Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
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Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 22
May 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
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There is only one teacher
and that is God
Reflections on the lessons for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Micah 3:5-12
Psalm 43
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13, 17-20
Matthew 23:1-12
THE reference books were opened
wide this week.
So get ready for a lot of facts and history and
dates.
THE reading from Micah has an interesting context. And it's one of a minority of passages in the Bible that can be pretty accurately dated. From the text it's clear that Micah was writing this poem (yes, it's a poem) about God's disgust with the ways of the world about the year 700 BC.
Things were rough for Judah (the southern kingdom that would ultimately be folded into Israel). Assyria was encircling the kingdom and turning up all kinds of heat. Damascus, then Samaria, then Ashdod had all been conquered by Assyria in about 20 years. Jerusalem, just north up in Israel, was under siege. Judah was next.
Think about the movie "Casablanca." Like in France as the Germans were advancing, the so-called People of God in Judah were acting out their survival in the worst of ways:
- Bribery and black market
bartering were the only ways to get any business done at
all.
Politicians were collaborating with the enemy.
Merchants were cheating and price gouging and selling shoddy and adulterated goods.
The poor were simply abandoned.
The synagogues were blending in elements from the Canaanite cults with the religion of the God of Exodus.
Everybody felt that the tanks were about to come rolling in.
And everyone was trying to get a buck while he could and to blend in with the enemies at any cost. - To this mess, Micah speaks "the
Word of God."
That's what prophets do. They call their society to task and hold up a mirror to behavior that they think God would condemn if God were there to speak out loud. To people who are being so politically correct that they're pathetic. And to people who are selling out everything good for personal gain.
Micah says that it's possible -- in fact certain --
that people can wind up "looking" smart, or good, or practical,
but very easily could find themselves empty and lost:
holding a handful of dust and a mouthful of ashes.IT'S NOT HOW THINGS LOOK THAT COUNTS,
IT'S WHAT'S GOING ON INSIDE. -
- PAUL'S letter to the Church at
Thessalonika is one of the oldest documents of
Christianity, written about 20 years after the death of
Jesus.
This is the conclusion of Paul's "confession": a section of the letter in which he explains that he has no great gift for making lengthy speeches -- and that he has no interest in making a living from preaching the gospel. He will remain, he says, a roaming tent maker so as not to be a burden on the congregations he founds and serves.
It's a section dotted with "recall" passages. "You recall..." he says, when I was with you, how this or that happened, how I said this or that. And the point that he winds up making is this:
- You recall that I never claimed to be very smart of very flashy, but you will also recall how I worked persistently and gently to tell you something very new and very great about God -- with no ulterior motives.
The contrast could not be greater with the kind of warped and venal leaders that are condemned by Micah and by Jesus in the Matthew's Gospel.
THE reading from Matthew is the first third of a long passage condemning "scribes and Pharisees" for a list of infractions as long as your arm.
Now, this is the part that's a little hard to get across. When reading the gospels, it's important to remember that the events described are not so much set in the context of the life of Jesus-- but in that of the life and times of the author of the gospel and the people who first read it. The gospels are not biographies of Jesus. They are applications of the teaching of Jesus to the real life problems of later people. Matthew wrote his book somewhere around 90 AD. And not in Jerusalem, but most likely up in Syria.
Of course, Jesus disputed with Pharisees in real life.
Many think Jesus was himself a Pharisee, teaching in that tradition, though on the radical fringes of it.
But, by the time of Matthew, the Christians had taken Jesus' ball and run with it. And the mainline Pharisees in the Jewish power system were clamping down on the Christians' slant on the Torah. (Remember, Christians were still Jews at this point.) The Christians had gone too far. They were heretics.
By the time Matthew wrote, Christians were being expelled from the synagogues, silenced in debates, forbidden to teach as rabbis.
And the Pharisees were doing something new to Jewish tradition. Instead of letting the dialogue among teachers and scholars range far and wide and develop first one consensus and then another, the Pharisees were organizing and recording and institutionalizing THEIR thoughts and reaching. And setting them forth as the real, true Judaism.
Now, along with this official set of doctrines and customs and propaganda, these Pharisees that were shoring up Judaism against these new "Jesus People" (as the early Christians called themselves) were for the first time in Judaism setting up a system of hierarchies of officials and the like in synagogues. (This is right after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple there in 70 AD.)
In the Temple there were priests and a high priest and a whole hierarchy. But that was gone. When there was a Temple, the synagogues all over the place were like clubhouses. There everyone who could lay claim to being a scholar of the Torah could gather to discuss and debate. And people would listen and hopefully learn. Now, the Pharisees were going to impose a Temple-like structure on a place that had never had such a tradition.
They started using titles. "Rabbi" (which means "teacher") would be a form of address. Synagogues would have a chief rabbi. Others would answer to him, or be excluded by him. He would be the gatekeeper of orthodoxy and right thinking. He would be called "Father."
Matthew's message therefore is:
Don't put on airs and wear big fringes on your prayer shawls and wear big phylacteries (boxes that hold written prayers close to you) to show that you're holier than thou.
Don't claim to have all the answers
Don't squash exploration and dialogue with your own opinions.
MATTHEW is not alone. He's saying just what the other readings are saying:
The true religion of the living God
is a matter of heart,
a mater of sincerity.
Clothing ambition,
or fear,
or desire for power
in the trappings of faith
is the worst kind of lying and self-deception.
When you see someone who claims to
have all the answers,
the Bible tells us: run, don't walk in the opposite
direction.
THERE IS ONLY ONE TEACHER
AND THAT IS GOD.
The rest of us are all in the school of life together.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.