Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (proper 11): July 17, 2005.

Isaiah 44:6-8

Psalm 86:11-17

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

You, O Lord, are a God
merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in
steadfast love and faithfulness.
--Ps 86:15

First Reading

Today's prophetic text arises out of the situation of Israel in exile. The people's chronic susceptibility to idolatry, older even than the golden-calf episode in the time of the wilderness wanderings, had become epidemic as the exiles learned to live "up close and personal" with the rich and alluring cultic life of their Babylonian conquerors. Add to this the existential trauma of living as a defeated people who viewed their God (despite the prophets' warnings) as their own tribal deity, and one begins to sense the difficulties of sustaining faith in a defeated God, or at least a God in retreat from the once supposedly "chosen" people. "How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" the psalmist laments (137:4). WOV #656 is a tuneful setting of this psalm.

Scholars tell us that the time of the Babylonian exile became precisely the crucible out of which the remnant faithful would learn to sing the Lord's song under duress as Israel undertook the remembering, collecting, and editing of its traditions. But Second Isaiah also testifies that what would emerge as the faithful remnant's tradition was pounded out on the anvil of pagan idolatry by the hammer of that first and formative commandment handed down at Sinai. "Is there any God besides me?" (v. 8b) was the question of Israel's struggle for identity and faithfulness, as it was Second Isaiah's passionate vocation to move the people to resist and reject the cultural and religious temptations that surrounded them with a resounding "No!"

Today's verses from Isaiah are followed by a deft and sarcastic lampooning of the whole process of idol production that merits attention (vv. 12-20). This leads to an extended reflection contrasting God who is our Maker (like a potter working with clay) with the way idolaters make their own gods, a passage that nicely anticipates Ludwig Feuerbach's nineteenth-century critique of the gods as merely "human projections" (see Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998], 69). Second Isaiah continues this critique of idolatry through chapter 46 where he pokes fun at the way idols become literally a "burden" to their makers, who must carry them upon their shoulders. The people of Israel, by contrast, God asserts, "have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb." God promises that "even when you turn grey I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save" (46:3-4).

Pastoral Reflection

In the first of his Beecher lectures, published as What's Good about This News? (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), David Bartlett argues that, in addition to Paul's emphasis on the legal image of "justification" as God's way of saving sinners, we need to pay attention to his metaphor of "adoption," which may translate better in our day. "You have received a spirit of adoption," Paul writes in today's reading from Romans 8, which is the Spirit's "bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ ..." (8:15-17). Bartlett tells the following story to illustrate how the image of adoption "works":

My wife and I have friends who have a wonder-fully mixed family, mixed
in part because one of their sons is their biological offspring and the
other children are adopted. Not long ago they were explaining to the
youngest child what it meant for him to be adopted--how he had been
chosen, and waited for, and welcomed with joy. As part of the story they
also had to explain that Mark, the brother, was their child
biologically. When they had finished explaining what it meant to say
that Tommy was adopted, he cried out: "Oh, that's wonderful. Can't we
adopt Mark too?"

And so, Bartlett concludes, Paul is here testifying that "God has adopted us all, Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, in Jesus Christ" (p. 16). This is indeed good news!

Paul goes on to give voice to his vision of a cosmic salvation in which the creation itself "will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God." Further, "we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves ... groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." Paul here recasts what he calls "the sufferings of this present time" and the groanings of the whole creation in which we share as a hopeful time akin to that of childbirth pangs. Adoption/redemption is a painful process sustained by hope, hope that is not a matter of seeing but of waiting with patience.

An insightful essay on biblical hope is Hans Weder's "Hope and Creation" in The End of the World and the Ends of God, ed. J. Polkinghorne and M. Welker (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2000), 184ff.

"Here is a place where the Scriptures leave the interpreter with a dilemma," Arland Hultgren says of today's Gospel reading. For the edgy parable Jesus tells of the "Weeds in the Wheat" and its explication, which many scholars attribute to Matthew, seem to head off in different directions. Today may be a good day to be transparently honest about the tensions we preachers face in seeking to preach the Good News of Jesus while interpreting faithfully the texts placed before us. How are we to respond to those within the community of faith who, in our own or someone else's judgment, do not seem to be living up to God's expectations? "Are patience and restraint the answer" as the parable itself seems to counsel? asks Hultgren. Or are "judgment and warning" to be our approach, as Matthew's interpretation of the parable seems to suggest? (The Parables of Jesus, 302)

Jesus' story speaks to the perennial issue of the faith community as corpus mixtum, which Jesus will also address in Matthew 18, 22, and 25. In Christian terms, saints and sinners live intermixed within the body of Christ. To put a characteristically paradoxical Lutheran spin on it, we are all simul iustus et peccator. We are both weeds and wheat at one and the same time. The parable, while attributing the presence of the weeds to the work of "the enemy," nonetheless counsels patience until the harvest (see Hultgren, p. 296). The "gracious and merciful" and especially "slow to anger" patience of the God of the psalmist is to be preferred in this meantime as we heed the prophet's warning "Do not fear, or be afraid" and as we join with the apostle in crying "Abba! Father!" to the only God beyond the many gods who has adopted us and made us heirs with Christ. Marty Haugen's "Soli Deo Gloria" (Renewing Worship Songbook #R300) invites us to raise "a billion voices in one great song" of praise to this our long-suffering and patient God. JR