This Week: Proper 26A or All Saints
Gospel: Matthew 23:1-12 or Matthew 5:1-12
Planning for preaching this week depends highly on whether the congregation plans to observe All Saints on this first Sunday.
The gospel for Proper 26A continues straight from last week, as Jesus turns away from the Temple leaders and addresses the crowd and his disciples directly.
After a chapter of dealing with tests of Jesus’s authority: direct attempts to compromise Jesus’d integrity with the crowds: we have Jesus finally speaking directly to them.
So what does he do?
He tells them the leaders are hypocrite fakes who probably go home and kick the dog.
OK, not that exactly.
Well, what he does say is actually worse.
He says these people are given the same authority to the church of today as Moses—and what they do with it is to live counter to the tenets they teach. And more than that, they insist on proving how amazing and special they are. Which is soooo not the point.
Why? Because the more special you are, the less interested God is in ensuring your place in the Kin-dom.
This isn’t just name-calling.
In the sense of what the Temple leaders were trying to do to Jesus, there is a similar underlying purpose in what Jesus is teaching the people.
The Temple leaders aren’t merely being mean to poor Jesus, they are trying to make him look bad. In a sense, they don’t have anything against Jesus as an individual. It’s not like they are picking on him for the size of his nose or whether he forgot to trim his ear hair. In this way, their attacks aren’t actually personal.
What they want is to get people to have nothing to do with his teachings. They want to silence him so that nobody listens to him.
In that same vein, Jesus is likewise encouraging people to follow his teaching. And he does so by both differentiating himself from them and by discrediting their motivations.
He wants to show the people that the Temple leaders don’t have the monopoly on knowledge, truth, or a genuine relationship with the divine.
And this tactic—distancing from the particular strain of the teaching offered by the Temple and encouraging his variation—seems to coincide with the message itself.
Jesus is democratizing faith.
At least that’s how we might describe it now. It is the impulse that provoked the Reformation. And before that, the rise of the Magisterium, the Great Schism, the Jesus Wars, and Christianity itself.
This isn’t supposed to be personal to the people in power. Not really. It’s about the point of how God is moving in the world. Toward an ever-changing, growing understanding of the goodness of God.
Therefore, we recognize God’s need to overturn the paradigm—the order. That the things as they are, are not the work of God. If they were, it would be backward. For the powerful exploit. And in the Kin-dom, there is no exploitation. So the powerful must be stripped of that power.
So that the meek can inherit the earth…as in heaven.
If you’re not using Proper 26…
This material is still useful to remember as we dive back into next week.
And I still think it is useful this week. As we dive into the stuff of All Saints’ Day.
The gospel for All Saints is, of course, the Beatitudes. An expectation-defying teaching about blessing in meekness and unsettled hearts.
We may be tempted to talk about something else. Or to preach about tender-hearted mercy. The latter is always the right approach, I suspect.
But getting a gospel proclaiming “blessed are the peacemakers” in the midst of international violence—the kind of which that could easily devolve into a third world war—feels hopelessly difficult to offer with joy and a light heart.
I also suspect that such inclination may find its way to a good number of preachers delivering a message of peace that may (or may not?) even resemble the present moment. Whether we “rise to the occasion” or not, the subject is no less lingering in the background.
Here, too, I feel a most troubling disconnect from the federal response from the U.S. to Middle East conflict—not because it lacks concern for righteousness. But because it has so far lacked an overt posture of any willingness to make peace.
This certainly does not imply a lack of complexity in international relations, nor a blind skepticism toward the nature of the conflict. But the gospel is expressly speaking to the blessedness of making peace—not bombing in pursuit of a future peace.
This fact is a clanging cymbal behind the reading of the gospel for many of us this week.
It is about our posture toward others.
And this becomes especially true as we continue reading in the Sermon on the Mount.
These seemingly backward-blessings, inviting us to feel blessed at the precise moment we don’t, are followed by sequence after sequence of new ways to see the world.
A big thrust of Jesus’s teaching is to see a way out of the binary—the false choice between two things. To help us see other things from which we are blinded.
The most famous binary is the instinct of fight or flight. That our bodies are designed to fight our way out of a problem or run away from it. And Jesus invites us to see it another way. That we don’t have to fight or run away.
We can stand up without throwing down. We can force the world to see the hypocrisy of our enemies. Or else get our oppressors in trouble by turning exploitation into their guilt.
In short, we don’t have two options. Or a “third way“. There are many other ways.
And there is also primary focus:
to reveal the liberating love of God and the oppressive shame of power.
Blessed are we, then, in our weakness. When we are last on earth. For it assures us that we will be first in heaven.
And blessed are we when we see the oppression of others. That we might want liberation for them. And therefore seek it. And in the end, make it happen.