Preaching Notes for the Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (September 6, 2015)

Preaching Notes for the Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost (September 6, 2015)

The Rev. Dr. Dawn Chesser

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23

I’m going to begin my comments with a confession: I’ve never preached a sermon on Proverbs. So now that that’s out in the open, you have several choices. You could move on to my comments on another text. You could look for a commentary from someone who has actually preached on Proverbs before (may I suggest Alyce McKenzie?) Or you could stay with me while I try to make sense of this collection of wisdom sayings from chapter 22 of Proverbs.

If you are still reading, I guess you must have taken option three. Thank you for going on this journey with me. I began writing these notes from the campus of United Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where I was privileged to sit at the feet of Dr. Gene Lowry for three days as he taught about preaching on the parables of Jesus for United Seminary’s annual Summer Preaching Institute. While there, I purchased Alyce McKenzie’s book, Preaching Biblical Wisdom in a Self-Help Society(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002).I also went to the library and consulted her previous book on Proverbs, Preaching Proverbs: Wisdom for the Pulpit(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). I commend both of them to you as excellent preparation if you are going to stay in Proverbs over the coming weeks. The earlier work, Preaching Proverbs: Wisdom for the Pulpit, is an excellent introduction to the genre. The book from 2002, especially chapter five, is helpful in interpreting the Proverbs for the current generation.

I have usedsome of Dr. Lowry’s advice this week and taken the time read the verses that have been left out of the lectionary to see if I can discern a reason for the omission. My guess is that the creators of the Revised Common Lectionary chose this collection of sayings because they are related to one another by a common subject: wealth and poverty and the relationship of money to justice and injustice in the world.

The thread of tension that runs through all the verses inthis collection of sayings from Proverbs has to do with how the wealthy of the world treat the poor. This is an uncomfortable thing—an “issue” or a “problem”—for me personally because I write from the position of privilege. Your own context may be different from mine, and I urge you to approach this text from the primary perspective of your own situation as well as that of the community you serve.My primary audience is United Methodist preachers across (and sometimes beyond) the denomination, and I write as a Caucasian American,educated, relatively affluent female. Who is your audience, and what from what perspective do you approach this text? How does that affect what you hear in this wisdom?

The writer (or writers) of these sayings is very clear that the Lord is the maker of both the rich people and the poor people of this world. Does that mean that God creates some people to be rich and some to be poor? I don’t think so. I think it simply means that both the rich and the poor are God’s beloved children and are equally deserving of God’s blessing and grace. Unfortunately, lots of people who have more in this life do not do very much to relieve the suffering of those who have less.

The bottom line for this set of sayings is that God doesn’t just hope for, or gently urge people when it is convenient, to care for the poor. God demands that God’s people, especially those who have been blessed with privilege and abundance, be generous with what has been given to them. Failure to do so has consequences: “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fail” (Proverbs 22:8, NRSV). Other translations are more explicit: “Whoever sows injustice reaps calamity, and the rod they wield in fury will be broken” (NIV); “Those who sow injustice will harvest evil; the rod of their fury will come to an end” (CEB); “Whoever sows sin reaps weeds, and bullying anger sputters into nothing” (The Message).

We don’t want to say such things from the pulpit, especially if we are preaching to the rich! But as this and the other passages from the lectionary for this week remind us, calling God’s people to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God is not optional. It is a mandate that persists throughout our sacred texts.

James 2:1-10, 14-17

This is week two of my notes intended for a five-week series on James. The topic for this week is, as in the reading from Proverbs, the relationship between the rich and the poor, and especially the responsibility of the faithful to the poor. It raises some difficult questions for the church.

If I think about my own church, or indeed, the majority of churches I have served over the course of my career, I would say that,in general, when membership committees at the churches I have served met to plan how they could attract visitors and draw new people into membership, most of the time the committee members were envisioning people who were a lot like them. That is to say, I have spent all of my career serving affluent, theologically centrist, mostly Caucasian congregations who, if asked to name their “target audience,” were looking to attract other affluent, theologically centrist white people to join their church.

The reality of our modern world is that many existing United Methodist Church buildings sit in the midst of neighborhoods that have changed dramatically over the years. This often creates a problem in terms of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with the neighbors of the church. Maybe it would be most helpful for me to illustrate this by way of two examples from my own life.

The first church I ever served was located in a historically white working-class town southwest of Chicago. The church had been founded by white workers from Appalachia who had migrated to the outskirts of the city to work in the steel industry after World War II. Most of the members of the church had lived in the immediate vicinity of the church earlier in life, but had left the neighborhood when first African American families, and then Hispanic families, began moving into the neighborhood. The longtime members came back to the neighborhood on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, and occasionally at other times for meetings, but the rest of the time they kept the building locked up tight. They even put up chains across the entrance to the parking lot and “No Trespassing” signs on the property. Only a few members of the church still lived in the neighborhood where the church was located, and the neighborhood families were not the target audience whom the church sought to attract into membership.

More recently, I moved to East Tennessee, where I received an appointment to a growing church in a small town outside of a city. On the day that I was to be introduced to the staff parish committee, my husband and I drove over to the town early. I had never been to the town before, and I thought it would be good to drive around and get a feel for the community before I went to the meeting.

As we drove around the older part of the town, we noticed that many of the signs on the commercial buildings were in Spanish. We talked about how the community must be somewhat diverse and wondered how that was affecting the ministries of the church to which I was being appointed. So when I went to the meeting, I asked the committee about the racial and ethnic make-up of the community. The members of the committee told me that the town was “lily white” and that there really wasn’t much racial or ethnic diversity to speak of. I responded by pointing out that my husband and I had spent some time driving around the town and had noticed a lot of signs in Spanish. The members then admitted that the Hispanic population was growing quickly due to there being work available to “them” in a nearby factory. When I asked if they had done anything to reach out to this new population, they said that “they” weren’t very interested in Methodism. The church had tried to establish a few programs to reach out to the Hispanic community in the past, but they had not succeeded. They were confident that other religious groups were doing a better job than they could at reaching out to the Hispanic community in their town.

I do not think that the members of either of these churches explicitly objected to the face of the church changing to better reflect its neighbors. It was more like they had an “us” and “them” mentality toward their neighbors. They saw the people of the neighborhood who were different from them as people to be served rather than the future of the church, and as such, they didn’t change anything about what they were doing in order to share the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ in the language of the newer people in their town, or to bring their new neighbors into membership in the church.

I share these two stories from my own experience because I think that what I’ve said about them is true of many churches. What experiences have you had that are similar to what I have shared? What story can you tell that might open the eyes of your current congregation to seeing those who might be invisible to them? How can you encourage them to take steps to be in ministry with their neighbors?

The writer of James makes it very clear we are to push beyond these mindsets and specifically reach out with Christ’s love to all people, especially those who are poor and struggling:

“My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there,’ or ‘sit at my feet,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?. . .You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:1-4, 8-9, NRSV).

James invites us to take a hard look at ourselves and our communities. But his challenge is only “good news” for us if we take him seriously and begin making the changes that are necessary to become the church of Jesus Christ for all the world.

Who are your neighbors?
Who lives in the houses around your church building?
Does the face of your congregation reflect the faces of the people who live in the neighborhood?
Who in your community are not being included in the family of Christ?
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?

Mark 7:24-37

This week we have two stories that have both similarities and differences.

This story about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman is a little disturbing. We like to think of Jesus as always being gentle, loving, and responsive to anyone who asks for his help. But when we read this story,we see something else. According to Mark, when this Syrophoenician woman came to Jesus, knelt before him, and begged him to heal her daughter, not only did Jesus refuse to help her, but he told her that the children of Israel were God’s chosen peopleand that the Gentiles were nothing but dogs.

So Jesus comes across as a bit harsh, unkind, and narrow-minded. As such, it might be easier to simply avoid dealing with this Scripture and preach on something else today. Perhaps justignore this part and go on to the next story, where Jesus is seen not only responding to a deaf man with a speech impediment, but actually curing him of his problems.

Unfortunately, God’s word is not always easy, and the lectionary does not always allow us to avoid the more challenging passages. This story where Jesus starts to turn away that Syrophoenician woman reminds us that we Christians have a tendency to overlook that Jesus was not only Jewish, but according to someScriptures, onlythose of Jewish descent were God’s chosen people. Furthermore, according to those same Scriptures, God sent Jesus not for everyone, but specifically to save God’s chosen people. According to the Gospel of Matthew, for example, after Jesus had gotten the twelve disciples together, he sent them out with instructions that they were to go nowhere among the Gentiles nor to enter any town of the Samaritans, but that they were to go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

It is only because Jesus changed his mind and responded in love to heal her daughter that this Gentile woman, and all the other countless Gentiles who have come to know Christ, can get the food that was originally intended for God’s chosen people. We were not part of the original plan. We were not initially invited to the table of the Lord. The good news here is that by the grace of God shown in Jesus Christ, the way has opened, andthe rest of us have been saved.

The second story is more straightforward. After healing the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter of her demon, Jesus went down to Decapolis, where, Mark tells us, “they” brought a deaf man to him and begged him to make him well. Jesus took the man off to a private place where he proceeded to perform a very detailed ritual that is painstakingly described by the writer. The man is miraculously healed, and Jesus tells “them” not to tell anyone what had happened.

So I have a couple of questions to explore about this. First, who are “they?” Are “they” Jesus’ disciples? Are “they” the people who are traveling with Jesus? Or are “they” some people from Decapolis who have come seeking healing?

And second, if Jesus took this man away to heal him in private, and ordered no one to tell anyone else about what happened, how is it that this detailed account of the exact ritual Jesus used to conduct the healing came to be not only told over and over again, but written down and preserved so that you and I are still hearing about it, over two thousand years later? Mark gives us a clue to the answer when he comments that “the more he ordered them [not to tell], the more zealously they proclaimed it” and “They were astounded beyond measure, saying ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak’” (Mark 7:36-37).

It seems to me that both of these stories have to do with “telling” or giving witness to the good news of Jesus Christ to communities beyond the original groups for which they were intended. Indeed, all three lessons for today share this common theme.

We are constantly challenged by Jesus to look beyond what is easy and obvious and continually search for ways to proclaim the good news to the lost and the least. How are you pushing your own congregation to share the amazing news of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ for all the people who live in your community?

How are you sharing God’s love with people from other cultures?
How are you sharing God’s love with the disabled and differently-abled?
How are you sharing God’s love with the poor, the lost, the oppressed?
How are you sharing God’s love with those from religious traditions other than your own, or maybe with those who have rejected religion altogether?