The Adventurous Lectionary – The Fifth Sunday in Lent – April 6, 20025
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
The Fifth Sunday in Lent is an invitation to gratitude and adventure. God is at work in the world and in the call and response of life is doing a new thing. God makes a way when we see no way and invites us forward beyond the past to be part of God’s new creation.
The readings invite us to embrace God’s future while honoring the past. God is our help in ages past, and also our hope in years to come. God is constantly doing a new thing, and God’s new thing builds on God’s past faithfulness. God makes a way – and in the past made a way – where we perceive only dead ends and failure. God works in our world and our history, taking us beyond our self-imposed limits to entertain and embody new possibilities for faithful service. Guided by Christ’s vision, we keep our eyes on the prize, constantly moving ahead. Faith tends towards a type of chaos, an iconoclasm that pushes us beyond our institutional structures. But innovative faith needs to be balanced by honoring tradition and discovering the order that enlivens and inspires.
Can faith make a difference in just such a time as now, when our nation’s leaders make no pretense to be moral, rejoice in bullying allies, and humiliating undocumented workers, in which dictatorship not democracy appears to be their goal? How will a forward looking faith, grounded in God’s promises, help us face the powers and principalities of our land, hellbent on destruction and turning back the hand of the clock and turning away from God’s vision of Shalom and when, tragically, many of our Christian kin celebrate violence, incivility, bullying, and abandonment of the vulnerable at home and abroad?
In a challenging time in his nation’s history, Isaiah proclaims that God is about to do a new thing! A new way is being made for the Southern Kingdom, made possible by God’s liberating actions. The One who has delivered the children of Israel in the past will deliver them again in the future, bringing them from captivity to freedom, from the heaviness of the past to the openness of the future. God is taking the initiative and presenting new possibilities to a people who, like their parents in Egypt, see no way forward. God’s way forward will include the non-human as well as human creation, as God embodies God’s own “green new deal” to heal the planet.
“Behold I do a new thing” is an important message for most churches to hear. Most mainline and progressive churches are in the spiritual wilderness and don’t see a clear pathway ahead. While conservative churches may savor Trumpism and his message of retribution, in so doing they are just as lost – they have lost their souls to a would-be dictator and follow a “wooden idol,” a fragile demagogue who cannot save.
The church has been a tail light, to quote Martin Luther King, and God wants it to be a headlight, illuminating a new positive future for itself and the world. Our way forward takes us beyond the past, even the positive past, to God’s creative future. We don’t yet know the future toward which God calls us, and we fear that we are not up to the task, but we must be willing to sacrifice for God’s vision and move from self-interest to world loyalty.
Isaiah’s visionary experience invites us to spiritual disciplines that open us to God’s provocative possibilities for the future. God calls us to be a headlight aimed at the horizons of Shalom and reminds us that even small and struggling churches can be vital and missional, if they open to God’s new thing. Saving one soul can save the world, and any congregation can be a world-saver.
Psalm 126 promises joy and celebration after a season of mourning and despair. The hopeless are finding new hope. Something new is happening. Within the concrete, and sometimes negative, limitations of our histories, God is delivering us from bondage and presenting us with a lively and new future. Can we discern the birth of something amid the deathful policies of the US leaders?
In the passage from Philippians, the apostle Paul challenges us to go forward in faith with eyes on the prize of companionship with Christ. Faith is not backward-looking, nor does it rest on its laurels. Paul had accomplished much in his zealous youth; he was at the top of his profession. But then God invited him to something more – to a living relationship with a living God. Everything before his encounter with Jesus, Paul says with more a little hyperbole, is rubbish compared to where he is going. Paul is not jettisoning his past. His rhetoric cannot dismiss his youthful ardor as in Judaism. In truth, Paul would not be here as apostle to the Gentiles, straining toward the goal, if he hadn’t been there, a zealous Jesus leader, committed to preserving the purity of his faith. His moving forward depends on his past just as our moving forward as congregations depends of the commitment of those who have gone before us.
Still, Paul challenges us to keep our eyes on the prize. Healthy faith – abundant living – looks ahead, and is inspired by visions of the future, grounded in the accomplishments of the past. There is always “more,” a far horizon that beckons us – new mission, new forms of
worship, new political challenges, new ways to articulate the faith and serve the world.
The Gospel reading portrays two essential facets of love. Perhaps, the pastor might include the passage from Luke 10:38-42, also involving Mary, Martha, and Lazarus to place Mary’s act of love in a wider, more holistic perspective, describing two sides of faith, the active and contemplative, the quotidian and the ecstatic. In both passages, Martha is serving. In the Luke passage, she ensures that the guests have appropriate hospitality. Although Martha tends to become too task oriented and anxious – she wants things just right – her service is essential to the evening and makes Mary’s attentiveness possible.
We need people concerned with brick and mortar, and we need mystics and imaginative thinkers. They are the yin and yang of congregational life, spirituality, and our own maturity in the faith. Martha pays the bills, so Mary can love extravagantly. We need housework and romance in a relationship and consistency and mysticism in the church and our personal lives. There is a time for building the infrastructure and insuring institutional well-being for the long-haul, this is Martha’s gift, and there is a time to throw caution to the wind, Mary’s contribution. Martha’s love is also extravagant, although understated compared to her sister Mary. Perhaps, in their own spiritual growth, Mary will become more earthly-minded and Martha more imaginative and mystical.
Mary’s extravagance reminds us that we have enough to be generous in time, talent, and treasure. She gives without limit, and we must be generous too, finding ways to balance fiscal responsibility with generosity and support of our citizens with welcoming of refugees, ensuring food for the vulnerable, and finding ways to resist the evils of our time. We can rejoice and feed the hungry, we can have fun and be socially responsible. In fact, passionate and joyful people energize our social outreach. Joyfulness, health, and healthy relationships are also forms of resistance.
The challenge is to find the creative synthesis of order and novelty, security and abandon, quotidian and transcendent. The whole earth reflects God’s glory and in response, even brick and mortar – and prayerful protest and contemplative challenge – can be windows into divinity. Behold, God calls us to something new, and our novelty in this time and place is grounded in God’s novel inspirations throughout history and embodied in this present moment.
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Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, MD (https://www.westmorelanducc.org/) and a professor in theology and spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary. He is the author of over 80 books including: “Homegrown Mystics: Restoring the Soul of Our Nation through the Healing Wisdom of America’s Mystics” (Amazon.com: Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries: 9781625249142: Epperly, Bruce: Books) “Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet “(Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet: Epperly, Bruce: 9781625248732: Amazon.com: Books), Saving Progressive Christianity to Save the Planet”( Saving Progressive Christianity to Save the Planet: Epperly, Bruce G: 9781631999215: Amazon.com: Books), and his most recent book, “God of the Growing Edge: Whitehead and Thurman on Theology, Spirituality and Social Change.” (The God of the Growing Edge: Whitehead and Thurman on Theology, Spirituality, and Social Change: Epperly, Bruce G: 9781631999291: Amazon.com: Books The God of the Growing Edge: Whitehead and Thurman on Theology, Spirituality, and Social Change: Epperly, Bruce G: 9781631999291: Amazon.com: Books)
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