Desilva In Season and Out

Sermons for the Christian Year
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68359-292-1
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Grow in the Scriptures throughout the church year with David deSilva as your mentor. Beginning with Advent and moving through the church year, David deSilva brings his years of experience as a biblical scholar to the church in the form of sermons delivered to his home congregation throughout the church year, now adapted into a thoughtful and inspiring collection of reflections. These reflections, which draw on readings from the Revised Common Lectionary, will inform and inspire your understanding of Scripture, written with Dr. deSilva's characteristic warmth and wisdom. In Season and Out makes for excellent devotional reading that will feed saints both in front of and behind the pulpit.

David A. deSilva (PhD, Emory University) is Trustees' Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Greek at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ohio. He is ordained in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church and has written numerous books, including An Introduction to the New Testament; Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity; and Sacramental Life: Spiritual Formation through the Book of Common Prayer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Desilva, David A.

Leseproben

1 “Our Wake-Up Call” (Advent) Isaiah 64:1–9; Mark 13:24–37 Today marks the beginning of another season of Advent, that period of watchfulness, of renewed waiting, that begins the church year. This Sunday’s readings remind us that the season of Advent is not just about, nor even chiefly about, getting ready for Christmas. Indeed, I’ve long felt that it was rather artificial, Advent after Advent, to act as if we were looking “forward” to Christ’s first coming in humility as a baby born in Bethlehem. Putting ourselves in the position of those who, more than two thousand years ago, were anticipating the coming of a Messiah and acting as if we were yearning for the baby yet to be born has long seemed to me to be a kind of playacting, of holy make-believe. The readings appointed for this Sunday, starting off this Advent, do remind us of that for which we are indeed still waiting, that for which we need very much to get ready—Christ’s coming again in glory. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence. (Isa 64:1 NRSV) Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. (Mark 13:26 NRSV) What I say to you, I say to all: Keep watching! (Mark 13:37) If we find that Christmas is upon us this year and we’re not altogether ready for it, it won’t be the end of the world. But if Christ’s coming again finds us unprepared, living as people who haven’t been looking for it—well, that’s another story, isn’t it? Advent is our wake-up call to what is coming, to who is coming, rousing us to shake off our sleep and restore our souls to vigilance. And we cannot afford to keep hitting the snooze button on this alarm. Preparations for Christmas tend to overwhelm Advent, to bury beneath an avalanche of gift buying, travel planning, cantata preparing, menu mapping, and home decorating what Advent, as a gift of the liturgical year, seeks to give us—a chance to examine ourselves and to realign our lives, both as individual disciples and as a church family, so that we will move this year toward greater readiness to meet our Lord at his coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. So let’s pause together and unwrap these two texts, and see if, perhaps, they might help us to receive this gift of Advent and make the best use possible of it, rather than setting it aside in favor of our Christmas preparations. The passage from Isaiah 64 really begins in the previous chapter. The prophet tells once again the familiar story of Israel. God showed them great favor, leading them out of Egypt and into the land of promise. Rather than keep faith with God by living as he commanded in his covenant, they rebelled against God and God’s law, so that God brought upon them the punishments that God had promised—destruction and exile. And now things are simply not the way they were meant to be. God’s chosen people are not walking in God’s ways and relishing God’s presence; Israel is not experiencing the promises that had been extended to it. It’s all just wrong. “How can God stand it?” Isaiah asks. How can he not “tear open the heavens and come down” and set everything right, the way it ought to be? We might ask the same questions—perhaps not on our own behalf (though we have no doubt had our moments) but on behalf of the many who have suffered significantly due to the evil or callousness of others. And we can be sure that the blood of the innocent cries out with these words before the throne of God day and night—“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”—the blood of a young family killed during a house robbery; the blood of countless children dead or maimed by the violence of mercenaries in Africa or land mines in abandoned war zones; the blood of a young woman raped and killed; the blood of generations who died as slaves; the blood of thousands who disappeared as a totalitarian regime protected its interests against potential dissenters; the blood of those who died simply because others refused to share with them the gifts that God intended for all. Iraqi Christians, refugees from the Islamic State, are crying out this prayer today; a Nigerian Christian woman and her children, whose husband and father was lynched in the street, are crying out this prayer today; Christians in the wake of mass shootings in our own country are crying out this prayer today. How can it be that Christ will not come, that a God whose heart is justice itself should not bring all to account before him? It’s been almost two millennia since Jesus uttered the words we heard read from Mark’s Gospel today, and he still hasn’t come back. This raises some difficult but legitimate questions. First, if God is going to tear open the heavens, if the Son of Man is going to descend upon the clouds surrounded by the hosts of heaven, why hasn’t he? Second, if he hasn’t in the last two thousand or so years, why should we be concerned—this year or next or the year after that—that he will? How important a compass point can his coming again be for us? Of all the things for which we might spend our lives getting ready, why should we say that this one is still so important that it should be placed at the top of our list of priority events for which to be prepared? We all need to solve these questions for ourselves. My own solution to the second question is not theologically profound, but one of simple math. I figure that, at the absolute maximum, I have forty or so years of life left (and that’s, in all probability, highballing the figure). If Jesus hasn’t returned within that time frame, I shall certainly go to him before the end of it. And the next thing I expect to see after death closes my eyes is the scene portrayed for us at the beginning of today’s reading from Mark 13: The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. (Mark 13:24–27 NRSV) It won’t much matter to me how much time elapses between death closing my eyes and the last trumpet opening them again. Jesus’ coming again is, for me, at most the rest of my lifetime away. As for the first question, it seems to me that God will only tear open the heavens and come down when one of a few possible conditions has been reached. One condition would be that God has seen positively accomplished on this earth and in the human story all that he wants to see accomplished, such that there is no longer any good left to come from delaying. Another condition would be that God has given up hope on humanity in general and sees that his church has exhausted its ability or its willingness to mediate his deliverance further to the people of this world, such that there is no longer any good left to come from delaying. The day on which God chooses to “tear open the heavens and come down,” when the Son of Man will be seen “coming in clouds,” will indeed at last mean justice for every soul, bringing to each either vindication or condemnation. But every day on which God does not tear open the heavens means opportunity for every soul. I’m not speaking here just of an opportunity to “get saved” or “accept Jesus” or any such pale shadow of what God seeks from each one of us. I mean here an opportunity to do the work that our Lord has entrusted to us—to each one of us as a disciple, to all of us as a congregation, and to all congregations together as the global body of Christ. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. (Mark 13:32–37 NRSV) This last sentence is one point in Mark’s Gospel where we find Jesus himself thinking beyond his immediate circle of hearers—namely, his disciples who have gathered around him on the Mount of Olives for this teaching—and thinking about the many who will hear him through them. We can almost see and hear Jesus at this point speaking to us, looking past his disciples and directly into the camera, as it were, to deliver this admonition to us: “Keep awake!” The question for us in this interim is not, “How long will it be?” or, heaven forbid, “Can we figure out exactly when it will be?” It is also not, “Why isn’t God doing anything to help? To make things better? To make it easier for us to believe and to invest ourselves in his work?” The question for us is: Are we doing the work that Jesus has entrusted to us, like servants who hope to be found faithfully and diligently doing that work when he returns? Or are we doing our own work, attending to our own agendas, seeking our own interests, making up our own list of things to do each day that have little or nothing to do with the work that God has laid upon us to do? Servants cannot afford to act that way; servants must attend...