Prayer suggestions for Pentecost 19:https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/prayer/?y=384&season=season_after_pentecost&d=proper_24

Jeremiah 31: 27-34

Jeremiah certainly challenged the ruling powers. As one can imagine, they didn’t like it. He persisted. Jeremiah’s message could be summarized this way:  “Because of our behavior (particularly those in power and the wealthy) Judah is going to receive a serious time out – in Babylon.” As you will remember from your previous studies of the Babylonian exile, several deportations occurred between 597 and 587BCE. During this ten-year period, Jeremiah, who remained in Jerusalem until approximately 583BCE, when he was taken against his will to Egypt (Jeremiah 43), also wrote to those in Babylon that they should work for the good of their captors. “Get jobs, settle down, you’ll be there a long time.” (Jeremiah 29:1-7) Yet Jeremiah also bought land in Judah, knowing that it was going to be overrun by the Babylonians! Realistic about the current brokenness yet optimistic about the forgiving nature of Yahweh, Jeremiah believed that God’s people did have a future in the promised land (Jeremiah 32:1-15).

When one thinks about our current ecological disaster and the willful misuse of our earth’s resources, coupled with intentional misinformation about the gravity of the situation, it isn’t hard to draw parallels between this time and Jeremiah’s. For a current similar perspective read this article by Babara Rossing. https://www.currentsjournal.org/index.php/currents/article/view/536/558

The verb “I will” is used eight times in this short reading from Jeremiah! As Luther reminds us in his small catechism, “I believe that I cannot, by my own reason or strength…” Jeremiah knows that the covenant God made with Israel at Mount Sinai had been broken by the people. Thus their long timeout in Babylon. This new covenant, which is God’s doing, will be carved within our own hearts, rather than on stone tablets. The final verse of our OT lesson is pure grace: “for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Psalm 119: 97-104

Since few of those who hear our sermons have a grasp of the role of Law, it might be helpful to remind your auditors that sequence matters. By that I mean God acted to save the Israelites from extinction (that is what would have happened as a people if the Pharoah’s edict to kill all baby boys had succeeded) before God gave them the Law. First God saved them, and then God gave them the Law as a means to organize their lives as saved people. Most auditors have the order reversed. They assume that in the Old Testament, the Israelites had to obey the law in order to get God to love them and/or save them. Actually it is the reverse. Because God loves them and saved them, God provided the Law as a way to live as saved people, thereby attracting other clans/nations to worship God as well. That is the spirit of Psalm 119. It is similar in our own faith tradition. We don’t serve God by serving our neighbors and God’s amazing creation in order to prompt God to love/save us! Rather, we serve our neighbors and the creation because God has freed us from having to save ourselves. God has done the heavy lifting. We have the pleasure of leaving the saving to God and spending our time living as saved people. What might that look like in your context? How are you serving the creation right now? How might you serve creation in the future?

Luke 18: 1-8[1]

During my time as a student at Concordia Seminary and then Seminex (1973-77), I was taught that one of the best ways to wrap my head around any given text was to put myself into the shoes of each of the characters in a particular Gospel story, and then imagine who those characters might be in the world of my current auditors. As I tried it out once again in preparation for writing these short reflections, I pictured the many Indigenous women and men who have publicly cried out on behalf of their corner of creation that was being polluted and/or destroyed; I pictured students/young leaders from across the world who have cried out to world leaders on behalf of climate justice; and the list could go on. What I had trouble picturing were unjust judges who finally acted with justice… Thankfully Luke reminds us that God is different! God longs to listen to God’s people crying out for justice. God longs to help. Might this be ‘Kairos’ moment for us? Might this be a time pregnant with opportunity for us to continually cry out to the unjust leaders of our day for justice for this earth and all its inhabitants – human and non-human? Might our persistence finally gall them to action? All the while we have the blessed assurance that our Creator God hears our cries and will not delay long in helping. If I were to make a T-Shirt to advertise this movement, I’d tweak the old “God’s Work Our Hands” T-Shirt to read “God’s Work Our Voices.”

In 2007, The Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said: “As individuals we are often conscious of a kairos, a moment when we make a choice that will affect our whole lives. For the human race as a whole, there is now a kairos, a decisive time in our relationship with God’s creation. We will either act in time to protect life on earth from the worst consequences of human folly, or we will fail to act. May God grant us the wisdom to act in time.” That was almost 20 years ago!

For other excellent resources from the Greek Orthodox community, check out this website: https://www.orth-transfiguration.org/climate-change-statements/

2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5

Our Lutheran Study Bible includes helpful background material for both letters to Timothy on their probable authorship and date. The church has been around for several generations and is growing. With growth in size and locations comes alternative ways of understanding Jesus and his followers’ place in the Greco/Roman Empire. I guess one could say that “alternative facts” have been around for a very long time! (2 Tim. 4:4) The writer reminds Timothy to ground his own belief system and life choices on the Scriptures in order to avoid being manipulated by peddlers of alternative facts, so that he and those he leads will be equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16-17)

It isn’t hard to jump to the similar problem facing those of us who sense our baptismal call to serve God by serving our neighbors, includes a call to serve God by serving God’s amazing creation! We are faced with intentional misinformation regarding climate change and its impacts. For all kinds of reasons, people “accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires.” Fake studies and data abound. In the flood of information the cloud now affords anyone with access to the web, how does one sift through the chaff to find the wheat? The writer of our NT lesson in 2 Timothy provides us helpful advice. “continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you have learned it…”

Might the role of curator be one of our callings as leaders to help people sort through the intentional misinformation regarding the ecological crisis and live faithful servant lives based on sound science as well as sound doctrine?[2]

Timothy is being urged by Paul to adhere to the basics of the faith tradition he had learned from Paul and others, and to lead boldly. His auditors might choose to follow teachers who tell them what they want to hear, but he is encouraged to resist that type of leadership.

What are the alternative facts that are easy to sell in your context? How are Scriptures equipping you to teach, reprove, correct and train for righteousness those you lead?

What does “every good work” include in our time and place, in this Kairos time for humankind’s Earth home?

Quotes from Luther on creation:https://webofcreation.org/LENS/luther.html

Quotes from Scripture and faith/environmental leaders:https://www.webofcreation.org/ReligiousEducation/quotes.htm

[1] I am indebted to Dr. Ray Picket, recently retired president of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and former professor of NT at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, for the following frame through which to read the gospel of Luke. Luke 1:1-4 tips off Luke’s auditors (I agree with those scholars who believe Theophilus is both Luke’s benefactor and represents all his auditors) that he is intentionally doing what good Greek writers did. He is going to write an orderly (kathexēs) account (diēgēsin), after investigating carefully (akribōs – the same word is used in Acts 18:26) everything handed down orally or written, by arranging the facts (pragmatōn) into a narrative (diēgēsin),  that would persuade them of his big idea. Why? Because Luke believed that although they had already gone through instruction in the Christian faith (katēchēthēs) they didn’t yet understand the truth (asphaleian) about Jesus and the implications for their lives in the Greco/Roman Empire. And what is Luke’s big idea you might ask? I believe Luke spells that out in Luke 4:16-30 and then underscores it in Luke 10:25-37. Most of our auditors today were instructed in the Christian faith decades ago during their middle school years, while their frontal lobes were still forming! Might we take a lesson from Luke, and offer to our auditors a chance to revisit the core of our faith tradition now that they have the capacity to actually process and then act on what they hear? Like Luke, let’s be bold in speaking the handed down witness to the saving work of Jesus in ways that will move our auditors to actually risk serving God by serving their neighbors and God’s amazing creation.

If you have time, I highly recommend viewing these 10 very short (less than 2 minutes each) videos of women who were persistent in the face of rejection and dismissal, and eventually made a difference in the causes that were important to them. If you have the good fortune of a tradition of having a session either during the week or after worship on Sunday to reflect on the texts of the day, these videos can help people understand the widow in our Gospel text. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dS6uX1RkUzIhvfzi1zPwdgTDv9NNnJK

[2] It might be necessary to remind your auditors that “Scriptures” at this time does not equal the Bible sitting on their coffee table at home. Rather it referred to the Torah (first 5 books in our Bibles today) and the Prophets (both the former prophets and the latter prophets). The Former Prophets include: Joshua, Judges, 1 b& 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. The Latter Prophets, include: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. These two parts of Scripture were closed by the time of Jesus. Jesus refers to Scripture using these two categories. (Matthew 5:17; 22:40; Luke 16:16). The third portion of Scripture (Jesus might be referring to this expanding collection of miscellaneous writings in Luke 24:44) was not yet closed at the time of 2 Timothy. It included books like Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ruth and others. The surviving Jewish community after two devastating wars with Rome (70-71 & 132-136 CE) would spend the next several centuries deciding the scope of their sacred writings. The Christian community was doing the same thing with their collection of writings about Jesus during these same 4 centuries! Select Learning, an ELCA ministry, has a short video course (available in English and Spanish) on the process of the formation of our Bible. You can access it here: https://www.selectlearning.org/store/all/how-we-got-new-testament-dvdThe two closed parts of Scripture tell the story of who God is and the story of how they became God’s saved people (Torah), and then the prophetic critique of their failure to live as God’s saved people (Prophets).