Wednesday, August 26, 2020            (today’s lectionary)
The prosperity of forgiveness
Most of us are trapped in echo chambers of our own making. It is difficult for me, at least, to spend much time listening to spins on the news in America that I am unaccustomed to. Hence, I hear the same thing over and over.
On the other hand, there was Paul and his friends Silas and Timothy, who worked hard while they were with the Thessalonians and likely had little time for either gossip or spin.
Night and day we worked so as not to burden any of you.
And we said to you, If you will not work, then neither should you eat.
That admonition was not for one of you, but for all.
In this atmosphere the Lord will provide peace
At all times and in every way.
I read a story about a hard-working New Yorker who moved to Oklahoma and discovered herself. Not everything she found was good, or polite, or scrubbed:
“All I can say is that when I pulled up to the house on Redtail Road, I thought life was one thing, and when I drove away I knew it was another. I knew quite simply that a life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us. It is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust, and the wind lifts it away.” – from “Natural Disasters,” by Alexis Schaitkin.
Don’t you have stories like that? Stunning charmers that don’t turn out well-scrubbed or particularly polite? All the more reason for me to get down on my knees a couple times each day and examine my life, ask God for his forgiveness, and move on. There is no alternative to this nearly invisible devotion. My sins, God says clearly, are “noted in water, jotted in dust, and then the wind lifts them away.”
Blessed are we who fear the Lord and walk in his ways.
We shall eat the fruit of your handiwork,
And we will see prosperity, the prosperity of Zion, of Jerusalem
All the days of our lives.
This prosperity is the prosperity of forgiveness, I am sure. It is not something with a fingerprint, and I can’t count it, or put it in the bank. It does not buy me love or mansions. The love and mansion is already promised, already given. That I CAN count on.
Jesus was not giving a political speech for either mainstream American party when he ripped into the Pharisees. His righteous anger was exactly the anger of the God who spoke through Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Not desperate, but frustrated. Not random, but pointed. Not carelessly condemning, but determined to convict. Not hateful or selfish, but very very tough.
Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!
Like whitewashed tombs you appear beautiful on the outside
But inside you are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
Actually, so far this diatribe of Jesus kind of does sound like a speech at last week’s convention, or this week’s. Looking back at polarization during the last two centuries of American political life, it sounds like a bunch of those speeches too.
But Jesus moves on. After castigating their leaders, Jesus turns to all the people and pleads with them. He insists on inner purity that can only come from God.
O Jerusalem!
How often I have longed to gather you
As a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,
And you were just not willing.
So now, see, your house is left to you desolate.
But I tell you, soon and very soon you will finally turn, and say,
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
Such are the promises and predictions of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Have mercy on me.
            (2 Thessalonians 3, Psalm 128, 1 John 2, Matthew 23)
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