Category: Lectionary Project

These posts form a weekly companion to the Sunday gospel reading of the Revised Common Lectionary.

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Until Something Better Comes Along

Second Sunday after Epiphany  |  John 1:29-42Fire

John is out by the river Jordan, baptizing people in the water. According to what the Gospel of John says, this other John is only out there to call attention to Jesus. This John is out there baptizing with water, biding his time until one comes who will baptize with fire.

Seeing Jesus walk by, John sends two of his own disciples to follow Jesus. Far from growing his own following, John is sending people away.

Clearly, he does not know how to build an organization.

From the time of Constantine, the Christian ideal has focused on building bigger congregations, bigger churches, gathering more members. Most religions do.

Jesus never did. It is easier to find stories of Jesus sending people away than it is to find him calling them together. He seems to have chosen only twelve core followers, and one of them was a failure.

There are many implications in this passage from John’s Gospel. One is that Christians may have the wrong idea about how to measure a successful church. Another is that outward baptism by water may have been a stopgap measure, an introduction to the inward baptism of the spirit. A third has to do with all of this walking and following—we are more likely to think we have arrived, but the first name for the Jesus movement was not Christianity: it was the Way.

On a more personal level, we might consider whether we are pointing to ourselves or to God. John the baptizer did not believe that he was the center of God’s universe. John pointed to someone greater than himself. He even sent the men who would have followed him to the end to follow someone else.

A religious man would have focused on building the organization. It takes faith to send people on the Way.

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Grace in the Darkness

Season of Epiphany  |  Baptism of the Lord  |  Matthew 3:13-17

SidewalkPlantThe lectionary leads us into the season of Epiphany, the showing or manifestation of Christ. Think of wise men seeing the young Jesus, and of Jesus becoming known to the world around him.

ἐπιφάνεια – ephiphaneia – epiphany – from the Greek verb “to appear” or “to show forth”: a manifestation, an appearance, a moment of realization

Consider Matthew’s account of the baptism of Jesus, an odd passage.

Jesus approaches John the Baptist and presents himself for baptism. At first, John refuses. It would seem to be a reasonable position: if Jesus is the Christ, the Lord, God incarnate, why would he need or submit to baptism? Why would such a ritual have any use for a god, let alone the God?

Not that the answer John gets is much use either: to fulfill all righteousness.

It may be that John simply threw his hands up at that point and said, “Fine.”

I have never read a single explanation of the baptism of Jesus that made any sense to me, at least none offering reasons of purity, or of a new beginning, or anything else that picks up on the customary uses and meanings of the baptism ritual—repentance, cleansing, dedication. Surely God has no need of repentance, or of cleansing, and surely Jesus was dedicated to his purpose in the very beginning (as John’s Gospel tells us).

Maybe for us the idea is closer to simple submission, or humility, even in the face of apparent meaninglessness. John submits to Jesus and performs the ritual, though he clearly does not understand the meaning of it himself. Jesus is submitting to the hands of John, though there is nothing to be gained; instead, Jesus’ submission may itself be a sign of grace. God is made known not only in human form, but humble even for a human.

We may sense God moving us to do something, though we do not understand the meaning or the value of it. Perhaps there is a meaning we do not comprehend. Humility and grace in the service of God, even when we do not see the purpose of what we do, may form the greatest experience and expression of faith.

We may not see the value of giving away our last candle. Perhaps it is simply that the other person lacks the faith to walk in our darkness and still find God.

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X By Any Other Name

Christmas  |  John 1:1-18

[Alternatively, Second Sunday After Christmas, not observed in 2016]

For the second Sunday after Christmas, or this year for Christmas, the Revised Common Lectionary offers John 1:1-18 as the Gospel reading. (You may also see a passage from Matthew referenced, there being some variation among lectionaries.)chi

The prologue of John is famous. These are the words offered in advance of the more ordinary telling of the Gospel story, and they begin, as most stories do, at the beginning. “In the beginning was the Word” is a recasting of the opening words of Genesis, the penultimate “in the beginning”.

At Christmas we often see the shortened form of Xmas, ‘X’ as used for ‘Christ’ even by the ancients in the times before storefront displays and decorated trees, and ‘Xmas’ itself for hundreds of years. The X of Xmas is not the ‘x’ of modern English: it is a Chi, an ancient Greek letter and the first in the name of Christ, written as Χριστός in the Greek alphabet.

The opening verse of John is, in fact, called a double chiasm. What does that mean? The thought structure of the verse, in Greek, would form two of our letter x’s, or two of the Greek letter Chi’s. Here is what the pairing of ideas look like using the Greek word order (different than the word order of the English translation):

The Beginning (God)                                          The Word

X

The Word                               With God

X

God                                           The Word

If you connect each reference to God (left to right to left again), and each reference to the Word (the Logos, or Christ – right to left to right again), you will have drawn two x’s. Or two Chi’s. The Gospel is using the image of the letter ‘X’ to emphasize the unity of God and Christ.

And yes, people in the ancient world did listen for that kind of thing, just as should we hear a modern day speaker offering a list of Light and Love and Life, we would expect the next item in the list to begin with an ‘L’ as well.

There is another comparison here in the beginning of this Gospel. It is a comparison of Jesus, the light of the world, and John the Baptist, who we are told quite plainly was not the light. It is an odd thing, surely, for an opening passage. Why bring out such a contrast, and right at the outset, if it did not have some overarching meaning for what was to come?

John, very much a human being, came to live in the wilderness, and the Gospel tells us that all John could do was point out the light to others. There is the obvious sentiment, of course: all we ourselves can do is point to the light.

There must be something more.

Right through the end of this passage in verse 18, the Gospel writer keeps alternating between the nature and work of Christ and the nature and condition of human beings. The contrasts go something like this:

God was in the world; we did not know God; God gave us power to transcend humanity (verses 10-13).

God became as us; we have not seen God; God the Son has made God known to humanity (verses 14-18).

God is starting with us where we are and taking us where we could not go.

Christians tend to take the later verse of John 3:16 and put it on every card, bumper sticker and billboard in the world. Perhaps we might consider that John 1:12-13 as a better summary of the Gospel message.

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Keep Dreaming

First Sunday after Christmas Day  |  Matthew 2:13-23

Three times in this passage we read that Joseph was warned in a dream. Just as before when Joseph learned that Mary was already pregnant and an angel appeared to guide him, it seems that Joseph’s angels appear to him only in dreams.Rainbow Wash 001

Dreams are that space where the walls we build around our innermost thoughts crack and come falling down. In our waking world we keep our fears at bay and we block out our hearts. In dreams, our fears disguise themselves and walk up to us, our desires walk out into the light to be seen. And in dreams, sometimes God speaks.

Maybe God is speaking to us all the time, and it is just that our dreams are the only place where our minds are quiet enough to hear.

The Magi came, strange wise men from the east. We know nearly nothing about them. It is likely Joseph knew nearly nothing. They came to see the child, left astonishing gifts, and departed never to be mentioned again. And after they leave, Joseph begins to dream.

He believes in the message of his dream enough to take his new family and hide them in Egypt, finding safety in what had been the land of Pharaoh. He has yet more dreams, and he believes in these enough to uproot his family again and to return to Nazareth.

Unlikely as it may seem, Joseph believed his dreams were the voice of God and acted on what he heard. Just like that.

A voice in our heads does not mean that God is speaking to us. Still, though the voice is just in our heads, it may be the voice of God. We only hear God when we stop to listen.

If we never act on our dreams, they remain only voices in our minds. When we act on our dreams, we meet God face to face.

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Only A Dream

Fourth Sunday of Advent  |  Matthew 1:18-25

In which Joseph dreams about an angel…Snow Path 001

Most of us would claim, if pressed, that should an angel appear to us and tell us what the Lord wanted us to do, then we would certainly follow the Lord’s bidding. In the meantime, if we somehow miss the mark, it is that we are unclear on just what it is that we ought to do.

Joseph, according to the story, was visited by an angel, and the angel told Joseph exactly what was going on and what to do. And of course Joseph did it. After all, there is no great difficulty knowing what to do when an angel comes and tells you, and any sensible person would do just as the angel said.

Joseph had learned that Mary, his bride to be, was already pregnant. We don’t know how that conversation went, but we may imagine that it was a bit awkward. We do find Joseph to be a thoughtful and kind fellow: while he was certainly not foolish enough to marry such a woman, neither would he add to her disgrace. He determined to break off the engagement quietly.

One might consider for a moment that the story does not, strictly speaking, say that Joseph saw an angel. In fact, the story says that Joseph dreamed about seeing an angel, which is not quite the same thing. If in broad and waking daylight an angel appears and tells you things, full of light and sound and actual presence, that would be difficult to rationalize away. If you only dream about an angel, well then, one begins to wonder.

If Joseph were very sensible, knowing how the world works and where babies come from, then he would have awakened that morning, shook his head, and muttered to himself that it was only a dream. Then he would have carried out his plan to break his engagement with Mary, gone and married some other woman, and he and what’s-her-name could have made a good life together. That would have been the sensible thing to do.

Following his dream, listening to the words he thought an angel whispered while he was sleeping, that was foolish. Ask any sensible person who knew Joseph.

Oh, that is right: we don’t know any of the people who thought Joseph was foolish. Their names are lost, and their lives are not remembered.

We do remember Joseph. He was brave enough to act on his dream. He was kind enough, loving enough, faithful enough to consider that God was at work in the midst of what appeared to be an untenable situation.

In the end, Joseph simply chose to believe that God was speaking to him. When Joseph made his choice, he did not have lights and trumpets and scrolls handed to him. He did not even have a proper vision, some waking encounter with God that someone else could, at least, observe and confirm in some way, if only to tell Joseph that he did, in fact, sort of blank out there for a few minutes. No, all Joseph had to go on was a dream.

And so Joseph made the best choice he could, despite the fact that well meaning and otherwise intelligent people were telling him he was wrong. He made his choice without certainty, and as he watched his wife’s belly grow, he must occasionally have wondered whether he had done something foolish.

In the end, Joseph knew that he had made the right choice. Just when things were going so badly that his new wife was giving birth in a rented stable, not even in a decent house, and they were so far from home that their nearest family member was a donkey, suddenly there were angels aplenty that everyone could see. And there were wise men coming from who knew where bringing gifts, pretty good ones.

By then, it may be that Joseph did not need angels and wise men to tell him he had made the right choice. Long before Bethlehem, and even if the child were to have been quite normal and unremarkable, he may have looked at Mary and known that he would love her and the child regardless. He had made his choice with what good sense he had, the love in his heart, and faith that God is in our choices and our dreams.