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postmodern preaching

Proper 18 Year C

  • Jeremiah 18: 1-11

Walter Brueggemann lists the most prominent metaphors for God used in the Hebrew Scriptures, including gardener, shepherd, mother, healer, and, as in today’s excerpt from Jeremiah, potter.  He identifies these as “metaphors of sustenance.,” which “include dimensions of Yahweh’s powerful governance [and] Yahweh’s insistence on order of a certain kind.”  But these “metaphors of sustenance” and nurture also include a warning: “Where that order is not honored or enacted, Yahweh is fully prepared to abandon the object of sustenance.  “The metaphors of sustenance turn out to have a dimension of demand,” Brueggemann insists,  “reflecting Yahweh’s sovereign expectation.”  “On the one hand, Israel’s testimony employs metaphors that articulate Yahweh’s judgment in the interest of reparations, rehabilitation, and beginning again.”  “On the other hand, some images seem to bespeak an ending without a beginning.”  (Theology of the Old Testament, pp 277-279)

  • Psalm 139: 1-5, 12-17

The psalmist acknowledges his creatureliness and the Lord’s role as his creator, who “shaped”  him in the womb.  (Robert Alter writes that the word “shaped” used here is closest to the action of a potter. [The Book of Psalms, p. 480])  The Lord therefore knows the psalmist better than he knows himself; the vessel is the the creation from the mind of the maker.  This realization overwhelms the psalmist.

OR

  • Deuteronomy 30: 15-20

The farewell speech by Moses moves to its conclusion with a stark choice for God’s people: “life and prosperity” or “death and adversity.”  Loving the Lord, walking in the designated way and obeying the Lord’s rules will result in blessing; if not, you will not survive in the land that had been promised.  God calls “heaven and earth” as a witness of the choice God has given to God’s people and the consequences of each alternative.  “Choose life….”

  • Psalm 1

The psalm placed by ancient editors at the beginning of the psalter sets the tone for the entire collection: “the Lord embraces the way of the righteous/and the way of the wicked is lost.”

  • Philemon 1-21

Writing from prison, Paul advocates for the freedom of a slave, Onesimus, who had become a partner in ministry with him.  Paul never makes a direct request nor asserts his authority.  Instead, he makes his appeal “on the basis of love….”  He hopes that the runaway slave’s owner will welcome his slave back “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother… both in the flesh and in the Lord.”  The basis for Paul’s appeal is the new kind of relationships that the church should engender, which are quite different than the norms in society.

  • Luke 14: 25-33

Luke has just completed a series of stories and sayings by Jesus (14: 1-24), which emphasize the unconditional, open invitation for any and all as welcomed into God’s reign.  So it makes sense that by now the crowds following Jesus have become very “large.”  Now Luke’s Jesus lays out some tough choices.  Following Jesus is a choice each individual makes, which sometimes can mean leaving family behind.  It can entail carrying “the cross….”  Luke provides two analogies unique to his gospel.  What happens if you build a structure without estimating “the cost, to see whether you have enough to complete it?”  Or, what military leader wages war without first trying to determine whether he has adequate resources?  For Luke’s Jesus, the cost of discipleship  comes down to this: “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

The farewell address of Moses to God’s people presents one choice between two, and only two, alternatives: “life and prosperity” or “death and adversity.”  The responsory psalm (1) is just as absolute: one can opt to be found or “lost.”  The stakes for a whole nation can be just as awesome, Jeremiah declares: rehabilitation or oblivion.  Luke’s Jesus is uncompromising: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate [emphasis added] father and mother, yes even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”  And, the commitment Jesus demands is total: “none of you can be my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Paul Ricoeur believes that hyperbole and paradox are essential to the intent of biblical narratives.  In various essays collected together in Figuring the Sacred, Ricoeur writes that the intent is to force the reader/hearer to become “dislocated in her or his life project.” (p. 59)  They are meant to cause a crisis, to upset, to shatter preconceptions and presumptions.  They are “destined to shake up ordinary thinking, as though it were necessary to bend a branch in another direction than the one it habitually takes.” (pp 121-122)  Or, we might add here the metaphor found in today’s first alternative reading and psalm: to be shaped and molded by a “potter” whom we recognize as our creator, redeemer and sustainer.  (We should probably presume that this molding process happens over a lifetime when the substance [us] sometimes resists and sometime yields to the potter [God].) The intent of the use of hyperbole and paradox in biblical texts is to make “the extraordinary break forth in the ordinary.”  Ricoeur summarizes that “there is no [biblical] parable that does not introduce… some implausible characteristic, something insolent, disproportionate; that is, something scandalous.”  (p 229)  But the intent is not complete at merely inciting shock and disorientation, (or the breakdown of the potter’s material).  “All discourse,” Ricoeur writes,  “including political and ethical speech is touched by this demand for ‘something more’ that is hinted at in the sayings and extravagant life of the parable, in the paradox and hyperbole of the proverb, and in the announcement that the kingdom of God is present.” (p. 61)

It is not honest to water-down the strong, stark, absolute choices and their dire consequences in biblical narratives, such as the appointed readings and gospel for this Sunday.  They are meant to jolt us out of complacency.  They are meant to dislodge us from whatever accomodations we have made with these choices and their consequences over the years so we can/will  aspire to “something more….”

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