Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12C, July 24, 2016, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Colossians 2:6-19 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit.
Luke 11:1-13 Because of his [lack of shame or honor].
O God of dignity, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
It seems to me that the themes of our scripture lessons for this morning are fidelity and honor in difficult circumstances. What excellent timing! Our three readings are saying, “Stay true. Hold fast to the reconciling Love of Jesus Christ. Don’t give up your dignity. Don’t give up your integrity. Don’t give up.”
From Hosea, forsake all other gods and stay true to the Holy One. Hosea – a prophet of Israel – was crying out against the people of God for breaking the covenant in their political and religious behavior – a covenant that requires full-bodied attentiveness to and trust in the Holy One of Israel. Idolatry and whoredom, in ancient Hebrew, are the same word – the same thing. Fidelity to the Holy One is expected and the people have been seeing other gods. They have been engaged in lewd living, moral defection, improper intercourse with other deities, deities like wealth and military might.
What we miss by ending at verse ten, is that the Holy One restores the people – to be called Ruhamah (compassionate) and Ammi (my people) – the part in v. 9 that says I am not your God – actually says “I am not your becoming” or “I am not your being” or “I am not your will be.” But in the next verses, all of that is restored, and indeed the covenant goes further and deeper than ever before. The covenant is no longer “you will be my people and I will be your god,” it is now that with compassion. Hosea’s is a story about a forgiving, patient, and tender God. Regrettably, indeed, dangerously and dishonestly, our lectionary (our Bible lesson delivery system) makes it sound as if God has forsaken and rejected God’s people in the 8th century BCE, not to be restored until Jesus came along. What we Christians do not hear is that the whole of Hosea is a treatise on God’s redeeming compassionate love for God’s people in the 8th century BCE. In spite of their past bad behavior, God will offer new beginnings. (On the other hand, what has not yet been redeemed is the fact that our sacred texts, including Hosea, are shot through with misogynistic imagery and metaphors. Then, as now, when men call each other bad names, the names they choose often denigrate women. But I digress.)
In the letter to those gathered in Jesus’ name in Colossae, east of Ephesus in modern day Turkey, the writer warns the people not to get caught in the traps of deceit and fear. Don’t let anyone convince you that you are not One with the Holy. Don’t let anyone convince you that you are somehow inadequately faithful. Continue to live your lives in the redeeming love shown to you in Christ Jesus, rooted and built up in him and established in that faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. Don’t let others steal your dignity. Don’t give away your joy. Return to this text especially when you feel afraid — when your own internalized oppression is telling you that your spiritual instincts or sensibilities are insufficient for the challenges ahead. Remember your belovedness. Remember that the power of Love is stronger than death. Keep living in love.
From Luke we have a lesson on prayer: ask, search, knock. Don’t give up. For the first time this past week, I noticed that what is being sought in the disciples’ request to be taught to pray, and what is being offered in Jesus’ response and words of assurance in verse thirteen, is a holy spirit, a spirit of holiness. In the original text, there is no definite article – and you probably remember there are no capital letters. This is long before the theological idea of Trinity. The quest and the gift is a spirit of holiness. If you ask for a spirit of holiness, if you search for a spirit of holiness, if you knock on doors begging to enter a spirit of holiness, it will be given to you; it will be opened for you.
This is the only time in all of the Gospels that the disciples ask to be taught. They don’t ask to be taught how to behave better. They don’t ask to be taught to think more clearly or accurately about God. They’re not asking to believe something. They’re not asking for a systematic theology. They’re not seeking better strategic plans or stronger managerial skills, or more effective organizing tactics. “Teach us to pray,” they say. Now my strong hunch is that they already knew some prayers – my strong hunch is that they were looking for something deeper, something better, maybe something more satisfying and effective. They saw Jesus praying, and they wanted some of what he had – a spirit of holiness. What does that mean? Holy means dedicated or devoted to the Divine. Spirit means life force, breath, essence, animation. A holy spirit is an essential dedication, an animated by devotion to the Holy One. A spirit of holiness is an inspiration to Love more boldly, more courageously – that is, from the heart.
What Jesus taught them is simple and direct. It’s essentially Jewish – with lines similar to the Kaddish, ideas found in Hebrew Scripture and in teachings of other first century Jews. None of the words or ideas is elaborate or innovative. I think Jesus is saying, there’s nothing magic about the words of prayer and there’s nothing new under the sun. Jesus taught his disciples to declare the hallowing of God’s name. Declare the nearness of God’s rule of Love, realm of mercy, reign of grace. Declare the justice and compassion that are so close, that the most basic needs of all can be met in the commonwealth of the Divine.
What comes next has caused centuries of debate among Bible scholars, because the line, “give us each day our daily bread” has an untranslatable word: epiousios. (One used to need access to a theological library to figure these things out, but now it’s all there on Wikipedia! [1]) Give us each day our __??___ bread. It might have been Martin Luther who decided the word for daily should go there, but the Greek word epiousios is definitely not the word for daily. There’s wide scholarly agreement on that. Trouble is, the word doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible (except in the parallel in the Gospel of Matthew’s version Jesus’ prayer). Nor does the word appear anywhere else in Greek literature. The most literal translation is probably something like over-substantial or supersubstantial. What does that mean? People who parse the word that way generally interpret it as bread that doesn’t run out, or a large amount of bread – an abundance, literally bread for tomorrow, or figurative bread for the messianic feast. In other words, much more than daily subsistence, today give us tomorrow’s bread, give us so much bread that we’ll never be hungry, give us the kind of bread that doesn’t go bad or run out. Pray for more than just today’s bread.
But what does this prayer mean when prayed by people who are among the minority of the world’s population that is overfed and wasting food, and the majority world’s population is underfed or starving. (Even in Massachusetts, one-quarter of children don’t get enough to eat.) If we’re honest when we are praying this Lord’s prayer, that will mean that we live on less so that others will have plenty – that goes for bread and other resources. The line that keeps running through my head is “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” (I can’t find an attribution.) Fortunately for us, what comes next is a request for forgiveness.
Now I imagine that the starkness of the wording, “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” might bring you up a little short. It does me. I’m always hoping that God will do a better job of forgiving me and my sins than the job I do of forgiving others who owe me one (or who owe me a lot). But that is a quid pro quo way of hearing these words. New Testament scholar Alan Culpepper writes that what Jesus was getting at, was an idea already established in Jewish teaching that linked giving and receiving of forgiveness. Forgiveness requires an open circuit. Mercy flows through the same channel, and one who will not forgive, cannot receive forgiveness because it is all part of the same gift. [2] Pray for an open channel. And finally, pray for deliverance. Pray that we will be saved from ourselves and from others. Pray that we might be spared from whatever would be too great to bear.
Luke follows this teaching about how to pray with a subversive and funny parable. In this case, we lose something in the translation into English [3] of a word that means “with no shame” (in other words, “honor”) into the word “persistence.” The story Jesus tells about a grumpy man who won’t open the door to give his neighbor bread is absurd. It would make his disciples laugh. It’s as funny as someone ringing a doorbell who then hears a voice from inside yell, “go away, there’s nobody here.” In Jesus’ time, no one in their right mind would deny bread to a nighttime traveler or the friend of a nighttime traveler, and they all knew it. It had to do with life and death, and it had to do with honor — the honor of the individual, the honor of the family, and the honor of the whole village. It’s not the persistence of the person knocking that results in the gift of bread, it’s the “without shame” or the honor of the person who has been awakened which will cause him to rise to give his friend what is needed.
The peculiar theology that results from this parable seeming like a lesson about persistence in prayer, makes God seem like a reluctant grouch who answers our requests to get some relief from our constant nagging. And it makes anyone who hasn’t received what he or she has been asking for into someone who must not have been asking often enough or crying out loudly enough. That kind of theology makes me so mad because it oppresses the very ones Jesus sought to liberate. David Buttrick, in his book about parables, writes: “the notion that, repeatedly, we must bang on the doors of heaven if we are to catch God’s attention is hardly an appropriate theology of prayer.” [4] Surely Jesus is not teaching his disciples about how to badger the Divine.
It seems to me that Jesus is teaching his disciples a practice that reminds us just who and Whose we are. This kind of prayer reminds us that the spirit of God, realm of God is in us and among us. Ask and you will have it. Seek and you will find it. Knock and it will open. It’s in you. It’s among you. Prayer, according to Jesus, is to be liberative, just, loving, compassionate, and redemptive (because God knows we all need liberation, justice, love, compassion and redemption). According to Jesus, this is how we are when we are God’s people. This is how we act. This is our stance. Prayer is not a transaction, it is a posture. [5] Prayer is an open posture of humility and vulnerability and the kind of bravery that comes from acknowledging our weakness. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote “Prayer does not change God, but it changes [the one] who prays.” Pray for a spirit of holiness. Pray for a holy spirit.