Lectionary Lab PREMIUM Edition for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
June 2, 2024
Thinking the Texts
There are plenty of poignant moments in the story of young Samuel in the temple with old Eli. As Delmer advises on today’s podcast, you just have to pick one of ‘em and stick with it. I am intrigued by verse 18, a good word for us preachers: “So Samuel told him [Eli] everything and hid nothing from him. Then he said, ‘It is the LORD; let him do what seems good to him.’" When you’ve prayed and worked, pastor, and you’ve got a word from the Lord for your congregation, don’t hold anything back. Let it rip; may God let none of your words fall to the ground!
In a related move, Paul writing to the Corinthians leads with: “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake.” That’s the ticket, right there! It’s not about us, and it’s not really about our parishioners (well, it kinda is, but you know what I mean.) It’s about proclaiming Christ as Lord, and as douloi (slaves/servants), we are both obedient (to God) and humble before our folks.
Mark has Jesus in a series of encounters with those who really wanted to oppose him, and thought it might be a good idea to quote a little scripture and tradition at him. It’s early in the gospel yet (just chapter 2), but these fellers will soon learn it’s never a good idea to get into a proof-texting context with Jesus! Consider, in light of what we’ve just said in the comments above, how Jesus maintains the strength of his message and also keeps his cool (relatively well) as a servant who has come simply to proclaim. He’s not giving any ground to his detractors, but he’s not arrogant or angry. Oh, that we may go and do likewise!
And Just for Fun
Two antennas decided to get married. The ceremony was pretty boring, but the reception was great!
My wife told me to take the spider out instead of killing him, so I did. We went out, had a few drinks, saw a movie. Great guy.
How many sailors are Pirates? 3.14%.
I was raised as an only child—and that got on my brother’s nerves.
A man rushed into a doctor’s surgery, shouting, “Help me, please! I’m shrinking!” The doctor calmly said, “Now settle down a bit. You’ll just have to learn to be a little patient.”
Sermon by Delmer Chilton
I grew up in Slate Mountain, a rural place along the North Carolina/Virginia state line in the Appalachian foothills. This community took Sabbath observance seriously. People went to church regularly and avoided working or shopping on Sundays. A few stores were open, but the law limited what could be bought and sold. Gas and food yes; beer and toys no. This was quite confusing because the stores in Virginia followed different rules than the stores in North Carolina. Two different state legislatures with conflicting, yet authoritative, interpretations of what it was okay for “Christian” people to buy and sell on Sunday. Even today all over the South, local rules on what can be bought and sold on “the Sabbath” differ by state and county.
I served a church in Conyers Georgia in the late 1980s. I remember standing around the grocery store in my suit and clerical collar on a Sunday after church, waiting until 1:00 PM so I could buy a six-pack of beer because friends were coming over for a cookout. The checkout girl looked at me real funny but hey, you can’t eat ribs without beer.
At first glance, our Gospel lesson appears to be about Sabbath observance. Jesus is twice chastised for breaking the community’s rules about how one should obey the commandment to “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.” The Ten commandments are laid out in the Old Testament in two places, first in outline form in Exodus, chapter 20, then in more elaborate, explanatory form in our reading from Deuteronomy 5. Over time, like states and counties and little towns trying to figure out how to protect the Sabbath, various groups created codes for what you could and couldn’t do. The Pharisees were the most strict of these groups. Their rules were drenched in legalistic logic, and were considered ironclad, no exceptions.
On this occasion, Jesus and his disciples were walking through a grainfield, and the fellas started plucking heads of grain. By this time, Jesus had begun to have a large following and had drawn the attention of the Pharisees who saw him as a possible rival. He was under their microscope. Now Jesus and the boys didn’t just go trespassing through a farmer’s field, they were following a public path open to all in which the grain was close at hand on both sides. The Pharisees immediately pounced, “AHA! Look at that, they’re harvesting! That’s a no-no. That’s work!” Whether the disciples absent-mindedly stripped off a few stalks to look at them or intended to eat them, the text does not say. But Jesus’ answer indicates they were eating. He says, “Hey, chill! Remember David and his army eating the Bread of the Presence? That was against the rules too. But they were starving so it was okay!” Then he adds the moral – like the end of one of Aesop’s fables, “The sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath!”
The text makes the point a second time with a story about Jesus healing a man in the synagogue, again on the Sabbath. This time, before doing anything, Jesus looked at the people watching him and put THEM on the spot, asking them an unanswerable question, showing their hypocrisy to the world, “Is it lawful to do good or do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or kill?”
And they said nothing. They knew the right answer. They also knew that to say it out loud would cut the legs out from under their rules and regulations. Jesus got angry at their “hardness of heart,” and they got angry at Jesus for defying their rules by healing the man anyway. Notice the last line of our lesson, verse 3:6 “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with he Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”
As I said, at first glance this text appears to be about Sabbath observance, but it’s really not.
It’s about God’s love for humanity, about humanity’s habit of turning gifts into obligations, and about our oftentimes narrow-minded hardness of heart when it comes to loving others with the same kind of unconditional love with which God has loved us.
Let me repeat that:
It’s about God’s love for humanity, about humanity’s habit of turning gifts into obligations, and about our oftentimes narrow-minded hardness of heart when it comes to loving others with the same kind of unconditional love with which God has loved us.
The Law, the Torah, the Teaching, was given to the Children of Israel, and through them, to all God’s people, as a gift, not a burden. It is a gift that teaches us how to live as God’s people in God’s way on God’s earth. In the story in Exodus, they were recently released slaves who knew nothing about governing themselves. All they knew was how to obey the master and defend themselves against the other slaves. Now they were a free people who had to learn how to act like a free people. And God gave them a gift of guidance in good living.
And they immediately started messing it up by turning a gift into an obligation. They started adding rules upon rules, regulations upon regulations, making sure they did not violate “God’s Law.” After a while, they forgot that the sabbath had been established as a gift of rest and recreation, a gift to make sure people didn’t work themselves to death as they had while they were in slavery. The sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath. New rules popped up: “Even if you’re hungry, don’t work to eat on the Sabbath. Even if the patient’s dying, don’t heal them on the sabbath.” What foolishness! Good thing we’re not like that!
Or maybe we are. Do we sometimes let our self-made rules and regulations, our pride and prejudice, our preferences and privilege, blind us to the ways that doing things how we prefer, and think is right often hurts and harms others? We in the modern church intend to be inclusive, with open doors and open hearts, but sometimes we fail because, like the Pharisees in Mark’s story, we have hard hearts and blinded eyes, failing to see the unintended fallout of our actions.
The Gospel for us today is that God has come in Christ to open our eyes and soften our hearts. We are called to do our very best in serving Christ and neighbor. We are called to do our very best in breaking down the barriers that keep others from hearing and seeing God’s love in all we say and do. We are called to do our very best to do good and not harm on the sabbath and every other day. And God will be with us, enlightening the eyes of our hearts so that we may always see and love others as Christ first loved us.
Amen and amen.