Third Sunday After The Epiphany / Third Sunday In Ordinary Time
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VIII, Cycle A
Theme For The Day
In the true church of Jesus Christ, there is but one loaf, and one Lord.
Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 9:1-4
Salvation Will Be Revealed In Galilee
(This passage has recently occurred in the lectionary, as part of the First Lesson for Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day, Proper I.)
Some historical background is helpful to understanding this passage, which has been chosen for today because it is cited in the gospel lesson. The historical background is found in 2 Kings 15:29: "In the days of King Pekah of Israel, King Tiglath-pileser of Assyria came and captured Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali; and he carried the people captive to Assyria." These are the lands referred to in verse 1 of today's lection: "the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations." These are territories of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that have been lost to the Assyrians. Isaiah's prophecy is looking ahead into the future to a day when these terrible losses will be reversed. Truly, this restoration of the captured lands, when it happens, will be as a light shining into the darkness (v. 2). In that day, the people will rejoice, with all the abandon of victorious soldiers plundering their defeated adversaries. Then, the Jewish people -- their homes and lands so recently plundered -- will be doing the plundering, for a change (v. 3). "The rod of their oppressor" will finally be broken (v. 4). In these present, dark days -- in which the future of God's covenant seems in doubt -- Isaiah is defiantly proclaiming that the Lord will one day redeem Israel and Judah, bringing them victory at last. From the Christian standpoint, the way in which God will reverse Israel's fortunes is through the coming of Jesus Christ -- giving a poignant double meaning to the phrase, "Galilee of the nations" (or, "Galilee of the Gentiles"), in verse 1.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
"Has Christ Been Divided?"
Picking up where last week's epistle lesson left off, Paul appeals to the deeply divided Corinthian church, urging them to make unity their highest goal (v. 10). Paul has heard reports of a church divided into at least three factions: some identifying themselves with his own teachings, others with Apollos', and still others with Peter's (v. 11). Some others -- perhaps exasperated with these divisions -- have taken to simply calling themselves followers of Christ (in a similar way, perhaps, to those in our own day who self-righteously say, "I'm just a Christian" -- implying that their particular church has cornered the market on true Christianity). "Has Christ been divided?" Paul asks, in exasperation (v. 13). He wants no part of such factionalism, disassociating himself from those who have put his own picture on their T-shirts and bumper stickers. He has no desire to be a rock star. Paul even expresses relief that he has baptized only a handful of people in Corinth -- any more than that, and he might have had a real fan club on his hands! Paul reasserts that his only desire, all along, has been to bring people to Christ through plain speaking -- not to gain followers for himself through elegant rhetoric (v. 17). Sadly, Paul's words are all too relevant today, for a church that continues to fragment itself along various lines: national, denominational, theological, social.
The Gospel
Matthew 4:12-23
Fishing For People
(Preachers who focused on the gospel lesson the week before will need to differentiate last week's passage, from John 1, from this one -- for there are significant factual discrepancies between these two accounts of the calling of Simon and Andrew.)
After John's arrest, Jesus withdraws to Galilee (which, Matthew is quick to remind us, fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah 9). Jesus then begins to proclaim the simple message that can be summarized in one line: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" (verses 12-17). After this, Jesus calls his first disciples, the fishermen Simon and Andrew, using the famous line, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people" (v. 19). As Matthew relates the bare-bones details of this story, that single sentence is enough to convince these two men to leave their nets -- and, indeed, everything related to their former life -- behind, and instantly follow Jesus (v. 20). James and John, the sons of Zebedee, are the next to respond -- equally abruptly -- to Jesus' simple, but compelling invitation (verses 21-22). They abandon their father, still sitting in the family fishing boat. This action on their part -- an appalling breach of filial duty, according to the law of Moses -- emphasizes the urgency of Jesus' appeal. A possible preaching point is the nearness of God's reign (v. 17), and how -- once we realize it -- that infuses our lives with a sense of urgency. Another approach is to focus on the experience of Christ's call in our lives -- acknowledging that Matthew's account of the calling of the first disciples is a sort of "executive summary" that telescopes what was probably a longer process of discernment and reflection into a single moment of decision.
Preaching Possibilities
Why is it that everywhere Christians go, there seems to arise a bewildering variety of churches?
"Has Christ been divided?" That's what the apostle Paul wants to know. Literally, the Greek means, "Has Christ been cut up and parceled out?" Even back in the first century, Christians struggled with unity. It was too early, back then, for them to troubled by anything resembling denominations. But that didn't stop the Corinthians. The divisions in that early church arose among the followers of certain teachers.
"What I mean," says Paul, "is that each of you says, 'I belong to Paul,' or 'I belong to Apollos,' or 'I belong to Cephas,' or 'I belong to Christ.' Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?"
We can hear in those words echoes of Christianity here in America. Paul's words sound as freshly on Main Street, USA, as they once echoed among the rabbit-warren back streets of Corinth.
Ecumenical unity is something many people struggle with, even in their own families. Many engaged couples, looking ahead to their married life, have struggled mightily with the issue of which church to raise the children. There are family members who haven't spoken to each other for years, split by disagreements over a wedding, a baptism, or even a funeral (events supposed to bring Christians together in love).
Many local churches have a wonderful heritage and celebrate that history at every opportunity. Yet, as precious as that heritage is, there is something more important than the church. It is not a something at all, but a someone: the Lord of the church, Jesus Christ. The witness of scripture is clear that the institutional church belongs to this earth, and to this present age; it will have no place in the life to come.
The author of Revelation puts it best, unfolding his vision of the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem: "I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (Revelation 21:22-23).
When it comes right down to it, when we all go off to meet our maker, the questions we'll be called upon to answer will not pertain to the practices of one particular church or another. God will not ask how much water we used to baptize, or whether we drank wine or grape juice at communion. God won't be much interested in whether our scientific theories run to seven-day creation or Darwinian evolution, or whether, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we are "trespassers" or "debtors."
No, in that day of judgment, the Lord will be much more interested in whether it mattered to us that we struggled with dieting to lose weight while children in Africa starved; or, whether we ached with the injustice of it all, when we heard that our nation has both the highest percentage of gun ownership and the highest percentage of our population in prison of any industrialized nation.
On that day, the Lord will be much less interested in the particular church we attended, than in whether we worshiped at all, less concerned with the type of cross hanging around our necks than with whether we showed the love that comes of knowing what the cross is for.
In recent years, we've heard a lot of fiftieth-anniversary stories about World War II. One of those stories comes out of France, from a village where all the young men went to war together, in one unit. And, in one unit, they were captured by the invading Germans, as the blitzkrieg thundered across the border.
The German officers promised the French soldiers they'd be returned to their homes: but, instead, the POWs were loaded onto railway boxcars and taken deep into Germany. For three days, the prisoners had no food and very little water.
Finally, they were unloaded at a POW camp, and these men of the same village were herded into a barracks that would be their home. In a final gesture of cruelty, one of the guards took a single loaf of bread and tossed it through the barracks door before locking it tight.
It landed in the center of the floor and in the twinkling of an eye the hungry men converged upon it. But then, into the tangle of arms and legs and the clamor of voices, there intruded a single voice rising above the tumult.
"Jacques; Pierre; François," it said calling each man by name. It was the voice of their parish priest who had gone along as chaplain to the unit. The priest made for the center of that desperate swarm, and the men suddenly ceased their struggle and parted to let him through. He stood face-to-face with the soldier who had ended up with the prize in his hands -- and who now hung his head in shame. He handed the loaf to the chaplain. The priest took the bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Each man had his fair share, small as it was.
As one of the soldiers remembered it, there in that dark room, those defeated, demoralized, and desperate men had their freedom and dignity restored. From that moment on, they knew their captors could not take those things away, ever again.
Those men are so like the scattered and contentious Christian churches in the disunity that plagues us. So comfortable have we become with the motley assortment of denominations that we have forgotten what a scandal it is that there are denominations at all. We can scarcely conceive how it would revolutionize the work of evangelism around the world if we could but attain a measure of Christian unity once again.
Whether the bread is broken in a POW barracks, at the communion table of a Protestant church, or before the high altar of a cathedral, there is but one loaf -- and one Lord!
Prayer For The Day
Lord, we are many;
your wish is that we all be one.
Lord, we are diverse; your wish is that we discover what we have in common.
Lord, we are individualistic;
your will is that we cherish community.
Bring us out of ourselves
and into the joy of loving others. Amen.
To Illustrate
There is a timeworn, but still serviceable, pulpit story about a shipwreck victim, marooned alone on a desert island for years and years. Like Robinson Crusoe, the castaway cleverly constructed everything he needed out of materials he found on the island: bamboo, gourds, coconut shells. He was proud of his handiwork -- so proud that, when a rescue ship finally arrived, he refused to leave until the captain would first accompany him on a walking tour.
Proudly, the castaway showed the captain everything he'd made: his dugout canoe, the tree house where he lived, his storehouse bulging with food, the little shed where he kept his fishing gear.
Finally they came to the largest structure of all: a magnificent, thatch-roofed building made of bamboo poles lashed together with what appeared to be a steeple rising from its roof. Inside, there were rows of handmade benches. Up in front was a pulpit carved from the trunk of a tree and high in the steeple hung a hollowed-out gourd in the shape of a bell.
It seemed to the captain that this church was the cleverest creation of all. But then he looked out the window and saw another building very much like the one he was standing in.
"If this is your church," he asked the man, "then what do you call that?"
"Oh, pay no attention to that building," answered the castaway. "That's the church I used to go to."
***
The story is told of a couple who got married. She was Episcopalian and he was Southern Baptist, but they loved each other, and after much wrangling they decided that he should join her Episcopal church.
The young Baptist worked hard to become a good Episcopalian. In time, he was even asked to be a lay reader in the worship services. The husband was fulfilling that role one day when the priest looked over and saw him, swinging the censer back and forth, dispersing the sweet-smelling smoke of the incense throughout the congregation.
The man's eyes were tightly shut. He seemed to be muttering something to himself as he swung the censer back and forth. As the priest walked by, he could just barely make out the phrase the man was repeating, over and over: "Don't do no good, don't do no harm."
The man was demonstrating a pretty useful skill, for those who love Christian unity: The ability to discriminate between the essential and the inessential, between the things that pertain to the gospel and the things that pertain merely to the institutional church.
***
Donald Bloesch has observed that Catholics and Protestants are like two brothers who are lost in a cave. Not knowing the other is nearby, each one struggles in the darkness to claw his way to the surface. The mystery, Bloesch writes, is that they do not see each other until they first see the sun.
In the true church of Jesus Christ, there is but one loaf, and one Lord.
Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 9:1-4
Salvation Will Be Revealed In Galilee
(This passage has recently occurred in the lectionary, as part of the First Lesson for Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day, Proper I.)
Some historical background is helpful to understanding this passage, which has been chosen for today because it is cited in the gospel lesson. The historical background is found in 2 Kings 15:29: "In the days of King Pekah of Israel, King Tiglath-pileser of Assyria came and captured Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali; and he carried the people captive to Assyria." These are the lands referred to in verse 1 of today's lection: "the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations." These are territories of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that have been lost to the Assyrians. Isaiah's prophecy is looking ahead into the future to a day when these terrible losses will be reversed. Truly, this restoration of the captured lands, when it happens, will be as a light shining into the darkness (v. 2). In that day, the people will rejoice, with all the abandon of victorious soldiers plundering their defeated adversaries. Then, the Jewish people -- their homes and lands so recently plundered -- will be doing the plundering, for a change (v. 3). "The rod of their oppressor" will finally be broken (v. 4). In these present, dark days -- in which the future of God's covenant seems in doubt -- Isaiah is defiantly proclaiming that the Lord will one day redeem Israel and Judah, bringing them victory at last. From the Christian standpoint, the way in which God will reverse Israel's fortunes is through the coming of Jesus Christ -- giving a poignant double meaning to the phrase, "Galilee of the nations" (or, "Galilee of the Gentiles"), in verse 1.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
"Has Christ Been Divided?"
Picking up where last week's epistle lesson left off, Paul appeals to the deeply divided Corinthian church, urging them to make unity their highest goal (v. 10). Paul has heard reports of a church divided into at least three factions: some identifying themselves with his own teachings, others with Apollos', and still others with Peter's (v. 11). Some others -- perhaps exasperated with these divisions -- have taken to simply calling themselves followers of Christ (in a similar way, perhaps, to those in our own day who self-righteously say, "I'm just a Christian" -- implying that their particular church has cornered the market on true Christianity). "Has Christ been divided?" Paul asks, in exasperation (v. 13). He wants no part of such factionalism, disassociating himself from those who have put his own picture on their T-shirts and bumper stickers. He has no desire to be a rock star. Paul even expresses relief that he has baptized only a handful of people in Corinth -- any more than that, and he might have had a real fan club on his hands! Paul reasserts that his only desire, all along, has been to bring people to Christ through plain speaking -- not to gain followers for himself through elegant rhetoric (v. 17). Sadly, Paul's words are all too relevant today, for a church that continues to fragment itself along various lines: national, denominational, theological, social.
The Gospel
Matthew 4:12-23
Fishing For People
(Preachers who focused on the gospel lesson the week before will need to differentiate last week's passage, from John 1, from this one -- for there are significant factual discrepancies between these two accounts of the calling of Simon and Andrew.)
After John's arrest, Jesus withdraws to Galilee (which, Matthew is quick to remind us, fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah 9). Jesus then begins to proclaim the simple message that can be summarized in one line: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" (verses 12-17). After this, Jesus calls his first disciples, the fishermen Simon and Andrew, using the famous line, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people" (v. 19). As Matthew relates the bare-bones details of this story, that single sentence is enough to convince these two men to leave their nets -- and, indeed, everything related to their former life -- behind, and instantly follow Jesus (v. 20). James and John, the sons of Zebedee, are the next to respond -- equally abruptly -- to Jesus' simple, but compelling invitation (verses 21-22). They abandon their father, still sitting in the family fishing boat. This action on their part -- an appalling breach of filial duty, according to the law of Moses -- emphasizes the urgency of Jesus' appeal. A possible preaching point is the nearness of God's reign (v. 17), and how -- once we realize it -- that infuses our lives with a sense of urgency. Another approach is to focus on the experience of Christ's call in our lives -- acknowledging that Matthew's account of the calling of the first disciples is a sort of "executive summary" that telescopes what was probably a longer process of discernment and reflection into a single moment of decision.
Preaching Possibilities
Why is it that everywhere Christians go, there seems to arise a bewildering variety of churches?
"Has Christ been divided?" That's what the apostle Paul wants to know. Literally, the Greek means, "Has Christ been cut up and parceled out?" Even back in the first century, Christians struggled with unity. It was too early, back then, for them to troubled by anything resembling denominations. But that didn't stop the Corinthians. The divisions in that early church arose among the followers of certain teachers.
"What I mean," says Paul, "is that each of you says, 'I belong to Paul,' or 'I belong to Apollos,' or 'I belong to Cephas,' or 'I belong to Christ.' Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?"
We can hear in those words echoes of Christianity here in America. Paul's words sound as freshly on Main Street, USA, as they once echoed among the rabbit-warren back streets of Corinth.
Ecumenical unity is something many people struggle with, even in their own families. Many engaged couples, looking ahead to their married life, have struggled mightily with the issue of which church to raise the children. There are family members who haven't spoken to each other for years, split by disagreements over a wedding, a baptism, or even a funeral (events supposed to bring Christians together in love).
Many local churches have a wonderful heritage and celebrate that history at every opportunity. Yet, as precious as that heritage is, there is something more important than the church. It is not a something at all, but a someone: the Lord of the church, Jesus Christ. The witness of scripture is clear that the institutional church belongs to this earth, and to this present age; it will have no place in the life to come.
The author of Revelation puts it best, unfolding his vision of the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem: "I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (Revelation 21:22-23).
When it comes right down to it, when we all go off to meet our maker, the questions we'll be called upon to answer will not pertain to the practices of one particular church or another. God will not ask how much water we used to baptize, or whether we drank wine or grape juice at communion. God won't be much interested in whether our scientific theories run to seven-day creation or Darwinian evolution, or whether, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we are "trespassers" or "debtors."
No, in that day of judgment, the Lord will be much more interested in whether it mattered to us that we struggled with dieting to lose weight while children in Africa starved; or, whether we ached with the injustice of it all, when we heard that our nation has both the highest percentage of gun ownership and the highest percentage of our population in prison of any industrialized nation.
On that day, the Lord will be much less interested in the particular church we attended, than in whether we worshiped at all, less concerned with the type of cross hanging around our necks than with whether we showed the love that comes of knowing what the cross is for.
In recent years, we've heard a lot of fiftieth-anniversary stories about World War II. One of those stories comes out of France, from a village where all the young men went to war together, in one unit. And, in one unit, they were captured by the invading Germans, as the blitzkrieg thundered across the border.
The German officers promised the French soldiers they'd be returned to their homes: but, instead, the POWs were loaded onto railway boxcars and taken deep into Germany. For three days, the prisoners had no food and very little water.
Finally, they were unloaded at a POW camp, and these men of the same village were herded into a barracks that would be their home. In a final gesture of cruelty, one of the guards took a single loaf of bread and tossed it through the barracks door before locking it tight.
It landed in the center of the floor and in the twinkling of an eye the hungry men converged upon it. But then, into the tangle of arms and legs and the clamor of voices, there intruded a single voice rising above the tumult.
"Jacques; Pierre; François," it said calling each man by name. It was the voice of their parish priest who had gone along as chaplain to the unit. The priest made for the center of that desperate swarm, and the men suddenly ceased their struggle and parted to let him through. He stood face-to-face with the soldier who had ended up with the prize in his hands -- and who now hung his head in shame. He handed the loaf to the chaplain. The priest took the bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Each man had his fair share, small as it was.
As one of the soldiers remembered it, there in that dark room, those defeated, demoralized, and desperate men had their freedom and dignity restored. From that moment on, they knew their captors could not take those things away, ever again.
Those men are so like the scattered and contentious Christian churches in the disunity that plagues us. So comfortable have we become with the motley assortment of denominations that we have forgotten what a scandal it is that there are denominations at all. We can scarcely conceive how it would revolutionize the work of evangelism around the world if we could but attain a measure of Christian unity once again.
Whether the bread is broken in a POW barracks, at the communion table of a Protestant church, or before the high altar of a cathedral, there is but one loaf -- and one Lord!
Prayer For The Day
Lord, we are many;
your wish is that we all be one.
Lord, we are diverse; your wish is that we discover what we have in common.
Lord, we are individualistic;
your will is that we cherish community.
Bring us out of ourselves
and into the joy of loving others. Amen.
To Illustrate
There is a timeworn, but still serviceable, pulpit story about a shipwreck victim, marooned alone on a desert island for years and years. Like Robinson Crusoe, the castaway cleverly constructed everything he needed out of materials he found on the island: bamboo, gourds, coconut shells. He was proud of his handiwork -- so proud that, when a rescue ship finally arrived, he refused to leave until the captain would first accompany him on a walking tour.
Proudly, the castaway showed the captain everything he'd made: his dugout canoe, the tree house where he lived, his storehouse bulging with food, the little shed where he kept his fishing gear.
Finally they came to the largest structure of all: a magnificent, thatch-roofed building made of bamboo poles lashed together with what appeared to be a steeple rising from its roof. Inside, there were rows of handmade benches. Up in front was a pulpit carved from the trunk of a tree and high in the steeple hung a hollowed-out gourd in the shape of a bell.
It seemed to the captain that this church was the cleverest creation of all. But then he looked out the window and saw another building very much like the one he was standing in.
"If this is your church," he asked the man, "then what do you call that?"
"Oh, pay no attention to that building," answered the castaway. "That's the church I used to go to."
***
The story is told of a couple who got married. She was Episcopalian and he was Southern Baptist, but they loved each other, and after much wrangling they decided that he should join her Episcopal church.
The young Baptist worked hard to become a good Episcopalian. In time, he was even asked to be a lay reader in the worship services. The husband was fulfilling that role one day when the priest looked over and saw him, swinging the censer back and forth, dispersing the sweet-smelling smoke of the incense throughout the congregation.
The man's eyes were tightly shut. He seemed to be muttering something to himself as he swung the censer back and forth. As the priest walked by, he could just barely make out the phrase the man was repeating, over and over: "Don't do no good, don't do no harm."
The man was demonstrating a pretty useful skill, for those who love Christian unity: The ability to discriminate between the essential and the inessential, between the things that pertain to the gospel and the things that pertain merely to the institutional church.
***
Donald Bloesch has observed that Catholics and Protestants are like two brothers who are lost in a cave. Not knowing the other is nearby, each one struggles in the darkness to claw his way to the surface. The mystery, Bloesch writes, is that they do not see each other until they first see the sun.
