Sunday, November 10, 2019

Lectionary Readings

Haggai 1:14-2:9  •  Psalm 145  •  Job 19:23-27a  •  2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17  •  Luke 20:27-38

Backstory

Haggai 1:14-2:9 (it may help to also read Ezra 3:8-13)

The exiled Israelites are now back in Jerusalem, and Judah, after seventy plus years in exile and slavery.  They are rebuilding from the damage created by their own disobedience before the exile as well as the destruction of the invading Babylonian forces.  There is a great deal of vision, excitement, and exhaustion but also, among the elder returnees,  there is much disappointment.  The older generation, while excited to be home, remembers the beauty and grandeur of the past.  They watch the foundation laid for the new temple and see that it is smaller and in no way compares to the past glory of their memories.  While others cheer, this generation weeps.  The prophets remind them of God’s outpouring in their release from captivity and that he has much more to bless and give – but also caution that God’s new work may not look the same or live up to what they think was superiority of the past.

Psalm 145 (responsive reading)

The Psalm, written by King David, is a personal, and national, recognition that God is God and a King is not God.  Following slavery, the people who are still discovering themselves as well as well as grasping who God is, are now free but under the thumb of the Persian Empire who conquered the Babylonians.  They have demanded of God, and received, their own King, but now are having to learn that a King is not God – and, it is their own King who is making this proclamation.  This moment is emphasized through a recognition of who God is and all that he has done.

Job 19:23-27a

Job is struggling.  His life has been turn upside down and now he is thought to hold the blame for his own suffering.  A great deal of the book of Job is an account of his quest, and demand, for vindication of this perceived guilt.  In chapter 19 he is now vacillating between receiving this vindication post mortem via a relative who can attest to his innocence or, his true desire, to hear and see God proclaim Job’s innocence.  His desire for an earthly, and eternal, vindication comes at the end of the book of Job as God meets him – then, Job is satisfied.

2 Thessalonians 2:1-17

Someone, or some group, has stirred up the church at Thessalonia teaching that the end days, the time of judgement (the Day of the Lord), are upon them. While many, even today, mistake this passage as being fully apocalyptic (end times teaching), it is actually a message of comfort and peace.  Paul reminds the church of what God has done while encouraging them to keep holding tight to God and what they have already been doing.  Paul tells the church to not be deceived by these false teachers of division and fear and, instead, to let the God of love and grace comfort and strengthen their hearts so they can do the same in the midst of their community.

Luke 20:27-38

The Sadducees were a community of priests who did not believe in the afterlife or resurrection.  They were, as a rule, more legalistic than the other primary priests community, the Pharisees.  In Luke 20 we see Jesus, now in Jerusalem and in the temple, facing an onslaught of religiously motivated intellectual attacks by the different religious leaders.  Our focus passage involves a group of Sadducees who attempt to engage Jesus in a debate about the reality of resurrection and life after death. They do this through a less than subtle legalistic approach revealing their attitudes towards women.  As the Sadducees think they have a fool proof plan to ‘win’ intellectually against Jesus, they instead, have many of their own faulty beliefs destroyed. Jesus not only presents proof of the resurrection, from the sadducees’ own accepted source, he also discredits their non-belief about angels. In the end, all the different religious leaders give up their effort to defeat Jesus on an intellectual and religious front choosing to walk away for the moment.