27 March 2012

Psalm 121, 122, 123; Exod. 5:1-6:1; 1 Cor. 14:20-33a,39-40; Mark 9:42-50

Pharaoh asks good questions.  He will get some answers to those questions but do those answers truly matter to man who believes himself to be a god?  He asks the right questions but he isn’t interested in the answers.  If Moses thought this was going to be quick, simple and painless he didn’t get what he bargained for.  Pharaoh’s reaction was to snub his nose at the Lord and exert his own power over these people, making their lives worse by far.  Moses had promised the Lord had heard their cry and seen their affliction and was prepared to deliver them.  Those words sounded like hollow lies now to everyone, including Moses.  Moses believes he knows best what should happen and what the Lord has done is evil.  He has much to learn.

The old standard was an eye for an eye, the lex talionis but here Jesus says it isn’t about what others do, it is about what you do.  Sin matters and we need to be ruthless about dealing with it in our own lives.  If I did that I would have relatively little time to spend thinking about other people’s sin against me or their sins in general.  Sin destroys the saltiness of Christians. We become tasteless to the world as we become more like the world.  As salt becomes tasteless it loses its value and may as well be cast away.  This passage tells us that the best way to become salty is to deal with our own sin and in doing so we won’t have as much need to condemn the world’s sin, our lives will reveal it without our words.  In the course of the plagues, God will reveal the distinction between His people and the Egyptians, and the distinction will be His lovingkindness towards His people, not anything in them.

I put back the verses omitted in the lectionary in the Corinthians reading.  They are difficult but that doesn’t give me license to omit them from the Bible.  Paul’s prohibition on women speaking is an absolute that he says is observed in all the churches.  The only question is whether this is cultural or not.  In my opinion such a practice is cultural but speaking is only one consideration, leadership and headship are different. 

Here Paul gives instruction for public worship.  It is funny that in our day people frequently quote verse 40, “all things should be done decently and in order” but only out of context.  Contextually Paul is speaking about prophecy and speaking in tongues in public worship.  Paul is concerned with the experience of unbelievers in public worship so he wants things done in an orderly fashion with the focus on the prophetic word rather than a free-for-all with tongues as the focus.  Worship needs to be comprehensible to unbelievers but it is not designed for them.  Would anyone today think in these terms when they design a “seeker-sensitive” worship?  We would never think of including tongues and several prophets in such a service but Paul expected that seekers might come to a service and therefore it needed to be orderly but with the gifts of the people of God being used.  Our witness is our lives but it also includes using our spiritual gifts to show distinctiveness in the body of Christ where all are valued and equally vital.

To you I lift up my eyes,
   O you who are enthroned in the heavens!
Behold, as the eyes of servants
   look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maidservant
   to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the LORD our God,
   till he has mercy upon us.