Month: November 2024

Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; NBC Mazatlan

Symbols and art have played an important role in shaping the faith of believers, especially before literacy was widespread. They helped a priest to educate, they inspired the mind to things difficult to understand.

Christ was often portrayed as Almighty Lord of All Creation, often in a particular pose called pantocrator—Greek for all powerful. The risen Christ is depicted, crowned, regally overlooking all things, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding the Word of God, the Book of Life.

This mosaic dates back to the late 1200’s and is visible on the upper walls of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.

Similar paintings are found throughout the Christian world.  This one is in Barcelona.

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday in the church year. Next week is the first Sunday in Advent, the season leading up to Christmas. Our texts today are filled with images and symbols of God as ruler over all earth.  From Psalm 93 “The Lord is king, robed in majesty, robed and girded with strength.”  From Revelation 1: Grace and peace to you from the one who is and who was and who is to come, from Jesus Christ, the ruler of the kings of the earth, to him who loves us and freed us from our sins and made us to be a kingdom, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty—there’s that word, pantokrator.

This painting hangs in our dining room at home.

When I was about 10 years old, my Dad bought it from the college where he worked. He collaborated with the head of the art department to design the scene. Dad traveled to church youth gatherings and college fairs, recruiting students for Concordia College, a Lutheran liberal arts college in Moorhead, MN. It’s three panels stood, like a booth, behind his recruiting table:  all the pursuits of study and life under the dominion of Christ the King, with the words of Colossians 1: 17 across the top: All things hold together in him. The symbol of the trinity behind the figure of Christ in classic pose, the book of life in one hand and the orb of the world in his upheld right hand.

What I like about this painting is that it is full of real life—sports, children, art, work. It’s relatable all things hold together; Christ is in the midst of real life. I’m sure I have been shaped by looking at it, day after day from the dining room table. Christ holds the world and all things. Christ, crown on his head, is king.

Christ the King Sunday is a very new addition to the liturgical calendar. It was instituted by Pope Pius 11th in 1925 as a countercultural observance. He saw a world becoming ever more dominated by totalitarian governments and exploiting economies and knew that Christians, all types of Christians, needed a reminder of where our allegiance and trust must be. Thus, Christ the King Sunday.  This is not a Sunday celebrating that Jesus is the King of our hearts or our souls or our spirits. This is a Sunday celebrating that the Crucified and Risen Christ is the King of the Cosmos, of all things.

The early followers of Jesus greeted one another by saying Jesus is Lord. That may sound super spiritual to us, but in their day that greeting was radical and dangerous. Citizens of the Roman empire said “Caesar is Lord,” the way citizens of the Third Reich said, “Heil Hitler.” But Christians insisted, that “Jesus is Lord. Hail Jesus.” That is what got them burned at the stake and fed to lions. They were martyred because they refused to bow down to the political system.

When we say that Jesus is Lord or that Christ is King or that Jesus Christ reigns or we talk about the Kingdom of God, we are talking about something real, tangible, everyday, actual. Jesus is Lord and money is not. Jesus is Lord and political parties are not. Jesus is Lord and fame is not. Jesus is Lord and The United States, or Mexico, or Canada is not. Jesus is Lord and violence is not. Jesus is Lord and religion is not. Jesus is Lord and as followers of Jesus we give our allegiance to him, place our trust and faith in him. Christ Jesus reigns as lord and king over all.

Ok, back to the images of Christ as King. In our gospel reading today, Jesus hangs between heaven and earth, between the power of God and the powers that be. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asks.  “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” he puts back to Pilate. Everything in the conversation—indeed, everything in the Gospel—has been pointing toward verse 36. “My kingdom is not from this world,” says Jesus. If it were, his followers would take the usual steps by the usual means to rescue their king. This all leads up to his hanging literally, on the cross, with the sign “King of the Jews” over his head.

Those pieces of art I showed you before don’t really capture the whole truth about Christ.  Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, painted a work called Christ of Saint John of the Cross. On the bottom of his sketches in preparation for the painting Dali wrote about a dream he had experienced, what he called a “cosmic dream,” in which he saw an image in color that he said represented the nucleus of the atom which took on a metaphysical sense. “I considered in ‘the very unity of the universe’ the Christ!” As he was preparing to paint his dream someone showed him a sketch by the 16^th century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross who is remembered for his reflections on the dark night of the soul.

The composition of Dail’s work was based on the sketch. He wrote:  I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which aesthetically summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.

Here it is.

I love the sharp darkness cast by Christ’s outstretched arm. Christ crucified contemplates an abyss skeined over with clouds before (or maybe after) a storm. There is something antigravitational about the perspective, how Christ hangs from the cross and the cross hangs in the sky so very un-wood-beam-like.

For me, this painting conveys something of the sacrificial regency of Christ, the King who came not to be served but to serve, the one who “did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped” (Philippians 2:6).

Christ’s power and glory comes by way of the cross. The polarities of his kingship are reversed. And we, the people drawn to him by his lifting up on the cross, have become a kingdom, “priests serving his God and Father,” says Revelation, whose vision of power is reversed as well. The cross of Christ calls power into question but also serves as the basis for a different sort of power. The genius of the gospel hangs together on the cross: the cross with its power that is not power, the cross that takes shape as the pattern of our lives, the foundation of Christian thought that is always also a kind of anti-foundation, the disturber of worlds.

In our gospel today, John 18, Jesus, the king who is crucified, calls into question the assumptions of power. We’re left asking: Who stands before whom? Who interrogates whom? Who is the king? Not the one who commands iron legions but the one who willingly lays down his life for the sheep. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” says Jesus, speaking of his kingship and more. But brutality and blood have crumpled Pilate’s sense of truth down into irony. “What is truth?” he asks.

For Christians, this means that any exercise of power that does not trace back to the self-sacrificial love of the cross is illegitimate, having lost its proper grounding in the cruciform mandate of God. I say that at the risk of sounding too academic. But that’s really the heart of the Christian faith, isn’t it?  It’s how we live day to day, how we want and how we purpose, how we steward influence, money, position, and all the rest toward God’s ends on behalf of the least of these. The cross shapes the power we use to work with and under and no longer over, at least not over in the same way.

Jesus’ cruciform kingdom is the basis for a different sort of power. Jesus has trampled down Death by death, and now it’s in that power of his name that the church preaches and heals and teaches and draws together the broken.

This is not a metaphor. This is real power of a different order that rescues us from the bondage of sin, from the fear of death, from slavery to our own little selves. All power resolves into Jesus, is follows his pattern: resurrection. “To him be glory and dominion, forever and ever.”

It is hard to hold onto that vision or version of power. It’s so easy to be pulled into the crowd, crowing for Barabbas in whatever new form that base but reliable power might take in our time, whetted sharp and holstered up. Whenever the church, throughout the world, throughout time, has leaned on Barabbas-power it has stumbled. Whenever the church plays the long game of faithful dependence on the Lamb that was slain, it ultimately wins. Parades of nuclear-tipped military power snaking through concrete capitals impress, but the cross in its turnabout mystery wins in the end.

Christ, crucified, is the one in whom all things hold together, the one who we need to know if we’re going to know anything else. Amen.

New Blue Church; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson

My cousin Rick was out in their horse barn this summer with his 6-year-old grandson, Jackson. In one of the cracks, between the thick rubber mats that cover the floor, there was a golf ball sized dung beetle. They are ugly–with big pinchers. Jackson looked up at his grandpa and said, “Should I squash it?” 

Wisely, Rick paused and asked him, “Do you want to?”

Jackson thought about it and, shaking his head, said, “No, it might be the last one!” continuing with another warning— “And that goes for grasshoppers too grandpa.” 

There’s some hope to be heard in that little voice. Even under the specter of extinction, we can hear the call to act for life, we can protect even the ugliest of creatures.

Our texts today are both examples of a type of literature focused on the end times. Apocalyptic writings arose during the few centuries just before until just after Jesus’ life. Daniel, the Book of Revelation, and this 13^th chapter of Mark’s gospel are classic examples, featuring graphic symbols, images, angels and fantastic beings. Often written under a pseudonym or attributed to a famous person, apocalyptic texts describe the end of the world, the last times, and offer hope beyond any present doom. The writings speak during times of oppression or persecution. Daniel was written in the 2^nd century BC, when the Greek culture and rule threatened Jewish practices. Mark’s gospel was written during the 60s AD, when internal division weakened the people of Israel and revolution against the domination of Rome threatened to bring the power of the state down on them.  Both texts offer an alternate vision for difficult times.

Every time this sort of text appears in the schedule of readings it seems timely. There’s never a shortage of fear or doomsday thinking in this world–Today is no exception. With the election of Donald Trump as president, half of the United States and much of the world is wondering if we’re tipping off into a political apocalypse. If the election had turned out the other way, of course, the other side would be doing the doom-scrolling.

Wars, rumors of wars, nations rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines. Each generation around the globe asks, with Peter, James, John and Andrew, what will the sign be? 

Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote his famous poem, The Second Coming at a time when doom was prevalent. It was 1919 just after WWI at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, just after the Bolshevik Revolution. He wrote:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The poem’s powerful images capture more than just political unrest and violence. It exudes the anxious concerns of the social ills of that time: the rupture of societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them—all of those factors have just been building for a hundred years now.

Some of the dreadful things Yeats wrote about came about actually. Looking back now, we know that the twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after 1919, as the poem forebode. The narrator suggests a “second coming” is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror.

As for the slouching beast in the poem, it wasn’t just a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but the broader historical forces, the technological, the ideological, and the political. Here we are, a century later and the slouching beast can be the threat of nuclear war, genocide, climate disaster, famine and new threats that we can’t even understand—like Artificial Intelligence. There is no shortage of cause for doom. Millions of people today aren’t just wondering about an apocalypse, they are living and dying in one, in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan. Entire countries look like places of unanswered prayers.  Doom scrolling is certainly an understandable reaction.

It’s tempting to copy Woody Allen’s mindset who said, “More than any other time in history, humankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter despair and hopelessness. The other path to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly!”

There are other options, though. Mark Twain once said, “My life has been filled with tragedies, many of which never happened .”

H.G. Wells suggested that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but despair. The perennial question is how do we move beyond despair and doom to a place of hope, kindness and action?

Jesus gives two pieces of advice for times like these—for all times, in fact.  First, he says “don’t be afraid.” Don’t be frightened or alarmed, don’t be worried or anxious. I especially like the translation of the parallel passage in Luke 21:9 in the New American Standard Version, “don’t be terrified.” Given the things that Jesus predicts — famine, war, earthquakes, imprisonment, torture, and more, this feels like wildly counterintuitive advice. It also feels like what some of us may need to hear: don’t be afraid. Instead, trust the mysterious providence of a loving God. Pray for Jesus’s promise of the “peace that the world cannot give.”

Let’s be careful here—hope is not denial. It’s not ignoring the problems in front of us. I’m not suggesting a kind of Pollyanna approach or a pie-in-the-sky-when you-die focus, looking away from very real challenges in this life.

Jesus’ second bit of advice is repeated at least eight different times in Mark 13, Jesus tells us, “don’t be deceived.” Watch out. Be on your guard. Take heed. Be alert. Keep watch. In other words, he calls us to vigilance and discernment, especially in light of all the many reckless lies and false promises that characterize times when people fear the ends of the age. Jesus says, don’t be duped, deceived, or distracted. Live in reality. Keep things in perspective.

There is work to be done. Always. We follow the risen Lord- who engaged with others in the world, who confronted oppression when he saw it, drew in the outcast, engaged people in healthy relationships and meaningful community.

The record producer Quincy Jones just a week ago. Many of the obituaries quoted him as saying, “Every day you have to make a choice between love and fear. As much as you can, choose love.”  We can live beyond doom—we can live into love, hope and action.

Let us pray: Gracious God, when things fall apart, remind us that you are the center that does hold. That you came in a rocking cradle, you continue to come, to lead us to choose love instead of fear. Amen.

Ruth 3: 1-5, 4: 13-17; 1 Kings 17: 8-16 and Mark 12: 38-44;

Nov 10, 2024; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; New Blue Church, Mazatlan

My grandma was widowed when my dad was just 8 years old. It was during WWII. My grandparents’ general store, the Ellenson IGA, and gone bankrupt in the 30s and they had been rebuilding their lives. Times were hard even before my grandfather died. Before she married, my grandma had been a teacher. She found a job as a teacher again and they moved to a small town and lived in 2 rented rooms. My dad never spoke of the hardship, except when his arthritic feet hurt, hammertoes a result of shoes too-tight throughout his growing years. No, he spoke of the care and love that surrounded him, the mentors and father-figures who stepped into the gap, and of his mother’s strength of character.

Maybe you have a widow’s story in your family. Widows figure prominently in the scriptures, 81 times to be exact. Widows, orphans and strangers stand as a sort of archetype of need. God commands their care, warns consequences for those who fail to care or cause them harm. A portion of every third year’s tithe when to support widows.

The story of Ruth has a relatively happy ending. Boaz was a relative of Elimelech, Naomi’s dead husband, and he fulfilled his duty, married Ruth and provided for them. She produced a son who became the ancestor of David and Jesus. Naomi and Ruth did what they had to do to survive.

The text from 1^st Kings shows us another important widow in Israel’s history. The prophet Elijah had spoken a word of judgement to King Ahab and Jezebel, predicting a drought and famine. Then, at God’s leading, he flees to Zaraphath, what is now Sarafand in Southern Lebanon, a city recently bombed by the Israelis, creating new widows and orphans. In the miraculous story we heard today, Elijah, the widow and her son are saved from starvation.

Jesus referred to this story in Luke’s gospel, chapter 4, right after his first message in the synagogue in Nazareth. He quoted the prophecy, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. And said, today this scripture is fulfilled. There’s a linkage there, between his reference to the widow of Zarephath and his mission, our mission. Widows, orphans and strangers, symbols or need.

In today’s gospel Jesus points out another widow. Sometimes “The Widow’s Mite” is used as part of Stewardship Sundays, the day when congregations ask people for pledges of giving and set the budget for the coming year. Who hasn’t squirmed when a well-meaning pastor asks: “If a poor widow can give her sacrificial bit for the Lord’s work, how can we — so comfortably wealthy by comparison — not give much, much more?” I’ll admit it; I’ve preached that sermon. And I’ve squirmed, because it feels exploitive to use the text that way. I doubt Jesus had that in mind when he commented on her giving. I wish I knew her name. I hope that she died with dignity.

Died?  Yes.  Died. I suspect that she died, probably mere days after she dropped those two coins into the Temple treasury. Remember what Jesus said about her as she left the Temple that day: “She, out of her poverty, has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

I think that was an accurate statement. If Jesus said the woman gave everything she had, well, she gave everything she had. We can be sure that she was an impoverished widow in first century Palestine, a woman living on the margins of her society, without a safety net. No husband to advocate for her, no pension to draw from, no social status to hide behind. She was vulnerable in every single way that mattered, just two pennies short of the end. 

As Mark presents the timeline, Jesus died about four days after the events in this story. I wonder if the widow died then, too. Mark prefaces the story of the widow with an account of Jesus blasting the religious leaders of his day for their greed, pompousness, and crass exploitation of the poor.  “Beware of the scribes,” Jesus tells his followers.  “They devour widow’s houses and for the sake of appearance and say long prayers.” The Scribes’ practice of their faith, in other words, is phony, and the religious institution they govern is corrupt — not in any way reflective of the God the Psalmist calls a “Father of orphans and protector of widows.”

In the days leading up to the widow’s last gift, Jesus offers one scathing critique after another of the economic and political exploitation he witnesses all around him.  He makes a mockery of Roman pomp and circumstance when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey’s back.  He cleanses the Temple’s money-mongering with a whip. He refuses to answer the chief priests, scribes, and elders when they demand to know the source of his authority.  He confounds religious leaders on taxes, indicts them with a scathing parable about a vineyard and a murdered son, defeats them on the question of resurrection, and bewilders them with riddles about his Davidic ancestry.

Jesus isn’t pointing to the widow as a model of giving here… Why on earth would he praise a woman for endangering her already endangered life to support an institution he keeps criticizing? Jesus never commends the widow, applauds her self-sacrifice, or invites us to follow in her footsteps. He simply notices her, and tells his disciples to notice her, too.

Wouldn’t you love to hear Jesus’ tone of voice. Was he heartbroken as he tells his disciples to peel their eyes away from the rich folks and glance in her direction instead? Was he outraged? Or was he resigned?  What does it mean to him, mere seconds after he’s described the Temple leaders as devourers of widows’ houses, to witness just such a widow being devoured? 

Then to top it all off: immediately after the widow leaves the Temple, Jesus leaves, too, and as he does, an awed disciple invites Jesus to admire the Temple’s mammoth stones and impressive buildings.  Jesus’ response is quick and cutting: “Not one of these stones will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

Ouch!  I wonder if the widow is still on Jesus’ mind as he predicts the destruction of the Temple.  He has just watched a trusting woman give her all to an institution that refuses to protect the poor.  No structure funded by such injustice will stand.Jesus calls out, and we can call out any form of religiosity that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction? 

Let’s find the good news. The gospel is this: Jesus notices the widow. He sees what everyone else is too busy, too grand, too spiritual, and too self-absorbed to see.  He noticed the widow’s courage.  Imagine what courage it took for her to make her gift alongside the rich with their fistfuls of coins, to allow the last scraps of her security to fall out of her palms, to swallow panic, swallow desperation, swallow the entirely human desire to cling to life no matter what — and face her end with hope.

Jesus noticed her dignity.  She must have had to steel herself when widowhood in her culture rendered her worthless, “expendable”, even in the Temple she loved.  She had to trust — in the face of all the evidence piled up around her — that her tiny gift had value in God’s eyes.

And finally, Jesus noticed her vocation.  Whether she knew it or not, her action in the Temple was prophetic.  She was a prophet because her personally-costly offering amounted to a holy condemnation of injustice and corruption. Without speaking a word, she spoke God’s Word in the ancient tradition of Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, and other Old Testament prophets.

She was also prophetic in the Messianic sense, because her self-sacrifice prefigured Jesus’ own giving.  Perhaps what Jesus noticed was that kinship.  Her story mirrored his.  The widow gave everything she had to serve a world so broken that it killed her.  Days later, Jesus gave everything he had in his unceasing intent to redeem, restore, and renew that same world.

We all know that the biblical world was patriarchal and misogynist, as has been most of human history. Women have not had self-determination, education or freedom. They were chattel, passed from control of fathers to husbands at marriage and passed back to fathers of on to their husbands’ male relatives at widowhood. But, in much of the world it’s still that way. There are 258 million widows worldwide, tens of thousands in Ukraine, 3000 in Gaza.   

How can we not make the connection between Ruth and Naomi, destitute, fleeing from Moab to Bethlehem and today’s widows without resources. How can we not see in them the faces of modern-day war widows, refugees, and victims of famine, making their own difficult way, nearly empty handed, carrying only the hope of safety and new life. 

God cares about this woman and her sacrifice. Our God sees her plight and recognizes her affliction. Our God will not stand for abuse, especially under the guise of religious piety. God sees her…and God cares about her. I doubt anyone else, including the religious elite parading around the Temple that day and dropping in their token offerings, noticed this woman. I doubt the disciples following Jesus noticed her either, until their Lord lifted her up for their attention.  God also sees struggles, recognizes challenges, cares about those who are hard pressed to make ends meet.

There’s a message to us, given our relative privilege in this world, too. God invites us to see each other, not just those like us, but those we don’t know too. To really see – the pain of those who are discriminated against because of their ethnicity, the desolation of those who beg on the street, those who have been exploited by sex traffickers, the millions of refugees seeking safety. God invites us to see them, to care for them, and to advocate for a system that does not leave anyone behind.

Oh, these are squirmy texts for sure…but the bottom line is this: God cares, and God invites us to care, too. God believes that we have something to contribute, that our words and actions can help bring more fully to fruition the kingdom God’s own Son, proclaimed and embodied. God cares about the widow and her sacrifice. God will not countenance abuse –especially under the guise of religious piety. 

God not only sees all our struggles and cares. God also believes in each one of us enough to use us to make a difference.  Where is God already at work?  Can we join God’s efforts to see those in distress, help them find comfort and relief, and work for a more just world?

Deuteronomy 6: 1-9; Mark 12: 28-34

Context is important when it comes to understanding most things. That’s true with these texts.

There are several layers of context to consider when we look at any scriptural text. The book of Deuteronomy begins with the people standing on the border of the promised land, which they are about to enter and occupy. That’s the storyline context- Moses and the people who have wandered the wilderness, preparing to conquer the land. The book of Deuteronomy is presented as a speech from Moses to the people before they enter the land in which he summarizes all the laws.

There’s another layer though. You see, the text wasn’t written down in 1300 BCE. It was first written down many centuries later, somewhere between 700 and 400 BCE. Deuteronomy was written in the context of foreign domination, just before, during or after the time we think of as the Exile. It’s important to remember that for most of Israel’s history they didn’t have their own kingdom with a temple and priests and so forth. Israel has nearly always been occupied land, dominated by various Empires—the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British.  

The 10 commandments are found in the chapter right before today’s reading. The law is to be observed, “so that it may go well for you, so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey.”  The original writers, in the 7^th to 5^th Century BCE, and the listeners or readers through the centuries that followed—even up until today— would have had the benefit of history to understand that text.

We know something about colonization, invasion and occupation. When we step back a bit and read the text with a historical mindset rather than the simple storyline view of it, we see the dangerous link between religion and politics. If we keep reading we find these words…

When the Lord your God has brought you into the land—a land with fine houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves you did not plant, when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

When God is used as justification for the subjugation of one people by another, things don’t go well for anyone. Whether that means the Israelites conquering Canaan during the period called the conquest, or the early white immigrants in what is now Canada and the US claiming the first nations’ peoples’ land through manifest destiny and the doctrine of discovery, or the Spanish conquistador’s domination of the Mexica or Aztec people, or the fighting over the Holy Land in our own times–when God is used as an excuse for domination and war, life becomes anything but a land of milk and honey. Contextual reading calls us to remember God as the liberator of slaves from Egypt and letting that understanding prevent the enslaving of others.

There are even more layers of context to consider though.  A few hundred years later, after the text in Deuteronomy was actually written down, the words were interpreted again in a new way.  During the Hasmonean dynasty, from about 140 BC, after the Maccabean revolt—from which the holiday of Hannukah arises—until 37 BCE, the Jews experienced a rare period when they enjoyed freedom and self-rule. It was during that time that Herod the Great had the second temple built. It was during that time period that the practice of reciting the Shema developed.

The Jewish people have a prayer called the Shema, after the Hebrew word for hear, with which the prayer begins. As familiar as the Lord’s Prayer is to Christians, Jews, everywhere, twice a day, cover their eyes with their right hand and recite,

Shema Israel, Adonai elhenu, Adonai achad. Hear, O Israel, The L-rd is our G‑d, The L-rd is One. 

They continue in a softer tone,

Blessed be the name of the glory of G-d’s kingdom forever and ever,

followed by the words from our Old Testament lesson for today.

You shall love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.

They often pray standing to show respect and deference and cover their eyes to prevent distraction. Their words express the belief that nothing exists outside of God, that all this exists is a veiled manifestation of God, that all is connected and interdependent, that life is continuously being re-created.

It was during that Hasmonean time that the use of phylacteries emerged. Still, today, some Jews take those words literally and they physically bind onto their foreheads and around their arms little leather boxes with long straps called phylacteries or tefillin. Those boxes have the words of the Shema printed within. They also place a little thingamajig on their doorposts, a mezuzah, which also holds the text of our lesson today. Jews touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.

Twice a day, Jesus would have recited the words,

Shema Israel, Adonia Elhenu, Adonai Achad! 

As I said, Shema! translates roughly to Hear! Or Listen! But it carries much more weight than that in Hebrew because there is no separate word for obey.  Hear means Listen and Do!  It’s sort of like that familiar parental command. Listen to me when I’m talking to you! It means: Listen and DO what I say. It’s why Jesus sometimes said Let those who have ears Hear, or They have ears but do not listen!  When he is asked what the greatest commandment is, his response is simply an elaboration of the word, Shema.  Love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, soul and might and love your neighbor as yourself!  Shema! 

So that brings us to the next layer of context. The setting for our gospel reading for today is Jesus’ encounter with the scribe, during what we think of as holy week. Jesus had already entered Jerusalem on a colt to shouts of Hosanna! During the next few days, he was met with one challenge to his identity and authority after another. The Chief priests, scribes, elders, the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Herodians have all argued with him and tried to entrap him. They each reacted to him with questions, disagreements, or doubt. In our text a scribe engages Jesus in the only civil conversation of the week. That’s the story-line layer of context of our gospel—Jesus’ encounters during the days before his crucifixion.

In his and the scribe’s words we can hear all the previous layers of context, the 1300 BCE storyline, the exilic period when Deuteronomy was written down, the Jewish identity shaped by centuries of domination and movement, the Maccabean revolt, the new temple built by Herod the great that would have been standing in Jesus’ own time, the practice of recitation of the Shema, all underlaid by the liberating history of God’s deliverance and blessing, the various factions within Judaism and the Roman power structure during Jesus’ lifetime, the roles they each played in his trail and death.

Then, bear with me, there’s yet another layer. Mark wrote his gospel some 30 years later, during another period of unrest. There were four main factions of the Jewish world around 65 to 70 AD, the Zealots, Pharisees, Essenes, and the Sadducees. They were basically engaged in civil war with each other, not to mention coping with the new sect of Judaism—Christianity that was emerging.

Nero was the Roman Emperor. In 68, he sent his best general, Vespasian, to crush the rebellion of the Jews in the northern region of Galilee. Vespasian then became the new Emperor in 69 and sent his son, General Titus, to finally put down the revolution by besieging Jerusalem.  Unrest and rebellion against the Roman authority had been the order of the day. The internal division weakened the cohesion of the Jewish territory and meant that the Roman army could put down the rebellion and eventually destroy Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD.

That was the contemporary context of Mark’s writing.  When Mark includes the various challengers to Jesus’ authority, Mark’s community would make a connection between the opposing factions of their own time.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus responds to the scribe’s question by reciting the text from Deuteronomy 6, and adding to it another command, from Leviticus, And love your neighbor as yourself.  His words call to mind the eternal dilemma of exclusive faith and universal love, the challenge faced by every time and people, that of loving One’s own God while maintaining a love toward those who love another God.  

Certainly, there is yet one more context to consider—today. How do we hear these texts on November 3, 2024? It is two days before an historic election in the United States, a nation challenged by division and the threats of Christian Nationalism and civil unrest. The nation of Israel is at war, a complicated situation nearly impossible to unravel even as the cities are being destroyed there, once again. The good news of Jesus Christ speaks to us, through the layers of history, with words of profound conviction and challenge.

Before I close today with a prayer in poetic form by Walter Bruggeman, included in his 2008 book Prayers for Privileged People. It is titled:
Post-Election Day

You creator God
     who has ordered us
       in families and communities,
       in clans and tribes,
       in states and nations.

You creator God
     who enacts your governance
       in ways overt and
       in ways hidden.
     You exercise your will for
       peace and for justice and for freedom.

We give you thanks for the peaceable order of
   our nation and for the chance of choosing—
     all the manipulative money notwithstanding.

We pray now for new governance
   that your will and purpose may prevail,
   that our leaders may have a sense
     of justice and goodness,
   that we as citizens may care about the
     public face of your purpose.

We pray in the name of Jesus who was executed
   by the authorities.  Amen.

The greatest commandment speaks through all the layers of history and can guide us onward. Love your neighbor as unconditionally as you love God, as God loves you. No historical situation, ethnicity, politics or religion is greater than this.