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Friday, 30 May 2008
Mining the minors
This week I'm preaching on Obadiah. A couple of weeks ago I dabbled in Hosea. Am I enjoying it? Not really but looking at why it's because it's making me work HARD. Basic message of lots of the minors. God's going to smite you unless you repent and in Hosea's case, God's going to smite you whether you repent or not. It's not cheery stuff.
Given my predisposition though to doom and gloom I am starting to think they're on my wave length. God does love us which is fab but it is a love of great expectation. This weeks jaunt into Obadiah looks at a people still tied up with familial fight between Jacob and Esau and a desire to win at all costs. Esau's descendants will watch as their brother's people suffer because it feeds their hunger to win an argument and be vindicated. I can relate on a personal level I love winning arguments, but really this story is about corporate feeling. This is about how a people are acting. All my time in church doesn't prepare me for this story because church, as we all know, was only invented for our own personal salvation. Church is to develop our individual relationship/walk with a loved up messiah. All this talk then in Obadiah of a nation being out of kilter with God we put in the back of the mental filing cabinet and label it out of date.
Corporate sin though is still mega bucks. Lots of the minors are drawing our attention to this. It matters how we act as a body of people. It matters what our corporate identity looks like and what the values and beliefs are that make up that identity. This value base is what's going to shape how we act.
Who are my people then? Will I describe myself as English? Will Baptists be a people I own? It's important. Humans need a sense of who we are to be healthy. We also need to own it and take responsibility before God for it. God will call us to account for who we collectively seek to be. I'm not going to get away with blaming Gordon Brown when it comes down to it, I can't write off the slavery debate as irrelevant just because I don't feel personally responsible for what happened and what continues to happen. It involves my people so I'm culpable and responsible.
Lets leave it with Obadiah:
You should not march through the gates of my people
in the day of their disaster,
nor look down on them in their calamity
in the day of their disaster,
nor sieze their wealth
in the day of their disaster.
You should not wait at the crossroads
to cut down their fugitives,
nor hand over their survivors
in the day of their trouble.
The day of the Lord is near
for all nations.
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Comments
Since you've just been preaching on Hosea:
I've been looking for a while (for "a while" read "a few months"; it's years since I last looked at Hosea and I had another go a few months ago) for a decent feminist interpretation of Hosea. All the commentary I looked at seemed to be rooted in sexist assumptions about Gomer's character (and after all, it's not as if the Bible says much about her). They also seemed to impose a fairly standard OT prophet narrative on the book, whereas to me it seems to be more about God's nature than Israel's waywardness.
Any suggestions? I have wondered about reading Yvonne Sherwood's "The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea's Marriage in Literary-Theoretical Perspective" which, from what little abstract I could find at least divided the structure of the book up more plausibly than most other commentators. But the title of the book is so dry that I haven't purchased it yet from fear of boredom.
Thanks!
Posted by: tim f | Sunday, 01 June 2008