Epiphany 3 | Ordinary Time 3
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VIII, Cycle B
Revised Common
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Roman Catholic
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Episcopal
Jeremiah 3:21--4:2
1 Corinthians 7:17-23
Mark 1:14-20
Theme For The Day
Proclaiming the good news is the task of all God's people.
Old Testament Lesson
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The Ninevites Heed The Reluctant Jonah's Halfhearted Preaching
Someone has pointed out that this sermon of Jonah's, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown," is the single worst sermon in all of scripture (at least as written). It's totally devoid of introduction and conclusion. Nowhere in it can you find so much as an illustration, or even a funny story. It's only got one point -- and that single point is about the most offensive thing Jonah could possibly say to the people of Nineveh. He's just going through the motions, fulfilling the minimum requirement. Anything to keep the Lord off his back -- and himself out of the digestive track of marine organisms. As Jonah turns on his heel after mouthing those unconvincing words, he notices something very strange indeed. The Ninevites are weeping. The Ninevites are wailing. The Ninevites are falling down on their knees and shouting "Amen!" It's amazing what God can do with the most halfhearted effort at sharing the good news.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
The Present Form Of This World Is Passing Away
Today's Epistle Lesson is an example of clumsy editing on the part of the lectionary committee. It begins in the middle of a pericope, omitting Paul's difficult-to-interpret words about marriage being a poor idea in light of the imminent end of the world, but marginally acceptable for those who cannot avoid it. As we join the argument midstream, hearing that "the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none," it's hard for a worshiping congregation, lacking context, to understand what the apostle is talking about. The only readily intelligible message in this unnaturally brief passage is the closing line, "For the present form of this world is passing away" (v. 31b). A sermon on this passage could emphasize the urgency of the gospel, but it will have to 1) back up and provide some of the context the lectionary omits and 2) deal with the problem of the delay of the parousia, of which Paul was just beginning to be aware at the time of writing, but which to our people -- two millennia later -- will be glaringly obvious.
The Gospel
Mark 1:14-20
Jesus Begins His Preaching Ministry And Calls His First Disciples
Immediately after telling of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, Mark provides a condensed version of his essential preaching: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." Jesus' sermon is every bit as brief as Jonah's -- although a bit more positive in tone. Jesus then calls Simon and Andrew to be his disciples, in equally laconic fashion: "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." To which Mark matter-of-factly adds, "And immediately they left their nets and followed him." These are beloved and well-known words -- even if they make us wish for more narrative detail, so we may understand what, psychologically, is going on in the minds of Simon and Andrew that makes them want to leave everything to follow this itinerant preacher. Even though Mark uses the word "immediately," his entire narrative is so stripped down and basic that we shouldn't necessarily assume that he means they dropped everything that second, happily trotting off down the beach after a man they scarcely knew. There was probably a bit more to it than that (although imagination is required to fill in the details).
Preaching Possibilities
An offbeat, though perhaps somewhat risky, approach would be to preach a sermon titled, "The Sermon You've Always Wanted To Hear." Begin by introducing the Jonah and Mark passages, holding up the one-sentence sermons within them as examples of messages that seem crashingly ordinary, but which have world-changing results. Then, ask the question, "What makes a good sermon, anyway?" (always a risky question to ask, as part of a sermon!) Then, turn the tables on the congregation: explaining that both Jonah's and Jesus' sermons are so simple, they could have been delivered by anyone (Jonah, in fact, seems singularly unqualified to enter a pulpit, his only credential being that God has ordered him to do so). What makes a sermon efficacious is the Holy Spirit. Since anyone could deliver such a sermon, then maybe it's something any member of the church could -- or should -- do. Maybe, we can say to our people, the sermon you've always wanted to hear is the sermon you ought to be preaching!
The Hebrew verb Jonah uses when he predicts, "Nineveh shall be overthrown" is one that's used in other places to describe something being flipped over: a bowl, a chariot on a battlefield, a piece of flatbread cooking in a pan. It bears with it the sense of reversal, of inversion, of things made topsy-turvy.
Our God is a God of reversals, of change. We know from the New Testament that the Lord works through both death and resurrection. In walking us through the on-again, off-again repentance of a reluctant prophet, the book of Jonah is a challenge: it is at once more demanding and more forgiving than we are naturally inclined to be.
Some of us want to proclaim the gospel only in its welcoming and inclusiveness -- forgetting that the gospel includes also the baptism of death, and that there is no Easter without the cross. Others of us are all too eager to preach death and destruction, to imagine the Lord blasting malicious evildoers, and rewarding the righteous -- forgetting that sin is a universal human trait, and that all have fallen short of the glory of God (even us!).
The whole point of the spiritual life is the discovery of new life, the bright dawning of love in the midst of darkness -- and that discovery is a lifelong process. The more mature we all become in the life of faith, the more we come to realize that all is not simple, black-and-white, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys conflict. All of us have within us the seeds of both good and evil.
Jonah is saying to the Ninevites, "You people are going to be flipped, reversed, turned over by the power of the sovereign God. Your whole city, your whole world, will be turned over -- what is up will be down, and what is down will be up."
Would that the preacher could have heeded his own message! It took a sojourn in the belly of a fish for Jonah to learn the error of his ways, to start paying attention to God's call. But still he falls short of the mark. Jonah, by the time the third chapter rolls around, has learned it's best to pay attention to God's leading: before he himself is overturned again.
This realization, this profoundly disorienting experience of reversal, is what qualifies Jonah to be a prophet. When Jonah is spewed up on that beach by the fish, he is no longer the naive, self-centered man he was just a few days before. God has turned him. God has reversed his natural inclination to run away from his problems. God has given him, at last, the perseverance to see his mission through.
A final note on dealing with Jonah: much ink has been spilled over the centuries in fruitless scholarly speculation over what sort of creature it was who swallowed Jonah, and how he could survive a three-day sojourn in the belly of the beast. Most congregations today can handle a frank description of this book as a fable or folktale. The Bible is not one book, but an entire library -- and just as some libraries include books of fiction as well as history and other subjects, so, too, with the collection we cherish as scripture. The Hebrew people told and re-told the story of Jonah in much the same way as the ancient Greeks told and re-told the fables of Aesop. What makes it a true story is not its historicity, but its ability to speak to the human condition. It is only more recent readers who have sought to impose on this tale a burden of historicity it was never meant to bear.
Prayer For The Day
Lord, speak to me, that I may speak
In living echoes of your tone.
As you have sought, so let me seek
Your erring children, lost and lone.
(Hymn, "Lord, Speak To Me That I May Speak," adapted)
To Illustrate
William Willimon, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, tells of getting a telephone call from an irate parent:
"I hold you personally responsible for this," the father told him.
"Me?" the campus minister asked.
"Yes, you. I send my daughter off to college to get a good education. Now she tells me she wants to throw it all away, and go off to Haiti as a Presbyterian mission volunteer! Isn't that absurd? A B.S. in mechanical engineering from Duke, and she's going off to dig ditches in Haiti."
"Well," said Willimon, in a feeble attempt at humor, "I doubt the engineering department taught her much about that line of work, but she's a fast learner; she'll probably get the hang of ditch-digging in a few months."
"Look," interrupted the father, "this is no laughing matter. I hold you completely responsible for her decision. She likes you. You've filled her head with all those pie-in-the-sky ideas!"
"Now look," said Willimon, trying to keep his ministerial composure. "Weren't you the one who had her baptized?"
"Why, yes," the father replied.
"And didn't you read her Bible stories, take her to Sunday school, send her off on ski trips with the Presbyterian Youth Fellowship?"
"Well, yes, but ..."
"Don't 'but' me. It's your fault she believed all that stuff, that she's gone and thrown it all away on Jesus -- not mine. You're the one who introduced her to Jesus, not me."
"But all we ever wanted was for her to be a Presbyterian," said the father, meekly.
"Sorry. You messed up. You made a disciple."
***
Repentance involves, first, a turning. In the story of Jonah we see that repentance also involves a tuning -- a linking of our wills to God's, so they function in partnership.
It's rather like what goes on when a musical instrument is tuned. The musician sounds a tone on another instrument: a pitch-pipe or a tuning fork. That first tone is steady, unvarying; it will not slip up or down the scale, thrown off by changes in humidity or frequent use. Change in tone will happen, in time, to the strings of a piano or a violin, but it will not happen with a tuning fork. That primary tone remains the same.
So it is with God's way, the way of Christian discipleship. It is not enough to make cosmetic changes in our lives -- to go around talking Christian talk, for a change -- unless you and I earnestly desire also to bring our lives into harmony with God's will.
***
We are not saints, we are not heroes. Our lives are lived in the quiet corners of the ordinary. We build tiny hearth fires, sometimes barely strong enough to give off warmth. But to the person lost in the darkness, our tiny flame may be the road to safety, the path to salvation.
It is not given us to know who is lost in the darkness that surrounds us or even if our light is seen. We can only know that against even the smallest of lights, darkness cannot stand.
A sailor lost at sea can be guided home by a single candle. A person lost in a wood can be led to safety by a flickering flame. It is not an issue of quality or intensity or purity. It is simply an issue of the presence of light.
-- Kent Nerburn, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of Saint Francis (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)
***
My soul is a mirror in which the glory of God is reflected, but sin, however insignificant, covers the mirror with smoke.
-- Teresa of Avila
***
In her book, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen tells the story of a young man from the Kikuyu tribe who worked for three months as a laborer on her farm. He surprised her one day by announcing that he was leaving her to work for a Muslim man nearby.
Surprised, Dinesen asked him if he had been unhappy working for her. He assured her that all was well, but that he had resolved to engage in a little experiment. He intended to work for a Christian for three months to study the ways of Christians, and then for a Muslim for the same period, to study the ways of Muslims. After observing the ways of both employers, he was going to decide whether to be a Christian or a Muslim.
What would a visitor like that learn about Christianity after a season of living in our homes?
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Roman Catholic
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Episcopal
Jeremiah 3:21--4:2
1 Corinthians 7:17-23
Mark 1:14-20
Theme For The Day
Proclaiming the good news is the task of all God's people.
Old Testament Lesson
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The Ninevites Heed The Reluctant Jonah's Halfhearted Preaching
Someone has pointed out that this sermon of Jonah's, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown," is the single worst sermon in all of scripture (at least as written). It's totally devoid of introduction and conclusion. Nowhere in it can you find so much as an illustration, or even a funny story. It's only got one point -- and that single point is about the most offensive thing Jonah could possibly say to the people of Nineveh. He's just going through the motions, fulfilling the minimum requirement. Anything to keep the Lord off his back -- and himself out of the digestive track of marine organisms. As Jonah turns on his heel after mouthing those unconvincing words, he notices something very strange indeed. The Ninevites are weeping. The Ninevites are wailing. The Ninevites are falling down on their knees and shouting "Amen!" It's amazing what God can do with the most halfhearted effort at sharing the good news.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
The Present Form Of This World Is Passing Away
Today's Epistle Lesson is an example of clumsy editing on the part of the lectionary committee. It begins in the middle of a pericope, omitting Paul's difficult-to-interpret words about marriage being a poor idea in light of the imminent end of the world, but marginally acceptable for those who cannot avoid it. As we join the argument midstream, hearing that "the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none," it's hard for a worshiping congregation, lacking context, to understand what the apostle is talking about. The only readily intelligible message in this unnaturally brief passage is the closing line, "For the present form of this world is passing away" (v. 31b). A sermon on this passage could emphasize the urgency of the gospel, but it will have to 1) back up and provide some of the context the lectionary omits and 2) deal with the problem of the delay of the parousia, of which Paul was just beginning to be aware at the time of writing, but which to our people -- two millennia later -- will be glaringly obvious.
The Gospel
Mark 1:14-20
Jesus Begins His Preaching Ministry And Calls His First Disciples
Immediately after telling of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, Mark provides a condensed version of his essential preaching: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." Jesus' sermon is every bit as brief as Jonah's -- although a bit more positive in tone. Jesus then calls Simon and Andrew to be his disciples, in equally laconic fashion: "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." To which Mark matter-of-factly adds, "And immediately they left their nets and followed him." These are beloved and well-known words -- even if they make us wish for more narrative detail, so we may understand what, psychologically, is going on in the minds of Simon and Andrew that makes them want to leave everything to follow this itinerant preacher. Even though Mark uses the word "immediately," his entire narrative is so stripped down and basic that we shouldn't necessarily assume that he means they dropped everything that second, happily trotting off down the beach after a man they scarcely knew. There was probably a bit more to it than that (although imagination is required to fill in the details).
Preaching Possibilities
An offbeat, though perhaps somewhat risky, approach would be to preach a sermon titled, "The Sermon You've Always Wanted To Hear." Begin by introducing the Jonah and Mark passages, holding up the one-sentence sermons within them as examples of messages that seem crashingly ordinary, but which have world-changing results. Then, ask the question, "What makes a good sermon, anyway?" (always a risky question to ask, as part of a sermon!) Then, turn the tables on the congregation: explaining that both Jonah's and Jesus' sermons are so simple, they could have been delivered by anyone (Jonah, in fact, seems singularly unqualified to enter a pulpit, his only credential being that God has ordered him to do so). What makes a sermon efficacious is the Holy Spirit. Since anyone could deliver such a sermon, then maybe it's something any member of the church could -- or should -- do. Maybe, we can say to our people, the sermon you've always wanted to hear is the sermon you ought to be preaching!
The Hebrew verb Jonah uses when he predicts, "Nineveh shall be overthrown" is one that's used in other places to describe something being flipped over: a bowl, a chariot on a battlefield, a piece of flatbread cooking in a pan. It bears with it the sense of reversal, of inversion, of things made topsy-turvy.
Our God is a God of reversals, of change. We know from the New Testament that the Lord works through both death and resurrection. In walking us through the on-again, off-again repentance of a reluctant prophet, the book of Jonah is a challenge: it is at once more demanding and more forgiving than we are naturally inclined to be.
Some of us want to proclaim the gospel only in its welcoming and inclusiveness -- forgetting that the gospel includes also the baptism of death, and that there is no Easter without the cross. Others of us are all too eager to preach death and destruction, to imagine the Lord blasting malicious evildoers, and rewarding the righteous -- forgetting that sin is a universal human trait, and that all have fallen short of the glory of God (even us!).
The whole point of the spiritual life is the discovery of new life, the bright dawning of love in the midst of darkness -- and that discovery is a lifelong process. The more mature we all become in the life of faith, the more we come to realize that all is not simple, black-and-white, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys conflict. All of us have within us the seeds of both good and evil.
Jonah is saying to the Ninevites, "You people are going to be flipped, reversed, turned over by the power of the sovereign God. Your whole city, your whole world, will be turned over -- what is up will be down, and what is down will be up."
Would that the preacher could have heeded his own message! It took a sojourn in the belly of a fish for Jonah to learn the error of his ways, to start paying attention to God's call. But still he falls short of the mark. Jonah, by the time the third chapter rolls around, has learned it's best to pay attention to God's leading: before he himself is overturned again.
This realization, this profoundly disorienting experience of reversal, is what qualifies Jonah to be a prophet. When Jonah is spewed up on that beach by the fish, he is no longer the naive, self-centered man he was just a few days before. God has turned him. God has reversed his natural inclination to run away from his problems. God has given him, at last, the perseverance to see his mission through.
A final note on dealing with Jonah: much ink has been spilled over the centuries in fruitless scholarly speculation over what sort of creature it was who swallowed Jonah, and how he could survive a three-day sojourn in the belly of the beast. Most congregations today can handle a frank description of this book as a fable or folktale. The Bible is not one book, but an entire library -- and just as some libraries include books of fiction as well as history and other subjects, so, too, with the collection we cherish as scripture. The Hebrew people told and re-told the story of Jonah in much the same way as the ancient Greeks told and re-told the fables of Aesop. What makes it a true story is not its historicity, but its ability to speak to the human condition. It is only more recent readers who have sought to impose on this tale a burden of historicity it was never meant to bear.
Prayer For The Day
Lord, speak to me, that I may speak
In living echoes of your tone.
As you have sought, so let me seek
Your erring children, lost and lone.
(Hymn, "Lord, Speak To Me That I May Speak," adapted)
To Illustrate
William Willimon, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, tells of getting a telephone call from an irate parent:
"I hold you personally responsible for this," the father told him.
"Me?" the campus minister asked.
"Yes, you. I send my daughter off to college to get a good education. Now she tells me she wants to throw it all away, and go off to Haiti as a Presbyterian mission volunteer! Isn't that absurd? A B.S. in mechanical engineering from Duke, and she's going off to dig ditches in Haiti."
"Well," said Willimon, in a feeble attempt at humor, "I doubt the engineering department taught her much about that line of work, but she's a fast learner; she'll probably get the hang of ditch-digging in a few months."
"Look," interrupted the father, "this is no laughing matter. I hold you completely responsible for her decision. She likes you. You've filled her head with all those pie-in-the-sky ideas!"
"Now look," said Willimon, trying to keep his ministerial composure. "Weren't you the one who had her baptized?"
"Why, yes," the father replied.
"And didn't you read her Bible stories, take her to Sunday school, send her off on ski trips with the Presbyterian Youth Fellowship?"
"Well, yes, but ..."
"Don't 'but' me. It's your fault she believed all that stuff, that she's gone and thrown it all away on Jesus -- not mine. You're the one who introduced her to Jesus, not me."
"But all we ever wanted was for her to be a Presbyterian," said the father, meekly.
"Sorry. You messed up. You made a disciple."
***
Repentance involves, first, a turning. In the story of Jonah we see that repentance also involves a tuning -- a linking of our wills to God's, so they function in partnership.
It's rather like what goes on when a musical instrument is tuned. The musician sounds a tone on another instrument: a pitch-pipe or a tuning fork. That first tone is steady, unvarying; it will not slip up or down the scale, thrown off by changes in humidity or frequent use. Change in tone will happen, in time, to the strings of a piano or a violin, but it will not happen with a tuning fork. That primary tone remains the same.
So it is with God's way, the way of Christian discipleship. It is not enough to make cosmetic changes in our lives -- to go around talking Christian talk, for a change -- unless you and I earnestly desire also to bring our lives into harmony with God's will.
***
We are not saints, we are not heroes. Our lives are lived in the quiet corners of the ordinary. We build tiny hearth fires, sometimes barely strong enough to give off warmth. But to the person lost in the darkness, our tiny flame may be the road to safety, the path to salvation.
It is not given us to know who is lost in the darkness that surrounds us or even if our light is seen. We can only know that against even the smallest of lights, darkness cannot stand.
A sailor lost at sea can be guided home by a single candle. A person lost in a wood can be led to safety by a flickering flame. It is not an issue of quality or intensity or purity. It is simply an issue of the presence of light.
-- Kent Nerburn, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of Saint Francis (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)
***
My soul is a mirror in which the glory of God is reflected, but sin, however insignificant, covers the mirror with smoke.
-- Teresa of Avila
***
In her book, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen tells the story of a young man from the Kikuyu tribe who worked for three months as a laborer on her farm. He surprised her one day by announcing that he was leaving her to work for a Muslim man nearby.
Surprised, Dinesen asked him if he had been unhappy working for her. He assured her that all was well, but that he had resolved to engage in a little experiment. He intended to work for a Christian for three months to study the ways of Christians, and then for a Muslim for the same period, to study the ways of Muslims. After observing the ways of both employers, he was going to decide whether to be a Christian or a Muslim.
What would a visitor like that learn about Christianity after a season of living in our homes?
