Summer is finally giving up, and it’s time to cut back the rosebushes. I’m not good at this, either cutting too long or too short. Mostly I’m too tender, wondering if the plants are screaming in pain. But then I’m left with a springtime tangle of spent canes. Most plants, I’m told, actually enjoy being pruned! Sounds masochistic to me. Next summer’s blooms are evidently dependent upon this fall’s zeal: spare the rod and spoil the rose… Passages to be read in your worship-space this weekend dwell with God’s being part of our lives even while said lives are falling apart.
Lamentations is a book we skip over between Jeremiah–its purported author–and the “minor” prophets. Historically, this is a lament over the wreck of Jerusalem (and the Chosen People) after the Babylonian desolation. A survivor speaks of this post-trauma community experience: “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!…like a widow…a princess…she weeps bitterly in the night….Her princes have become like stags that find no pasture.” (1:1-6) Can we deal with this awful change? Will Zion Be Great again? Things aren’t like they were when I was a lad… Does Yahweh still have our back?
Generations later, there’s still trouble. “Paul” is pictured as writing from prison to “Timothy”, a protege. (Detour, if you will, to Bonhoeffer’s “Letters from Prison” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) In the middle of the confusion there do appear signposts to mark the way (II 1:1-14): Adhere to what you’ve been taught; know that Christ Jesus overflows with love; and “guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit LIVING IN US.” Keep your sunny side up, kid, “for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”
My Pastor, Michelle Bogue-Trost, calls them the “duh-ciples”. They certainly ask dumb questions–which is good, otherwise I’d have to ask them myself. Luke 17:5-10 could be read in a snarky way, because they asked Jesus to “increase their faith”. If they went to seminary with me, they’d have learned that Faith is from the INside, our response to the wonders of Grace. But Jesus reassured them that even their microscopic smidgen of Faith can cause world-changing events There’s no purpose in a briny mulberry tree; but there are many gigantic frontiers of justice, peace and the healing of the nations which could be credited to the incarnate faith community. “Faith cannot be measured, only enacted”, says Kimberly Bracken Long in FEASTING on the WORD, C 4:144.
The immediate challenge to our hearers is a choice: to mourn the “Good” Old familiar Days–or to embrace where our faith-journey is unfolding, even if the Old Guard should be imprisoned by our dream-dragons while the Young Turks blaze new trails. I think I’ll go out now and cut back the rose bushes. ‘Way back…
God Bless Us, Every One Horace Brown King
My thoughts on scriptures to be heard on the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this space on Facebook, or at horacebrownking.com
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