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postmodern preaching

Proper 11 Year C

  • Amos 8: 1-12

Amos re-states the requirements of God’s covenant and the consequences when it is ignored.  He describes in detail the exploitation of the poor and needy by those who are better off as a heinous violation of God’s covenant.  He even names one specific wide-spread practice– rigging daily business transactions to cheat people.  Toleration of such practices will bring “famine” on the nation worse than a “famine of bread, or a thirst for water…”  There will come a famine of “hearing the words of the Lord.”  Belatedly, people will wander around, trying to find those “words” again., “but they shall not find it.”

  • Psalm 52

The psalmist indicts the “evil” person with sarcasm by calling such a person a “hero.”  Such a person “loves” deceit, lying and every practice that increases injustice and mocks fairness.  “God will surely smash you forever/sweep you up and tear you from the tent/root you out from the land of the living.”  The “righteous” will see the fate of such people and recount to themselves “God’s kindness forevermore.”

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  • Genesis 18: 1-10a

The reader is told that the Lord appeared to Abraham and Sarah, but they only see three strangers at their door.  Upon  opening the door and seeing the three strangers, Abraham spontaneously goes into action to welcome them with generous hospitality and a flourish of obsequiousness.  Using the word “fetch” four times and the word “hurry” three times, Abraham offers them a quick snack and with Sarah starts preparations for an elaborate and generous meal.  The strangers ask the whereabouts of his wife, Sarah.  One of the three makes a staggering promise: “I will surely return to you at this very season and, look, a son shall Sarah your wife have.”

  • Psalm 15

The psalmist asks: Who travels to and takes up residence in the Lord’s house?  The psalmist answers: the person who “does justice,” speaks truth, does not slander and conducts business with others honestly.

  • Colossians 1: 15-28

The eloquence of this magisterial hymn/poem/liturgical text befits its cosmic sweep.  Jesus is “the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation… the head of the body, the church… the first born of the dead….”  In him “the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” for the distinct purpose to reconcile to God  “all things, whether on earth or in heaven….”  By a specific act– “the blood of his cross”– you are the beneficiary of his death.  The writer depicts Paul’s suffering as an extension of “Christ’s affliction.”  The cross of Christ “makes the word of God fully known, the mystery that had been hidden throughout the ages….”  Gentiles have been included by God.  Everyone can benefit.

  • Luke 10: 38-42

Luke follows his famous story of someone least likely to fulfill God’s wishes, an anonymous Samaritan, with another story involving hospitality.  Jesus accepts an invitation to the home of a woman, named Martha, in a village he does not identify.  Martha immediately sets to the tasks of offering him gracious hospitality while her sister, Mary, “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.”  Martha tries to recruit Jesus into chastising her sister for not helping, but Jesus assures them “there is need of only one thing.”  Mary had made the better choice, he says

The story of Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality tells of an ideal openness to the stranger and the promise of new life to an elderly, childless couple that will ensue.  Their response to the arrival of the strange, different, unknown in the form of these three strangers who arrive on their doorstep is open, immediate, spontaneous; the promise that comes out of this encounter is nothing short of miraculous.  Mary’s welcome for the stranger is honored by Jesus.  The condemnation of cheating one another in every day life, especially those less fortunate, could not be stated more frankly and sternly in Amos and both appointed psalms.  

By the time of his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida produced thirty books over a thirty-year career and narrowed his focus to certain “impossible/possibles,” as he called them, including hospitality.  In 2001 he wrote:

“Unconditional hospitality can’t be an establishment, but it may happen as a miracle… in an instant, not lasting more than an instant, it may happen.   This the … possible happening of something impossible, which makes us think what hospitality, or forgiveness, or the gift might be.”  (Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, Paul Patton and Terry Smith, eds., Sydney: Power Publications, 2001, pp 101-102)  

Six years earlier Derrida had written:

“Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surrender the arrivant.”  (Specter of Marx, Peggy Kamut, trans, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 65)

Derrida’s explication/plea at the end of his life for “impossible/possible” hospitality reminds us that although such sincere, fearless, ready openness to something or someone “strange” to us is an ideal, its mere expression of  some possibility that we might exhibit, or even experience as a recipient, keeps alive the glimmer that there is at least the possibility of something new, something life-affirming, life-giving still to come in our lives.  And, that mere possibility keeps alive the hope of new life, even when it had come to be assumed that new life was impossible.  Indeed, the possibility of new life that hints at the miraculous comes to us initially in the guise of someone or something strange or new or even a little threatening.

The story of Martha and Mary continues the peculiarly biblical notion that responsiveness to others, especially those who show up in our lives unexpectedly, can be the test/opportunity for new life to be born.  Martha is depicted as the one who took the initiative to invite Jesus into their home and then busied herself with the best manners of hospitality.  (Dorothy Sayers imagines Martha as “House-proud” in The Man Who Would Be King.)  Mary is presented as mesmerized with “the words” of Jesus.  When called upon to settle the difference between the two siblings, Jesus does not condemn Martha’s actions, he just says that Mary made the better choice of how to use the time with their guest.

The emphasis of the story of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah and of Martha and Mary, balance and enhance the other.  “The words” from/about Jesus work their wonder when we devote our full attention to them because they open our hearts to God and to one another.  But the words die in polite manners if not attached to action.  The ideal behavior of Abraham and Sarah reminds us that it is the most basic, common, ordinary actions of meeting the needs of others– sometimes especially those who are strangers to us– that is tantamount to welcoming the Lord!  Such experiences in our lives can be unexpected opportunities for something new to come alive, even when we had come to be resigned to our ‘barrenness’.

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