Holy Textures

Mark 9:38-50

Short, easy to use, thought provoking background commentary for your sermon, bible study lesson, or scripture reflection.
Listed on The Text This Week, www.textweek.com.

Year B, Season of Pentecost
Proper 21, Ordinary Time 26
Sunday Between September 25 and October 1 Inclusive 
17th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

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Today's lesson has enough wisdom for a month of Sundays. What can be read in 5 minutes may take a life-time to ponder and practice before we have been inwardly formed by the voice of the text this day.

As someone once said:

You can divide the world into two groups of people.
Those who believe you can divide the world into two group of people,
and those who don't.

Jesus' disciples belong to the first group; Jesus belongs to the second.

Mark 9:30-37

Short, easy to use, thought provoking background commentary for your sermon, bible study lesson, or scripture reflection.
Listed on The Text This Week, www.textweek.com.

Year B, Season of Pentecost
Proper 20, Ordinary Time 25
Sunday Between September 18 and September 24 Inclusive
16th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

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Today's lesson is the second of three times that Jesus teaches his disciples that they are headed to Jerusalem where he will betrayed, condemned to death, crucified, and after three days he will rise again. (Last week's Mark 8:27-38 and Mark 10:32-34.)

It is also the second of three times that his disciples fail to understand, and Jesus must teach them about God's honouring that reverses commonly accepted human understandings of honour / status / prestige / salvation.

Mark 8:27-38

Short, easy to use, thought provoking background commentary for your sermon, bible study lesson, or scripture reflection.
Listed on The Text This Week, www.textweek.com.

Year B, Season of Pentecost
Proper 19, Ordinary Time 24
Sunday Between September 11 and September 17 Inclusive 
15th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

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For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, this is an ideal passage for pondering the transition from summer to fall. The season of rest and recreation, of planting and tending is giving way to season of harvesting. Within each year, and within each lifetime, comes those moments when all that is past becomes the prologue for what is to come. (To paraphrase Wm. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1.)

The questions that arise in this passage are:

• What have we learned thus far from our travels with Jesus?
• Who is Jesus - really?
• What has all this prepared us for?
• And just what is it that lies ahead?
• What will be required us to actually produce the fruit from all this preparation?
• Are we ready for what lies ahead?

Mark 7:24-37

Short, easy to use, thought provoking background commentary for your sermon, bible study lesson, or scripture reflection.
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Year B, Season of Pentecost
Proper 18, Ordinary Time 23
Sunday Between September 4 and September 10 Inclusive
14th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

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In this week's lesson, Jesus is going to be challenged to practice what he preaches.

Last week, Jesus had successfully defended his disciples from the criticism by the Judean elite that they were not following "the tradition of the elders" when they ate without washing their hands.

His teaching:

There is nothing that goes into a person from the outside which can make them ritually unclean. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that makes them unclean.
For from the inside, from a person's heart, come all the evil ideas which lead them to do immoral things.
Mark 7:15, 21 (Good News Bible)

radically altered two strict social boundaries.

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Short, easy to use, thought provoking background commentary for your sermon, bible study lesson, or scripture reflection.
Listed on The Text This Week, www.textweek.com.

Year B, Season of Pentecost
Proper 17, Ordinary Time 22
Sunday Between August 28 and September 3 Inclusive 
13th Sunday After Pentecost 2009

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The lectionary ends its 5 weeks of dabbling in John and returns to Mark. No murmurs from me about this.

Once again Malina and Rohrbaugh provide helpful background on this passage. (Pages 174-176, see footnote below.)

At one level, the controversy here is between the Judean elite who were 5% of the population, and everyone else. The elites lived in towns and cities and had access, time, and money for the water needed to follow their interpretation of the washing required to follow the Torah.

The "tradition of the elders" is NOT the teaching of Moses as found in the Bible. It is the practice of the Judean elite which they are seeking to impose as THE one and only correct practice. And, as noted, the amount of water, time and money to follow those practices was beyond the reach of most people. And so most people were seen by the elites as unclean.

Matthew 21:23-32

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Today's text ought to make all of us who are in church very nervous.

It would be a misreading to hear this text as Jesus condemning Jews and Judaism. Instead, if we ask, "Who would be the chief priests and elders today," the answer is, "Us!" For we are the religiously observant people today. We are the ones who go to church. We are the ones who read our bibles.

Matthew 20:1-16

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This text is another parable on the Kingdom of Heaven.

As is often the case, the parable focuses on the survival concerns of those who are poorest and most vulnerable under the reign of the present ruler: food, daily wages, protection, etc.

As is the case today, daily labourers were among the poorest. The denarius, the usual daily wage, was just enough to buy food for that day. No work that day meant no food that day.

As the landowner engages each group of labourers, he makes the standard agreement with each of them. But at the end of the day, the early groups are surprised - and envious - that he has made the SAME agreement with everyone, even those who only began working at the end of the day.

Matthew 18:21-35

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Chapter 18 of Matthew is a series of teachings about what community of Jesus' disciples is to be like / look like / act like.

The previous passage, Matthew 18:15-20, outlines a detailed process for resolving conflicts WITHIN the community. At a minimum this should give us a heads up that there will be conflict within the church. We will fight. There is no question of that. The question is: How will resolve conflicts? (We will resolve conflicts, won't we? Not just hold silent grudges for the rest of our lives. Just asking.)

Good old Peter can see a loop hole in the advice Jesus gives.

Luke 16:19-31

The story of the nameless rich man and the named beggar, Lazarus, (Hebrew for, "Our God has helped") is placed by Luke between verse 16:14:

You cannot serve both God and Money.

and verse 17:1:

Occasions for stumbling are bound to come.

seemingly as an illustration of both truths.

As is typical with Jesus and ourselves, there are a number of assumptions and reversals in this story.

Luke 16:1-13

Over the last few Sundays, the "audience" has shifted from "large crowds" (Luke 14:25), to "Pharisees and the scribes" (15:2) to now, "the disciples." (16:1) And, apart from the story of the prodigal and his father and brother (Luke 15:11-32), the content of Jesus' teaching is primarily wisdom stories and concluding sayings. (And often the concluding sayings are only loosely connected to the actual content of the stories. For example, the sheep and the coin are lost but do not sin nor repent. The sayings about joy in heaven would more logically follow the story of the prodigal son.)

And so, what are we to make of the story of the manager (or steward or agent) and the concluding sayings?

First, we should understand that the manager is indeed being shrewd (or wise or prudent or astute), in that,