Psalm 26: 1-12 (links validated 7/18/23)
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Sermon Starters (Proper 16A)(2023)
In this sermon commentary I mentioned that if claiming total sinlessness for ourselves represents an extreme position, the opposite extreme is also not helpful when we try to consign even the best of ourselves to the scrap heap of spiritual worthlessness. In his satirical and sometimes cynical novel The Blood of the Lamb, Peter DeVries lampoons this darker end of the Calvinist theological spectrum by talking about how on Sunday afternoons in his boyhood home, his father and some of the spiritual leaders of his Reformed church would have a kind of competition to see who could outdo whom in the chalking up of even their best works as rotten, stinking “filthy rags” that not only do not please Almighty God, maybe they even make God nauseous. In a bitingly wry aside, DeVries’s narrator in the novel then observes, “This being what we thought of virtue, you can but imagine what we thought of vice.”God's Vindication (gwh)
Speaking of vindication, of upholding a just cause, that reminds me of the following story, about the Métis of Ste. Madeleine, Manitoba, which you may have watched on a recent T.V. newscast. In the third weekend of July every year since 1990, Red River Métis gather in a field 340 kilometres west of Winnipeg as cattle graze around them. Thirty-five Métis families used to live in a village here. They had a church and a school and homes until the government burned it all to the ground in 1938 to make way for a community pasture where area farmers could leave their cattle to feed off the land. “I don’t think many Manitobans or even Canadians know this story where cattle were more precious than human beings and the Métis people,” says Manitoba Métis Federation president David Chartrand. All that remains now is the community’s cemetery, where village founders and many of their descendants are laid to rest. Elder Verna DeMontigny’s family is here. She has her own plot set aside for when the time comes. But she and others hope to live here someday—not just be buried here. The federation is in talks with the Manitoba government to get the Crown land back from the cattle that displaced them...
Resources from 2020 to 2022
Sermon Starters (Proper 17A)(2020)
For the 1999 edition of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, illustrator Barry Moser sketched two portraits of David. The first is of the young David, the “getting ready to slay Goliath” David. He’s young, brash. The eyes say it all. He has his whole life ahead of him and he’s confident it’s going to be a good life. There is a little of the Dirty Harry “Go ahead, make my day” look to him. He’s ready to take on Goliath and all takers while he’s at it. The second Moser portrait flashes forward quite a few years. This is King David, the David who is old and restless enough that he’s about to make the mistake of his life with a neighbor woman named Bathsheba. Again, the eyes say it all. They are downcast, not defiant. They are weary (insofar as we can see them at all) not energetic. The spring has gone out of his step and in the springtime when the kings go out to make war, he stays back in Jerusalem now. Battles are for younger folks, not him anymore. That confident and perhaps cocky young boy who used to slay bears and lions and giants and who used to be really good at outfoxing old King Saul . . . he’s just a memory...Integrity and Innocence
Four boys found $13,000 in a brown paper bag on a New York street. Three of the boys wanted to divide the money and keep it. The fourth one persuaded them that the honest thing to do was to inform the police. The police took the money, but the boys’ action was widely publicized. In no time at all, a dozen claimants showed up to state that the money was theirs. It’s amazing how many people lose $13,000 in a brown paper bag! After a period of time had elapsed, the case was brought before the court and the boys were called in. The judge listened to all the claimants, then praised the boys’ honesty and awarded the money to them. Faced with a conflict of right or wrong, they had made the right choice...