The walking death of hypocrisy

Here's a little sermonette I preached yesterday to a "congregation" of two classmates in a preaching class.  We were pushing the lower limit of Jesus' words in Matthew 18: "For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them." (NIV) First, here's the biblical text we were working with, Luke 13:10-17 (also NIV):

On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity." Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.

Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue ruler said to the people, "There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath."

The Lord answered him, "You hypocrites! Doesn't each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?"

When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.

Read on after the break for my short sermonic reflections...

Economics is ALWAYS a morality play

Whose image is on this? (Mt. 22)

Let me preface this post with a few things:

• I am not an economist. For better or worse, I dropped out of the one economics class I took in my undergrad because 1) I changed my major (from journalism to English) and didn't need it anymore and 2) the teacher was terrible.
• I don't know who Paul Krugman is other than what the page whose link I'm about to post tells me. He's a self-described liberal, has a blog on the NY Times site (a column in the paper too?), and writes about economics.
• My reflections will not be coming from the field of academic study categorized as "Economics" with its various competing theories that are then put into practice in the world.

Now on with the post! In Paul Krugman's NY Times blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal," he posted something whose mere title gave me pause: Economics Is Not A Morality Play. In this short piece, he makes a few subsequent statements that also make me scratch my head. Namely these:

• "(E)conomics is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good system most of the time, though not always — with no special moral significance." (emphasis in original)
• On our current economic situation, demanding what he describes as "depression economics": "This is a situation in which virtue becomes vice and prudence is folly; what we need above all is for someone to spend more, even if the spending isn’t particularly wise."
• "(I)t would have been much better if the Depression had been ended with massive spending on useful things, on roads and railroads and schools and parks. But the political consensus for spending on a sufficient scale never materialized; we needed Hitler and Hirohito instead."

Read on after the break for more on why I'm scratching my head...

De-Freakyfying John's Apocalypse

The last book of the Christian scriptures in the Bible - the Apocalypse (Revelation) of John - has had a rocky past with its handlers. While my tradition - the Church of the Brethren - has tended to not get freaky with John's Revelation, neither do I recall any sort of serious work with this text in the context of Sunday morning worship services growing up (my primary mode of receiving Scripture in my youth). The broadly Protestant, rural Midwestern (Iowan) environment that I grew up in, however, did contain some strands of the Christian faith that were more receptive to...um...freaky interpretations of John's letter. Last summer on my Honnold.org website, in a discussion that started on a completely different topic, we somehow we got onto the subject of freakiness in connection to Revelation, with a few guys around my age and growing up in the same kind of environment sharing some interesting stories about their youthful experiences in congregations with Revelation. Read through it there if you're curious, I won't go any further here. Suffice it say that this topical side-track discussion of Revelation was a perfect illustration of how this text has been used and abused, especially within American Christianity in the last 100 years or so.

The broad goal of this post is to begin narrating my own coming to grips with this purportedly wild and crazy book of Scripture: Revelation. Over the past 9 months, I've grown to have a deep appreciation for John's Apocalypse, and have even begun to see how it is a key interpretive text for the Christian faith...although not in ways that many Christians have bought into, in part due to my Anabaptist/nonviolent orientation. Hopefully to people who read it (hint: it's long and all text), it can offer a refreshing perspective. It is work done in faith, within the life of the Church. May it be edifying to the body.

First, read the passage itself: Revelation 5:1-14 (NIV) from BibleGateway.com
Then, read on for my lengthy exploration of this pivotal passage from the Apocalypse of John...

In these scant few verses...

This morning, I sat down to write a reflection paper for my biblical interpretation class.  It is the culmination of over a month spent in just six verses of the Gospel of Mark, 14:3-9.  Here is the text, from the NRSV (with verse numbers removed):

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.

But some were there who said to one another in anger, "Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor." And they scolded her.

But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her."

What follows is the last of seven papers I wrote for this class, on this text.  It is the final step in the exegetical process: theological reflection.  For the non-seminary crowd, "exegesis" can simply be defined as "close reading."  Seven or eight weeks on six verses of scripture certainly qualifies as that.  Read on to see what conclusions I came to...