Week of Proper 21: Saturday, Year 1

Above:  An Icon of Baruch

Image in the Public Domain

Good News in the End

OCTOBER 7, 2023

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Holy Women, Holy Men:  Celebrating the Saints (2010), of The Episcopal Church, contains an adapted two-years weekday lectionary for the Epiphany and Ordinary Time seasons from the Anglican Church of Canada.  I invite you to follow it with me.

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Baruch 4:5-13, 27-29 (The Jerusalem Bible):

Take courage, my people,

constant reminder of Israel.

You were sold to the nations,

but not for extermination.

You provoked God;

and so were delivered to your enemies,

since you had angered your creator

by offering sacrifices to demons, not to God.

You had forgotten the eternal God who reared you.

You had also grieved Jerusalem who nursed you,

for when she saw the anger fall on you

from God, she said:

Listen, you neighbours of Zion:

God has sent me great sorrow.

I have seen my sons and daughters taken into captivity,

to which they have been sentenced by the Eternal.

I had reared them joyfully;

in tears, in sorrow, I watched them go away.

Do not, any of you, exult over me,

a widow, deserted by so many;

I suffer loneliness because of the sins of my own children,

who turned away from the Law of God,

who did not want to follow his injunctions,

and would not follow the ways of his precepts,

or tread the paths of discipline as his justice directed.

…

Take courage, my children, call on God:

he who brought disaster on you will remember you.

As by your will you first strayed away from God,

so now turn back and search for him ten times as hard;

for as he brought down those disasters on you,

so will he rescue you and give you eternal joy.

Psalm 69:34-38 (1979 Book of Common Prayer):

34  The afflicted shall see and be glad;

you who seek God, your heart shall live.

35  For the LORD listens to the needy,

and his prisoners he does not despise.

36  Let the heavens and the earth praise him,

the seas and all that moves in them;

37  For God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah;

they shall live there and have it in possession.

38  The children of his servants will inherit it,

and those who love his Name will therein.

Luke 10:17-24 (The Jerusalem Bible):

The seventy-two came back rejoicing.

 Lord,

they said,

even the devils submit to us when we use your name.

He said to them,

I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven.  Yes, I have given you power to tread underfoot serpents and scorpions and the whole strength of the enemy; nothing shall ever hurt you.  Yet do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you; rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven.

It was then that, filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, he said,

I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.  Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do.  Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Then turning to his disciples he spoke to them in private,

Happy are the eyes that see what you see, for I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, and never saw it; to hear what you hear, and never heard it.

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The Collect:

O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Reinhold Niebuhr wrote of how he came to learn the meaning of the middle paragraph of this day’s Gospel reading.  In the second decade of the twentieth century, when Niebuhr was fresh out of seminary, he served a congregation in Detroit, Michigan.  Two respectable and “equally respectable” women in his church were dying, but they dealt with death differently.  One lady raged against the dying of the light, to steal a line from Dylan Thomas.  She resented her end-of-life illness and related suffering.

Yet the second woman, who had known great suffering (including her husband’s insanity) and whom circumstances had forced out of Victorian and Edwardian domesticity into the role as breadwinner faced her death with great serenity.  She suffered, too, dying of cancer.  Yet, as Niebuhr wrote,

I stood weekly at her bedside while she told me what passages of Scripture, what Psalms and what prayers to read to her; most of them expressed gratitude for all the mercies of God which she had received in life.  She was partially grateful to her two daughters and their love; and she faced death with the utmost peace of soul.

I relearned the essentials of the Christan faith at the bedside of that nice old soul.  I appreciated that the ultimate problem of human existence is the peril of sin and death in the way that these two perils are so curiously compounded; for we fall into sin by trying to evade or to conquer death or our own insignificance, of which death is the ultimate symbol.  The Christian faith holds out the hope that our fragmentary lives will be completed in a total and larger plan than any which we can control or comprehend, and that a part of the completion is the forgiveness of sins, that is, the forgiveness of the evils into which we fall by our frantic efforts to complete our own lives or to endow them with significance.

Significance, of course, comes from God alone.

This is the same God in the Book of Baruch.  The Canadian Anglican lectionary I am following will move along to Jonah beginning with Monday in the week of Proper 22, so I feel obligated to quote the glorious fifth chapter, as The Jerusalem Bible renders it:

Jerusalem, take off your dress of sorrow and distress,

put on the beauty of the glory of God for ever,

wrap the cloak of the integrity of God around you,

put the diadem of the glory of the Eternal on your head:

since God means to show your splendour to every nation under heaven,

since the name God gives you for ever will be,

“Peace through integrity, and honour through devotedness.”

Arise, Jerusalem, stand on the heights

and turn your eyes to the east:

see your sons reassembled from west and east

at the command of the Holy One, jubilant that God has remembered them.

Though they left you on foot,

with enemies for an escort,

now God brings them back to you

like royal princes carried back in glory.

For God has decreed the flattening

of each high mountain, of the everlasting hills,

the filling of the valleys to make the ground level

so that Israel can walk in safety under the glory of God.

And the forests and every fragrant tree will provide shade

for Israel at the command of God;

for God will guide Israel in joy by the light of his glory

with his mercy and integrity.

The oppression of Antiochus IV Epiphanes did end.  Centuries before that, exiles did return from Babylonia.  It does get better in time.  May we persevere in faith through good times and bad times.  Along the way we can learn profound spiritual truths from people who might seem like unlikely teachers.  May we be open to them and to God.

KRT

The Niebuhr source is his Intellectual Autobiography (pages 4-7 of it, to be precise) contained in Reinhold Niebuhr:  His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, edited by Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New York:  Macmillan, 1961).

http://blogatheologica.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/good-news-in-the-end/