Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14; I
Timothy 1:12-17; Luke
15:1-10.
Those skilled in doing evil
bring chaos, while apostles and disciples are joyful because God finds those
who are lost.
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28.
The prophetic
reading is a couple of clips from a very dramatic chapter in Jeremiah’s
poetic oracles. (The literary unit is Jeremiah 4:5-31.) The whole dramatic chapter presents the
indictment and demise of God’s people and their mother, the promiscuous wife
who is the divine persona of the City.
Zion
and her children are threatened – and finally ravaged – by a terrifying
force that sweeps down from the North.
The prophet hears
alarms, cries out warnings, and sees panic and horror all around. All, of course, is about judgment for
betraying God and being skilled only at doing evil (verse
22). But the driving purpose of all the
laser-light show that flashes from scene to scene and from voice to voice is to
present the dread and horror of ruthless, inhuman invaders and destroyers.
Generally
speaking, the breezes over Judah
come from the west and carry moisture from the Mediterranean Sea
as far as the point of highest elevation, the mountain range separating the
coastal plain from the Jordan Valley. To the east things are drier, even desert,
until you reach the high country of Ammon and Moab
in the distance, far beyond the Jordan River.
But sometimes
conditions are such that east and southeast winds sweep over Judah. They are dry, dusty, and may even be
tornado-like winds called siroccos.
These winds, multiplied to the Nth degree, are the winds referred to in
verses 11-12. These are winds too
violent to winnow the harvested grain – they simply blow everything away. Such winds are God’s way of speaking in
judgment against Judah
and Jerusalem.
Only one verse in
our reading gives the reason for God’s judgment (verse 22). The central issue is that the people’s
education has been perverted. They
lack knowledge of God. They are
“foolish,” they are “stupid children,” and have “no understanding.” They have lots of street smarts, but no
proper education. Consequently, they
have earned advanced degrees in practicing evil, but are only pre-schoolers at
doing good!
The climax of the
passage is the prophet’s vision of a land transformed wholly to chaos. Without knowledge of God and skill at doing
good, all things become “waste and void” (verse 23, NRSV). The heavenly lights are gone, the mountains
totter and tremble, and – most of all – no one is there.
The land is
empty, lonely, strewn with rubble, a surface wholly burnt over by the judgment
of God.
Such are the vast
consequences of humanity’s lack of education, that is, lack of loyalty to God,
lack of knowledge of justice, and lack of skill at doing good.
Psalm 14.
The one brief
statement of indictment in the Jeremiah passage (4:22 )
is expanded in the Psalm reading.
We hear of
“fools” who say there is no God and who have gone astray and become
perverse. “There is no one who does
good, no, not one” (verse 3, NRSV). These evildoers, who have no knowledge, are
not equated in this psalm with God’s people under judgment (as they are in the
prophet). Rather, they are more like the
foe from the north, busy consuming God’s people (verse 4).
However, such
foolish but powerful consumers are doomed to the same terror as Jeremiah’s
highly-trained evildoers. “There” – at
some undesignated place (read “Zion,”
where the final judgment on the nations takes place) – “they shall be in great
terror.”
Why? Because their victims have a champion, who
will finally appear to rectify things.
… God is with the company of the
righteous.
You [evildoers]
would confound the plans of the poor,
but the Lord [will prove to be] their
refuge” (verse 6).
I Timothy 1:12-17.
The Epistle
reading is the first of seven weeks of selections from the Pastoral Epistles,
as scholars have called I Timothy, II Timothy, and Titus since the eighteenth
century.
About these
Letters. The great fact about these
letters in New Testament scholarship for the past 150 years is that they speak
of different problems and use different language from the letters
unquestionably written by Paul (Romans, both Corinthians, Galatians, I
Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon).
So scholars commonly regard them as letters written in Paul’s name by
later leaders in the churches he founded.
The strongest
thing in favor of Paul’s authorship is that the letters, taken by themselves,
are convincing. They SAY they are from
Paul, they have compelling personal passages, and they are consistent and ring
true through all three letters.
Against Paul’s
authorship is that Paul died around 62 to 67, and these letters reflect church
conditions of the 80s to the 110s. They
are concerned with such things as qualifications for church offices, elders,
deacons, and even a “bishop.” Also,
there is great concern to teach and preserve “correct doctrine” (read
“orthodoxy”) and opposing people who do not follow that correct doctrine. We
have in these letters a stage in the development of the Christian movement that
is no longer holding its breath for the return of the glorified Christ but is
settling in for a long stay in the Roman world.
Looking over all
the thirteen letters attributed to Paul, it is fair to say that they show us at
least three Paul personas, each with its own challenges, thoughts, and
writing style.
·
Paul the First is the
familiar battler for the gospel of justification by faith and love found in
Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians.
·
Paul the Second speaks the
more mystical language of the Cosmic Christ in Colossians and Ephesians, and
·
Paul the Third is the
Apostolic doctor doing courses on leadership training, correct doctrine, and
false teaching to be combated.
Folks who read
Paul for religious and devotional purposes (rejecting the concept of
pseudepigraphy in the canon) prefer to think these are the same Paul at
different periods. Historians recognize
we have three different stages in the Paul Movement (see the Special Note
for the July 14, 2019
Biblical Words.)
What we read in
the two Timothy letters may be the Paul that faithful apostle-delegate Timothy
needed to hear (and record for himself) as the challenges of church leadership
grew and expanded in his later years.
Our passage from
I Timothy is the self-declaration of the Apostle.
The Paul who
speaks here holds himself up as the extreme example of a sinner delivered and
given a new mission. His personal story
provides the most drastic change imaginable from an old life to a new, and thus
his life is itself a powerful proclamation of the “mercy” and “patience” of
Jesus Christ (verse 16).
“Timothy,” and
all those ministers-to-be who sooner or later heard this letter, are instructed
in the essence of an apostle, one chosen and personally sent by the risen Jesus
Christ. It is from one with such
credentials that the rest of the letter is to be heard.
The Gospel
reading is about divine discrimination.
As usual, the
discrimination is in favor of sinners and other social-political suspects (such
as tax collectors and women). The proper
society people, represented by the Pharisees and scribes, grumble. “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with
them.” Once again, table fellowship is
the make-or-break of religious (and therefore social) correctness. In the realm of God, however, the focus is
not on those who are in but on those still left out.
One sheep is
missing from the shepherd’s flock of 100.
That represents a 1% loss. If
that’s it for the season he has done very well!
The shepherd in the parable, however, is not satisfied. He leaves the ninety-nine “in the wilderness”
and goes after the one that is lost. The
story doesn’t invite us to evaluate the risk to the ninety-nine, but it implies
that there was at least some risk – “in the wilderness” is not usually a safe
environment for unattended sheep.
And when the lost
sheep is found, the shepherd makes a really big deal of it. “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep
that was lost” (verse 6, NRSV ). And then the really discriminating divine
punch line: “Just so, I tell you,
there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over
ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”
Generally, I feel
like one of the ninety-nine, and therefore somewhat devalued by this behavior
of the “good” shepherd. (Which, of course, includes me in the class-action
suit brought by the older brother in the long parable below, the Prodigal
Son.)
And a woman had
ten valuable silver coins. (Luke tends
to group stories or episodes in pairs, one for a man and one for a woman.) When one coin is lost she does the
total-search routine – with success. In
her case there is probably no danger to the nine coins still resting in her
cash box, but she too makes a really big deal of the recovery of the lost
coin.
Divine discrimination! Even the angels in heaven engage in it (verse
10), so what chances do Pharisees have who are so finicky about the
qualifications of their eating companions?
This shepherd and matron, Jesus says, have got the right message: Rejoice!
Rejoice!
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