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Pericope Study
The Center for Theology, LRC
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 19, 2001
Jeremiah 23:23-29
1. Ah, the prophets who prophesy lies. Jeremiah devotes what is now designated as his 23rd chapter to the "'shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture,' says the Lord." (23:1). God will "gather a remnant" (23:3) and "raise up for David a righteous Branch," (23:5) as remedy after the scattering and destruction. Jeremiah further asks, about the prophets, "Who among them has stood in the council of the Lord to perceive and to hear his word, or who has given heed to his word and listened?" (23:18)
2. God continues the conversation in 23:23 and following through the selection: " Can they hide from me?" He asks. "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" (23:24) "I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, 'I have dreamed, I have dreamed!'" (23:25)
3. How long will they speak lies? "Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat?" says the Lord. (23:29).
4. "Is not my word like fire," demands the Lord, "and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces? (23:29)
•••••
5. So. It is not only Paul of Tarsus who warns against a "different gospel, … contrary to that which we preached to you" (Galatians 1:6,8) and a philosophy of "empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe." (Colossians 2:8)
6. What we have in Jeremiah is a word directly from the Lord as to the lies of the false prophets. In Jeremiah's time, no doubt their lies had to do with a facile sense of well-being, regarding the "day of the Lord" as a day of deliverance instead of a day of wrath. Jeremiah was obliged to say the hard word, the word of destruction, contrary to the gaggle of sycophants (to the king) who doubled as demagogues (to the people).
7. Lest we want to dismiss Jeremiah as merely bitter, if not raving, remember: he was right, as to prophecy. History, whether written by the winners or losers, shows him to have been right. History validates his claim to speak for the Lord, and to judge his optimistic contemporaries as liars.
8. The predicament of the prophet of God is two-fold: first, one has to discern what is the word and will of the Lord. Second, only time will demonstrate whether one has discerned properly and spoken faithfully.
As to the former, discernment can come immediately, that is, without medium. It did for Moses. It did for Jeremiah. It did for Paul. But for us, discernment is mediated; for us, mediation must reside primally in the Holy Scriptures as norm and rule for faith and life. As then newly-elected Bishop H. George Anderson said in August of 1995, "We are a church of the scriptures, the creeds, and the confessions." Interpreting the scriptures as word of the Lord is the task of the preacher, who is prophet as spokesman-in-behalf-of-God even if he or she otherwise would rather not be.
At this point two very important factors emerge: first, the interpretative principle by which one reads the scripture. And second, the "read" of the people and culture to whom and to which one is proclaiming.
9. To say that we have presently operating several hermeneutical principles is an understatement. To discern who is "faithful interpreter" and who is "lying prophet" is made less difficult by those who, from the beginning, dismiss the scriptures as norm and rule for faith and life.
But those who would "speak His word faithfully," who wish to know the difference between straw and wheat, are themselves impugned by those who espouse cultural norms imported into the prophetic canon: religion as function of human imagination, tolerance as cardinal virtue, diversity as arche ... gnosis as trump against the plain word of scripture.
10. Peter Rogness, Bishop of the Greater Milwaukee Synod, one of the seven finalists for presiding bishop who spoke to the ELCA assembly in Indianapolis last week, affirmed the Holy Scripture as the norming norm for faith and life, citing as he did the article in the ELCA constitution that references it. Then he went on to ask whether we are "right" about our claim to understand what scripture says. His summer vacation reading had included a book of correspondence between Galileo and his daughter, wherein the father made his case privately that he was right in affirming Copernicus and the Church wrong in censuring him. The Church, said Rogness, knew that the earth was the center of the universe, because (it believed) the Bible says so. Galileo had thus to be wrong. And thus to be silenced. So for us, he continued. Things we think are so, because of the Bible, may turn out not to be so. And thus one of the limpest rationales for legitimizing homosexual behavior. Rogness and his sympathizers, who evidently numbered as much as nearly half of the assembly, scorn interpretations of the Bible that do not any longer suit their sensibilities. They scorn Jeremiah, false prophets who lead astray the people of God by voices and winds from the prevailing culture. Zeitgeist trumping Heilige Geist.
11. Jeremiah scorned is not Jeremiah wrong. He is either a supreme piece of arrogance or the genuine article. Only supreme arrogance or the genuine article would presume to declare the words of the Lord, in labeling his opposition as liars. That he was genuine can be discerned from the record.
12. What it was like for him at the time can be better understood from chapter 20: "Cursed be the day on which I was born! … Cursed be the man who brought the new to my father, 'A son is born to you,' making him very glad. … Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?"
13. We do not have, as Jeremiah did, an immediate word from the Lord. What we do have, which Jeremiah did not, is the Holy Scriptures in their complete and final revelation, including now the formerly scorned Jeremiah. We do have the most complete and ultimate self-disclosure of God, prior to the final coming of Jesus Christ. We do have the consensus ecclesia catholicae. We do have the prolepsis of the Resurrection. We are baptized children of God in Jesus Christ. We proclaim the Gospel, in its wholeness of law and gospel.
14. In the midst of the tension of trying to discern the word of the Lord, while enduring the taunts of facile purveyors of apostasy who traffic under the banner of progressivism, we speak a prophetic word: "Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces?" Kyrie eleison. Peccata fortiter.
JLY 08.29.95… rev. 08.13.01
•••••
Hebrews 11:29-12-2
1. The writer rehearses the trials of those of the era of the Old Covenant who waited, by hope and faith, on the promises of the Lord. By faith all these people ventured and prospered, were tested and tortured. By faith they withstood the ravages of a hostile world--and sometimes a just-as-hostile "people of God." These, the text continues, "were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
2. Not only the scriptures but also church history recounts the faith of those persecuted or scorned--from Jeremiah to Luther. It is ever, in that cavalcade of courage and persecutions, the easier to discern after the fact who was properly scorned by the state or the culture, and who was not. The Gnostics are rejected in retrospect; in their own time many embraced their teaching. Luther was a confusion to many, troubling the consciences of the faithful so that some embraced his reform but others clung to the church. The vision of hindsight separates better the wheat from the chaff, but even in review there are differences of how this or that is regarded. Luther's teaching, for instance, is only just now cautiously being examined with fairness, much less embraced with enthusiasm, among Roman Catholics. Gnosticism rears its head again as a prime contender, in hermeneutics if not in content, for an age of postmodern subjectivism. The contemporary Gnostic is less likely to claim a special, private, divine revelation for his certitude. He is more likely to claim a privileged understanding per se, having privately and without pang of conscience usurped the place of God to determine the content of good and evil. Today's Gnostic deconstructs received teaching as merely the repository of subjective musing, to be replaced on the altar of self-understanding and exercised in the arena of political advocacy.
3. In such a climate--and who can deny we have entered such a twilight zone?--we do well to recite and remember the advice of the author in 12:1-2: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." Particularly the parts about running the race with perseverance and fixing our eyes on Jesus. Because perseverance can mean political action, fighting fire with fire. Fixing our eyes on Jesus means viewing and even bearing the cross. The contention for the soul of the Christian faith in America, in the Lutheran Church, in our time, has become fierce. Powers and principalities have come to the fore. What we need first is discernment. And then courage. The author of Hebrews knows those things, and lights our way.
•••••
Luke 12:49-56
1. The words of Jesus burn in my ears: "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed. Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division." Jesus is facing trial, crucifixion, and death. Which he overcame in the Resurrection, to our everlasting joy! His words are often invoked by apocalyptic self-appointed prophets, who, like the poor, are always with us.
2. But pointedly, now, the words of Jesus burn in my ears: "I have come to bring division." The church of Jesus is by schisms rent asunder and by heresies distressed. What is coming--indeed, it is already here--among the churches of American Protestantism that consider themselves "main-line," is the threat of schism over the sexuality agenda. The Presbyterian sessions and presbyteries are voting up or down the resolution passed in their convention to legitimize gay and lesbian relationships in the manner of marriage. The Lutherans have lately elected as presiding bishop a man who has presided over a synod that itself has advocated much the same. He has been obliged to censure (though he did it lightly!) a congregation for ordaining to the gospel ministry--in an unauthorized ordination--a lesbian who has previously had her relationship with another lesbian blessed by her pastor. This in the presence of her bishop (Hanson), whose presence and silence scream consent, if not also blessing.
3. My friend Richard Niebanck has been obliged to declare status confessionis, that he is out of communion with his bishop and his Upper New York Synod. This on account of the actions of that synod to endorse the blessing of gay relationships in the manner of marriage, and to petition the ELCA to consider the same, and, further, to develop a rite for such a service.
4. What precise actions have been taken by the St. Paul Area Synod under the leadership of Bishop Hanson? If those actions are of similar or identical sort to the Upper New York Synod and the Metropolitan Chicago Synod, to name two more, what is their effect as to what the presiding bishop-elect has committed himself to? Are pastors "out of communion" with their presiding bishop in the manner that Richard Niebanck declared? One tends to wait-and-see.
What will be invoked is what is being invoked in all manner of disputes: an ecclesiology of radical congregationalism. This best suits the operational principle of diversity. On such grounds can dissenting seminarians request that they be ordained by a pastor or pastors rather than by a bishop or bishops. That was the substance of the CCM amendment adopted last Saturday by the assembly. On such grounds can Anita Hill be ordained "to place," as was suggested by Peter Rogness at Indianapolis. That is, not ordained into (or by) the whole church, but only by and for that congregation. Not even for that synod, per se. And such aberrations, it is argued, ought not disturb the faithful at Grace Church, Newton. Or in Delhi, New York. Or York, Pennsylvania.
5. But such aberrations will disturb the faithful. Evil is being called good, because the ascendant gnosticism has grafted into itself the cultural agenda to intimidate even the soundest of pastors and bishops in the church--another of the dubious fruits of the "hermeneutic of suspicion" concerning the word of God. Absent the prevailing authority of Scripture, or an adequate episcopal authority as in the Bishop of Rome, American protestantism runs its rudderless course of left-political advocacy toward ecclesial oblivion.
What to do? For the moment, pray. Pray for discernment. Courage. Faithfulness.
And wait. Wait and give the new presiding bishop a chance. Sometimes the responsibility of wider venue in leadership drives both left and right to the middle. If only to avoid schism.
But finally, we must serve God rather than man. Our conscience, like Luther's, must be captive to the Word of God--not informed by its own musings or preferences. Such captivity to the Word of God may well include this via crucis in our own time.
"I have come to bring division." Indeed. Only this division is less over the Savior than a causus celebre of the culture.
--Larry Yoder
JLY - 08.14.01
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