Ezek22 Lectionary Reflections

Today’s Readings (text):

• Genesis 1:1-2:2
• Genesis 22:1-18
• Exodus 14:15-15:1
• Isaiah 54:5-14 (not in RCL*)
• Isaiah 55:1-11
• Baruch* 3:9-15, 32-4:4
• Ezekiel 36:16-28
• Romans 6:3-11
• Ps 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23
• Luke 24:1-12

In the Latin, the words of the angel to Mary at Jesus’ empty tomb, right after “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” are “Non ibi est; resurrexit.” “He is not here; he has risen.”

There’s nothing quite like the Roman Catholic mass on the Easter vigil among all the Christian celebrations. The priest sets a fire outside, after sunset, symbolizing the light of Christ rising amid the darkness. Oil is blessed, to be used in anointing the sick and new Christians during the course of the next year. Many Protestant churches, particularly Lutheran churches, have maintained a large part of the Roman rite that celebrates the Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter.

It is with great sorrow that we note widespread reporting in renowned news sources of the apparent complicity of the pope himself in the cover up of the sexual abuse of children, not only in the United States but in Ireland and other European countries as well. I don’t wish to propagate rumor, but the document trail from a case in Wisconsin is rather convincing.

The Vatican’s chief spokesman has acknowledged that the Church’s response to cases of sexual abuse by priests is crucial to its credibility and it must “acknowledge and make amends for” even decades-old cases: “The nature of this issue is bound to attract media attention and the way the Church responds is crucial for its moral credibility,” Father Federico Lombardi said on Vatican Radio, Reuters reported.

Although the cases cited happened “even decades ago, acknowledging them and making amends to the victims is the price for re-establishing justice and looking to the future with renewed vigor, humility, and confidence,” Father Lombardi said.

The Vatican’s statements, however, miss the point: That sexual abuse happened is the fault of the priests who committed it. It is horrible and carries both civil and religious penalties. That the abuse was covered up, cast into the darkness of a church that represents light, not only at Easter but in our hearts throughout the year, is the part that is irreconcilable. The church leadership remains in denial about that aspect of the sex-abuse scandal.

With this massive cover up (and even what some are calling a cover up of the cover up), the church has lost its moral authority. Pope Benedict has denied any personal involvement in a cover up, referring to accusations as the “petty gossip of dominant opinion.”

That is why, this Easter, we ought to turn to the church as the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection was intended. We are an Easter people. We are the people of the fire. The promise of eternal salvation with our Lord has caused the shedding of light on the gross injustice by abusers and by those who covered up the abuse.

Christ is not dead: he lives and is walking with us on our journey. We spend each day in joyful anticipation of the world yet to come. But we seem to be seeking the living (Christ) among the dead (the church’s leadership). We need to go back and tell Peter (the people of Christ’s great church) and the others (the civil authorities) that the Lord has gone to meet them at Galilee (our safety and home in the church of our childhood and of our culture), just as he promised (in the gospels).

But rather than focus on the many children who have been sexually abused by protected members of the clergy, I wish to focus on 2,152 students in Baltimore, whose Catholic schools will close at the end of this school year.

“I wish there were a painless way to do this,” Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, spiritual leader of the area’s half-million Catholics, said in an interview. “It’s going to be quite painful. It’s going to have a ripple effect beyond what we can predict.”

At the root of the closures is the fact that the archdiocese of Baltimore doesn’t have enough money to keep the schools open. Donations have fallen, and attendance at the schools is down, as is the ability of many parents to pay the tuition.

Of course, a consideration for the underlying cause of donations dropping off is beyond the scope of news organizations like the Baltimore Sun, which reported the story above. The answer, obvious to everyone except perhaps those in the church who have developed a severe case of denial or blindness, is the 400-pound gorilla in the room, known as the priest sex-abuse scandal.

Children are losing when it comes to the church in many ways. The degradation of support for young people goes beyond the Roman Catholic Church as well, but Catholics have the biggest attention right now. The churches our Lord has built failed them and will continue to let them down if the light doesn’t rise from the darkness soon.

Our prayer is that the Roman Catholic Church, in all her glory, as Christ himself set her on the path to salvation, will follow her leader and rise from the grave in which the sex-abuse scandal, cover up, and cover up of the cover up have put her. We pray that she will take note of the fire after sunset in her own beautiful Easter Vigil ceremony and shed a new light on this issue — one that offers prayerful reconciliation and joyful hope for a new world.

—–
* Because many Protestant churches do not consider the book of Baruch part of the true canon, they may substitute Proverbs 8:1-8, 19-21; 9:4b-6 and Psalm 19 for this reading, according to the Revised Common Lectionary. In addition, some churches add two readings to the salvation history: Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18; 8:6-18; 9:8-13 in between the first and second readings in the Roman rite; Ezekiel 37:1-14 after the reading from Ezek 36; and Zephaniah 3:14-20 just before the epistle. The total number of readings listed in the common lectionary is nine: three are added, as listed, and one is removed (Isaiah 54).

Today’s Readings (text):

• Isaiah 50:4-7 (RCL* -9a)
• Ps 22:2, 8-9, 17-24 (RCL* 31:9-16)
• Philippians 2:5-11
• Luke 22:14-23:56 (or, shorter, 23:1-49)

Today’s gospel, the longest single reading in the entire lectionary, will dominate services or masses across the country today. It is the story of Judas’ betrayal, the trial and punishment of Jesus, and his death on the cross.

But conversation around the country is dominated by the health care reform bill passed by Congress and signed by President Obama earlier this week. The vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was mostly along party lines: no Republican voted for the bill, and only about 30 Democrats voted no, the remaining 219 voting for the health care reform bill.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was against passage of this bill. Joining them, many Christian Democrats in the House pledged a “no” vote on the grounds that the bill would fund abortion. But Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat, at first an apparent champion for the unborn, got President Obama to write an executive order that seems to prevent any federal dollars from funding elective abortions.

The problem with that deal is, executive orders can be rescinded just as quickly as they are signed, and no court can enforce the provisions of an executive order. The bottom line about the executive order is that it’s probably meaningless. For sure, it can’t erase what is now in federal statute in the bill signed by the president Tuesday. Here is what the new law says about abortion:

Health plans could choose whether to cover abortion, but individual states could prohibit the coverage of abortions by health plans that are offered for sale through any insurance exchanges states form.

If the health plan you choose covers abortion and receives federal subsidies, the federal dollars must be kept in a separate “account” and funds from that account cannot be used to pay for abortions. In other words, only premium payments and co-payments can be used to cover the procedure. Enforcement of this separation of funds is left up to the states.

Finally, if you want abortion coverage, you would have to pay for that separately, and that “account” would cover only abortions, not other medical care.

We hear the prophet Isaiah say in today’s Old Testament lesson, “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.”

I’m not sure in this case whether anti-abortion Democrats gave their cheeks to Rep. Stupak or the other way around. What happened was, for me, when I heard the congressman say abortion won’t be paid for in the 2,400-page health care reform bill and then actually read the bill for myself, I felt betrayed. I’m just not sure who betrayed me.

Was Mr. Stupak playing Jesus or Judas here? Maybe he was both. Maybe all politicians are. But who is telling the truth? I don’t know. I doubt if I’ll ever know. Only our Lord can separate the truth from a lie.

With all this mess, I feel blessed to have a God who tells the truth, a sovereign Lord who keeps every single one of his promises. Subjectively, I tell myself this must be true, because this worldview makes more sense than anyone else’s explanation to me. Jesus kept his promises, starting with his payment for our sins on the cross. Prophets like Isaiah predicted these things would happen, and Jesus fulfilled those prophecies with his very life: the suffering, death, and resurrection.

What about our own lives? In our human imperfections and half-truths, many of us combine episodes of standing up for what we believe in with acts of selfishness and getting something that serves our own best interest. You can be sure that a 2,400-page law will play on both sides of human nature as well.

For example, the new law will help to ensure innocent children can get the medical care they need. Lawmakers are not children, so this provision was clearly not a selfish interest.

However, several aspects of the bill seem self-serving, arbitrary, and almost capricious, such as the amount of the penalty each individual pays if he or she fails to purchase health insurance and employers don’t offer it. A 1 percent penalty (2.5 percent in 2016), based on income, seems steep for most Americans, and the harshness of that penalty, while it will deter many from going uncovered, seems to violate constitutional principles, such as those found in the 14th Amendment’s equal protections clause.

This is why Jesus’ sacrifice was the perfect one: His life and well-being were completely insignificant in comparison with what his death caused: the paying of the debt for all our sins. We Americans have allowed health care to get out of control on many levels. It remains to be seen whether the number of abortions will increase or decrease under the bill, but someone had to turn his back to those who were doing the whipping. And although the current law is much less than perfect — it was, after all, developed by humans — we know only God is perfect.

We look to Jesus for the perfection of love, not to our political leaders, and while I wish the latter could have done a much better job of writing a law that takes better care of Americans, I remember that Paul wrote, “Equality with God is not something to be reached for.”

Perfection like that is not something we can expect from humans. We (and God) will forgive, thanks to our Lord’s actions about 2,000 years ago, but some of our hope in government seems eroded today, especially in its ability to rise above worldly (or, political) views and triumph in an occasion of greater glory. For that we need Jesus, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and we Americans had almost forgotten.

“Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father,” Paul wrote.

Today’s Readings (text):

• Isaiah 43:16-21
• Ps 126
• Philippians 3:8-14 (RCL* 4b-14)
• John 8:1-11 (RCL* 12:1-8)

In the wisdom of people who have prayerfully studied scripture and developed the major lectionaries of our Christian churches, Isaiah 43 in the First Reading (or the Old Testament Lesson) has been paired with an episode in which Jesus came to the defense of a woman (for adultery in the Roman Catholic reading or for “wasting” perfume to make Jesus’ feet smell nice in the Revised Common Lectionary).

But the profound prophecy in Isaiah 43 (”Behold, I am about to do something new. Can’t you perceive it?”) necessarily begs the question: What’s so new about Jesus forgiving a sinner? Well, the answer is: Nothing, because we’re looking in the wrong place. We need to look at the other places in the gospel passages.

When Jesus came to the defense of (and didn’t condemn) the woman about to be stoned for adultery, he “bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.” And then while all her accusers were walking away, he did the same, “Again he bent down and wrote on the ground,” scripture tells us.

Yes, he spoke, but speaking and teaching and forgiving were not new things for Jesus at this time. But when he wrote something with his finger (we are not told what he wrote), that was something new indeed. In fact, the only other instance of God actually writing in the entire canon of scripture—in all 73 or 66 books, depending on which version of the Bible you use—is when he wrote the tablets for Moses, handing down the law.

God first gave us the law (we don’t know what those original tablets said, either, since they were destroyed before Moses could read them for his people), and then he replaced the punishments that had been given for the law (maybe not on the original tablets, but through Moses) with forgiveness, bending down to write probably a new law in the sand.

Adultery was still against God’s law, in Jesus’ book, but a new covenant was written, “Nor do I condemn you. Now go, and don’t sin any more.” The way I see it, Jesus here “completed” the 10 Commandments. We don’t know what he wrote, but his actions speak volumes. We should not sin, but we shouldn’t condemn or stone people to death for committing adultery, either.

In the Revised Common Lectionary, we see something new as well: the first foreshadowing of Judas Iscariot’s betrayal in John’s gospel as he accuses Mary Magdalene of not giving money to the poor from the sale of the perfume. John even observes Judas’ hidden agenda in accusing Jesus.

But take a look at the Epistle as well, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. “For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things, and I consider them so much rubbish,” he writes. That is, whatever he had was lost—everything on Earth. It has been replaced with the promise of his resurrection in Christ, “not having any righteousness of my own based on the law but that which comes through faith in Christ.”

I usually try to include more modern references in these reflections, but the fact is, the events described in the gospel passage, Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and their prophecy in the Old Testament lesson are three of my favorite passages of scripture. I suspect people who read these reflections have their favorite events as well. I’m a writer, and when Jesus used his actions in defending and not condemning a woman accused of adultery to become a writer himself, well, that did it for me.

There are a few notable exceptions, but typically, it is the written account of something that has the largest significance in our minds. One exception that comes to mind would be the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg. For that disaster, the spoken news account plays a more significant role in our historical memory. But for most other events in history, the written account outlasts and outweighs the spoken account.

As John says at the end of his gospel, Jesus did many, many things that could not be written down. Some of those things are part of our tradition, but what mostly survives in our churches is what people did get the chance to write down. Well, this is the one time that Jesus himself, God incarnate, wrote something down. That stands alone as his indication of the importance of forgiveness in God’s kingdom.

Today’s Readings (text):

• Joshua 5:9-12
• Ps 34:2-7
• 2nd Corinthians 5:17-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

The story of the prodigal son appears only in Luke’s gospel, missing from both Mark and Matthew among the synoptic gospels. We usually refer to this parable as “The Prodigal Son,” shifting all the emphasis of the story to the son who goes off and squanders his inheritance, only to return to his father, begging to be taken back into the family.

By putting the emphasis on the lost son, we lose some of the understanding of the importance of the older brother and his outburst in Luke 15:29b-30: “Look, all these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders,” he protests. “Yet you never even gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him.”

We also neglect the role of the father in the parable. According to the way Jesus tells the parable, the lost son acts on his own accord. He doesn’t come back because he gets a letter from his father or something; rather, he runs out of money and would probably have died without assistance from his family.

In today’s crazy world, we have reality TV. One show in Spain, entitled “Patricia’s Diary,” specializes in reuniting people with long-lost family members. Last month, producers discovered something had gone terribly bad with one episode.

It all started in 2003, when a 38-year-old woman spotted her father on the show, telling the TV audience he had not seen his two daughters since 1966, when he and their mother split up.

The daughter first spoke with him on the telephone, and then they decided to meet at his house. The father reportedly kissed her on the lips during one of their meetings, but she returned with him afterwards to her home. He allegedly sexually abused her there, with sexual abuse continuing and even rape occurring, according to court testimony.

He has been sentenced to seven years in prison for his crimes, which he still claims were invented by his daughter as revenge for him abandoning her as a child, “because of the lack of support which she had suffered throughout her life.”

The roles are reversed a little here. It is the father in Spain who plays the prodigal son from our Lord’s parable. While his daughter apparently had every hope of behaving like the father in the parable, the long-lost father’s intentions with his daughter were apparently very different from those of the prodigal son — or maybe not so different.

What we see in the case in Spain is a man who had lost everything. Maybe he squandered away a loving relationship he once had with his daughters’ mother. Maybe he squandered away a guiding hand he once had with his daughters. He very likely felt just as empty inside as the prodigal son did before going back to the family and seeking to reconnect.

But just because the beginning of the story is the same as the prodigal son parable doesn’t mean the story happens as our Lord would have liked. When the daughter welcomed her father and, in effect, killed the fattened calf for him, he raped her.

A blogger on family.com, Beth McHugh, writes, “Sadly fathers do rape their own children and sometimes they even rape their infant children. They can even rape several daughters over a period of years.” These rapes often go unreported, because, as Ms. McHugh writes, many daughters feel that sexual assault is how their father shows them they are loved.

And while the father in Spain will spend some time in prison, we must distinguish between his actions, which occurred after his daughter welcomed him home, and those of the prodigal son in Jesus’ gem, where the only question of punishment comes from the elder son. For the father — and for heaven in this metaphor — it was enough that the son returned. He had done wrong, but as far as the father was concerned, he was home. His wrongdoing ended there, as we hear in the Old Testament lesson, “Today I have removed the reproach of Egypt from you.”

The father in Spain, on the other hand, sinned after his daughter opened her arms and her house to him. For that, you get prison. And penance. The elder son would be happy to extend the story of the parable to modern-day reality TV, thus gaining a fuller understanding of God’s sense of justice and sparing a love between a father and one of his daughters. But in Spain, things didn’t go according to God’s plan, did they? Love does not need a confession; nor does it demand restitution. Love is enough by itself. Taste and see God’s goodness, which is love.

Today’s Readings (text):

• Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15 (RCL* Isaiah 55:1-9)
• Ps 103:1-11 (RCL* 63:1-8)
• 1st Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12 (RCL* 10:1-13)
• Luke 13:1-9

Today’s gospel reading is the parable of the fig tree, but even if we are not a person who plants fig trees in our gardens, we can get the drift of the story. For three years, the tree bears no fruit, leading the owner of the fig tree to want to cut it down. But the person tending the garden convinces him to leave it for just one more year, during which time he will pay special attention to it. “If [it doesn't bear fruit next year], you can cut it down,” he tells the owner of the fig tree.

In the mid-1800s, in the Kansas Territory town of Osawatomie, peaceful people who were against slavery, ideologically led by ministers such as Rev. Samuel Adair, stood their ground, holding on in the face of militant pro-slavery forces. Although the peaceful abolitionists lost a few battles in guerrilla-style warfare, they were winning a publicity war back in the East.

Because they stuck it out, there was more time for settlers to come from free states in the North, and soon, people who opposed slavery outnumbered — and outvoted — those who supported slavery.

This is kind of like the fig tree parable. It takes time for a tree to bear fruit. It doesn’t always happen in the first, second, or third year. Sometimes you don’t get fruit until the fourth year. The peaceful abolitionists in Osawatomie didn’t win any elections when their movement began. Rather they chipped away at the pro-slavery majority by giving time for like-minded settlers to make their way to Osawatomie. And today, the town enjoys the same commitment to peace prevalent in the time of Samuel Adair.

Our God is a God of infinite goodness, but the time he allows in his schedule for us to turn to him is not so infinite. God works on his own schedule, not on ours. When the psalmist declares, “The Lord is kind and merciful,” the “mercy” refers to the time given after we have sinned but during which no punishment occurs. God alone decides the time for punishment, as he did in the many punishments written about in the Old Testament.

So really, the fig tree story is a little like a call to repent. It tells us God will give us time and show us mercy, but after that time has elapsed — and we don’t know when that will be — if we still haven’t turned our hearts, minds, and strength to God, that’s it. He cuts down the fig tree.

Finally, the single most popular page on this Web site is my retelling of the story of Moses and the Burning Bush, featured in today’s Roman Catholic Old Testament reading. The Revised Common Lectionary uses a passage from the Book of Isaiah today, which basically gives the same advice that could be gleaned from the fig tree parable. I have no idea why the Moses story is so popular among Google searchers, but it seems to have become a hit. I wrote it for a seventh-grade religious education class, along with other stories from the Bible.

Please take a moment to read the moral of the story at the bottom. Keep in mind that our God is infinite in his goodness in our lives. He continues to refresh our minds with new events that bear witness to his kindness. The Burning Bush story asks us, Would we recognize God and his actions in our lives today? Would we give witness to his glory as he works through us every day?

———-
* RCL refers to the Revised Common Lectionary of the Christian churches, copyright by the Consultation on Common Texts, as endorsed by about 16 Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic church.