12 Pentecost, Cp17, August 31, 2025
Jeremiah 2:4-13 Ps. 112
Heb.13:1-8 Luke 14:1, 7-14
The notion that what is greater than us communicates with us in specific purposeful ways for determining future actions is a wide spread notion. Modern scientific laws are readings about the behaviors of nature that seem so consistent that they become a predicable guide to human behaviors, as practical as not keeping our hands from being burned in a flame of fire. And we've come to rely on weather prediction for guiding our activities; but what about events which pertain to making decisions regarding our human behaviors within our own communities and other communities in our world?
The notion of the divine as an incarnate Logos, particularly in the person of Jesus, and generally in the notion that humans cannot help but organize and interpret their world because they possess language, means that human experience is governed by what is always being communicated. We can perpetually be seen to be talking within ourselves and to ourselves even as we talk to each other. We can perpetually interpret our very situations as messages to read and how we read our situations determines our actions.
Because we have language, we live as sign makers and sign readers. Human life is based upon the notion of communication itself. And those who do not or do not yet have fully developed language abilities cannot help but be those who are read as signs by others, as in the case of parents trying to read the signs of a crying baby who cannot offer the higher signs of actually saying what is the cause of their crying.
Humanity has always been on the quest for higher knowledge to have as it were, some insider information on how to attain advantages for better living. And so one can note the oracular features in the history of humanity. An oracle is a communication which comes from beyond specific human control such that one can say that direction has been received or communicated from a higher source, even of divine origin.
An oracle, implies a talking or orating deity or higher source of guidance. The Psalmist proclaimed that the heavens declare the glory of God, meaning that as poets we anthropomorphize the skies as speaking entities. The ancient and continuous practice of astrology instantiates a "speaking sky" which reveal to humans with star reading traditions the connection of their lives with something beyond their own sense of earthly limitations. Ancient people practiced augury, even divining the entrails of carcasses by trained readers to give directions on the battlefield and for life.
There is within the biblical tradition, the understanding of people being used as oracles of God. The Hebrew Scriptures provide many examples of human persons as those who channels messages of God for their communities. The prophets were regarded to be oracles of God's word, because they told us so. "Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob. Thus says the Lord..." The words of the prophets were often rebukes against their people for their unfaithful behaviors. Since the words of the prophet are known to us as written words we understand that those who collected words, edited and redacted them later were presenting their writing for inspiring community values and behavior in the various writing contexts when they were presented to their communities. Not only were persons regarded to be oracle but the written Scriptures had a continuing oracular function within the community.
When the Psalmist writes in the voice of God using the first person, the Psalmist is presuming to know what God would want presented in the poetic, and intoned prayers of the community gathered for prayer. The Psalmist assumed that if God used direct words to us, this is what God is saying to us. The portion of the Psalm that we have read today is in the voice of God which means that the oracular function was known in the liturgies where the highest values, the divine values were channeled through those gifted hymnodists.
In the collection of the writings which have come to comprise the New Testament, the oracular function of sacred writing continued to be the custom of the church. Written words in contrast to spoken words appear to have a fixity to them, even though the interpretations of them can be as diverse and changing as oral speech. The fixity of the text gives the sense of permanence and changelessness, which give a normative sense of preservation for the oracles of God.
The written words of the New Testament are oracles about the chief oracle of God in the Christian tradition, namely Jesus Christ. Jesus is poetically called the Logos, the Word of God, in essence, the Oracle of God to humanity. Jesus as the oracle of God to humanity spoke and through his ministry presented the chief values for forming communities.
In the appointed Gospel today, Jesus is presented as one who reveals the human tendency to seek status and we are reminded to rely on the reward inherit in the act of doing good, whether we get recognized for it or not. If we seek public honor without the merit of performance, then we may become vulnerable to know the humiliation of being exposed as those who want recognition without performance.
The writer of the book of Hebrews pens oracular words of what the example of Jesus inspires within enlightened community: Welcoming strangers, honoring spousal relationships, avoiding greed and the love of money, respecting leaders, and taking every opportunity to do good.
Today we have read words of Scripture which derived from many different circumstances, and they attained the status as oracles for the values of God for people living in the communities which have received the oracular tradition of Holy Scripture.
What you and I can ponder today is our own understanding of what our highest values are for living, living well within community. But we also ponder the oracular function which occurs in the modes of how our highest values have been communicated to us and inculcated within our community life. Let us be thankful for the oracular phenomenon in our lives whereby we have come to be persuaded about the importance of love and justice. And let us be thankful for our chief Oracle, Jesus Christ, whom we believe to be the bi-lingual speaker of divine things to our very human lives. Amen.
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