This is my sermon for August 31, 2025, the Twelfth Sunday after Penetecost, Proper 17, Year C. We are using Wilda Gafneys’ A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, and the readings were Obadiah 1:1-4, 10-15; Psalm 7:8-11; James 4:5-11; and Luke 17:1-4.
This week, as I read and listened to the news, including the most recent attack on a hospital in Gaza and the school shooting at the church in Minnesota, I was once again struck by how violent we can be when we believe we have been wronged. Perhaps I should say how “indiscriminately violent” we can become because more and more it seems that we have no qualms about brutalizing and killing people who had absolutely nothing to do with the ways in which we feel wrong or have been harmed. It is as if our anger, our sense of betrayal, gives us free reign to enter into a seemingly endless cycle of violence and retribution that will do little, if anything, to heal our hurt, to cure the brokenness. Often, this seems to be done without compunction, with no sense that we could one day be on the receiving end of this kind of violence. But Scripture tells us otherwise.
The first lesson today, in which this message is pretty clearly stated, is one that we likely have never heard preached in church before. The prophesy of Obadiah, the shortest book in the Hebrew Scriptures, is not included in the Revised Common Lectionary, which is the custom in the Episcopal Church. We get it today because we are using Dr. Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. And that is both a little bit of a preacher’s curse, but it is also a gift, because one of the gifts of reading, hearing, and reflecting on the lessons using Gafney’s lectionary the past few years is that it opens our hearts and minds to read, hear, and understand Scripture a bit differently than the customary lectionary. The different combinations of readings, even without the differences in her translation, point to themes and to messages, it makes connections that are only possible when you read this group of lessons together. This helps us to better understand the story of God’s work in the world, God’s presence with us, and our part in that story.
To set a bit of context: The name Obadiah means slave or servant of the Lord and the entire book – all 21 verses of it – is a vision. We don’t know much about the book or the person who wrote it, but it is thought to have been written in the period of time at the end of the Babylonian exile and the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem, so perhaps about 2500 years ago. It references generational conflict between the descendants of Jacob and Esau. The problem is a rupture in the family that gives rise to horrific behavior. It happens in a family, all descendants of Jacob and Esau, though they don’t necessarily remember their family ties because geographical distance and also because it’s generation after generation, so the ties are less obvious. It ends with a fairly ominous reminder that what goes around comes around, to use a familiar phrase. It is a timely lesson. And one for which Dr. Gafney says, “There is no happy ending for this passage and it should not be given one.” That raises the question, “So where’s the hope?”
The obvious answer for a person of faith is that our hope is in God. And we believe that, don’t we? We claim Christian identity because we believe in Jesus. We pray together every Sunday that we believe in God, the Trinity. We pray, as it says in today’s psalm, for the end of the “wickedness of the wicked” but do we really believe that the end of the wickedness of the world will come about simply through our prayer? Or do we know, as has been popping up all over the place on social media, that prayer in these times is not enough, and we must act differently if we want to live in a world in which people are treated differently? Some of the good news is that our faith invites us to pray and to act. Perhaps it is more accurate to say to pray for the wisdom and courage to act. Is there hope to be found in living faith as a verb, not a noun?
Today’s readings, no matter how troublesome they start out, point to the answer to that question as being a resounding,” Yes!” There is hope in living faith as a verb and not as a noun. There is a lot of action described in these readings, even when the action is in the form of a “you should not have” as we read in Obadiah. When we look at the psalm, when we look at James, and when we look at the Gospel, there is the overtly physical action of flapping lips; of entering the gate; of cleansing hands; of lamenting and weeping, which is as fully an embodied expression of grief as I have ever seen; of laughing, although in this case it is about not letting it be at someone else’s expense. And then there are of the less overtly physical acts of praying, opposing the devil, of forgiving those who cause us harm, and of trusting that God will see that all things our made right. Faithful living is not something that just happens to us, it happens because we choose to live our lives in ways that are consistent with God’s will and God’s dream for the world. And that includes knowing and living the knowledge that, whether the wrong done to us is real or imagined, more objectively factual or seen through a particular political or cultural lens, wrong done to us does not justify wrongful behavior on our part. It doesn’t.
A few times in the past couple of months I’ve come across this quote: “Now is not the time to accept the things we cannot change but to change the things we cannot accept.” Now I’ve seen this mostly in response to actions of the current administration but it certainly applies to more than that, doesn’t it? If we cannot accept as people of Christ that the way others are treated, the way things are happening or are structured in this world, then by our faith we should be acting in ways that change that. This statement about changing the things we cannot accept is a hopeful statement. It’s a reminder that that we are disciples of the Incarnate God and that we are called, and we are supported and nudged – and in my case, as you may have heard me say, we are victim to the holy 2×4. We are nudged and guided by the Holy Spirit to live our faith out in the world each and every day.
We follow Jesus, the one who showed us how to love as we are loved and who promised us that his Spirit would remain with us to guide, nudge, and otherwise convince us to live our faith. Jesus also told us and showed us that God’s family is not just those we know or who look like us or act like us or talk like us or worship like us or love like us or whose actions have an immediate and direct impact on our lives. God’s family is all people for all time and, even though we can’t know when and we may not understand how, we will be held accountable for the things we have done, as well as the things we have left undone.
Now, that might not sound like a hopeful statement, but I’d argue that it is. Each of us has the freedom to make the kinds of choices that will make a positive difference in the world now and for the future. We get to choose the right path, even if not always the easy path, knowing that with God’s help we can do it, we can be a part of the change. And we also know that we don’t have to be perfect. God will forgive us. God will forgive our missteps and even our deliberate misbehaviors, if we trust enough to repent and seek forgiveness. As I said over and over during the many months of Covid, God has us. God has our backs. We just need to believe that God is with us. We need to believe Jesus’ promise that his Spirit will be with us, to guide us, to nudge, to lead us. In that way, we get to be a part of ending the cycle of violence that, for some reason, we have such trouble stepping away from. We get to be beacons of hope for ourselves and for the world. And we get to say, as we say in our baptism and in other sacred rites in the church, “we will, with God’s help.”