The Lively Lectionary Old Testament is a blog that reflects on the Old Testament text from the Revised Common Lectionary each week.
“Humans see with the eyes and YHWH sees with the heart.” The traditional translation of this well-worn phrase “the Lord looks on the heart” is only one way to hear it. If my translation is chosen, then the claim is that YHWH uses God’s heart, God’s seat of understanding or insight, to make human choices.
This second Sunday after Pentecost begins a continuous narrative based on the books of Samuel and two chapters of 1 Kings that covers the next 12 weeks of texts. This is a rare and wonderful opportunity for any preacher to address a long series of sermons, rooted in the finest literature of the Hebrew Bible.
I would suggest that it is a crucial part of our call from God to preach. If we preach only what people want to hear, if we tickle their ears with pleasurable sounds of support and easy words of affirmation only, then our preaching is in vain and our words are empty. There has never been a generation that does not need the harder call of God, the call to take with the utmost seriousness the shortcomings of one’s people and one’s self.
Many of us have become cynical, inured to words of hope and succor, tired of claims of future possibilities in the power of God. Yet, Isaiah says that YHWH has sent to us a servant whose work it is to present to us strength in our weakness, light in our darkness, and hope in our despair.
Jeremiah’s vision of the new covenant still gleams as a distant goal of YHWH, a possible hope for a better future for all of us, human and animal and plant. And that future for us Christians is bound up in Jesus Christ who offered himself as servant of all and slave of all, giving his very life for that future.
The wilderness, wherever it is, is a very dangerous place, and always needs a pole or two to aid our passage through. And for us Christians, the pole that saves is not topped by a gleaming snake but rather by a bleeding and dying man, who cared for us enough to offer himself as a gift for all.
What we say to one another is extremely important; the 9th commandment reminds us that words can be weapons of destruction as well as building blocks of community.
If one is reading straight through the book of Genesis, arriving at chapter 17 could easily be seen as a serious letdown. However, a closer look at the context of the chapter suggests that its placement here has importance to the ongoing tale of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel.
After an especially heavy and frightening cloudburst, the rainbow soothes and makes plain the safety all may feel when the clouds part and the torrents of water end.
There can be no search for power over others for followers of Jesus. I find the relationship of David and Jesus to be fraught with dangers too many to enumerate, and hope that next Advent the collectors of the lectionary will do all they can to avoid this connection.
For the third Sunday of Advent we turn again to III-Isaiah, that loose collection of oracles that has played an outsized role in the formation and understanding of Christianity.
© SMU Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence
