Living Words The Rev'd William Klock

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity
St. Luke 15:1-10
by William Klock


The Pharisees and the scribes were angry with Jesus.  Our Gospel, taken from Luke 15 if you’re following along, begins as Luke tells us:



All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing new to listen to Jesus.  The Pharisees and the scribes [they were the legal experts] were grumbling.  “This fellow welcomes sinners!” they said.  “He even eats with them!”

 

But why would they be angry about that?  You might remember the story I read with the kids a few weeks ago, the one about the “Super-Extra-Holy People”.  Those were the Pharisees.  And you’d think that seeing sinners repent, seeing sinners change their ways, seeing sinners welcomed back into the covenant community, you would think that the Extra-Super-Holy People would be thrilled to see that happening.  But they weren’t.



To understand why, we need to understand a bit about these Super-Extra-Holy Pharisees.  They were an interest group.  They were mostly rich people.  Some of them were part of the Sanhedrin, which was the governing council of the Jews.  But they weren’t really the gatekeepers of Judaism.  They had their own ideas of what it meant to be a proper Jew.  But they didn’t have the authority to say who was in or who was out.  The priests in the temple, they were the gatekeepers—literally.  It was up to them who could come into the temple and who could not.  They were the ones who offered sacrifices for the people.  They had the control, not the Pharisees.  But the Pharisees could still make their views known.  They could be spiritually ostentatious in public.  They could talk—even if the priests didn’t care and even if they annoyed the common, ordinary, every-day people who went about their faith and their law-keeping in the usual way.  They could look down their noses at Jesus and they could argue with him, but they couldn’t do anything to him.  That’s why, as we saw last week, they lurked around, watching him in the hopes he’d do something or say something that they could report to the authorities—something arrestable and punishable—because they didn’t have that kind of authority themselves.



But what were the Pharisees actually about?  Well, they longed for the Lord’s return.  The people had returned from their exile in Babylon, they’d rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, but the Lord’s presence—his shekinah—had never come back to rest in the holy of holies.  And God’s people were still living under the boot of foreign pagans.  First it was the Persians, then the Greeks, and now the Romans.  It wasn’t supposed to be that way.  And so they decided to be Super-Extra-Holy.  Pretty literally.  They did this by taking the torah’s laws for the priests and the temple and they applied it to themselves.  To enter the temple, the Lord required ritual purity.  It reinforced the idea of the holiness of God and of his presence to the people, because in ordinary life you dealt pretty regularly with impurity.  Impurity wasn’t a bad thing in itself.  There were some sins that would leave you unclean, but mostly impurity came from ordinary things like menstruation or sex or contact with a death, whether human or animal.  In most cases, you waited for a day, then bathed, and you were ritually clean again.  But unless you were a priest, it wasn’t a big deal, because you only really had to be ritually pure if you wanted to go to the temple and most people only did that on the great feast days.



But the Pharisees, they saw that the world is not as it should.  They knew that earth and heaven were created to be one, overlapping unity.  They knew that human beings were created to enjoy God’s presence, but that human sin had created a rift between earth and heaven and human beings and God.  They longed to see things on earth as they are in heaven.  They knew, the one place in the whole world wh

A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
1 John 3:13-24 & St. Luke 14:16-24
by William Klock


It was the Sabbath.  Jesus and his disciples were in town and Jesus did all his usual things: healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, opening the ears of the deaf, casting out demons.  And he’d said and preached and proclaimed all the usual things: “Repent, because God’s kingdom has come.”  The poor heard God’s good news.  Others were challenged.  They begged Jesus to read the scripture lesson in the synagogue service, so he did, and then he said some profound and eye-opening things about it.  Some of the Pharisees were intrigued by Jesus.  Some of them didn’t know what to think.  Some of them were angry.  Some of them had already determined to trap Jesus.  If they gave him enough rope, he’d eventually hang himself.  He’d say or do the wrong thing and then they could all point at him and tell everyone, “See!  See!  We warned you from the beginning that he’s out to lunch,” and everyone would lose interest and Jesus would go back to Galilee and be forgotten—or, maybe if they were lucky, what he said or did would be bad enough they could have him arrested.



One of the leading Pharisees lived in this town.  He invited Jesus to his house for lunch as everyone was filing out of the synagogue.  It would have looked bad if he hadn’t.  But he and some of his friends had an idea.  Luke, in Chapter 14 of his gospel, says that they were keeping a close eye on Jesus.  In fact, we might translate Luke’s words to say that they watched him lurkingly—just waiting for him to do or say the wrong thing.  They lurked on Twitter and had scoured their way through ten years of Jesus’ tweets.  Nothing.  (Actually, no.  Jesus wasn’t on Twitter—he’s too smart for that.)  So it’s no surprise then that as Jesus arrived at the Pharisees’ house for lunch, he met a man whose limbs were swollen with dropsy.  The Pharisees probably hadn’t invited the man.  The rabbis taught that dropsy was the Lord’s punishment for secret sexual sins.  But in those days, doors were open, people came and went from banquets.  The poor and needy would show up looking for handouts.  On any other day, this Pharisee probably would have shooed away the man with dropsy, but not today.  He wanted to see what Jesus would do.  It was a given that Jesus healed the sick—but would he do it on the Sabbath?



And, of course, Jesus saw right through the whole scheme.  Seeing the man, he turned first to the Pharisee and to his lawyer friends—the local torah scholars and experts on the law.  And Jesus put them on the spot.  “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath or not?” he asked.  They should have seen that coming, but they didn’t.  They wanted to trap Jesus, but now he’s got them trapped.  No matter what they said, they’d condemn themselves.  And so while they stood there looking awkward, Jesus healed the man with dropsy and sent him away.  And then he turned back to the Pharisees and to the lawyers and said, “Suppose one of you has a son—or an ox—that falls in a well.  Are you going to tell me you won’t pull him out straightaway even on the sabbath say?”  And, of course, they just looked at him.  They had nothing to say that wouldn’t condemn them.  Because, of course, if their son or their ox fell in a well, even on the sabbath, of course they’d pull him out.



It was hard to hear.  The Pharisees were right about a lot of things. They knew that Israel was supposed to be a pocket of God’s light in the middle of a dark world.  They were the people who lived with the living God in their midst.  They were his people, graciously chosen, delivered from bondage, and made holy for just this task: to be light in the darkness.  The Pharisees were zealous for the law because they were grateful for God’s grace.  Not all of the people in Israel were as faithful as the Pharise

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
St. Luke 16:19-31 & 1 St. John 4:7-21
by William Klock


The crowd was settling down after that first frenzied crush when Jesus had come to town.  The sick had been healed.  The tears had been wiped away.  In Jesus the people had had a taste, they’d seen a pocket of what the world is supposed to be, of the world set to rights.  They’d had a glimpse of God’s kingdom.  Now it was time to listen as Jesus spoke.  There were all sorts of people there.  People from town, people from the countryside, regular people, poor people—even some Pharisees looking down on the town square from the rooftop of the richest man in town.  And Jesus began:



“There was once a rich man.  He was dressed in purple and fine linen, and feasted sumptuously every day.”

 

Jesus was smiling at some little kids sitting in front of him as he said this, but everyone else looked at the Pharisees up on their rooftop perch.  They were rich.  They weren’t feast-every-day rich or even dressed-in-purple rich.  Very few people were.  But they did wear fine clothes and only rich people could afford to live like the Pharisees with all their scruples and rules and everyday things.  Jesus continued:

 

“A poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores, lay outside his gate.  He longed to feed himself with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table.  Even the dogs came and licked his sores.”

 

Jesus paints a picture of extremes.  First there’s the rich man.  Super rich.  Ostentatiously rich.  Only kings could afford to wear purple and feast every day.  And in stark contrast there’s Lazarus.  He’s destitute.  He’s covered in sores, which means he’s almost certainly unclean.  He’s probably lame.  At some point he had either dragged himself to what he thought would be a prime spot for begging or someone else had deposited him there, at the gate of the richest man in town.  And the rich man and his friends would come and go.  He would hear the music and laughter from the other side of the wall.  He could smell the meat roasting.  He would have been happy with the bread the rich people used to wipe their hands.  But there was nothing for poor Lazarus.  And to make his life worse, as he lay there helpless, the feral dogs of the town would come to lick his oozing sores and leave him stinging.



Jesus puts a new spin on an old story the rabbis told.  There was a story—it’s been preserved in the Talmud—that originated in Egypt and was brought back to Judah by Alexandrian Jews.  It was a story about a rich tax collector and a poor torah scholar.  They both died and everyone attended the rich man’s funeral and no one could be bothered to show up the funeral of the poor man.  But a few days later, a friend of the poor man had a dream of paradise, and there in the middle of paradise was the poor torah scholar enjoying everything he’d sacrificed in life for the sake of God’s law.  And not far away was the rich man, parched and in torment, struggling to reach the stream, but forever held back.  When the story was told that way, everyone had sympathy for the poor torah scholar and hated the rich tax collector.  But Jesus changes it up a bit.  The rich man is just a rich man—maybe even a Pharisee.  And the poor man’s just a poor a man.  And when it’s told that way, given the thinking of the day, most people would have had their sympathies reverse.  Riches—so long as they weren’t gained from collecting taxes for the Romans—riches were a sign of God’s favour.  And the poor man?  Well, think of the disciples’ question to Jesus about the blind man.  “Who sinned?  This man or his parents?”  A lot of people would have chalked up the poor man’s state to his sins.  He was out of favour with God and deserved his miserable lot in life.



There’s another interesting change Jesus makes.  In the usual version of the story,

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday
St. John 3:1-17
by William Klock


Knock!  Knock!  Knock!  Someone was at the door.  Peter—or maybe it was John or James—got up to see who it was.  It had been a long day.  Everywhere Jesus went the crowds followed.  Some were full of questions, but most of all they were full of problems.  And they brought them all to Jesus.  The blind, the deaf, the sick, the dying, the demon-possessed.  This isn’t how the world is supposed to be, full of tears.  Everyone knew it then.  Everyone knows it now.  And everyone then and now hoped for a day when somehow it will all be set to rights.  And so the people flocked to Jesus, because wherever he went, there was a little pocket of the world as it should be, the world as God had made it, the world set to rights.  Wherever Jesus went, there was a little pocket of God’s future brought into the present.  A little pocket of the world where the tears are wiped away.



Knock!  Knock!  Knock!  There it was again.  They’d found a quiet place to spend the night away from the crowds, but someone had found it.  Peter was getting himself ready to tell whoever-it-was to go away, so image his surprise when he opened the door and saw Nicodemus standing there.  They’d never met, but everyone knew who Nicodemus was.  He was a rich man, he was one of the leaders of the Pharisees, but more than that, he was a member of the Sanhedrin—the ruling council of the Jews.  And here he was at the door of the house where Jesus was staying, standing there with a couple of his servants, politely asking to speak with the rabbi now that the crowds were gone.



Nicodemus had seen what Jesus was doing.  Nicodemus had heard what Jesus was preaching.  Nicodemus had watched from the edge of the crowds and listened in the temple court.  In Jesus he saw the hopes of Israel being fulfilled.  He saw that little pocket of God’s future following wherever Jesus went.  He believed—he just wasn’t sure what exactly it was that he was believing.  Have you ever had that happen?  You see God at work.  It’s obvious.  But it’s not what you expected.  So you believe, but you don’t really understand.  That’s where Nicodemus was.  He wasn’t one of the simple people who just needed some physical manifestation of the kingdom—like the blind and the deaf and the sick.  He knew the scriptures.  He knew how the God of Israel was supposed to fulfil his prophecies.  And Jesus was fulfilling them, but not in the ways anyone expected.  So the great theologian had come, not to be healed, but to ask how all this can be.  “We know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God,” Nicodemus said to Jesus, “Nobody can do the signs that you’re doing, unless God is with him.”



You can hear the unspoken question implicit in Nicodemus’ affirmation.  It’s the theologian’s equivalent of “Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  It was like this for everyone.  The disciples saw, they heard, they believed, but whenever Jesus pressed them with questions, ninety per cent of the time they gave the wrong answer.  Peter knew with certainty that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God.  But when push came to shove, he drew his sword and was ready to bring God’s kingdom with violence.  Even the disciples were full of all the wrong ideas the Jews had about the Messiah and the coming of the kingdom.  Nicodemus was in the same boat.  It’s just that he knew he was missing something and here he was to get it sorted out.  But Jesus doesn’t give him the answer he wanted, because even if Jesus explained it all, even if Jesus connected all the dots for Nicodemus, that’s wouldn’t solve the problem.  Nicodemus would still need something more.  And this is where Jesus answers his implicit question with those familiar words, “Let me tell you the solemn truth.  Unless someone has been born from above, he won’t be able to see God’s

A Sermon for Whitsunday
Acts 2:1-11
by William Klock


“Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?  How about now…now are we there yet?”  As you read the Gospels the disciples’ questions about the kingdom of God feel a bit like that.  All Jesus needed was one of them kicking the back of his seat on the way to Jerusalem.  “When will the kingdom come?  How long?  Are we there yet?  Is it almost time, Jesus?”  But it wasn’t just the disciples.  It was First Century Judaism.  Pretty much everyone was on the edge of their seat with anticipation for the kingdom.  Everyone except the Sadducees, because of course, they were sitting on the top of the heap, already in control of everything.  They’d already arrived and weren’t particularly interested in anything that might upset the status quo.  But even then, they knew it was the Romans who were really calling the shots, so I suspect even the Sadducees were thinking “Are we there yet?”  They just didn’t say it out loud.  Everyone knew it was time.  It had to be.  And that sense was even stronger for the disciples, because they knew Jesus was the Messiah—the one come to usher in God’s kingdom and to set the world to rights.  So if the Messiah had come—well—the kingdom had to be really close.



And so Luke, as he opens the book of Acts with the Ascension of Jesus, he tells us of Jesus’ promise to his friends: “Don’t go back to Galilee.  Stay in Jerusalem.  As John baptised you with water, in a few days I will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.”  But they hadn’t asked Jesus about the Holy Spirit.  They wanted to know when the kingdom was coming, because it had to be soon.  And so even as Jesus was leading them up the Mount of Olives and about to ascend to his throne, they were pestering him, “Is this the time?  Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?”  And, remember, in answer to their question Jesus ascended, up on the clouds, into heaven, to take up his throne, to rule and to reign.



And as he did that, he commissioned his disciples to do something that I don’t think they expected.  He commissioned them to be his royal heralds, to go out and to proclaim this good news to Jerusalem, to Judea, even to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth.  Now, this wasn’t the first time Jesus had sent his disciples out to proclaim the kingdom, but when he’d sent them out before, it was to a people who were also asking those “Are we there yet?” questions.  The disciples had gone out and told the people that in Jesus the Messiah had come and that the kingdom was in sight.  But now Jesus is sending them out to proclaim that in his resurrection and ascension the kingdom has come and that was no small task.  Because even though the disciples had seen their risen Lord and even though they saw him ascend to his throne, this wasn’t how anyone expected the kingdom to arrive.  They thought everyone would be resurrected all at once.  They though the Messiah would put down the enemies of God’s people and cast down their empires.  They expected a king like David who would punish evil, wipe away all the problems, and make everything as it should be.  Instead, the wrong people were still in control, evil people still did evil things, so much was still wrong with the world—and yet Jesus had inaugurated something, he really had risen from the dead, and they’d seen him ascend to his throne with their own eyes, so they knew he was truly Lord and that the kingdom had come.  The Lord’s plan was to work through them, to spread the good news and to tell the world that Jesus is Lord, and to grow the kingdom.  That wasn’t what anyone expected, but they should have, because that’s how the Lord had been working in the world ever since he called Abraham out of the land of Ur and set him apart from everyone else, and made him and his family a witness to the world—that one day, through this

A Sermon for Ascension Sunday
1 St. Peter 4:7-11 & St. John 15:25-16:4
by William Klock


Today is that Sunday in the Church Year that has us sitting with the disciples as they wait for the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise of God’s Spirit.  It’s a little bit like the scene of them on Easter Day.  Think of Mary, confused and distressed, running to tell Peter and John about the empty tomb and finding them, hunkered down in a dark house with the doors and shutters locked tight.  Both times, the disciples sat in a house in Jerusalem waiting.  On Easter Day, they were waiting out of fear.  Jesus had been executed and, if they weren’t careful, they’d probably be executed too.  They were waiting for the Passover festival to end, for the crowds to start leaving the city, so that maybe they could just blend into the crowds streaming out through the gates and down the roads, so they could make their way back to Galilee and hopefully just go back to their old lives and forget—and everyone else forget—that they’d been followers of Jesus.  And so they waited.  In the dark.  Fearful.  Barely talking in whispers.



Today the disciples are, again, waiting in Jerusalem.  But today is different.  Late on Easter Day Jesus had appeared in that locked room, risen, and not just alive like, say, Lazarus was alive again after he came out of his tomb.  Jesus wasn’t just alive.  He’d been made new.  The same Jesus they knew, even bearing the marks of his crucifixion, and yet different.  This new Jesus, resurrected from the dead, was as at home in heaven as he was on earth and as at home on earth as he was in heaven.  This Jesus embodied their hope of an Israel, of a whole human race, set to rights.  In him they were confronted with the birth of God’s new creation.  And everything the Prophets had said and everything Jesus had said about God setting the world to rights now made sense—at first, suddenly, it made sense at a gut level, but then as this risen Jesus walked them through the scriptures—probably the same scriptures he’d walked them through umpteen times before—gradually it all finally started to make sense in their heads, too.  Jesus’ resurrection changed everything.  But most of all, they saw the hopes of generation after generation after generation of Jews for a world set to rights, they saw that hope fulfilled in Jesus, and in that they saw the glory of God like no one had seen the glory of God since—well maybe since the Exodus.



And so, for forty days, Jesus met with his disciples and with hundreds of others, and they studied the scriptures and, I expect, they worshiped and glorified the God of Israel who had done this amazing thing and, who, right before their eyes, was fulfilling his promises.  And then he led them out to the Mount Olives and ascended into the clouds.  Jesus had prepared them for this.  He’d said before that eventually he would be leaving them.  These passages have been our Gospels for the last three weeks.  Remember John 16: “In a little while you won’t see, but a little while after that you will see me, because I’m going to the Father.”  Or two Sundays ago, “I’m going to the one who sent me and it’s important that I do, so that I can send the one who will come along side you on my behalf, the Helper.”  And last Sunday, “I’m leaving the world and going to the Father.  In the world you will have tribulation, but I have overcome the world.”  That last bit from John 16:33 surely underscored for them the lordship of Jesus.  Now it was time for him to take his throne in the heavenlies.



And so Jesus commissioned them to take this gospel, this good news, back to Jerusalem and to all of Judea, and eventually even to the Samaritans and then to the nations.  And as he commissioned them he rose on the clouds to his throne.  Jesus didn’t have to do it that way.  It’s not like heaven is literally up there somewhere.  You can’t get