Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost (proper 28): November 13, 2005.

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18

Psalm 90:1-8 [9-11] 12

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Matthew 25:14-30

"By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the
ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you
shall return."--Gen 3:19

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat
or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not
life more than food, and the body more than clothing?"--Matt 6:25

First Reading

Zephaniah 1:2-3:20 originated in the early years of King Josiah, and the writer intended to support Josiah's reforms. The material in today's reading warns the people of the consequences of failing to seek God. Zephaniah's message was that God's ultimate goal in judgment was to transform God's people into a poor and humble people among whom God could live.

Psalm 90, perhaps the most abundant and definitely the most visceral of all the texts for this day, comes from the voices of the community. People pray in a certain aesthetic and patterned manner in this petition hymn. The community prays about the essential and permanent difference between God and humanity. The difference is God's transcendence and humanity's hopelessness (particularly as expressed in this psalm). Those praying this psalm know the experience that Garrison Keillor describes in his book Wobegon Boy (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997). "My dad, Byron, was a little edgy, expecting the worst, saving glass jars and paper clips, turning off lights and cranking down the thermostat to keep our family out of the poorhouse.... Mother was well composed, a true Lutheran, and taught me to Cheer up, Make yourself useful, Mind your manners, and above all, Don't feel sorry for yourself" (p. 1). Byron gives voice to the experience of those punished by life. Mother consoles herself by reciting words in a poetic fashion. "[The hopelessness that humans experience] is a curse," David Robertson writes, "but to state it poetically is to go much the way of bearing it" ("Literary Criticism of the Bible: Psalm 90 and Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," Semeia 8 (1977): 48). In our contemporary sacred world, we hold not just Mother and Keillor but the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, and Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer.

Then, we move on to the sweet words of Paul. This is a passage of hope. While Paul challenges the people of Thessalonica to think about the second coming in a vigilant and sober way, he at the same time attempts to comfort the early Christian community and guide them in a way that inspires hope. Eugene Peterson paraphrases vv. 9-10 well: "God didn't set us up for an angry rejection but for salvation by our Master, Jesus Christ. He died for us, a death that triggered life. Whether we're awake with the living or asleep with the dead, we're alive with him!" (The Message Remix: Bible in Contemporary Language [Colorado Springs: Navpress, 2003]).

Finally, Matthew pulls no punches. Almost at the end of year A, the lectionary gives us one of the most challenging, in my humble opinion, of all parables--from, in my humble opinion, the most challenging version of the Good News. Jesus "may well have aimed [this parable] ... at those religious circles in his own Jewish community who were so concerned for the law of Moses to be preserved in all its purity, that they hedged it round with all manner of extra rules and regulations.... The truly faithful servants ... are ... those who actually go out ... they meet a wounded man on the Jericho road,... they meet the poor, the lame and the blind and the forgotten ones of the land" (Keith Clements, "Trustworthiness: More than Preserving the Past," The Ecumenical Review 1 (2004): 63-67).

Pastoral Reflection

The word that comes to mind throughout all of these readings is the word anamnesis. If one were to summarize the meaning of anamnesis, one could describe a ritual act kept now, that makes a truth, and that which God sets apart, present in kairos and today.

The Holy Spirit brings about anamnesis. Remember who you are. Remember your Creator. Remember your Redeemer. Remember this parable, which God preserved from the teachings of the early church and included in the gospels, just at the time when the Christian community was moving out of its Jewish context into the wider world of the Roman empire, Europe, and eventually North America. In order for the church to keep the gospel, the church entered the market places of Corinth, Athens, Rome, and Ann Arbor, Michigan--no easy task. With the Spirit, the church had to take the gospel into the new frontiers of ideas and beliefs that those Christians were encountering.

This day, some of our frontiers are geographic. At the same time, as they were in the earliest days, our frontiers are philosophical, epistemological, and, always, missiological. CGM