2 Lent C March 16, 2025
Gen.15:1-12,17-18 Ps. 27
Phil.3:17-4:1 Luke 13:22-35
We've read about the institution of the Abrahamic covenant which included a ritual of smoking pot passing between animal carcasses and included one of the participants falling into a deep sleep. Thankfully, even High Church ritual have not come to copy such expressions, though one can imagine babies and the bored sleeping deeply through church liturgies.
God's covenant to Abraham, "I will give you a child even when you and your wife are beyond child-bearing years. And from this child, there will come countless descendants. "
Abraham's covenant to God, "Okay, I don't know how it will happen but I will act with the persuasion that it will come to pass, not because I will ever see many descendants, but because I know you and I am persuaded about you."
Such persuasion, trust, and belief was regarded to be his imputed righteousness.
The Abrahamic covenant was re-visited in the writings of St. Paul. With this covenant, St. Paul wrote the adoption papers for the non-Jewish followers of Jesus Christ into the family of God. St. Paul was very certain about what he called, "my Gospel." He received it by direct revelation from Christ with whom he had such an identity that he wrote that God was pleased to reveal Christ, not to him, but in him. Christ in him revealed a version of the Gospel which has become known to us in the Pauline writings. The Gospel revealed to Paul included a two-path system of membership. Jews who followed Christ were to continue to keep their adherence to the requirements of the Torah. Non-Jewish persons were not required to fulfill the ritual requirements of Judaism in order to know an adoption into the Abrahamic family of faith. Their belief, their faith in Christ was regarded to be the rightness of their standing with God.
Paul was very outspoken and harsh about people who wanted to mix the two paths of membership into the family of God. The faction of people who were called Judaizers were Jews who insisted that non-Jews had to become proselyte Jews first by adhering to dietary custom and the initiatory rite for males requiring circumcision.
Paul said that if Jewish ritual adherence was required of non-Jews, it would negate the salvific work of Jesus and faith in him as the requirement of being right with God and being an adopted member of God's family. Paul insisted that in Christ, Jews and Gentiles could live in a new spiritual family as citizens of another order of life while waiting to be caught up in the air at the second coming of Christ.
A cursory honest reading of Paul and many of the words attributed to Jesus indicate that they and their communities believed that they were living in the last days. They were waiting to be "caught up in the air" at a second coming.
The lament of Jesus over Jerusalem, was recited in the Gospel writing of Luke some while after the destruction of Jerusalem. A promised land was part of the Abrahamic covenant and Jerusalem was central to this promised land. The destruction of Jerusalem meant that the land covenant had to be revised and understood in a spiritual way, in being a heavenly one, a new Jerusalem, with realization of a heavenly citizenship which would include not just the Jews but all people.
The lament of Jesus over Jerusalem expresses the grief of seeing how people could not accept the insights of prophets who discerned that new understanding about God needed to be attained. The Jewish Wars were in part inspired by the apocalyptic fervor of zealot Jews who believed in a God who would help Davidic-like messianic forces expel the Romans from their land, but alas this kind of Messiah was not the suffering servant Messiah who Jesus turned out to be, at least in his first coming. The lament of Jesus shows that the followers of Jesus regarded him to have the heart and compassion of a mother who wanted her children to come into their mature adulthood status in God's family. But many were held back by their preconceived notion about the extent of God's plan for all the people of the world. And Jesus, in apocalyptic words, proclaims that in some future they would be able to say, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."
How are you and I supposed to honestly appropriate the writings from Holy Scriptures which we have read today. Our liturgy and Scriptures incorporate a belief in a future coming. We can affirm the function of being apocalyptic without pretending to think that we know specifically what it means or pretending to make the coping with oppression imagery of suffering people into specifically predictive events in our own time.
We like Paul, can affirm a universal heavenly citizenship known through particular covenants within our lives. As Episcopalians, we express our covenant in baptismal vows in which we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. This how we honor the Abrahamic covenant as well as our covenant with Christ to invite everyone to the love of God.
We can understand the apocalyptic function, namely, the visualization of the end of suffering, particular suffering, for some better after suffering state when justice for the oppressed is restored. Too many comfortable Christians today, literalize the apocalyptic as a way of falsely implying, that "God is for me and my correct positions on God, Christ, and the Bible, and my God is going to come show you that I am right, and you are wrong, and my God is going to do it with force." This kind of apocalyptic God is not the loving and attractive and mothering hen of Jesus who laments over those who are hindered by their own immature smallness of heart and who need to be overwhelmed by a loving God experience which draws them to confess "Bless is he who comes in the name of the Lord."
Let us today live in the train of the Abrahamic covenant of letting the extent of God's family be known to all. Let us visualize the end oppression and seek solace in visions of justice as we seek to live the attraction of the life of the Risen Christ, who in us is calling this world to love and justice. Amen.
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