Christ Lutheran Church

1701 Arroyo Chamiso

Santa Fe, NM 87505-4775

(505) 983-9461

church@clcsantafe.com

  

 

March 15, 2009: Third Sunday in Lent

 

Gospel: John 2:13-22

 

[Note:  The following translation is from The New Testament by Professor Norman A. Beck of Texas Lutheran University.  It is “A new translation and redaction that dares to be sensitive to anti-Jewish polemic and to sexism, and dares to be innovative for our time by moving back into the past of early church development and forward into the future of the church that is still to come.”]

 

13 Then it was time for the Jewish Passover festival, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 And in the outer court of the Temple he confronted those who were selling cattle and sheep and pi­geons, and the coin-changers sitting there. 15 And, having made a whip out of thornbushes that were growing in that area, he chased all of the sheep and cattle out of the Temple court, and he scattered the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he said to the ones who were selling pigeons, “Take these things out of here! Do not continue to make my father’s house an emporium:’ 17 His disciples recalled then that it is written, “Zeal for your house will result in my destruction.” 18 The people who were making money from these transactions in the Temple then responded to him and said, “What sign can you show us to verify that you have the authority to do these things?” 19 Jesus answered and said to them, “If you destroy this temple, within three days I will raise it up:’ 20 They said to him, “The construction of this Temple has required forty-six years, and if it is destroyed you will raise it up within three days?” 21 Jesus, how­ever, was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 Therefore, when he had been raised from the dead, his disciples remem­bered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

 

A Little Bit About the Lectionary

 

+ In nomine Domini.  Amen.

Our Gospel Readings in Lent in this Year of Mark are quite interesting.  With the exception of the First Sunday in Lent and Palm Sunday, all of the Gospel portions are from the Gospel of John.  To explain why this is so, we have to understand a little history of the source of our Lectionary.

A Lectionary is both a calendar of the church year and a table of scripture readings.   In other words, what the Lectionary does is to create a calendar of its own that structures the life of those following Jesus in a rhythmic way alongside of a secular calendar, and then provides a sequence of Bible passages to give flesh and life to that Church Calendar it has developed.

The basis of reading passages from the Bible in an ordered way was fairly well developed in the Western Church (the Church centered in Rome) by the 4^th Century.  Most of us in the Church Nave this morning, my age and older, remember from our childhood only a 1-year Lectionary … and, we also remember that things changed in the 1960s … if you were Roman Catholic, the language of the Mass changed from Latin into whatever was the language of your country (in our case it was English), the Eucharist began to be celebrated with the Celebrant facing the people not with back turned to a high altar, and (among many other changes) more readings from the Bible began to appear in the Sunday worship.  

For Christians in the Western Tradition, it all had to do with the giant gathering of the Roman Catholic Church called Vatican II.   And the development of a 3-year Lectionary replacing the 1-year Lectionary was part of the development. 

Lutherans and Episcopalians grabbed the tail of the Lectionary Lion and – in the case of Lutherans in this country and in Canada – the 3-year sequence of Matthew, Mark and Luke each dominating one year was firmly included in the Green Book (the Lutheran Book of Worship that came out in 1978).

In actuality there were several varieties of this new way of reading the Bible in Churches and so in 1983, the North American Consultation on Common Texts (CCT), published the Common Lectionary which was an attempt to harmonize the variations which had sprung up.

This meant that you could go into a Roman Catholic Church, or an Episcopal Church, or a Lutheran Church, or a Presbyterian Church … and so forth, and you would find most everyone reading the same portions of the Bible each week.  And then in 1992, the same consultation published a revised edition of the Common Lectionary and that is the one we follow.

The reason that in the second year of this 3-year cycle, the Year of Mark, we read a lot of the Gospel of John is because the earliest Gospel is the shortest of the 4 on the one hand, and on the other hand, it thus gives a place for John to be read.

There are many suggestions that there could be a 4-year Lectionary using all four canonical Gospels, and in fact the translator of the text that I read this morning, Dr. Norman Beck of Texas Lutheran University, has suggested that.  And I know that in the congregation he serves … they do in fact follow a Lectionary based upon all of the Gospels, a Lectionary that he himself (with the help of others certainly) has revised.[1]

I should also mention that frequently when we have readings from the Fourth Gospel, John, I will choose to read them from Norm Beck’s translation of the New Testament.  Why?  I’ve let him speak in his own words in the note describing today’s Gospel reading:  “[this is] … A new translation and redaction that dares to be sensitive to anti-Jewish polemic and to sexism, and dares to be innovative for our time by moving back into the past of early church development and forward into the future of the church that is still to come.”

The Gospel of John within the context of its time, at the end of the 1^st century, has within it some rather rude comments about Jews and Judaism that are not always found in the other, earlier, Gospels.  That is, John’s telling of the story has more and those anti-Jewish polemics are there in that story for a reason … we should remember a 1^st century reason, that is to show people what that community of followers of Jesus who lived with the Gospel of John wanted Jews of their time to turn to Jesus. 

And that has, over centuries, with enough preaching, often been taken sideways into other generations with cruelty and divisiveness so that if we do not read this fourth Gospel with some understanding of its own context, then we are not only supplanting into our current time words and phrases that bear a lot of historical odium and dislike (as in the phrase “it was the Jews who killed Jesus” … thankfully nearly all of the followers of Jesus today have renounced and continue to renounce such a statement, because it was the Romans who killed Jesus, and yes some of Jesus’ own people were implicated … but to blame the death of Jesus on the Jews is truly the abomination; not withstanding how that phrase has been used throughout the centuries, and even today) … so we not only try not to simply take ancient words and put them into our mouths without understanding of time and context for the reason of erasing the possibility of creating hatred in our world, we also do the gospel itself a disservice if we read it that way.  That is, we turn the Gospel from Good News into Horrible News.

And so that is why you will hear a reading different from what is in your pew Bibles (if you are following along) when I read from Beck’s translation. 

I could, of course, provide you with my own translation … or better yet, we could have the Greek Class (that sits in these pews each week wondering if I am going to call upon them for the translation of a particular word from the New Testament) do a class translation … but we seem not to have enough time to do that each week … caught up as we are these days with the Imperfect and Aorist tenses of Greek Verbs.

There is nothing sacred about the Lectionary itself, the sacredness comes in the story that flows from it.  However, when preaching does not take the full context of the story itself, aided by years and years of scholarship and archeological understanding of the texts, then sermons can come out in all kinds of unfaithful ways … or worse the Good News turns into My News instead of God’s News.

It is what makes preaching such an onerous task and responsibility.  Preaching asks the following, and most sermons follow this 4-step outline:

• What is the problem or issue or thing facing us today?
• What was the problem or issue or thing facing the people whose story we are reading in the Bible (Moses, or Elijah, or Paul, or Jesus …)
• What was the answer they found then?
• Perhaps that is the answer we might find now.

[Here followed a very brief summary of how to do a sermon on today’s text vis à vis the outline above.  It was different at each Service.]

Reading Scripture this way is also what makes being a member of a congregation such an onerous task and responsibility … because, you see, we believe that when Scripture is read and interpreted for us with as much clarity and understanding as we can make, then not only does Scripture come alive in our midst … but we, we are part of it life, the story lives in us, and we in it, and we are changed by it, we are moved by it, we are compelled to go into the world and share it … with our words and our actions.

For example that is why this week we will take our turn preparing and serving food at our Interfaith Community Shelter for the Homeless, and we will take our turn sitting at a desk, welcoming each and every guest who has no safe and warm and healthy place to sleep that night.

What we are doing is taking the life of the Story that we hear in this place, and letting it come alive in our own bodies, so that, if you will, the Bible is not just a book, it is a book that brings to us a living story that is the source of understanding who we are as full human beings … and what is that?

We hear it all through this season of Lent as we read these Gospel portions … follow Jesus and you will follow him not into a chapel where you will remain, but into the world where you, like he, will have abundant life, by sharing life, by giving life, by making life possible for others.

Think of that this week as you take food and your very selves into the lives of those who will come to rest for one night or a week of nights in a place we have provided in the name of the one who teaches us to love our neighbor.

+ Deo Gratia.  Amen.

The Rev. Benjamin Larzelere III, Pastor