Sermon: Scriptural Whiplash

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

November 16, 2025, Pentecost 23C

Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19

 

Scriptural Whiplash

 

 

At first glance, one might have trouble imagining why these two scriptures were paired up in today's lectionary. If anything, they might seem to be diametrically opposed to one another. 

The words from the next-to-last chapter of the book of Isaiah are a look at a time yet to come. Images within this passage both hearken back to earlier writings (the serpent's payback in verse 25, being reduced to eating dust, seems a deliberate echo of the fall story in Genesis) and anticipate future oracles (Revelation 21 starts with a very clear of Isaiah's verse 17 here). The promise here is that the Lord, to borrow a phrase from chapter 43 of this book, is doing a new thing; not just the new heavens and earth but a "new Jerusalem" as a source of joy rather than sorrow. Long lives are the rule rather than the exception; people get to enjoy the fruits of their labor without having them taken away; animals live in harmony with one another. It is a deeply optimistic vision.

Luke's reading, on the other hand, is anything but optimistic at first blush. Jesus speaks of the temple being destroyed, an event still in the future in Jesus's time but already done by the time Luke's gospel was written. Wars and insurrections were not at all unknown in that time. Persecution is familiar to Luke's readers, with martyrdom coming first to the deacon Stephen and later to the apostle James, not to mention such early church leaders as Paul, executed somewhere around the year 62 - again, well before Luke's gospel was written. Verse 12 almost sounds like Jesus foretelling his own fate as one that awaited his followers as well. (And that instruction in verse 14, the one about "not to prepare your defense in advance"? Does that leave anyone else feeling a bit shaky? But then, the apostles in the early chapters of the book of Acts, being filled with the Spirit when brought before the Temple authorities, might be an example of following this instruction.)

So, the two readings assigned to today don't immediately seem to have much in common, and one might a kind of scriptural whiplash moving from Isaiah's joyful vision to Jesus's more hard-edged discourse in Luke. However, if we "widen the field" just a bit we discover that, far from being in opposition to one another, these two scriptures may in fact be in harmony with each other, or at least singing from the same hymnal, so to speak. 

Our reading today comes from the next-to-last chapter of Isaiah. The final portion of this book is primarily addressed to the Israelites who had returned from exile in Babylon. What they found when they returned, to be honest, was not much. The Temple, what had been the central point of Jewish worship and practice, was broken down and not functional. The same could be said of the homes and farmland that had been left behind; what had once been fertile soil and dwelling places was now mostly wasteland. 

Roughly the last eleven chapters of Isaiah are addressed to these returnees, whose current life and standing looked nothing like the beautiful vision Isaiah pours out here. These chapters contain a lot of lament from the people, a goodly amount of chastisement directed at those same people for their sins and shortcomings, and the occasional piece of encouragement, of which this is the most well-known example. That new heaven and new earth will come, but there will be challenges along the way, and some of those challenges will even be self-imposed.

Similarly, the passage from Luke does not tell the whole story. After the event at the Temple when Jesus comments on the poor widow who gave everything she had, some of the disciples have gotten distracted by how impressive the Temple was, which frankly was part of the purpose for which it was built. Jesus makes his pronouncement about its destruction (as we have already noted) and continues with the forth-telling, continuing to add more and more calamities to the list. 

But then, when his listeners might have been on the brink of despair at all manners of disasters and forebodings, Jesus throws this curveball in verse 28:

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

 

Just when all seems lost, the tables turn and the Son of Man appears. 

In the end, it turns out, these two readings are far from opposed; one might say they're both pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle, each fitting into its place in the overall story we are given in scripture. There will be hardship and difficult times; there will be (or have already been) wars and insurrections; but still the new heaven and earth come, our redemption draws near. 

Notice one thing missing from these stories; at no point is the follower of Christ called to "go to war" or anything like that. The closest thing we get to an order is in that verse 28; "stand up and raise your heads...". That's it. We stand up and we look for Jesus. 

To be sure, standing has its own risks. You might get thrown down on the ground, choking, with somebody's knee on your throat. You might get a bunch of pepper balls shot right at your face. Nonetheless, amidst all the signs and rumors and violence and fear, we stand and look for the Son of Man. 

We know from Isaiah that a new heaven and a new earth are coming,

We know from what Luke wrote down from Jesus that there will be many fierce challenges on the way. 

And between the two of them, we know how it ends.

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #839, Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine!; #767, Together We Serve; #738, O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee 

Sermon: That's Not How This Works

First Presbyterian Church

November 9, 2025, Pentecost 22C

Luke 20:27-40

 

 

That’s Not How This Works

 

A few years ago, an insurance company ran a commercial set among a group of women who, we might say, would fit comfortably into the general age demographic of this congregation. One of the women was boasting about how, instead of mailing pictures of her vacation photos to all her friends, had saved herself time by posting them on her wall. Of course, a first thought to the social media-savvy might suggest she had posted them on social media of some sort, possibly Facebook or Instagram. Instead, the camera pans slightly and you see that the pictures are, literally, taped to the wall of her living room. One of the other women pipes up that she likes one in particular, but the third, one presumably more knowledgeable about such things, looks back and forth between the two incredulously. When the first woman boasts about having an insurance-related achievement in fifteen minutes, this third one retorts that she only needed half that time, to which the first responds, with a dramatic gesture, “I unfriend you.” Finally the third can’t take it anymore and, gesturing around the room, exclaims, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!”

It would not at all have been out of line for Jesus to respond in exactly that same way to the question put to him by the Sadducees in today’s reading from the gospel of Luke. 

The setting here is in Jerusalem, as we approach the climax of Jesus’s earthly life and ministry. It’s the type of scriptural text that the framers of the Revised Common Lectionary like to slip in toward the end of the liturgical year, a text that at least in some way looks forward to the life not of this earth but of eternity, or heaven or however one frames it.

In this case that particular framing comes from a faction in the religious society in which Jesus lived that didn’t even believe in such a thing. The Sadducees, a competing group to the Pharisees about whom we hear so much, are lingering on the edge of a conversation in which Jesus has just smacked down a group of scribes, or their lackeys as verse 20 suggests, with the response famous in its old King James rendering as “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” That group has beaten its hasty retreat, to the hooting and derision of the crowd, and this group of Sadducees steps up for its at-bat. 

As verse 27 informs us straightaway, the Sadducees “say there is no resurrection.” This puts them at odds with the Pharisees and is a product of their particular interpretation of what constituted “scripture.” While the Pharisees, for example, took the prophets and the Psalms as authoritative, the Sadducees only read the books of the Torah that way. The prophets and Psalms speak in at least some degree of resurrection, the Torah does not; therefore the Sadducees and Pharisees disagree. While Jesus butted heads with Pharisees often, on this point they were in agreement. 

The Sadducees’ question is admittedly an absurd one, which relies on a particular allowance of Mosaic or Torah law. If a man died childless, his wife was expected to be married off to the next available younger brother, in theory as a means to provide for the widow, but frankly mostly so that the brother might produce a son to ensure the first brother’s legacy. In this trap question, the poor woman was put through seven brothers, each of whom failed to produce a son; when the hypothetical woman died, the Sadducees ostensibly wanted to know, whose wife would she be in the resurrection?

One could point out a lot of things about the beliefs inherent in such a question. One thing that cannot be overlooked is that it’s pretty clear that to these questioners a woman in such a situation is little more than a piece of property, more a subjected and captive character from The Handmaid’s Tale than a living, breathing human being and child of God and daughter of Abraham. The only thing that matters about her is whose possession is she for all eternity.

This all has to be qualified with words like “hypothetical” and “ostensibly” because in fact this batch of Sadducees weren’t really all that concerned with the answer. At the risk of including a second social media reference in the same sermon, they are trolling Jesus. The very asking of the question was its own end, namely mocking not even Jesus necessarily, but their Pharisee rivals and their oh-so-ridiculous beliefs about life after death. 

The trouble is that these Sadducees, unlike modern social media trolls who can disappear in an instant and not be held accountable for the evil that they do, could not get away fast enough. In the end, they were just as humiliated as the scribes who got tripped up on the tax question. In the world of social media, one of the most common and usually best pieces of advice is “don’t feed the trolls,” or in other words don’t give anyone who is clearly engaging in bad faith attacks a forum for their lies. Jesus isn’t most people, of course, and he is quite well-equipped to drive these trolls back under the bridge.

Jesus opens with a lesson that we modern Christians might well have trouble with. This is where the potential “that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works” response comes in.

To sum up as best as possible, marriage is a mortal concern. People marry because for most folks, going through life with a partner is easier and more pleasant than going through life alone. That’s a pretty succinct nutshell argument for why marriage is a thing at all in the eyes of God, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden and God’s remark that it wasn’t a good thing for Adam to be alone. This matters because, to put it in as stark a term as possible, we’re going to die, all of us at some point, and such times as we have to endure on this earth go better if we can endure it with someone we love. 

Those who share in the resurrection, on the other hand, are never going to die. Life is eternal in the presence of the Eternal One. The concerns of that old past mortality, worries about property and legacy and all that implied in the question, simply don’t matter. In that life the hypothetical woman is in fact a child of God and a daughter of Abraham, subject to no one else.

As much as we might not want to admit this, we don’t like the sound of this, not one bit.

Think about it. What kind of songs, for example, do we sing about Heaven? One example I can’t get out of my head is an old gospel number called “Mansion Over the Hilltop.” Perhaps you remember this one, maybe from Elvis Presley’s version?

I’m satisfied with just a cottage below

A little silver, and a little gold

But in that city where the ransomed will shine

I want a gold one that’s silver lined

 

(Refrain)

I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop

In that bright land where we’ll never grow old

And someday yonder we will never more wander

But walk on streets that are purest gold

 

The second verse goes on to talk about wanting “a mansion, a harp, and a crown”. The question of what to do with a harp for all eternity aside, cue the lady from the commercial: That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

The song does get one thing right; in that bright land we really will never grow old. Otherwise, the metaphor Jesus uses in John 14 (another King James concoction, the one about “In my father’s house are many mansions”), the one meant to communicate how the disciples do not have to worry about life after resurrection because all is provided and there’s room for everyone, gets hardened and fixed into a dogma that we can all pre-order our gold mansions for all eternity. I wish I were exaggerating more than I am, but I’ve seen it up close too many times.. 

All such things miss the point. Whether the Sadducees intended it or not, this encounter really is about the resurrection, and the resurrection is about God, and being in communion with God and with all who are in communion with God. The resurrection is not merely an extension of this life with better building materials; it is about being in resurrection with the God who has loved us and redeemed us in Christ. 

This is illustrated by the second part of Jesus’s response to the Sadducees, the one in which he uses their beloved Torah against them by citing the words of Exodus 3:6, right out of the Torah that the Sadducees cited as the only true scripture. When God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush, God doesn’t say “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob back when they were alive”; God puts it all in present tense. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Am. Present tense. Jesus elaborates that God is “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” If God is their God, then they aren’t dead. Their lives are held in God, thus they live and shall live, and somehow that will hold true for us too.

How does that work? Beats me. Paul expended a lot of time and energy in his epistles trying to reassure the Thessalonians and the Corinthians about what resurrection meant and how it related to earthly life, which was to say not much. We get phrases like these from 1 Corinthians 15: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable”; “we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed”; or “for this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” How? Paul doesn’t even go there, nor does Luke, and I’m not going to either. But this is the work of God in us, redeeming us in Christ and preparing us through the Holy Spirit that when our time comes, when death comes upon us, it will not be the final word. What is mortal puts on immortality, and lives in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, really forever and for all time. 

We human beings are wildly insecure. We have a terrible habit of substituting rigid belief for life-giving faith. We demand to know how it all works – witness all those preachers and pseudo-Bible scholars who insist on trying to calculate the date of the Rapture when even Jesus says he doesn’t know the day nor the hour. We don’t trust at all, when you get down to the heart of us. Are we ready to take Jesus seriously, and be the living body that Jesus calls us to be now – to do Christ’s work in God’s world – and trust that our resurrection life is secured in God? Can we do that?

We are mortal creatures, subject to all the finitude and brokenness and decline that is the lot of all mortal creatures. But that is not our final fate, no matter whether we know how it works or not. 

For the God of the living, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #645, Sing Praise to God Who Reigns Above; #238, Thine Is the Glory; #546, Lord, Dismiss Us with Your Blessing 

 

 

 

Sermon: Ragged Saints and Right Gifts

Grace Presbyterian Church

November 3, 2019, Pentecost 21C (All Saints)

Luke 19:1-10

 

Ragged Saints and Right Gifts

 

Short people got no reason

Short people got no reason

Short people got no reason to live…

 

If it weren’t for the fact that Randy Newman didn’t write this minor novelty hit song until 1977, you might have to wonder if Zacchaeus heard this song one time too many in his life.

It’s not enough that Luke makes a big deal of Zacchaeus’s being a tax collector. In the culture Luke describes pretty much all along the way in Jesus’s life, being a tax collector was a surefire ticket to being hated and despised by, well, pretty much everybody. Even only a chapter before, in one of Jesus’s parables, we find a tax collector being lumped in with some pretty awful sinners – thieves, rogues, adulterers – by a super-righteous Pharisee. But that wasn’t enough; Luke had to tell the world Zacchaeus was so short he had to embarrass himself climbing a tree to see Jesus over the crowd.

But there’s something else true about tax collectors in Luke’s gospel; Jesus spends an awful lot of time with them. One of the first followers he calls is the tax collector Levi, the one known as Matthew in other gospels. After Levi is called, he gives a great banquet for Jesus, and a whole bunch of tax collectors show up. It becomes enough of a thing that the Pharisees complain about it; “why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” becomes their question as early as 5:30, and it apparently becomes a common enough complaint that Jesus refers to it in 7:34:

For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”

 

It actually works out pretty well for Zacchaeus to show up on this Sunday for the observance of All Saints’ Day in many churches. When we hear the word "saint" our minds often follow the pattern of the last hymn we will sing today, the one that starts “I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true…” and goes on to describe just how wonderful and perfect those saints are as well as all the jobs they did (not to mention the one who “was slain by a fierce wild beast”!). 

There’s just one problem with that, though; more often than not our saints have a ragged backstory to them, rather like our Zacchaeus here. When Luke tells you not only that Zacchaeus is a tax collector, but also that he’s rich, you’re being led fairly strongly to gather that those riches were ill-gotten, as was usually the case with tax collectors of the era working for the Roman Empire. 

The catch is, though, that Zacchaeus is hardly the only such saint in our heritage. We get a suggestion of this in Glory to God hymn that we will sing later, #506, “Look Who Gathers at Christ’s Table!” Even as the “ancient followers appear” there in verse 2, we hear their own confessions of guilt and failure: “Peter tells of his denying Christ was ever in his sight; Paul relates his fruitless efforts to obliterate the light…” These are hardly the only such stories we could find in the Bible to demonstrate the clay feet upon which the saints walk. When we’re honest about it, we see that the saints in our own lives have their own feet of clay, and were, like we are, ragged sinners in need of forgiveness. 

And as to that stewardship season we've been working through, isn’t it interesting that upon his encounter with Jesus, the first thing we hear Zacchaeus say is that he’s going to make right whatever financial wrong he has done? Or how, when Jesus called Levi, even as he gave that great banquet, he also walked away from all the wealth his tax-collector work provided? 

It seems that when these ragged saints came face-to-face with Jesus, one of their first impulses was to know what was wrong with themselves in terms of wealth and possessions, and not only to know but to act on that understanding. 

Even the most ragged saints make their way to providing the right gifts. Whether or not we feel like saints, we can give like them. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #326, For All the Saints; #731, Give Thanks for Those Whose Faith Is Firm; #506, Look Who Gathers at Christ’s Table!; #730, I Sing a Song of the Saints of God

 

Sermon: The Church Under Repair

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

October 26, 2025, Reformation

Psalm 46; Jeremiah 31:31-34; 

         Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

 

 

The Church Under Repair

 

Today we are celebrating the anniversary of the Reformation.

Of course this is not strictly correct. We are celebrating the anniversary of one particular branch of the Reformation, or more precisely yet, one key event in one particular branch of the Reformation – an event which, to be sure, may not have happened quite precisely in the way it is often depicted, and which (if it happened that way) happened more than five hundred years ago this coming Friday, not today.

But, to keep things accurate: it was on October 31, 1517, that Martin Luther, then a young-ish German monk assigned to teach classes on scripture at the University of Wittemburg, first promulgated his ninety-five theses, or arguments, on the corruptions of the church and the need for reform. The theses were definitely sent to his superiors at the Vatican; popular lore also says he nailed a copy of those ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittemburg, as depicted in a number of popular paintings, though more concrete documentation of that event is not so easy to come by.

It would not, contrary to some portrayals of the story, have necessarily been a scandalous thing to do to use the doors of the church for such a purpose; in a still-rather-medieval town like Wittemburg, those doors were quite possibly a virtual bulletin board for the town, and Luther’s biggest difficulty might have been clearing a space to post his own rather substantial document. 

The corruptions charged by Luther included such practices (under the guise of raising funds for building projects) as the selling of indulgences, something that smelled way too much like buying forgiveness of sin to Luther. His theses enumerated scriptural and moral arguments against that and other practices and called for a sweeping reform of the church to eliminate such corruptions.

Luther was a pretty unlikely candidate to trigger such an upheaval; much of his adult life had been consumed with nearly crippling self-doubt, he being convinced that he could never be good enough for God. The supreme irony of Luther’s career is that the study of scripture his new teaching vocation demanded of him had the effect of convincing him, ultimately, that he was right; of his own efforts he never would be good enough; a passage like today’s reading from Romans (as well as several others from that book) showed him that he was saved not by any work or effort of his own, but only by the great gift of God’s grace. So liberated, Luther found the nerve to bear witness against the all-powerful church even at the cost of his own excommunication, and thousands of others found similar courage to follow into something new and unknown,

Luther does teach us a lesson, one applicable even to us modern Christians; things don’t change if we don’t speak up. Whether perpetrated by church, corporation (an entity unknown to Luther, of course), or government (or by the thoroughly unholy alliance of all three), injustice and corruption aren’t simply going to go away by themselves. Followers of Christ are obliged to bear witness – to speak out – against those injustices, no matter how pervasive or powerful, and no matter how much it costs us our standing in our community.

Let me repeat: followers of Christ are obliged to bear witness – to speak out – against injustices, no matter how pervasive or powerful, and no matter how much it costs us our standing in our community. Otherwise we’re fooling ourselves. After all, the word “protest” is embedded in the name “Protestant.” It’s in our spiritual D.N.A., so to speak.

Of course, Luther’s “reformation” was not the only one that took root in the church during this period. John Calvin was all of eight years old when Luther promulgated those theses, but by 1536 (at age 27) he produced his monumental theological treatise Institutes of the Christian Religion, which became a bulwark of the branches of Protestantism that bear the term “Reformed” in their names, as well as our own Presbyterian tradition via Calvin’s Scottish admirer John Knox. The work of Ulrich Zwingli and others also played a role in Reformed theology: the Second Helvetic Confession found in our own Book of Confessionsis a Zwinglian document. The Anglican Reformation would take root some decades later, and Methodism would evolve out of that tradition about two centuries later under the leadership of John and Charles Wesley. In short, the Protestant Reformation was no one-time thing. 

Sadly, no branch of the Reformation can claim any innocence of its own corruption. For many centuries Lutheranism drank far too deeply of Luther’s own anti-Semitism, which long outlived him and was useful to the Nazis in their consolidation of power in twentieth-century Germany. The theological extremes of Calvin and Zwingli (predestination comes to mind) were easily twisted into harsh and destructive theologies that we are only now coming to grips with.

Calvin might look at passages such as those from Jeremiah and John as evidences for the sovereignty of God – the absolute freedom of God to do as God wills, unbound by any theological or other bind. It is ironic that his descendants have preached some of the most oppressive theologies against that sovereignty, claiming God to be “bound” to send person X to hell or give you great riches if you just say the magic scripture and pray the magic prayer. (I exaggerate, but not as much as you think.) Where such preachers seek to bind, the scripture found in John points to quite the opposite – “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” It resonates in such doctrinal ideas as the “priesthood of the believer”, the idea that every person is both free and responsible to minister to one another in the name of God and to, in the words of 2 Timothy from a couple of weeks ago, to present himself or herself to God as “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” It’s an idea that every Protestant tradition somehow manages to claim as unique to itself. 

In fact, the history of pretty much every reformation is one of taking such words of scripture and, often after a good start, failing to live up to them. Hence Calvin’s famous instruction that the church was to be “reformata et semper reformanda” – “reformed and always being reformed”; to be brief, we are – or always need to be – under repair. Being composed of fallible human beings, churches will fail and must be constantly challenged to return to the scriptures and to be under the charge of the Holy Spirit to reclaim our calling, in order to live into whatever challenge might await God’s church over, say, the next five hundred years or so.

If we take today’s reading from Jeremiah seriously, we are under the watchful care of an all-sovereign God, a God who yet in the midst of such sovereignty and power knows us, and places in each of us nothing less than knowledge of God, writing on our very hearts.

If we take today’s psalm seriously, we have in our God a strong fortress, a “bulwark never failing” in the words of the famous hymn we sang earlier. We are never abandoned by God no matter how much we abandon God. 

If we take today’s reading from Romans seriously, we know that despite our deep sinfulness, we are preserved and redeemed by Christ, who is faithful to be the mediator of divine grace even unto death on a cross – a death that could not in the end keep him.

If we take today’s reading from John seriously, we are free. Free, that is, in Christ – we are freed from sin, freed to continue in the words and work of our Savior, free to know the truth. 

None of these were new at the time of all those reformations. All of them are as old as the scriptures those reformers fought to put in the hands of followers of Christ and to teach and preach. It’s fair to say, though, that perhaps those ideas had faded a bit from the church’s collective memory and needed to be refreshed. The same is true for us. It’s on us – all of us – to reclaim all of those legacies, as well as the legacy that give us our name “Protestant.” It’s time to speak up. After all, a little reformation now and then is a healthy thing.

For a legacy, and for the ongoing repair of that legacy, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #275, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God; #329, God Is Our Refuge and Our Strength; #---, O hear this word today

Sermon: The Inevitable, Necessary Stewardship Sermon

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

October 19, 2025; Ordinary 

2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Mark 12:38-44

 

The Inevitable, Necessary Stewardship Sermon

 

It is one of those things for a new pastor. You know it’s coming. It’s inevitable. It doesn’t quite fall into the category of “things they didn’t teach you in seminary,” but it’s close. 

It’s stewardship time! Woohoo!

In all seriousness, this is nobody’s idea of fun. Nobody, except possibly certain folks who gravitate to public radio or television, likes to ask for money. I certainly don’t. I’m quite sure the Finance Commission folks would rather not have to go through this. We’d really rather be able to go on about things and not have to go through the whole business of pledge cards and all that. 

I’d certainly rather not have to conjure up a “stewardship sermon” out of scripture that really doesn’t want to be used that way. While in the Old Testament, or at least much of it, the people of Israel did have an established Temple that certainly required financial maintenance, in the New Testament there wasn’t really a “church” out there that needed a financial plan. By the time Paul and his contemporaries are helping the body of Christ spread across Asia Minor and into southeastern Europe, there are handfuls of “house churches,” meeting primarily in the homes of some of its members, without the overhead of a modern church building. When money was required, for care for the poor or sometimes for taking care of a visiting teacher like Paul or others, it was collected, essentially by passing the hat. 

That’s the kind of collection going on as Paul writes to the Christ-following community in Corinth in today’s epistle reading. Paul is trying to gather up funds for the believers at Jerusalem (who had fallen on hard times), and he begins the chapter by telling the Corinthians about the generosity of the Christians in Macedonia, who despite their own hardships had given with great generosity towards this collection. We do that kind of special collection on occasion.

But as far as regular budgets go, that’s obviously not how this church, and most modern churches in the US, work. We have a building. It’s a good building, even if all these stairs challenge me on some days. There are some repairs needed. There are regular expenses for things like electricity and water, keeping the grass from getting too long, having materials for study, and so forth. The choir needs music. Commissions need funds to varying degrees to carry out their work. Staff people need to be paid, even me, not to mention that manse next door being ready to receive your next pastor. And to be certain that we can meet those obligations, we ask that our members commit to giving as we are able to do.

Paul’s verses sound quite uplifiting; “God loves a cheerful giver” … “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance” …  “You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity” … really, some great stuff there. And Jesus’s comments about the widow also are pretty effective at encouraging us, those of us who are not blessed with great material wealth, that our generosity matters, and that our generosity will be rewarded.

It all sounds so good, doesn’t it?

But there’s also a very disturbing and dismaying aspect to verses and stories like these, of which we are reminded in the verses before Jesus points out the widow to us. Teaching in the Temple, during the last week of his life, Jesus calls his disciples’ attentions to the scribes. It’s pretty unlikely that Jesus means to sweep every single scribe into this condemnation, as only a few verses before he has had a much more encouraging encounter with one of their number, but he’s had enough bad experiences with the scribes that he’s drawn some sharp and critical observations about them. 

One of the behaviors Jesus calls out involves the very kind of people he observes in the later verses of our reading today. First of all, Jesus disdains their propensity for seeking attention and flattery, for claiming the best seats at the table and generally being quite impressed with their own authority and power. But amidst this is an accusation that might catch us off guard: “They devour widows’ houses…”.  We don’t have an absolute fix on just what kind of action Jesus is condemning here; it might be the practice of “Corban” that was mentioned earlier in this gospel (declaring resources that might support such a person as “dedicated to God”), or it might be the exploitation of widows by traveling teachers who make themselves guests in those widows’ homes and consume their limited resources. Whatever it is, Jesus calls it out and puts forward the declaration that for their excesses “They will receive the greater condemnation.”

It’s not hard to find modern descendents of those scribes – in fact, if you’re of my generation it’s hard not to. It’s pretty easy to draw a line between these scribes and their modern descendents, if you’ve grown up in and lived in the age of the televangelist. I know some of you, maybe a lot of you, remember the likes of the Bakkers, the Swaggarts, and so many more who became infamous for extracting sums of money from the widows of our own day, persons on fixed incomes giving large chunks of those fixed incomes to those televised preachers. Frankly, any preacher of my generation trembles at preaching from these verses just because of that ugly abuse for which they’ve been used before.

So to some degree a stewardship drive, in which we ask you at least in part for your money, needs to be accompanied by a pledge by those charged to lead the church – from me and other staff members through the session and commission moderators – that we will not be exploiters of what you pledge and give. We must commit to you that what you give will be used wisely, prayerfully, and with no other goal than the support of this church in its ongoing call to do Christ’s work in God’s world. 

Still, even with this past hanging over today’s scripture, we can’t just dismiss the widow in the Temple as some kind of dupe. We don’t know her individual story; were it not for Jesus’s description we wouldn’t necessarily even know that she was giving everything she had. We’ve never heard of her before, and we never hear of her again.

But for all of the mystery about this woman, one thing we can know is that she is the opposite of the protagonist of an earlier story, the so-called “rich young ruler,” who came asking Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life only to go away sorrowing because Jesus told him to sell it all and follow? He was too attached to his possessions to follow. He was plenty willing to give his actions – remember how he declared he had kept the law since his youth? His wealth, though…another matter entirely. He had to hold on, to keep control of his stuff. And yes, this does sound a lot like those possessed by the greed that came up in a sermon a few weeks ago.

Our widow, though? No such fear. To borrow a slang term from poker, the widow has chosen to go “all in.” A player whose chips are limited might choose to push them “all in” when a hand demands it. The widow has little else to fall back on; she chooses to commit it all in the Temple.

We do not ask for all your money. We do, however, ask for all of you. We need not just your money – though we do need that – but we do need your time. We need your gifts of talent, your ability to teach or sing or give or lead or anything you can do. We need you, and we need all that you have to offer. There are lists in the fellowship room across the hall that give you some examples of that need.

Yes, fill out those pledge cards and turn them in next Sunday. But that’s only a start.

For commitments large and small, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #714 God of the Fertile Fields #716, God, Whose Giving Knows No Ending; #708, We Give Thee But Thine Own

Sermon: Rightly Dividing the Word?

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

October 12, 2025, Pentecost 18C

2 Timothy 2:8-15

 

Rightly Dividing the Word?

 

 

Study to shew thyself approved unto God,

a workman that needeth not to be ashamed,

rightly dividing the word of truth.

 

Where last week I ran into a verse I had learned from a gospel hymn refrain from my childhood, this week's reading contains this verse, rendered in the King James Version with which I grew up, that was imprinted on my brain from another source: Bible drill. (This is where I mention that in the Georgia Baptist Convention's competition in 1980, I finished second in the entire state...by one stinkin' point. No, I'm not traumatized by it at all.) I don't remember if this was a verse I was called upon to memorize or just one that came up a lot in the searching part of the drill, but it is still highly imprinted on my brain, idiosyncracies and all. That third word of the verse, that we pronounce "show," was in fact spelled s-h-e-w. That always freaked me out to no end; it was everything I could do not to read it out as "study to shoe thyself approved unto God...". 

The other part that weirded me out was the ending. I absolutely could not make sense of that verse concluding with the description of the "workman that needeth not to be ashamed" as "rightly dividing the word of truth." It was so strange to me that I couldn't even joke about it. I am so, so grateful for the NRSV's more comprehensible "rightlyexplaining". That I can understand.

This is, of course, part of the instruction here: proclaim the "word of truth" so that it can be understood. But there are other things that need to be addressed here, such as "what does it mean, this 'word of truth'?" And what about all that stuff that comes before that verse?

The passage begins with another reminder of the author's imprisonment, which also appeared in last week's reading from this letter. Again comes the reminder of enduring for the sake of those to whom God's call is extended, and that our ultimate salvation is in Christ Jesus. 

What follows is possibly an excerpt from a liturgical formula, or possibly a hymn, that was already in use in the churches of this period, again the late first or possibly early second century. It's a challenging read, one that would probably catch us short if it appeared in our liturgy.

"If we have died with him, we will also live with him"; a not-uncommon expression, especially when one remembers that baptism was in this era described with the metaphor of "dying with Christ." 

"If we endure, we will also reign with him"; again, not a new idea in the church. The New Testament letters instruct readers that their job is to endure or stand firm, such as 1 Corinthians 16:13 or Galatians 5:1 or Ephesians 6:11-14. The instruction to go looking for a fight, so much an emphasis in certain contemporary theology, isn't there; the call is to stand, to endure.

"If we deny him, he will also deny us" - wait, what? On one level this might seem logical; how can Christ claim as his own one who does not claim Christ as their own? 

And yet, we have right in scripture at least one clear example in which one who flat-out denied Jesus was still claimed as Jesus's own, no less a figure than Peter. It might be worth remembering that to deny with one's words, as bad as that was for Peter to do, is a different thing altogether than to deny with one's life. It might be that this is what is implied here; a life lived in rebellion against Christ will not be claimed by Christ. Or it might be that the next statement clarifies this:

"If we are faithless, he remains faithful" - it sounds possibly confusing again, but the added clarification makes a difference; "for he cannot deny himself." Christ cannot be unfaithful to Christ's own Christ-ness; our infidelity cannot sway Christ from being the Son of God. We do not change Christ, no matter how much we might test him. And part of that faithfulness to Christ is enduring with Christ.

Curiously, the lectionary reading straddles the boundary between two different strains of thought here, although the introductory instruction to "remind them of this" does at least offer a connecting thread. Here, though, the emphasis shifts from the author's own suffering and endurance to more direct and practical instruction to his readers. Verse 14, frankly, is just good advice, and not just in ministering to the church. Really, who loves "wrangling over words" at all, aside from some thoroughly unpleasant people? I'm not sure anyone would consider it an exaggeration to say that it "ruins those who are listening." 

And that brings us again to that initial verse.

No matter how I tried in my youth, I could not make "rightly dividing the word of truth" make a bit of sense to me. Dividing the word? To be honest, I didn't really know anyone who could make that particular phrase make sense. So yes, I am glad for a good straightforward word like "explaining". 

OK, all fine and good, but that doesn't quite answer everything. What exactly is it that we're "rightly explaining"? 

As much as it might sound all Bible-like and churchy, this phrase "word of truth" is not actually all that common across scripture. In fact, most of its use is right here in these three letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. So in this case it's probably best to look within this trifecta to understand just what is meant by this phrase. And when we do so, it doesn't end up quite meaning what I was taught in my childhood. 

Even as a child I knew enough to understand that the Bible didn't drop fully-formed out of heaven; a lot of different "books" - sixty-six in all - were compiled and gathered up across a lot of different decades and centuries. This book of 2 Timothy was part of that process, naturally, which made it hard for me to figure out how this verse could be talking about all of the Bible (which is what I got taught in Sunday school) when the Bible hadn't actually been "finished" yet (in fact 2 Timothy was probably one of the last books to be added).. 

What we're talking about here would be better summarized as "the gospel" or the good news of Jesus Christ - this is what is consistently proclaimed across all of the New Testament letters, including this set of three. Paul's letters are clearly focused here, as he describes in 1 Corinthians 2:2 where says that he "decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." The other letters of the New Testament, while they differ from the Pauline body of writings in more than a few ways, are consistent on this message as well; what we proclaim is the saving work of Christ.

This leaves us with a hard question: do we "rightly explain the word of truth"? Do we tell the good news? Do we, to use a modern word borrowed from an old Greek word, evangelize?

Ooh, this gets uncomfortable. Talking about religion is so taboo, such a good way to get in trouble. Talk about "rightly dividing"? Trying to talk about religion is a most effective way to divide, and not in the way this verse means.

And yet, maybe that's the point. In an age where an awful lot of self-professed Christians or even self-professed leaders or teachers in the church have become quite proficient at "wrangling about words" and turning cherry-picked bits of scripture into bad news with which to bludgeon those they don't like, are we telling good news? Do we rightly explain the word of truth?

And if we don't, how do we start?

For a hard question to answer, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #453, How Firm a Foundation; #432, How Clear Is Our Vocation, Lord; #772, Live Into Hope

I don't think this is what that means...?

Sermon: No Shame at the Table

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL
October 5, 2025, Pentecost 17C
2 Timothy 1:8-14

 

No Shame at the Table

 

 

{sing} I know whom I have belie-ved

and am persuaded that he is able 

to keep that which I've committed 

unto Him against that day

 

That's one I remember from my childhood. I'm going to be honest with you; I had no clue in the world what that was supposed to be about. It made no sense to young me whatsoever. I know people get all sentimental and attached to the King James Version of the Bible (and some folks more than that, quite viciously combative about it), but had you showed the young me verse 12 from today's reading and said that this was the verse that this old gospel refrain came from, I wouldn't have believed you one bit. This is one case where I'm quite grateful for modern translations.

This comes to us in a strong and admirable bit of testimony from the author of this letter, acknowledging the struggles he has faced and yet declaring his continuing trust in God and encouraging his reader(s) to do the same. But getting to this testimony takes us through some challenging territory.

[Quick note: even though Paul's name and Timothy's are both on the letter, it is extremely unlikely that Paul actually wrote this letter or 1 Timothy. The roles of bishop and other church leaders described in 1 Timothy simply didn't exist by the time Paul had died, and the writing style is frankly alien to the rest of Paul's letters. This was not uncommon practice at the time. For the sake of convenience in the rest of this sermon, I will refer to writer and reader as "Paul" and "Timothy" anyway.]

The author, who we're calling Paul, seems to want to make a big deal of his imprisonment, and seems awfully concerned that his young reader might be feeling some shame over Paul's situation, whether for Paul directly or for how it might reflect on himself to have his teacher and mentor in jail. Perhaps as a result, this dynamic duo of "shame" and "suffering" pops up twice in this brief passage. First, in verse 8, Paul is encouraging Timothy not to be ashamed of Paul's testimony or of Paul himself, but to "join with me in suffering for the gospel." Later, in verse 12, Paul, having spoken of his call to apostleship, acknowledges that he suffers for this, but again encourages Timothy not to be ashamed. 

For anyone who knew Paul's career, suffering was almost a given. Paul had been jailed so many times that under modern marketing practices he would probably have earned a free stay somewhere. He had faced any number of arrests, tortures, and harsh punishments for his proclamation work. Speaking of suffering simply was talking about life for Paul. This business of shame, though, is something different. 

Paul's most well-known statement on suffering came back in Romans, where he proclaimed that "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of salvation...". In other epistle passages there is talk of others being ashamed for various misdeeds they might have done. This business of whether "Paul" might feel shame over his imprisonment is new, and frankly odd. 

The idea that Timothy (or whatever reader might see this) might be ashamed of Paul for this is still farther afield. Actually, this might make a decent argument for why Paul did not write these letters, as such attitudes about Paul (while not unheard of in his lifetime) became much stronger after his death, as different leaders with different ideas and attitudes came to the fore in the church. 

Still, whatever its sources, this does raise some questions that it's worthwhile for the church today to consider. What brings about shame these days? 

You would think that, say, reports of rampant sexual abuse and subsequent coverups by Roman Catholic priests some years ago, and Southern Baptist pastors more recently, would be the kind of thing that might provoke some degree of shame. But no, the only responses seem to be more coverup, more hiding, or sometimes "doubling down" and endorsing the leaders exposed for their wrongdoings. Somehow, shame at the abuse of other human beings doesn't seem to enter the picture; the only ones who end up being shamed are the victims of abuse, shamed for not forgiving their unrepentant and unpunished abusers. 

One might think the church's past complicity in the eradication of Native American peoples from their lands and erasure of their Native identities might also be an object of shame. There have been some fitful and tentative gestures towards acknowledgement and apology, and some church bodies have very recently returned lands to the native tribes or nations from which they were taken, there isn't a whole lot of evidence that any church so involved has experienced much shame for their actions in those times. 

So what do churches "get shamed" for these days?

Maybe for being small? 

You ever see that, or hear it? Someone affiliated with a larger church maybe being a little bit pitying, a little bit patronizing toward someone who goes to a smaller church? What are the automatic assumptions about a small church, the default words used to describe it? Maybe "struggling"? Maybe even "dying"? Maybe the higher-ups in that church's denominational struggle get into hushed conversations about how to gracefully ease that church aside and devote more resources to the bigger, more "successful" churches? (Or maybe that just happens among pastors...)

Well, for one thing, small churches are trendy now. There's even a book on the subject of the trend towards very small churches - even smaller than us in some cases[1]. For another, small ain't necessarily dead. I've been in small churches that crackle with activity and mission, and large churches that are - bluntly put - dead as a doornail. Seems from here that one church shaming another over size needs to worry less over the one finger pointing at the small church, and the three others pointing right back at them. 

In short, there are reasons churches should be ashamed, but they seldom are. And there are things about which churches don't need to be ashamed but sometimes get told they ought to be. Neither is good - the first because something very bad has clearly happened, and the second because one church trying to shame another for no good reason is, well, frankly, something to be ashamed of. 

Whatever shame was being experienced by Timothy (or whatever reader of this letter) was doing no good and probably distracting from the work that needed to be done. The same can be said for us. Getting caught up in shame over being small or over being ostracized by some fundamentalist church types doesn't help anything and probably gets in the way of the work that is before us. So, let's not waste time with that, okay?

And let's certainly not waste any time with that on World Communion Sunday. On a day (first proposed and carried out by a Presbyterian minister and his congregation) when we are reminded that the table is something we share with all of God's children, we certainly have no reason for shame. 

For not getting caught up in pointless shame, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns: (from Glory to God: the Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #310, I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord; #---, I'm not ashamed, whate'er my trial; #503, Lord, We Have Come at Your Own Invitation; #641, When in our Music God is Glorified

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[1] https://www.amazon.com/Microchurches-Smaller-Way-Brian-Sanders/dp/1088455662