Sermon: We Didn't Come This Far Just to Come This Far

First Presbyterian Church

July 27, 2025, Pentecost 7C

Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

 

We Didn't Come This Far Just to Come This Far

 

 

The quote itself can be found attributed to a number of different individuals, including a sci-fi/fantasy author and a reality TV star. It came to my attention, though, when it was quoted several times by one of the top athletes on the Kansas City professional sports scene. No, I'm not talking about Patrick Mahomes or Taylor Swift's boyfriend or anybody on the Chiefs. I'm talking about Bobby Witt, Jr., the young All-Star shortstop for the Kansas City Royals (Side note: if I were going to talk about *the* top athlete, it would have to be someone from one of KC's soccer clubs. You can't play that sport at all without being an insanely good athlete.)

As the Royals were making their unlikely push for the playoffs, Witt Jr. was increasingly the member of the Royals sought out by the media to get a feel for where the team was. First as the team assured themselves of a winning record for the first time in nine years, Witt Jr. refused to be satisfied with that achievement; then when the team clinched a playoff spot, that wasn't enough either; finally, winning that first playoff series prompted that same refusal to be satisfied one more time, in these words: "We didn't come this far just to come this far." The quote and the spirit behind it became popular enough to be turned into a t-shirt. [show t-shirt]

Wherever Bobby Witt Jr. came up with that line, it's a good one, even for churches. 

We've been through two years together of study and reflection on this church and its place in this community, sometimes intense, sometimes more casual. We've looked at questions about how things have changed since the last time this church called a non-temporary pastor, whether it might be time to think about the building or about a part-time pastor or even if closing the church might be an option (not at this time, came the conclusion). Then a Pastor Nominating Committee was formed and did the work of putting together a profile of the church for potential pastors to consider. They conducted several interviews, narrowed the field of candidates, and finally chose Pastor Amie Vanderford, who will be in this pulpit next Sunday and the Sundays going forward. Eventually I’ll be off to another church to do this process again.

For any church looking to go forward, there are always precautions to be observed and things to remember. Our scriptures for today offer a couple of examples. Neither of these should be earth-shaking, but they're still worth remembering.

The rather dense passage from Colossians, one of those books with Paul's name on it but probably not actually written by Paul, contains some language that isn't typical of Paul's letters but nonetheless does make a point that Paul would want to make: do not be put off from the fullness of Christ by things that are, so to speak, only human. Here our author speaks of "hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of the world" as a thing to be avoided; indeed he urges the church to "let no one take you captive" to such things. 

It might be a shock to see "human tradition" cast in such a negative light, particularly given the church's propensity to honor and revere tradition in its theology and practice. I find (and I freely admit this is my own conclusion) that this statement might be better understood in modern minds by reference to a variant of that word: traditionalism. 

Tradition is a foundation, something that can be and is even meant to be built upon. Traditionalism, on the other hand, uses that foundation to build a prison, limiting and constricting rather than growing and encouraging. In the words of theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name."[1]

There will be temptations in this community around us, seeking to impose "human tradition" on us. To put it bluntly, there will be churches in this town that condemn this church for calling a woman as pastor. Clearly, they've never read Romans 16, in which Paul commends the deacon Phoebe, the evangelist Prisca, and the apostle Junia for their work in the church. Those strictures are "human traditions" best left aside.

The foundation of our faith in Christ is in Christ. Seems like a redundant thing to say, but clearly the church has a habit of forgetting that on a regular basis. But in all earnestness, the foundation of our faith in Christ is in Christ, and nothing else. Not human-enforced doctrine, or human-based tradition, nor even in human comfort and familiarity.

Speaking of familiarity...

Hopefully you've noticed that the passage we heard from Luke sounds familiar and sounds different at the same time. (I truly and deeply pray that no one said that it sounded "wrong"...) As is often the case, the same event - the disciples asking Jesus to pray - is covered by both Matthew and Luke, but those two gospel writers cover it just a little bit differently. 

You might notice that Luke, in comparison to Matthew, doesn't quite finish the prayer. And of course, where we are accustomed to asking God to "forgive us our debts," here the text simply says "Forgive us our sins." Admittedly "debts" can be a big deal, but "sins" really does get to the point more directly and clearly. And yet churches can split over which version or translation of the Lord's Prayer is used in a service. 

I know that this is a horrifying thought. There's a reason we Presbyterians are the butt of a particular version of the old light bulb joke. It goes like this:

Q.: How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?

A.: Change???!!!

 

If that's you, I have news for you: some things will change.

Pastor Amie, who will be in this pulpit next Sunday, is going to be a different pastor and preacher than I am or than Pastor John was before me. Change will happen. 

Here's the thing, though; things would have changed anyway, no matter what pastor you called. For that matter, some things would have changed even if Pastor John had stayed all this time. It is an inevitability of human existence and of the church in a world that changes. Things change. It simply happens.

If the church remains rooted in Christ, as Colossians instructs us to do, all the change in the world cannot change that. If the church remains rooted in Christ, all the "human tradition" and the "basic principles of the world" cannot change that. If the church remains rooted in Christ, in fact, we will discover that some things about the way we do church may need to change, but the church's rootedness in Christ does not change. Whether we say "debts" or "trespasses" or "sins" in the Lord's Prayer does not change the need for the church to remain rooted in Christ. 

While the Royals don't look like there's another playoff charge in them this season, Bobby Witt Jr. still got one thing right: we really don't come this far just to come this far. Next Sunday will mark a new beginning for this church, not the end of anything. 

We didn't come this far just to come this far. The church still has more work to do.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #41, O Worship the King All Glorious Above; #275, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God; #693, Though I May Speak (The Gift of Love)

 

 

---

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, "The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

See, it really did get made into a t-shirt...

Note: this was the final sermon I preached at First Presbyterian Church of Independence.

Sermon: In Praise of Martha. Yes, Martha.

First Presbyterian Church

July 20, 2025, Pentecost 6C

Genesis 18:1-10a; Luke 10:38-42

 

In Praise of Martha. Yes, Martha.

 

Hot on the heels of the Good Samaritan parable (which, you’ll remember, ends with Jesus’s instruction to “Go and do likewise” in showing mercy to those in need), we come to an event that almost – almost – seems to contradict that instruction. 

A little context is helpful here: this happens, as does last week’s account, during the journey that takes up the central portion of Luke’s gospel. In 9:51, Luke tells us that “when the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” That particular idiom points not only to the geographical destination of the city of Jerusalem itself, but also the inevitable confrontation that would take place there – the “final showdown” of Jesus’s earthly ministry that would end (or so it seemed) in his crucifixion. While trying to trace out a map of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem according to Luke would be a pretty vexing task, this unnamed town was apparently on the way. Even the most determined travelers need to stop and rest on occasion, after all.

We are told here that “a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.” This raises a lot of questions for such a seemingly simple sentence: who is this woman Martha? Did she know Jesus already? How is it she is the “head of the household,” so to speak – it wasn’t unprecedented in this time, but it wasn’t common either. Did Jesus already know Martha? And what happened to the disciples? Were they not invited in? Luke, however, isn’t interested in such details.

The story is pretty familiar: Jesus enters the home, where Martha is at work on the tasks of hospitality. Her sister Mary sits at Jesus’s feet – the traditional posture of a teacher’s disciple at the time – and listens, offering no help to her older sister (it’s not said, but you just know that Mary is the younger sister, don’t you?). Martha loses her patience, but rather than calling upon Mary to help, she appeals to Jesus to make Mary help her. Jesus declines, answering Martha with the somewhat cryptic words of verses 41 and 42, and that’s the end of this brief narrative.

It’s at least possible, and maybe even likely, that Martha knew who Jesus was and vice versa. Earlier in chapter 10 Jesus commissions seventy of his followers to go out and visit and proclaim in the towns he intended to visit on his journey. It’s possible that Martha had hosted one or more of those witnesses in her home, and some have even suggested that she and Mary had actually been among those seventy. At any rate, that mission might well have prompted Martha to welcome Jesus into her home. 

Whatever the case, Jesus enters the home, where we first encounter Mary. We never hear from her, though, and there’s no suggestion that she speaks at all, even if she is in the disciple position at Jesus’s feet. This is actually a little odd, in that exchanges of questions and answers would have been expected between teacher and disciple; perhaps Luke just didn’t care about recording that, or perhaps she never spoke. Whichever was the case, she wasn’t providing any help to Martha, and this eventually got to Martha. She complains; Jesus does not come to her aid, and the story is over. 

And from this, for decades if not centuries, Martha has been made into the “bad guy” (so to speak) of the pair. And this isn’t fair. There is, in the end, a needed lesson that comes out of this encounter, but the church has long mastered the art of getting the wrong lesson.

First, let’s be sure that we understand that Martha’s work itself is not the problem. I'm from Georgia, and I know that southerners tend to think they have the corner on hospitality, but both the Jewish tradition Martha inherited and the Mediterranean culture in which she lived both mandated the provision of hospitality to any guest, even an unexpected one. The former is demonstrated in the reading from Genesis we heard earlier. Note that when the three men passed near Abraham and Sarah’s dwelling, Abraham went out of his way to welcome the unknown guests. (Just because Abraham referred to “my lord” – small ‘l’ – doesn’t mean he knew he was speaking to The Lord –  capital “L”.) Both Abraham and Sarah end up thoroughly busy preparing food and drink for the three men, without the guests even asking. For the most part this story is told because of that out-of-the-blue promise by the stranger that Abraham and Sarah would have a son before long, but the extravagant act of hospitality offered by the two is almost prototypical of the expectation of hospitality in that tradition. So Martha is not wrong to be doing the work of hospitality: indeed, in ninety-nine similar situations out of one hundred, Martha would have likely been judged to be in the right.

But what makes this Situation No. 100? Notice how Martha is described: not as “busy,” but as “distracted.” Do you ever have the experience of getting so involved or overwhelmed, or “distracted,” by the “many tasks” involved in preparing for company that you almost forget you have company at all or why that company matters? That’s a bit of where Martha has ended up, and Mary’s absence doesn’t help. The tasks themselves take over in her mind, rather than the guest for whom those tasks are performed. 

That’s a problem. And that problem is amplified by the fact that this is no ordinary guest Martha is hosting. Much as it turned out for Abraham and Sarah, this is not an occasion to be distracted and miss the message that this guest is bringing.

Remember, this is the Jesus who has “set his face towards Jerusalem,” and who had sent out witnesses in advance to the towns he intended to visit on the way. Whether or not Jesus had met Martha and Mary before this visit, it seems pretty clear that Jesus’s presence in this village was not an accident, and quite likely neither was his presence in Martha’s home. And when Jesus  (again, Martha knew enough to call him “Lord” – capital “L” - rather than the more common “my lord” – small “l”) has come specifically to you, to speak to you and to listen to you, it’s kind of important not to miss that.

And it’s definitely out of line to seek to prevent another from being present for Jesus. Honestly, for me it’s pretty easy to be suspicious of Mary in this story and to suspect that she’d quite likely behave the same way whether the guest was Jesus or not, but in this case she does get it right. Jesus is here, and (as Jesus himself knows whether or not Mary or Martha do) Jesus won’t be there for long. Listen while you can. 

Here lies the dilemma for us, those of us today who would learn from this story. The mandate that was given at the end of last week’s parable (which, you’ll remember, leads directly into today’s reading) doesn’t go away. We are still called to do. We are still charged to show mercy to the ones in need, to refuse to engage in hatred or fear of the stranger or the wounded or the foreigner in the land. We are still charged to provide hospitality. That doesn’t go away. 

But we are also charged to stop and listen to the speaking of God. We are still called to study and reflect on the words of Jesus. And we are called to listen, listen always for the leading and prompting of the Holy Spirit, that pervasive presence of God that broke out at Pentecost and still moves and breathes and acts and, yes, speaks in the world today. God has not shut up; God, the Holy Spirit, still speaks.

We are still charged to listen for the calling of God. God is not a closed book, confined or imprisoned forever in history or tradition or bound up in the pages of any book. God is not contained, and the moment we decide we’ve got God all figured out and don’t need to listen anymore, we become heretics. Yes, I used that word.

God still calls. Believe me, sometimes I wish God had stopped calling people years ago and that I was still in that comfortable old academic life I used to know. Being a pastor in this day and age is no picnic, but God does still call women and men into the vocation of service, whether in ordained ministry or in any other form. God still calls us to do the more mundane tasks of love and compassion and mercy as well. But being able to answer that call requires listening, and sometimes that requires stepping away from the work and taking time to be disciples, sitting at Jesus’s feet and doing nothing but listening.

In short, there are times and places to be Martha, and times and places to be Mary. Honestly, we live in a world that needs a whole lot of Martha-ing. Need and suffering are endemic, and when people are calling empathy a sin, compassion and basic human decency are in seriously short order. Our call is not to stand down from the world and retreat into some kind of splendid isolation or contemplation. We have work to do.

However, in order to do that work properly, we do need to spend time, maybe even in isolation, listening for God, awaiting the moving and prompting and sometimes cajoling of the Holy Spirit, studying and taking in the words and life of Christ, and making ourselves ready for that service to which we are called. 

For Mary and for Martha, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #634, To God Be the Glory; #----, This One Thing Only (insert); #361, O Christ, the Great Foundation

Sermon: The One Who Did Mercy

First Presbyterian Church

July 13, 2025, Pentecost 5C

Luke 10:25-37

 

The One Who Did Mercy

 

 

It is such a familiar story, what’s a pastor to do with it? 

It is maybe the most well-known parable Jesus told, rivaled only by the parable of the prodigal son or maybe the parable of the sheep and the goats. It’s a full-fledged story, with plot and development and conflict and all the good stuff that makes a story compelling enough to hear. 

Well, one thing we can do is back up and remind ourselves that the story didn’t just come out of thin air; Jesus is – cue the dramatic music – being interrogated. By a lawyer. 

The lawyer is, as Luke tells the story, testing Jesus. Throughout the different gospels different parties at different times do just that, trying to trap Jesus in some kind of bind that would either set him up to be found in error theologically or cause him to fall out of favor with the people. The lawyer (not the kind of lawyer we think of nowadays but an interpreter of the law) seems to be probing Jesus for some kind of theological misstep about the commandments. 

Instead, Jesus (as he so often does) turns the question on his interrogator, who could hardly get away with declining to answer – it was his job to answer questions about the law. So, he answered, and did so appropriately, turning to words from Deuteronomy 6 (with the "mind" added to the heart and soul and might - here given as "strength" - found in that passage). That's the part of the scripture reading covered in that first hymn we sang, and it also shows up in different contexts in the gospels of Matthew and John. 

In this case, with the famous parable coming right after it, it's easy to overlook this summation of the "greatest commandment," but we shouldn't. While here it is quoted by Jesus's interrogator, in those other gospel context Jesus himself states it as "the greatest commandment" and "one like unto it," to use the King James style of speech. If you were seeking to summarize the faith in as few words as possible, this isn't your worst possibility. 

Jesus more or less congratulated him and invited him to go his way in peace and security. This of course left the lawyer stewing in the same kind of humiliation that Jesus’s would-be interlocutors typically endured; their questioning turned against them, their duplicity exposed. 

But in this case the interrogator can’t leave well enough alone, and – using a long-favored legal tactic – tries to recover himself by questioning the terminology in the answer: “And who is my neighbor?” 

The novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner offers this take on the lawyer and his question:

He presumably wanted something on the order of: "A neighbor (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbor to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever."

Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbor is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you. The lawyer's response is left unrecorded.

 

Well, not that I want to be in the position of questioning a Pulitzer Prize nominee like Buechner, but one small part of the lawyer’s response actually is recorded for us. And it’s a pretty revealing answer. 

Upon finishing the parable, Jesus again turns on his would-be interrogator. Having told the story in which a Samaritan steps up, above and beyond the call of duty, to aid a badly wounded man who had been passed over by members of the religious elite, he again questions the lawyer, asking him to identify which of the three travelers in the story had been a neighbor to the wounded traveler. Do pay attention to the lawyer’s response:

“The one who showed him mercy.”

On one level, of course, the lawyer has answered rightly. Now the way the Greek is constructed in this particular sentence, a more literal translation would read something like “the one who did mercy to him.” That’s actually a theologically superior way to put it, if not so wonderful grammatically. “Mercy”, like so many of the loaded theological words we use, is active. It’s not a feeling or emotion or empathetic reaction. Mercy is, even if English doesn’t quite capture it, something you do. And this traveler had indeed “done mercy” to the wounded man, unmistakably so. And Jesus’s answer to the lawyer acknowledges this, as he leaves him with the command “Go and do likewise.”

But notice the lawyer’s answer again, even in the theologically superior but grammar-awkward version: “The one who did mercy to him.”

The three passing travelers in this story didn’t get names, but they did get pretty clear identifiers that Jesus’s listeners would have immediately recognized. One was a priest, a religious authority, and the second was a Levite, a member of that tribe set apart since Moses’s time for service in the Temple. Two figures to whom would be attributed qualities of righteousness as a part of their standing among the people.

The third man? A Samaritan. The lawyer couldn’t even say the word.

In the time of Elijah and Elisha Samaria was simply a region of Israel, the northern of the two kingdoms that had resulted from the machinations of those who succeeded Solomon as king after his death (the other kingdom was Judah, which was centered in Jerusalem). The city of Samaria sometimes served as the seat of government of that northern kingdom, and a lot of prophetic activity was concentrated there. By the time of today’s story, though, all of the region is simply lumped into a larger Roman province called Palestine. Yet over the centuries a virulent schism had erupted between those Jews (whose worship was centered on the Temple in Jerusalem) and the Samaritans, who were, technically, Jews, but whose practice had evolved to worship on Mount Gerizim in their own territory. That site was, they claimed, the original holy place in Israel, dating to the time of Joshua, as opposed to Jerusalem, which only became prominent during the era of King David. In short, a disagreement over what might seem to outsiders an arcane theological point had become a hard-and-fast schism, with Jerusalem Jews literally going out of their way to avoid even passing through the region of Samaria, much less actually having anything to do with Samaritans.

For Jesus to invoke the third, merciful traveler as a Samaritan no doubt provoked agitated bristling, and probably an oath or two, among his listeners, if they were a well-behaved group. And let's be clear; had the parable been told in Samaria, and the identity of the third passerby been Judean, reactions would have been extremely similar. Vitriol ran both ways.

It was a two-sided provocation that Jesus put before his listeners. By no means would any self-respecting Jew of what we might call the Jerusalem party even think of defiling himself by dealing with a Samaritan at all; being a neighbor to a Samaritan was out of the question, and no such self-respecting Jew would conceive of a Samaritan being a neighbor to a Jew. It would never happen, they might say, the way a plantation overseer of the 1850s might say that someone of the same skin color as the slaves he ruled over would never be President of the United States. 

Such was the vitriol that our lawyer couldn’t even vocalize that “the one who did mercy” could even possibly be a Samaritan. 

It’s easy enough for us to grasp the main point of the parable, and to apply to it Frederick Buechner’s point that a neighbor is basically anybody who needs you. But it’s not always easy or comfortable - or, frankly, desirable to us - to get Jesus’s point that “anybody” really does mean anybody. We live in a world that isn't prepared to give up our grudges, our ancient hostilities, our prejudices or superior attitudes or whatever ruses we use to divide ourselves and keep ourselves set apart from and above others. It would never happen. It can’t happen. 

I won’t let it happen.

Our society is pretty good at demeaning and dehumanizing “the other.” The world out there calls them job-stealers and threatens to build a great big wall to keep them out, never mind who’s going to pick all those tomatoes and strawberries in south Florida or California. Or people call them terrorists and yell "go back where you came from" even if they were born here, never mind that they are likely to be the ones that the actual terrorists kill first.

Or, when they get shot, people just call them thugs.

Jesus has this nasty habit of not caring one whit about our preferences or prejudices or whatnot. The world tries to respond with “but Jesus, they’re…” and Jesus cuts us off and finishes the sentence “your neighbor.” Society protests “but he’s a…” and Jesus won’t let us finish but says “the one you should imitate.” See, the kingdom of God doesn’t honor those divisions we create. The kingdom of God sees need and moves to meet it. End of discussion. If we want to claim to be part of that kingdom of God, if we call ourselves disciples, we’d better move that same way.

Which one … was a neighbor to the man who fell among the thieves?

The one who did mercy to him.

Go and do likewise. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #203, Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us with Your Love; #---, O love your God with all your heart; #707, Take Thou Our Minds, Dear Lord

Sermon: Do the Easy Thing

First Presbyterian Church

July 6, 2025, Pentecost 4C

2 Kings 5:1-19a; Luke 4:21-30

 

Do the Easy Thing

 

The prophet Elisha doesn't get nearly the acclaim that goes to his prophetic predecessor Elijah, but he does have his moments. He has his quirks, to be sure; when a trio of kings came to him for an oracle in 2 Kings 3, he refused to speak until a musician was provided to play – perhaps making Elisha the first beat-poet prophet. (That scripture reading tells us that once that musician began to play, "the power of the Lord came on him." Maybe some of us preachers today ought to give that a try.)

In today’s reading from 2 Kings, Elisha remains almost a background character, only appearing in person at its close but deeply involved in events nonetheless. While a powerful army commander and multiple kings are involved in the story - people who expect to be important - some of the biggest roles in the story are played by people who are anonymous to us, utterly insignificant in the social strata of the time; the servants of the general Naaman and his wife. 

Take the young servant girl who served Naaman’s wife, for instance. She had been taken captive from her home in Israel, presumably during one of many skirmishes between Israel and Aram. Probably she was homesick for the land of her birth. In her servant role she would have been aware both of Naaman’s military prowess and of the skin condition that threatened his stature, no matter his successful in the field. It would have been easy for her to rejoice in Naaman’s potential downfall; after all, he might even be the reason she had been taken from home. 

Is it possible that this servant girl remembered her first calling? Maybe such gloating, or even simple refusal to offer help in that time of suffering, simply was not reconcilable with what she knew of Israel’s God. Yahweh was a God who heals, and she remembered the prophet of that God in her homeland who healed others. With all of this in mind, she spoke up to her mistress, telling her about that prophet and setting in motion the events of today’s story. To her, it was the right thing and the easy thing to do.

Elisha himself also shows us what it is to remember whose we are. Like any good prophet, Elisha has had a testy relationship with the monarchy so far, apparently getting along better with Jehoshaphat, then the king of Judah, than with the ruler in his own land of Israel. Nonetheless, Elisha reached out to Israel’s king at a moment when that king was apparently forgetting whose he was. By his intervention, Elisha helps avert a potential disaster between Israel and Aram, and incidentally reminds that king that there is indeed a prophet of the one true God in the land (Israel's king Jehoram was an idol-worshiper like his father Ahab). Later in the story Elisha will also demonstrate whose he really is as well, refusing Naaman’s very generous offers of reward for his healing.

For Naaman, though, first he has to learn whose he is, which goes against everything he has been taught to believe. He was a man of power and accustomed to wielding authority over others even as he also served his king. The humiliating spectre of his disease threatened that. Being so desperate as to take the advice that a foreign servant girl gave to his wife was bad enough, but to get shuffled off from the king to some prophet out in the Samarian backwoods, only to be handled by some messenger boy, was too much. I am the general of a great military power, he must have thought. Who are these people, these mere Israelites, these nobodies, to treat me this way? He might well have started thinking about how to bring these insolent people down once and for all. 

Fortunately, more of those anonymous servants are there to save the day, persuading Naaman that it only made sense do the extremely simple thing that the prophet asked of him. Finally he takes his Jordan River bath and is “over-healed”, his skin being made like that of a young boy.

It seems that a lot of people overlook an important point in this story: Naaman converts! He declares his profession of faith in verse 15 – “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” He’s still a little confused about some things, not realizing that that same God would be with him even in Aram and wanting to take along some Israelite dirt, but it’s a start. After Elisha rebuffs his attempts to pay, Naaman confesses his dilemma; his job required him to support his master, who still worshiped that foreign non-god, even physically in that act of idol-worship. He seeks pardon of Yahweh through Elisha, who sends him on his way in peace. Whatever else he may have had to learn, Naaman had picked up one important thing: he knew whose he was, he knew the Lord who held not only his healing but his very life in his hands, and that this Lord would still be whose he was, first and foremost.

But let's not overlook just how much Naaman's pride almost undid everything. Look again at Naaman's ranting after Elisha has first given him the instruction on how to be healed. First, this one: 

"I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy?

 

Naaman was expecting a big production number, something of a spectacle to be made over a Very Important Person like himself. It's not hard to imagine that Elisha's predecessor Elijah might have given exactly that kind of spectacle if he had deigned to intervene at all. But Elisha doesn't even leave the house; he sends these instructions via messenger - another servant, in other words. How in the world could a general who could crush Israel if he so chose be expected to take instruction from a mere servant?

Then there was this bit of ranting:

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters in Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?"

 

Here's where his Aramean nationalism is showing. Why do I have to dunk myself in this podunk river when there are great and mighty rivers back home I could immerse myself in? Who does this jerk think he is, anyway? Fortunately, those servants talked some sense into Naaman, and he went to the river and obeyed the instructions he had been given.

It's worth noting that a kind of nationalism attaches to our gospel reading from Luke. Jesus tells this story in his first visit to his hometown during his public ministry. All he has to do is mention this healing, along with Elijah's help to a widow in Sidon, and the crowd literally tries to throw him off a cliff. Elisha's intervention here might have gotten Israel out of another battle with Aram, but it won him no fans in Israel.

Anyway, not only was Naaman healed by the time his seventh dip was done, but he was even over-healed; his flesh was cleaned "like the flesh of a young boy" which Naaman was not. It's enough to cut through all the pride and bluster and bring Naaman to a completely different understanding of ... well, of everything. All because a man who was looking for some great thing to do was finally talked into doing the easy thing he was given to do.

Do we fall into this trap sometimes? Does the church get obsessed with doing some big public spectacle of a thing to the detriment of carrying out the work God gives the church to do? 

One of the initiatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is the Matthew 25 Initiative, taking its inspiration from the well-known parable at the end of that chapter known as the "parable of the sheep and the goats." The three focus points developed from that scripture for this initiative are:

·      Building congregational vitality.

·      Dismantling structural racism.

·      Eradicating systemic poverty.

That sounds rather intimidating, to be sure; but go back to the source and look at those things Jesus talks about in Matthew 25:

"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."

 

How much of that do we already do? Not all, but a good bit.

There will be times when the church, or maybe some of us as individuals, are called upon to do harder things. But the first thing is to do the basic, easy things that God has set before us, some of which we do almost by reflex here. 

Sometimes the hardest thing is to do the easy thing. Naaman almost ruined everything by being unwilling to go dunk himself in a river. Let us never get so caught up in anything that would distract us so that we fail to do the most basic things God has set before us.

For the obedience to do the easy thing, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #331, God of the Ages, Whose Almighty Hand; #442, Just As I Am, Without One Plea; #700, I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me

 

Sermon: Wisdom and Trinity

First Presbyterian Church

June 15, 2025, Trinity C

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5

 

Wisdom and Trinity

 

It's an almost stereotypical image, one found in comic strips or editorial cartoons or any number of other visual media. In it you see a lone sojourner, or maybe a pair, hiking or even climbing their way up a mountainside or cliff. When they get to the top, they find a lone figure, typically an elderly man, probably seated with legs crossed, appearing as a guru or sage of some sort prepared to dispense wisdom. 

The scene is often used for comic effect, but it trades on something of a traditional image of a seeker of wisdom as being one who is cut off from society, engaged in solitary contemplation in that withdrawn setting. The writer of today's reading from Proverbs would not necessarily agree with this image of withdrawal in search of wisdom.

Today's reading is part of a more extended rhapsody (my word) on wisdom, briefly touched on in chapter 7 and then taking up most of chapters 8 and 9. It follows a discourse on a different character, one who would lead astray (in many different ways) the young student to which Proverbs is directed. In this rhapsody Wisdom is personified; most of chapters 8 and 9 are depicted as wisdom speaking to that young student. 

Let's go ahead and make this clear: yes, Wisdom really is personified in this rhapsody as a woman. Take that, guys. In context, the character in the previous discourse who would lead the young student astray is also a woman, so the passage works as a clever literary device to present the two different paths set before the young student. Still, Wisdom (divine wisdom, clearly, as the rest of the discourse makes clear) is personified as female. Right out of the Bible, folks.

The opening four verses of the chapter set forth the character (sometimes called Woman Wisdom in the scholarly literature), and our author's depiction of Wisdom at work doesn't quite square up with the mountaintop guru of comic-strip notoriety. Far from having to be sought out in some isolated place, Wisdom is out in the world, calling to anyone who would listen:

At the highest point along the way, where the paths meet she takes her stand; beside the gates leading into the city, at the entrance, she cries aloud...

 

This isn't wisdom in hiding or in secret. She's out there, calling out for all to hear. 

"All fine and good," you may say, while either being excited or offended to see something of the divine being portrayed as a woman. "All fine and good," you may say, "but what does any of this have to do with Trinity Sunday? Why aren't you preaching on something more obvious like that reading from Romans where all the persons of the Trinity are mentioned? Why is this Proverbs bit in the readings for today?" That's where verses 22-31 come in. 

That section opens with Wisdom's declaration that "The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old." It may surprise you to hear that this description was the subject of heated debate at no less than the Council of Nicaea, the first meeting of which took place way back in the year 325, and which was the initiator of that statement of faith we know as the Nicene Creed (we tend to say it in worship on Sundays when the Lord's Supper happens). In their extensive and often testy debates over the nature of the Trinity, this passage, with its confusing Hebrew about being "created" or is it being "begotten" or "made" or "born" became a shorthand for discussing whether the second Person of the Trinity - the one we call God the Son, or Jesus - was "created" or "begotten" or "made" or "born" in John 1. Indeed, for some years, this character of Wisdom was sometimes discussed as a foreshadowing of the Son of God (notwithstanding Wisdom being personified as a woman here!) and of that Son's being "in the beginning with God," as John 1 says, or being one through whom "all things were made" as the Nicene Creed ends up saying.

If that's how the second Person of the Trinity is involved here, the largest part of the reading names the first Person of the Trinity as the great Creator of all. Most of the text describes Woman Wisdom's bearing witness as God engages in the various acts of creation and even being God's "delight, rejoicing before Him always" and also "delighting in the human race." 

While the third Person of the Trinity is less directly invoked here, it has not escaped notice that the way Wisdom is described in this rhapsody looks and sounds a lot like the way the Holy Spirit gets described in various other corners of scripture. All that business about not being hidden off on some mountaintop but being out in the streets and at the gates of the city is awfully similar to the doings of the Spirit, after Pentecost in particular.

None of this should be taken as a "proof" of anything. Obviously, this was written many, many years before the Nativity or Pentecost. What this quite exuberant passage does show us is that God's people have been, literally for centuries, even millenia, seeking ways to understand and comprehend how God moves in God's world. We aren't the first to struggle with it. The Council of Nicaea wasn't the first to struggle with it. And no doubt even the writer of Proverbs wasn't the first either. Outside of the more dramatic interventions revealed in scripture - say, the Exodus, or Pentecost, or the very life of Jesus - God's people have been challenged by the work of putting together all that we have been shown and instructed in order, not to have God completely figured out, but at least not to get God egregiously and harmfully wrong. 

In the end, perhaps such words as "wonder," or even the "delight" that Wisdom herself invokes in today's reading, might be at the last the best place to end up in such pursuits. To borrow the Apostle Paul's words from 1 Corinthians, we are still in that place where we see "in a mirror, dimly"; the time when we "will see face to face" is not yet here. Would that this age of contemplation would be, rather than a source of dispute and anger over the nature of God, be a source of delight, perhaps with the help of good old Woman Wisdom.

For wisdom and her delight, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #1, Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty; #8, Eternal Father, Strong to Save; #2, Come, Thou Almighty King

For those who miss the non-heretical kittens...

acts 2

we couldn’t understand anybody 

we were alone in the city

this great big city by itself 

but now

with so many visitors 

from so many nations 

speaking so many languages 

we truly couldn’t understand anybody 

we were alone

when we tried to speak the local language 

nobody could understand us either

we would try to find food 

or a shelter 

and people would look at us 

like we were aliens

which I guess we were to them

but still

we kept getting lost

and were alone and hungry

and we didn’t know how to find the festival 

even with all the crowds 

or maybe because of them 

there was some commotion 

in a building 

maybe a house

off to one side

a lot of voices

many people crowded around 

we came closer

there were people speaking 

a lot of different languages 

but amazingly 

as clear as could be 

we heard a voice speaking our language 

we stood gaping

at this new word we could hear and 

understand

then

one of them stepped forward to speak 

to say they weren’t drunk at 9 a.m.

and then to quote a prophet 

and to talk about 

a Spirit being poured out on everybody

and then to talk more about someone 

named Jesus

others came through the crowd 

to help us 

one of them asked us 

not in our language 

if we needed anything 

I said 

as best as I could in their language 

we were hungry 

and somehow she understood 

and took us in

and gave us food to eat 

so we were fed twice that morning 

we knew then

that we would not be returning to 

our homeland alone

even if 

we would be traveling 

by ourselves