1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30
SERMON “Time Bandits”
During Coffee Hour last Sunday, I mentioned to Rose and Monica one of the particular complexities in dealing with the Christian scriptures we call the “New Testament.” Not only do we only have bad copies of bad copies centuries removed from the supposed original sources and no two manuscripts alike, but those texts are written in a way most of us have never experienced.
They are in Koine Greek, a variation on Classical Greek that we understand fairly well, as it was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean from the Hellenistic Age until the early Byzantine Age, about 900 years, so we have many texts. It is one of three languages found on the Rosetta Stone, which proved to be the key to understanding Egyptian heiroglyphics.
Koine Greek would be easier to understand if you could just separate the words, for it was written in all capital letters with no punctuation and no spaces between words or sentences. Scholars are often left guessing what word is intended, where one word or thought ends and another begins. It would be a thousand years before the text was divided into chapters, another three centuries after that before verse numbers were added.
Never mind the whole problem of translation.
This means that every single Bible you have ever used is an act of human interpretation.
Even the Nestle-Aland, on the shelf in my study, the go-to version of the most commonly received text, is an act of interpretation, with upper case and lower case letters, word and paragraph breaks, and even chapter and verse.
The Tanakh, the Hebrew Scripture sometimes erroneously called the “Old Testament” is just as difficult, if not worse. Modern Hebrew was a 20th century invention. Ancient Hebrew was a dying language even in the time of Jesus, used almost exclusively in the synagogue. Jesus would have taught in Aramaic. Given his interactions with Romans, he was probably fluent in Koine Greek. And we know he could read scripture in Hebrew.
The entire enterprise of scriptural interpretation is like an ancient Finnegans Wake, the notoriously impenetrable novel by James Joyce, though few would claim for that work ultimate questions, the matter at hand with scripture.
Neither the Jewish version of the Tanakh nor the Christian versions of either testament is in anything like chronological order, if any real chronology or even geography could be constructed from texts that aren’t even internally consistent.
Then, for final measure, we pick some passages, ones that fit our agenda, and sprinkle them around the calendar, with passages from the Tanakh, the Psalms, New Testament works outside of the four gospels, and passages from the gospels themselves, assigned to each Sunday on a three or four year rotation.
It is as if we were the characters in “Time Bandits,” either the 1981 Terry Gilliam film or the 2024 remake, where Lisa Kudrow played Lisa Kudrow, as she always does, brilliantly.
Where are we today?? If it is Epiphany 4C, we must be in Nazareth for the gospel, writing to Corinth from who knows where in the epistle, or in the Kingdom of Judah after the Northern Kingdom has been destroyed in the Tanakh.
While we technically started Year C at the end of November, the year focused on the Gospel According to Luke, Advent and Christmastide have some standard texts, so last week we really got started with the public ministry of Jesus after his baptism. We pick up this week where last week left off.
But here’s the thing: we skipped the temptation of Christ, the time spent in the desert. That story is always assigned to the start of Lent, which moves every year.
Honestly, it isn’t a great system, because every story in scripture is in conversation with other stories in scripture, and in conversation with other texts in scripture.
Last week, Jesus read from Isaiah, specifically Deutero-Isaiah, written by an unknown prophet during the Babylonian Captivity, but he does this having just turned away earthly power.
You remember. Satan, which simply means “the Adversary,” met Jesus when he had been fasting and praying in the desert for an extended period. The second temptation was power and glory. When Jesus unrolls the scroll and says that his gospel is good news for the poor, he is telling you, in the context of this story, that this is a choice he has made.
Then things take another turn, the one we find in our gospel reading this week.
We don’t know how much of Christ’s ministry to Gentiles reflects his own self-understanding and how much of it is us reading backwards through the lens of Paul. What we do know is that Jesus understood himself as a reforming prophet in the rich tradition of pre-Rabbinic Judaism. And pre-Rabbinic theology was not only transactional, as we have discussed.
While there were sometimes moves toward the universal, the core story of that faith was national exceptionalism. Our tribe is exceptional, better than all other tribes, in that it was a Yahweh-chosen people.
Jesus undermines this sense of privilege in a way that is easy to miss, primarily because we do not understand the importance of Elijah in that religious system. I mean, Elijah doesn’t have a book of his own in the Tanakh. He was from the Northern Kingdom, which is generally seen as the lesser state as it was destroyed first, before the construction of much of what would become Jewish identity. Even the identity Jewish is based on the name of the Southern Kingdom, Judah!
But there is a cup for Elijah at the Passover Seder. It is Elijah many Jesus followers see in the ministry of John the Baptizer. It is to Elijah that many think Jesus cries from the cross when he begins the 22nd Psalm. It is the re-entry of an undead Elijah that Muslim rulers hoped to obstruct when they placed a cemetery in front of Jerusalem’s Eastern Gate.
Jesus points out that during a punishing drought, Elijah was sent to care for and receive care from a widow who was not a Jew, despite all of the Jewish widows. In the same way, he reminds those in the synagogue in Nazareth that it was a leprous general who was not a Jew, Naaman, who received healing under the guidance of Elisha, Elijah’s chosen successor, despite all of the leprous Jews in the Northern Kingdom. Jesus tells them that God’s blessing doesn’t always go to those who feel entitled to it.
And they go nuts. They’re going to throw him off a cliff. Then somehow, he escapes.
The citizens of Nazareth were prepared to make Jesus a scapegoat, to murder him, long before the Sanhedrin and Rome conspired to murder him as a scapegoat in Jerusalem.
It turns out, some people do not like being told that they are not special, not entitled, that their nation is not divinely chosen. Even hint that all humans are God-touched, and they go nuts.
They are looking for scapegoats, the body of James Byrd dragged behind a pick-up in Jasper, Texas, Matthew Shepherd crucified on a fence line in Laramie, Matthew Shepherd who had no final resting place for twenty years until the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde invited the family to place his cremains in the safety of the National Cathedral. Yes, that Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, now receiving death threats for preaching mercy to a sociopath. Because we are programmed as pastors and preachers to believe in repentance.
For the record, pre-Rabbinic Judaism was constantly having to re-write their theology to accommodate the fact that chosen or not, they were defeated, captured, and slaughtered again and again. In the time of Jesus, the tribal exceptionalism of the Jews ran headlong into the tribal exceptionalism of the Romans, and the Romans won.
Just as this week’s reading is a continuation of last week’s reading, this week’s sermon is in many ways a continuation of last week’s sermon. It is not only a call to existential humility, it is a call to challenge any notions of entitlement or exceptionalism. It would be fine for God to bless America, though we have long promised what we have failed to deliver, but God can and does bless all nations, each a human construct with no reality in the scheme of creation. Repentance, redemption, reconciliation are open for all people, to live into their call and to thrive, for that Holy Mystery we name as God is experienced by us as love, creativity, and transcendence, seen in all the way we lift one another up.
Grace is free, but it is not cheap. It costs, for we must move beyond our impulses and cravings, and live into our best selves, and that is not always easy.
The Hindu woman who hides her Muslim neighbor from BJP thugs, the Quakers who stand in the doorway of the Meeting House, refusing entry to the jackboots of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Board Members of Costco who refused to buckle to demands that they abandon Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, restoring the traditional affirmative action that gave cisgender straight white males jobs when there were better candidates, all of these people are doing holy work.
And we are doing holy work, when we, like Jesus, challenge entitlement, challenge power, challenge violence, for the road that starts with temptations in the desert must pass through the terror of Good Friday before it gets to love’s victory on Easter morning.
God loves us because God is God, not because of our merits, and most certainly not because of human constructs like race or tribe or gender.
God loves you because God is God, not because of your merits, and most certainly not because of labels attached to you skin color or ethnic heritage or gender. And God always will, as you shine for a moment, one beautiful and loved spark in the cosmic symphony of creation. Amen.