Proper 13
Preaching
Preaching and Reading the Old Testament Lessons:
With an Eye to the New
Few passages in the Old Testament are more important than this one, because it sets forth central understandings of the nature of God and of his relation to Israel and to the course of world history.
When the Lord delivered that bunch of slaves from Egypt that later became the nucleus of his people in the thirteenth century B.C., he made them a people and adopted them as his son. Knowing that is absolutely necessary for understanding the Bible. Israel was God's adopted son. The Lord redeemed Israel, that is, he acknowledged Israel to be his family member whom he bought back out of slavery -- that is the meaning of redemption (cf. Leviticus 25:47-55). And so from the time of the exodus onward, Israel is God's adopted son, and God is Israel's Father (cf. Exodus 4:22-23; Deuteronomy 32:6; Jeremiah 3:19; 31:20; Isaiah 1:2; 63:16; Malachi 1:6; 2:10).
What follows in this passage, therefore, are the tender scenes of God the Father caring for his adopted son. God taught infant Israel how to walk, holding out a finger for the child to grasp as he toddled along and stumbled and fell, and was lifted up again in his Father's arms (v. 3). Gently and compassionately God led Israel along the path of life by giving them his presence in the law (Deuteronomy 4:7) and granting them the guidance of the Word from prophets (cf. Amos 2:11) and priests.
Verse 4 of our text is often emended by changing one Hebrew vowel to read, "And I was to them as those who lift a baby to their check, and I bent down to feed him." Whether the emendation is accepted, or the verse is read as in the RSV, the tenderness and compassion of the Lord are clear.
But Israel has forgotten the tenderness and love of its Father and has run from God like a disobedient child. God has repeatedly called, and Israel has not listened (v. 2). Indeed, Israel is so set in its apostasy and worship of the fertility gods of baal, that it cannot return. "Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God, / For the spirit of harlotry is within them, and they know not the Lord" (Hosea 5:4).
They are slaves of their sin, Paul would say, captives to the habit of idolatry, just as we become habitually captive to our sin and forgetfulness of the One who made us. God calls us through his written and preached Word, and we do not listen, running out into the path of danger, with our Father pleading with us to stop.
The wages of sin is death, however (Romans 6:23), and disobedient Israel will receive that wage, just as every wanton one of us will be paid what we have earned. "Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap," writes Paul. "God is not mocked" (Galatians 6:7).
And yet -- and yet -- when God considers the death of his adopted people, he cries out in longing. "How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel!" How can I make you like those cities of Admah and Zeboim that were destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah? (Deuteronomy 29:23).
The Bible tells us that God has no pleasure in the death of anyone. He just wants us to turn our lives around and to live (Ezekiel 18:32). And so God weeps over his disobedient child Israel, as our Lord wept over Jerusalem (Luke 13:34), and as he still weeps over us. And because he is pure and merciful love, he cannot give up us his children, any more than he could finally give up his adopted child Israel. At the end, writes Paul, "all Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:26). Beyond Israel's exile to Assyria, beyond its apparent destruction for its sin, there is a new and saved people of God that will know salvation.
The reason is plain. God is the Holy One (v. 9), that is, he is totally other than anything or anyone in all creation. His thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9), and his fatherly love for those whom he has made, for Israel and for us, is beyond all comprehension. So there is at the end of our passage, the glad picture of Israel saved and returned home --the dream of God for the future of his adopted son.
As for us, God's love is made manifest in the figure of a young man, hanging on a cross on a hill called Golgotha. There is God's declaration to us that he cannot give us up, despite all our wayward wandering from his fatherly directions, despite all our indifference toward the One who has taught us to walk, and constantly carried us in his arms, and continually bent down to feed us with his good. Instead of giving us up to the death that our sins so richly deserve, God gives up his only begotten Son, and you and I are offered the free gift of life in Jesus Christ.
It finally is a lesson in history, isn't it? -- that the one fact that will triumph in this world is the love of God. For all the evil of nations, and despite all the wrong of the human race, God is sovereign over every form of evil. He was sovereign over Israel's sin, sovereign over Assyria that took her captive, sovereign over the power of Rome that nailed Jesus Christ to the cross. And he is yet sovereign over our lives, for which he wills only his eternal life and love. Who can refuse the Father of such amazing love?
Lutheran Option:
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
These excerpts from Ecclesiastes could be a characterization of our society. The author of Ecclesiastes, who is called the Preacher, sets out to make an examination of the ways of Wisdom theology. And in that examination, he studies the work at which men and women toil. It is full of vexation, the author writes. A person strains to do a good job, takes his work home with him at night, worries about it on his bed, and gets up and does the same thing all over again the next day.
But what is the point of it all? the writer wants to know. To what does it lead? Nothing lasts. The contributions that you make are soon forgotten. The capital that you have accumulated may just be foolishly spent by your heirs. Two generations from now, even your relatives will no longer remember much about you.
As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more. Psalm 103:15-16
All the pain, all the toil, all the anxiety and worry that we pour into our daily round finally are part of a transitory life that ends up in nothing -- in vanity, nothingness, as the Preacher says. "Vanity, all is vanity."
To be sure, we all have to earn our daily bread and support our families and put a roof over their heads. And we all do try to do a good job at whatever labor we undertake. But the Preacher here in our text is asking the deeper question. What is the meaning of it all? What endures? What eternal significance does my little life or yours have in the course of history that just goes on and on and on?
Ecclesiastes' answer to that was simply to enjoy the life and work and family love that God has given us, and not to worry about the future. "There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil" (v. 24). "Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which (God) has given you under the sun ... Whatever your hands find to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol (the place of the dead), to which you are going" (Ecclesiastes 9:9-10). To enjoy your brief span -- that's the meaning of your life. As a young man said to me this summer, "I think the purpose of life is just to be happy."
The Apostle Paul knows differently, however, because he knows that Jesus Christ is risen. At the end of 1 Corinthians 15, which is Paul's great chapter on the resurrection, Paul tells us Christians, "Therefore, my beloved ... be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."
In God's service, you see, nothing is vanity and meaningless, because God uses that labor to further his purpose on earth. And finally, in God's love, our work is taken up into his eternal kingdom and perfected. And you and I end up not in the dark forgetfulness of the grave, but in the joyful company of God's everlasting family. If our lives are dedicated to the obedience, the service, the love of God, never are they in vain.
When the Lord delivered that bunch of slaves from Egypt that later became the nucleus of his people in the thirteenth century B.C., he made them a people and adopted them as his son. Knowing that is absolutely necessary for understanding the Bible. Israel was God's adopted son. The Lord redeemed Israel, that is, he acknowledged Israel to be his family member whom he bought back out of slavery -- that is the meaning of redemption (cf. Leviticus 25:47-55). And so from the time of the exodus onward, Israel is God's adopted son, and God is Israel's Father (cf. Exodus 4:22-23; Deuteronomy 32:6; Jeremiah 3:19; 31:20; Isaiah 1:2; 63:16; Malachi 1:6; 2:10).
What follows in this passage, therefore, are the tender scenes of God the Father caring for his adopted son. God taught infant Israel how to walk, holding out a finger for the child to grasp as he toddled along and stumbled and fell, and was lifted up again in his Father's arms (v. 3). Gently and compassionately God led Israel along the path of life by giving them his presence in the law (Deuteronomy 4:7) and granting them the guidance of the Word from prophets (cf. Amos 2:11) and priests.
Verse 4 of our text is often emended by changing one Hebrew vowel to read, "And I was to them as those who lift a baby to their check, and I bent down to feed him." Whether the emendation is accepted, or the verse is read as in the RSV, the tenderness and compassion of the Lord are clear.
But Israel has forgotten the tenderness and love of its Father and has run from God like a disobedient child. God has repeatedly called, and Israel has not listened (v. 2). Indeed, Israel is so set in its apostasy and worship of the fertility gods of baal, that it cannot return. "Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God, / For the spirit of harlotry is within them, and they know not the Lord" (Hosea 5:4).
They are slaves of their sin, Paul would say, captives to the habit of idolatry, just as we become habitually captive to our sin and forgetfulness of the One who made us. God calls us through his written and preached Word, and we do not listen, running out into the path of danger, with our Father pleading with us to stop.
The wages of sin is death, however (Romans 6:23), and disobedient Israel will receive that wage, just as every wanton one of us will be paid what we have earned. "Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap," writes Paul. "God is not mocked" (Galatians 6:7).
And yet -- and yet -- when God considers the death of his adopted people, he cries out in longing. "How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel!" How can I make you like those cities of Admah and Zeboim that were destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah? (Deuteronomy 29:23).
The Bible tells us that God has no pleasure in the death of anyone. He just wants us to turn our lives around and to live (Ezekiel 18:32). And so God weeps over his disobedient child Israel, as our Lord wept over Jerusalem (Luke 13:34), and as he still weeps over us. And because he is pure and merciful love, he cannot give up us his children, any more than he could finally give up his adopted child Israel. At the end, writes Paul, "all Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:26). Beyond Israel's exile to Assyria, beyond its apparent destruction for its sin, there is a new and saved people of God that will know salvation.
The reason is plain. God is the Holy One (v. 9), that is, he is totally other than anything or anyone in all creation. His thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9), and his fatherly love for those whom he has made, for Israel and for us, is beyond all comprehension. So there is at the end of our passage, the glad picture of Israel saved and returned home --the dream of God for the future of his adopted son.
As for us, God's love is made manifest in the figure of a young man, hanging on a cross on a hill called Golgotha. There is God's declaration to us that he cannot give us up, despite all our wayward wandering from his fatherly directions, despite all our indifference toward the One who has taught us to walk, and constantly carried us in his arms, and continually bent down to feed us with his good. Instead of giving us up to the death that our sins so richly deserve, God gives up his only begotten Son, and you and I are offered the free gift of life in Jesus Christ.
It finally is a lesson in history, isn't it? -- that the one fact that will triumph in this world is the love of God. For all the evil of nations, and despite all the wrong of the human race, God is sovereign over every form of evil. He was sovereign over Israel's sin, sovereign over Assyria that took her captive, sovereign over the power of Rome that nailed Jesus Christ to the cross. And he is yet sovereign over our lives, for which he wills only his eternal life and love. Who can refuse the Father of such amazing love?
Lutheran Option:
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
These excerpts from Ecclesiastes could be a characterization of our society. The author of Ecclesiastes, who is called the Preacher, sets out to make an examination of the ways of Wisdom theology. And in that examination, he studies the work at which men and women toil. It is full of vexation, the author writes. A person strains to do a good job, takes his work home with him at night, worries about it on his bed, and gets up and does the same thing all over again the next day.
But what is the point of it all? the writer wants to know. To what does it lead? Nothing lasts. The contributions that you make are soon forgotten. The capital that you have accumulated may just be foolishly spent by your heirs. Two generations from now, even your relatives will no longer remember much about you.
As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more. Psalm 103:15-16
All the pain, all the toil, all the anxiety and worry that we pour into our daily round finally are part of a transitory life that ends up in nothing -- in vanity, nothingness, as the Preacher says. "Vanity, all is vanity."
To be sure, we all have to earn our daily bread and support our families and put a roof over their heads. And we all do try to do a good job at whatever labor we undertake. But the Preacher here in our text is asking the deeper question. What is the meaning of it all? What endures? What eternal significance does my little life or yours have in the course of history that just goes on and on and on?
Ecclesiastes' answer to that was simply to enjoy the life and work and family love that God has given us, and not to worry about the future. "There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil" (v. 24). "Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which (God) has given you under the sun ... Whatever your hands find to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol (the place of the dead), to which you are going" (Ecclesiastes 9:9-10). To enjoy your brief span -- that's the meaning of your life. As a young man said to me this summer, "I think the purpose of life is just to be happy."
The Apostle Paul knows differently, however, because he knows that Jesus Christ is risen. At the end of 1 Corinthians 15, which is Paul's great chapter on the resurrection, Paul tells us Christians, "Therefore, my beloved ... be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."
In God's service, you see, nothing is vanity and meaningless, because God uses that labor to further his purpose on earth. And finally, in God's love, our work is taken up into his eternal kingdom and perfected. And you and I end up not in the dark forgetfulness of the grave, but in the joyful company of God's everlasting family. If our lives are dedicated to the obedience, the service, the love of God, never are they in vain.
