Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

I might have passed this one by, if I had been in the mood, but I checked with my go-to Old Testament scholar, John C Holbert at patheos.com and got some good insight. This is another minor prophet, of debatable dating and unknown authorship. The Hebrew can be difficult, so even the words are questionable. But, what’s the feeling?

It starts with a lament, much like what we’ve been hearing from Jeremiah for weeks. God doesn’t seem to be listening. There’s violence going down. The wicked are everywhere. This could indicate the time of the first Babylonian exile, a time when puppet rulers were installed in the kingdom. In their hands, the Bible is meaningless. That is, someone from outside the culture can't be viewed as a legitimate keeper of the culture. This is not only a recurring theme of the Bible, it’s a recurring theme in the world. Who are your leaders today? Do you trust them with your nation’s laws, or the foundation for those laws?

Habakkuk doesn’t give us enough to sort out the politics, but it gives us something at the end of this passage that shows a shift in world history. It’s a shift from claiming a promised land and building a temple that houses your god, to living by faith. God is not answering him now, but he writes it in stone that he’ll stick with God anyway. Others may have said this throughout time, but the culture that preserved these words actually lived it out over the next several generations, and that created a culture that has survived the diaspora.

They later divided over what a messiah is, but St. Paul, a leader in that division, quoted that last half of the last verse in this passage in Rom 1:17, Gal 3:11 and Heb 10:38-39. Martin Luther used those verses to support his “justification by faith alone” and made a new division away from Roman Catholicism. The writer of Habakkuk probably has much simpler ideas of living the just and righteous life described in the Torah. Those ideas probably helped the exiled people keep some hope for a better future.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

We have another disputed epistle this week. Paul most likely wrote the 1st letter to the Thessalonians, but this 2nd one might have come much later, possibly after he died. One of the themes of the letter is dealing with people who are dying before the second coming. This is a critical time for Christianity. People have believed Jesus died for them, that he rose bodily, that he did all those miracles, but they are waiting to see something with their own eyes. They are waiting for a promise to be fulfilled.

Priests and leaders of that time can’t get away with claiming a new vision of Christ. They’ve put their money on Paul and trying to out-Paul Paul would probably not work. This is a situation that calls for forged letters. I don't mean to claim to know the mind of the person who wrote this. They may have had a fragment of something they believed to be from Paul and they crafted into this letter. We don't know.

When he was alive, Paul didn’t make clear what would happen to people who died before Jesus came back. Jesus didn’t help much either, he only said “some” in Matt 16:28, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” If this letter was indeed written near the end of the 1st century, almost everyone who had been alive at the alleged time of the crucifixion would be dead. Some facts are harder to explain away with theology than others.

Details of this will continue in a couple weeks.

Luke 19:1-10

We are approaching the end of the lectionary year, and the ministry is quite far along in this story. Stories of his miracles precede him and people climb trees to see him pass. In this case it’s a big time sinner. This one appears to be actually a tax collector, unlike the toll collector from last week. This story is much simpler, at least on the surface, but displays a similar problem as last week’s. Jesus is here to save sinners, which is great because we’re all sinners, but does that have to include a tax collector?

As a theme to the story, this is foreshadowing, as several stories have been throughout Luke. He’s going to Jerusalem, and some people will understand his message, and some won’t be happy about who he includes in his community. Some will have different ideas about what a messiah should do, and Jesus won’t measure up.

Less simple, we don’t know what Jesus anticipated here, or what the tax collector’s future actions will be. Did Jesus know the tax collector would repent if he came to dinner with him? We like to see repentance coming first, then forgiveness, even in our secular systems of justice. Was the tax collector planning on offering his money or did he do it to assuage the grumbling crowd? Jesus usually offers his healing to people on the margins. Does he see this man as one on the “margins” of respect from the community, even though he is certainly not marginal in terms of wealth?

Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate every word in a story since we live in a time when people write about what they ate for lunch or what their cat did on a daily basis. We are inundated with words. We have a whole class of radio called “talk”. But in the 1st century, it was expensive to write words and expect them to be copied and read. So the little fact that the man is “short” is probably not there just to explain why he needed to climb a tree. More likely, the author wants us to make something of that. Like maybe the man is “short” of character or of respect. Not being able to see and climbing a tree is something about not letting the crowd obscure his desire to connect with the divine, to reach that better place where he isn’t defined by his crappy job.

When Jesus sees him, we see the fulfillment of “if you try hard enough, you’ll get what you want.” I’m usually not for that type of moral of a story, but we still have the grumbling crowd, so we aren’t quite at a Hollywood ending here. The Jesus character here might be representing that higher calling that exists in that crowd, or in any crowd. Outwardly, we grumble when life isn’t fair. We think Jesus (or fate, or the captain, or whomever) should pick us because we gave food to the poor last week, or we performed our rituals. Instead he picks out the guy we all hate and has dinner with him. The outcome we will get when we include everyone in the community is uncertain. This story says, do it anyway.

There's a great poem, called the Paradoxical Commandments, by Kent M. Keith. It was put to music by The Roches

Isaiah 1:10-18

The word "sodomy" is so well known today, when it shows up in the Bible, it's easy to assume what it must mean. But you won't find that meaning. There are only a few verses that mention Sodom and they are about greed and injustice (Ezek 16:49 for example). I've read that the association to sex did not happen until the Hellenistic period, but I didn't check the source of that so I won't cite it.

The passage is pretty clear that it's time to quit doing sacrifices. It also offers some clear suggestions for what "good" means. Just one short verse of them unfortunately. If verses like that were all gathered in one place I doubt they would take up more than a page or two. So, just like every other day, we are left to figure out what “good” means. There's a brief discussion on that in the Glossary. I wish it were as simple as looking it up in a book, or praying. I'm afraid it's something you have work at every day and that you can expect to get wrong pretty often. Note here is says to “learn” and “seek”. Learning often involves failure and seeking is not always getting there.