Sunday Worship 13 July | Lectionary Proper 10: "Do this and you will live"

Psalm 82

God presides in the great assembly;

    he renders judgment among the “gods”:

“How long will you defend the unjust

    and show partiality to the wicked?

Defend the weak and the fatherless;

    uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.

Rescue the weak and the needy;

    deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

“The ‘gods’ know nothing, they understand nothing.

    They walk about in darkness;

    all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

“I said, ‘You are “gods”;

    you are all sons of the Most High.’

But you will die like mere mortals;

    you will fall like every other ruler.”

Rise up, O God, judge the earth,

    for all the nations are your inheritance.

Colossians 1:1-14

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people — the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel that has come to you. In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace. You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

So we’re back with the lectionary, and while last week we focused on the Old Testament and Gospel readings, this week I’ve chosen for us to hear the Psalm and New Testament readings. I did say this would encourage us to engage with a breadth of scripture! So you have an idea of where we’re going, my plan is to look at each of the two passages separately, and then consider them together.

Beginning with Psalm 82, the references to ‘gods’ may be surprising to you, as the two religions that share this text are both monotheistic, believing in only one God. One way of reading this is to assume that the psalmist was adopting and perhaps even mocking the language of the cultures around him to make the point that God is greater than any other being. Biblical Hebrew does not use punctuation, so the quote marks introduced by the NIV are not original, but they do point towards that understanding, as if the writer is saying “I'm using the word ‘gods' because it's what others say, but I know they're not gods really”. Other translations read “heavenly beings” in verse one, suggesting that this is an affirmation that God is higher than the angels who are spoken of elsewhere in scripture. Interestingly, Jesus quotes “I said ‘you are gods’” in John 10, when he is challenged by some of the teachers of the law.  He uses the expression to refer to those “to whom the word of God came”, which he then uses to justify calling himself the Son of God. However we understand the nuance of the language of this passage, the main thrust of it is a cry for God to judge the earth and put right its wrongs.

Moving on to Colossians, this is what is known as a disputed letter, which means not all scholars agree that it really was written by Paul and Timothy, as is claimed in the first verse. If it was written by Paul, and for the sake of simplicity, let us proceed as if it were, it seems to have been written while he was in prison or under house arrest, to a church he knew only by reputation. Many of the churches Paul wrote to had been founded by him, and that was the basis of his relationship with them. The church in Colossae however was founded by Epaphras, who Paul appears to have worked alongside elsewhere, and who has shared with him news of this faithful community. In this opening to the letter, Paul delights in the faith and love they demonstrate, and that the gospel is growing among them, and prays for them with great feeling. The interconnectedness of the early church was really quite impressive given the transport and communication available at the time, and ought to be an example and inspiration to us. We sometimes talk about Baptist churches being interdependent, but it seems to me that we are good at the ‘dependent’ part but often forget the ‘inter’ bit. We can work on that though. I have been invited to preach at a neighbouring Baptist church in September, and perhaps I might take with me a letter from this congregation, giving thanks and praying for them.

Let's take a step back now, and look at how our readings interact. I'm not sure how the lectionary readings are worked out or why they fall together as they do, but it seems to me that the readings we have heard this morning speak to one another, thematically if not directly. In Psalm 82 the psalmist calls on God to sort things out, and in Colossians 1 the writer commends the church for doing a great job. Perhaps that doesn't seem like a terribly coherent conversation, but if we add in the other two readings from the lectionary, we can begin to discern a clear through line. The Old Testament reading is taken from Amos 7, and recounts the prophet's vision of a plumb line being used to judge Israel. The gospel reading is taken from Luke 10, and is the parable of the Good Samaritan. So putting all of that together, in Psalm 82 the psalmist calls on God to sort things out, in Amos 7 the prophet warns that God will act decisively, in Luke 10 Jesus reiterates the command to love God and neighbour, and in Colossians 1 the writer commends the church for doing a great job. We cry out, God responds, God calls us to act, we respond. We are the answer to the world's grief, not because God does not act, but because God works through us.

And let's be honest, we are the source of much of the world's grief too. That's not to pin every sin and sorrow on those of us in this room, but to recognise that people make mistakes, and we share in a collective responsibility for the world and one another. I've spoken before about what Francis Spufford calls the Human Propensity to Mess Things Up, which together with the equally powerful Human Propensity to Be Utterly Wonderful, is a defining feature of our species.  And the thing is, if we don't learn to fix what we've broken, we'll never fully understand what it means to break it, and so we'll keep on breaking it. It's right that we cry out to God, and God will be there handing us the dustpan and the mop, but we have to put the work in ourselves. We have to be the ones to deconstruct the unjust systems we have created and perpetuated. We have to be the ones to “defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

How then do we do that? Here I want to turn to one of the lectionary readings we haven’t heard yet, the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is found in Luke 10:25-37. I am sure it is a familiar story to many of us, and it doesn’t feel so long since I last preached on it (it turns out it was actually four years ago!) which is why I wanted to give space to hear the other readings in full, but I think it is really important in teasing out what the lectionary has to offer us this week. The passage begins like this: On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” 

Jesus had this infuriating habit of not quite answering the question he was being asked, and here the expert in the law wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life, but Jesus instead leads him to see what he must do to live. Jesus isn’t just interested in the life to come, but in the life today, and his teachings are not an insurance policy for eternity, but a living ethic for here and now. We might say that he is concerned not just with the length of our life, but also with the breadth and depth of it, how far we reach out into the world and how deeply we commit ourselves to it. Because reaching out and committing is how we love God and love neighbour, and that is how we do the work to which we have already seen we are called.

That might have been enough for the expert in the law, but he wanted to know who his neighbour was, and so Jesus told a story in which a man was robbed and beaten and left to die at the side of the road. Respected members of the community passed by, but a despised Samaritan stopped to tend to his wounds and get him to a place of safety, showing himself to be the true neighbour. There's a link back to last week's story of Naaman's healing, with compassion crossing hostile lines there too. Love does not stop at borders, and it is not turned back by prejudice. It bears fruit and grows throughout the whole world, just as the gospel does, because love is the gospel and the gospel is love. 

And as love bears fruit and grows, it becomes more than just an act of kindness between two people, it becomes a movement for justice, all that the psalmist cried out for. Martin Luther King Jr, who we sometimes forget was a Baptist minister as well as a civil rights activist, spoke brilliantly on the story of the Good Samaritan. In returning to his insights, I was struck again by these words: “One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.” This week my family enjoyed a spontaneous after school trip to Watermead Park, and as we threw pebbles into one of the lakes, we talked about how kindness spreads just like the ripples in the water. Enough pebbles can create enough ripples that the Jericho Road can be transformed, so may we keep throwing our kindness into the world. And may we “live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might”. Amen.