Jehoia-who?
Jehoia-who?
By Pastor Katherine Olson
This weekend’s reading from Jeremiah (36:1-8, 21-23, 27-28) describes the prophet’s clash with a disobedient king named Jehoiakim. When I first learned of the Scripture passage appointed for this weekend, my first thought was “Jehoia-who?” Most of you probably share my reaction – so for those of you who might like a refresher on ancient kings of Judah, read on.
At the Lord’s command, Jeremiah had his scribe Baruch write down the content of his prophetic preaching on a scroll, and then ordered him to take that scroll into the temple for a public reading (since Jeremiah was no longer welcome inside). Baruch carried out his duties, the scroll was read in the hearing of the people, and then the king’s cabinet members decided that Jehoiakim ought to also hear the words that called the wayward nation to repentance and posited a challenge to the status quo.
The scene then shifts to a chamber inside the palace walls – the king cozies up next to a fire in his luxurious winter apartment and hears the words which threaten his job security. As his servant read the scroll aloud, the king ripped shreds of the scroll off with a penknife and tossed each word, column by column, into the blazing fire.
Professor Roger Nam observes: “King Jehoiakim’s response, though deplorable, is not surprising in that the destruction of prophetic words is natural for a ruler who is both paranoid and massively self absorbed….(but) instead of eliminating the word of God, Jeremiah 36 shows that it is more powerful and lasting than the actions of a narcissistic king. The words of Jeremiah continue to find power two millennia later. King Jehoiakim is merely a footnote as a disobedient king.” Jehoia-who indeed!
Upon reading Nam’s observation about Jehoiakim’s “paranoid, massively self-absorbed, narcissistic, and disobedient” temperament, I smirked: “Gee, we wouldn’t have any political leaders like that in our world today, would we?” Yes, like many citizens in our country I’m still smarting from the events of a bitter political season. But my sense of smug contempt was soon tempered by another thought: “There’s a little king (queen?) that exists within my own heart…I possess all those same qualities too.”
I’m still working on my sermon for this weekend, but if you come to church, you’ll hear something like this: in Jesus Christ, we have an entirely different King, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:6-8) Exalted by the Father, he has also promised the riches of his kingdom to poor sinners like the criminal hanging on the cross (Luke 23:39-43), sinners like you and me.
Let us pray. King Jesus, obliterate the disobedience, sin, and selfishness that exists in our hearts by the fire of your Holy Spirit. Remember us in your kingdom, which, unlike all earthly powers, shall reign forever and ever. Amen.
A Reflection for Sunday
“And I heard the voice of the LORD saying, ‘Whom shall I send,
and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’” (Isaiah 6:8)
At the heart of our Old Testament reading for the worship services this weekend, is the calling of the prophet Isaiah. To be called by God, to proclaim his Word for the sake of others, is the whole matter of Vocation. Too often in the history of the church, this vocational matter of proclaiming or serving God’s Word has been understood as something only pastors or clergy do. Not so. For God uses each and every one of us … with each of our unique gifts and talents, no matter how great or small … in each of our respective occupations/stations in life … to serve as instruments of God’s forgiving mercy and grace … for the sake of others and God’s kingdom come. This is what Martin Luther calls the “priesthood of all believers” that begins in our baptism (cf. Luther’s Works 36: 113). One of my all-time favorite definitions of Vocation comes from the wise and wily Frederick Buechner, former professor of Yale Divinity School and well-beloved Christian author-preacher. Listen-in …
“VOCATION. It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a person is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do, and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only by-passed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.
[And here’s my favorite part (!) …] Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Fred Buechner; Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC pp.94-95)
j.r. christopherson
Senior Pastor
For All The Saints
“Saints: God’s Peculiar Treasures”
Jonah 1:1-2:2, 10; 3:1-5, 10 And Matthew 12:38-42
All Saints Sunday
Our Old Testament lesson for this coming weekend is an amazing story about a reluctant and cynical saint (“Did I say saint?!”), called by God to be a prophet … (“Ah, that’s where the sainthood comes from.”). His name is Jonah. You remember: the guy who was swallowed by a whale? … His fire ‘n brimstone sermon, the shortest in the Bible (Jonah 3:4b), perhaps “burns” Jonah even more than the folks whom God calls to repentance. The aforementioned folks are the dreaded terrorists of Jonah’s time: the Ninevites. One of Jonah’s fellow prophets describes the their Assyrian Empire as “bloody … all full of lies and booty – no end to their plunder” (Nahum 3:1). HOWEVER, upon hearing God’s Word through the prophet, Jonah … they immediately repent in “sack cloth and ashes” … all the way until the very cows “came home”! (Jonah 3:5-9).
If you listen carefully, you’ll come to hear that the book of Jonah is a humorous sort of story, and the joke seems to be on those who think that God’s love and grace are reserved only for the chosen people of God. (As you heard the rebuttal last Sunday: “But hey! We’re descendants of Abraham after all.” John 8:33) It’s a story that suggests that God is One and that the One God is God also of those whom “we” – the church – often exclude by our definitions of who’s “in” and who’s “out” with God. Anyone looking at their navels yet? How peculiar are we, those baptized into Christ, looking for-all-the-world to be a bunch of self-centered misfits; yet called by God to be his earthen vessels (some of us more cracked than others!) that carry his Word of peace and hope for the world. Peculiar treasures, we saints.
But then again, as we hear the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday … we realize that what is defining is the treasure we carry (see II Corinthians 4:7). “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.’ But he answered them, [going back full circle to our Old Testament reading] “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matthew 12:38-39). In a world, as the famous song lyric of the 60s observes, full of the sensational …“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign” … what is this sign that Jesus is referring to? (j.r. christopherson)
MARTIN LUTHER: GOD’S MAESTRO OF THE GRACE NOTE
(A Precis for Reformation Sunday 2016)
Martin Luther (1483-1546) is in relation to the Reformation (which we celebrate this weekend) much like the opening notes of some great symphony – say Beethoven’s “Fifth” – which states the theme, is then taken up by other instruments, and is finally absorbed into the developing pattern of music. The incredible soul searching and trials of this man – most often solitary, but never alone – affected a renewal, a re-formation for the whole orchestration of the Catholic Church of his time (“ … and still is ours today.”)
Luther stepped onto the stage of human history on account of an idea. That idea convinced him that the church of his day had misunderstood the Gospel; that is, the “good news” of God by grace alone, through faith alone, in the person of Christ and his cross alone … the essence of Christianity. It was therefore necessary to recall the church to fidelity, to reform initially its theology and subsequently its practices. This idea is summarized in a singular phrase: “Justification by grace through faith.” In his famous treatise of 1520, The Freedom of the Christian, Luther states: “One thing, and one thing alone is necessary for Christian life, righteousness and liberty. And that one thing is the Word of God – the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
From his own experiences of trying to live a righteous life – pure and holy before God – as an Augustinian monk, Luther realized that trying to “earn” God’s love and salvation was impossible. “For however irreproachable I lived as a monk,” wrote Luther, “I felt myself in the presence of God to be a sinner with a most disturbed conscience.” Luther’s troubles centered in one word, justitia – the “righteousness” or “justice” of God – as Luther studied St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, especially Romans1:17: “For in the Gospel the righteousness/justice of God is revealed.”
Initially, Luther understood this sense of justice in an “active” sense; that is, as something humanity had to earn by certain “good works.” If this were true, Luther could see only despair. But then, as he prayed and read further in the book of Romans, in Romans 3:21-26 … God’s Spirit turned Luther’s interpretation upside down: from an “active” sense to one that is “passive” – with God as the Subject, not the Object. Moreover, one might say, Holy Scripture began to interpret Luther. God’s light of grace began to shine brightly upon Luther, as he witnessed later: “At last by the mercy of God, I began to understand the justice of God as that by which God makes us just in God’s mercy and through faith in Christ” – a holiness that is completely outside of ourselves (as an “alien righteousness”). God’s saving Word, comes home to us in Christ, and continues so this day through the Church (that’s you and me) … proclaiming Christ for a world that is dying to hear such a radical grace-filled and saving word (cf. Romans 10:14-17; Ephesians 3:7-12).
The importance of this discovery is not that it was new, but that it was new for Luther. What he saw in the Bible … with spirited fresh eyes … he was able to teach others so that the doctrine of justification by grace had a new and central importance – serving as a safeguard against an over-reliance on human achievement or rituals. Keeping humanity always humble before Christ’s cross. And so it was that Luther “went to the wall” – with everything that was in him and more – in nailing his now famous 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church doors on October 31, 1517 … now nearing a 500th anniversary. In this re-forming/revolutionary act, Luther was protesting a human scheme (“the indulgence controversy”) that would tempt people into believing that they could, in any way, “buy-God-off” (cf. Romans 3:19-28; 5:8; 7:15-25a). For essentially, this would make the cross of Christ superfluous or unnecessary. It was on this belief, based on Holy Scripture and reason, that Luther faced a papal inquisition at the Diet of Worms in 1521, stating his now famous conviction: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise. God help me.”
By the end of the 1520s it was plain that the great solo instrument was being absorbed into the great symphony. Another reformation tradition was beginning to emerge in the cities of Switzerland and south Germany, raising-up its own leaders in Zwingli and Calvin. The possibility of a vast Protestant front was ended at this time at Marburg in 1520 when Luther and Zwingli could not come to an agreement over the interpretation of the Lord’s Supper. For Luther it meant the “real presence” of Christ. For Zwingli it was to be interpreted as a symbol – a “memorial.” Nonetheless, the Word went forth conquering. There was Luther’s translation of the German Bible, open at last to a growing literate audience of all classes – the “priesthood of all believers.” There was Luther’s own powerful evangelical preaching and writing. There were new forms of Christian instruction, like Luther’s beautiful children’s catechism (The Small Catechism) from which simplicity he said his prayers to the end of his days. His people of Germany, and those who call themselves Lutherans, learned to pray his German liturgy, and to sing his fine hymns, one which we sing today, the great hymn: A Mighty Fortress. It captures well Luther’s reforming theme in its verse: “Thy Word is our great heritage.” And this reforming Word still continues (semper reformanda).
What do they know of Luther who only Luther know? By 1525 and still more by his death in 1546, Luther was but one element, one note, in the Reformation symphony. In comparison with the great tides of history, even the giants are but dwarfs. Yet there are moments in world history, sometimes creative, sometimes destructive, or like the Reformation of Luther’s time, a bit of both, when it seems to matter that there are people who speak out in order to keep faith with their conscience – as informed by Holy Scripture – and who in a dangerous hour stand firm because, God helping them, they cannot do otherwise.
Dr. John Christopherson
Thoughts for Sunday
David falls prey to the classic trap of being chosen by God. Though he knows that everything comes from God, the thought creeps in that everything ends with him. God took him from being a young, nobody shepherd, and made him king of Israel, and victorious over Israel’s enemies. While David doesn’t dispute any of this, yet now he gets it in his mind that he repay God. He decides to build God a house. A house of cedar to house the ark of the covenant. It may seem like a reasonable gesture, a thankful offering out of God abundance, but God sees something more. God will not allow David to do him any favor, so that David has something to boast about. Instead, God promises to do even more for David, something David could never do even for himself. God will establish an eternal kingdom that will not decay, rot, or rust; a kingdom where God is Father and the ruler is God’s Son.