakes. Instead, it’s an attempt at owning who we are. We are not perfect and we will hurt the people around us. The church is not immune from being a place where this kind of hurt happens. And that is a hard thing to accept because faith is a team sport. God knows that we become who we are supposed to be when we are in communities that follow Jesus. We need other people because they have the gifts we need to thrive. We need their talents for study, prayer, teaching, and more. We need them to care for us and we need to care for them. When we are together, our faith grows. But since we are together, we can find ourselves in situations where our mistakes hurt the ones around us.

James spends today (3:1-12) looking at what we say. He knows words have power. Our words can show others they are loved and valued. Our words can cause harm and destruction. We shower praises and thanksgiving on God and then a few minutes later, shower others with the “colorful” language that is part of our New Jersey identity. What we say to each other affects lives. It’s also affects our faith. If we, as God’s beloved children, speak harshly and poorly to each other, what does that say about God?

When we start our worship with confession and forgiveness, we are publicly acknowledging who we are. We are sinners who make mistakes. We also declare there is a God and we are not it. Yet our words and our actions reflect who we imagine God to be. As we heard in James 1:17-18, “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” If we believe God is full of grace, love, and mercy than we, as God’s people, should practice these virtues every day. We need to see each other as beloved children of God. We need to see our enemies as people made in God’s image. We need to listen when it’s difficult and acknowledge the hurts we’ve felt or caused. And we need to also give ourselves and other people grace. Because we will make mistakes. But we don’t have to let those mistakes limit who know knows we can be.

Each week, I write a reflection on one of our scripture readings for the week. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship Bulletin for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost, 9/16/2018.