This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday March 14, 2010, the 4th Sunday in Lent.
Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
The story of the Prodigal Son, who doesn’t like the story of the Prodigal Son?
Well, I guess every “older brother” that ever walked the face of the earth. Every honest, hard working, home bodied, insufferable, stick-in-the-mud sibling that ever walked the face of the earth probably doesn’t like the story of the Prodigal Son. Well, today it seems that I am putting him on the spot for being such an unbearable over-wound fogey; but at least he will have company.
Let’s begin where the story begins, with a man who had two sons. In the beginning of the passage, all we learn about the man is that he is a patriarch of a clan with some land to call his own. He is blessed, as would be any father with two sons. Granted, in this day and time seven sons is a greater blessing, but he’s got two and that’s good indeed. In a way, it’s like Miss America, should the older son not be able to fulfill his obligations the younger will be able to take over. Soon, we discover that this patriarch is what the listeners to this story would call a patsy, but that comes later.
The younger son is the one we all know more about from this story. He must have been a real piece of work. “Oh Daddy, I wish you were dead so that I may have my share of you now.” Yeah, now that’s love. “Oh Daddy, I don’t want anything to do with the family business. I want to make my way in the world and for that I’ll need a third of all that’s yours to be mine, now.”
As repulsive as it sounds to us, in the time Jesus was telling this story it was particularly horrible. In an era where “Honor thy Father” was one of the “Heavy Ten” and not the title of a made for TV organized crime movie; in a culture where family and community always took precedence over the individual; the younger son’s request was insolent.
Now it wasn’t unusual for a father to distribute his property before his death, the marriage of a son was a common reason to expedite the inheritance, but for the younger son to demand an early distribution so that he could make his way in the world is disrespectful, rebellious, and foolish.
None of this would have escaped the listener when Jesus told this story.
So now we return to the Father. Surely the Father is blessed, and from the hundreds of times we have heard, read, and contemplated this story, we know him as the generous Father of grace, peace, and mercy. He is love personified. But this is not necessarily how Jesus’ listeners would have heard this story.
In the first century context, to those Jesus originally shared this story, the Father is the biggest failure in the whole tale! First of all, he raised a son who was so impertinent toward his family that he dared ask for his share of the family fortune just so that he could get out of the house and away from the farm. To make matters worse, the Father agrees to his son’s disrespectful request.
The Father further disrespects himself by waiting for the return of his son. Scripture doesn’t elaborate on this point, but according to our reading the Father sees his son returning while he was still far off. Obviously, the father was watching and waiting for the return of his disobedient spawn.
Establishing that the father not only waited but then saw the son coming home, the Father, the patriarch of this small but blessed clan, ran to meet the son who dishonored him. Patriarchs never ran anywhere. In the mafia movie “Goodfellas,” Ray Liota’s character speaks of the head of the family saying, “Paulie never ran anywhere. He didn’t have to.” This mentality was the norm for the fathers of Jesus’ day.
Then, just to put the icing on the cake, the father has the fatted calf butchered so that there can be a party to celebrate the sorry brother’s return. The calf that could have been used to honor the Lord at a religious festival is used to hail the irresponsible son’s return. Then to put the decorative flowers and the “Welcome Home” on the icing on the cake; the older brother is so angry that he refuses to enter the house so the father had to come out and begin to plead with him. The first century listener would have revoked the father’s man-card on the spot.
While this is not what we hear listening to this story, this would not have escaped the listener who heard Jesus tell this story.
While we’re on the subject of the older brother; he’s a piece of work himself, but not without reason. To suit his younger brother, Dad liquidates one-third of the estate. That obviously left the family in a cash crunch. Then when the younger brother comes home, it is entirely possible that little brother can be set up with another share of the estate. Doing the math, it is possible that the gadfly brother could walk away with over half of the father’s wealth.[1] I don’t think any of us would be any less upset than the older brother.
Yes, the Father will affirm that the property will not be split again. The father tells his older son “all that is mine is yours,” but he sure didn’t know that while he’s standing outside.
Still, reason or not, he lets his anger show disrespect to his father by hanging out under the olive tree hoping the whole thing will just go away. The culturally foolish father comes out and is raked over the coals by his devoted yet now disrespectful son. “You never did this for me. I worked my fingers to the bone for years, for you, and did I get any thanks? No, you gave this son of yours, notice it’s not my brother, but your son, gave this son of yours the fatted calf and I never got a pony, er… party.” Sure in the end the younger brother’s life in the wilderness turned out to be a punishment, but it’s the lack of discipline in the beginning of the story that the older brother loathes.
It may be hard for us to imagine, but the older brother might have been the most sympathetic character to the listeners of the story in Jesus’ day. He was the only one who is devoted to the traditional values of family and community, but you can’t get away from this story without thinking he needs to get off of his pity pot.
The “traditional values” part of this would not have escaped the listener when Jesus told this story. The un-sympathetic character portion might have.
Henri Nouwen, one of the great spiritual writers of the twentieth century, commented on the “lostness” of both sons in this story.
He wrote, “Did you ever notice how lost you are when you are resentful? It’s a very deep lostness. The younger son gets lost in a much more spectacular way—giving in to his lust and his greed, using women, playing poker, and losing his money. His wrongdoing is very clear-cut. He knows it and everybody else does, too. Because of it he can come back, and he can be forgiven. The problem with resentment is that it is not so clear-cut: It’s not spectacular. And it is not overt, and it can be covered by the appearance of a holy life. Resentment is so pernicious because it sits very deep in you, in your heart, in your bones, and in your flesh, and often you don’t even know it is there. You think you’re so good. But in fact you are lost in a very profound way.”[2]
I have colleagues that call this gospel “Luke and the Losers.” This story is a fine example of why. Jesus has a habit of turning failures into heroes in his stories, turning failure into victory. Jesus picked losers such as tax collectors to be his disciples and partied with people who everyone in polite and pious society would have considered to be failures on many, many of levels.
He didn’t seem to mind being pictured as a failure because he knew that was the only way that folks everyone else considered failures could come to him. This story was designed to invite self-righteous Pharisees and scribes to see how they had become the older brother, failing to experience the joy and celebration that God does when wayward sinners come home. But it is also designed to remind us all of the embarrassing lengths to which God, in the person of Jesus, would go to make that homecoming a reality.[3]
There are a lot of tensions in this story: grace over justice, disrespect over honor, and foolishness over traditional values. As this story invited the Pharisees to see how they have become the older brother, these tensions force us to examine the way we handle tensions in our own lives. They force us to examine how we have become both brothers in one way or another.
The final tension we have to explore is that the Father goes to each son. The father joyfully welcomes the irresponsible brother when he returns home from the physical wilderness. Then the father joyfully welcomes the responsible brother as he stands in his virtual wilderness. Foolish as this seems, it is the mark of the generous and loving father we have come to associate with the Lord our God. This is the sign and seal of God’s gracious love for us. This is the way our Lord turns what the world considers failure into victory.
Lent reminds us that the story of Jesus inevitably moves toward the cross, the ultimate picture of failure and disgrace. Jesus was willing to risk the embarrassment of being stripped, beaten and hanged naked to die and to be held up as a failure for the whole world to see on that Friday. It is through that failure that God chooses to save the world.[4]
[1] Traditionally, the younger of two sons could inherit one-third of the father’s wealth. According to homileticsonline.com, id=23050 the younger son could have left the first time with only 11% of his inheritance, but if he had been restored to the estate, he could have eventually taken up to 40% of the father’s estate. According to homileticsonline.com, id=40793 he could have taken one third of the father’s estate and then one-third again, or up to 56% of the original split. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
[2] Henri Nouwen, From Fear to Love: Lenten Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, (Fenton, Missouri: Creative Communications for the Parish, 1998), 13-14.
[3] Post Your Failure, HomileticsOnline.com, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93040516, retrieved February 15, 2010.
[4] Post Your Failure, HomileticsOnline.com, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93040516, retrieved February 15, 2010.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Sunday, March 07, 2010
re-Turn
This sermon was heard on Sunday March 7, 2010, the 3rd Sunday in Lent.
Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
A good friend of mine strongly believes that whenever we study scripture, new things open to us that had escaped us in the past. He never speculates why, I figure there are many reasons. Maybe sometimes there is something else in the passage that caught our eye in the past, so there is still a morsel on the bone waiting to be devoured when we read it again. Maybe we think we understand it, but then something happens which makes us reconsider our earlier reading. Maybe it’s something that just seemed so obvious in the past that there is new meaning in the present.
Well, I had one of those epiphanies over our gospel reading.
Verse five reads, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Suddenly I’m reading this and wondering just what in the world that means, “Just as they did.” In reading other translations, this distinction isn’t as obvious. It’s tempting to go with a simpler translation, treating the issue like an ostrich with its head in the sand, and ignoring it; but that’s not what we’re called to do. So what does it mean?
Let’s begin with looking at the Galileans and the eighteen killed at Siloam and see what’s so special about them. We come to this question at a disadvantage; because these stories don’t exist anywhere else in scripture. These events in Luke’s narrative are described nowhere else. The only things we know about these events is what we can gauge from Luke’s description and a little background knowledge.
The Galileans were killed with their sacrifices. While Luke’s gospel is silent on this issue, the others speak of Jesus cleansing the temple, toppling the tables of the money changers, and scattering the livestock. The reason for the money changers and the livestock at the temple was to provide animals for sacrifice and a way to purchase them. It would have been very difficult for anyone to bring livestock flawless and worthy of sacrifice from home to the temple, so enterprising entrepreneurs set up a market so that sacrifices could be purchased once people reached the temple.
This knowledge allows us to be quite certain that the blood of the Galileans that was spilled and mingled with their sacrifices did not take place in Jerusalem’s countryside; it took place at the temple. So the Galileans are more than simple victims of Pilate’s brutality. They are martyrs to the petty anger of a despot in the courtyard of the temple, in the front of the holiest place in Judaism.
So who were the eighteen killed at Siloam? The tower of Siloam was most probably at a corner of the great wall of Jerusalem by the pool of Siloam. It is to this pool that Jesus will send the blind man of John 9 to wash after the Lord restores his sight.
There is nothing particularly special about this pool. There is nothing particularly special about a tower falling. There is something particularly horrible about the death of eighteen people at this pool when the tower falls, but it certainly isn’t the same sort of death faced by the martyrs from Galilee. Perhaps they were doing their ritual cleansing; preparing to enter the temple, but that would be speculation.
On one hand we have the victims of a brutal dictator and on the other victims of a construction accident. What in the world is the connection between these two? Why is Jesus using these two examples warning us that we may perish “just as they did”?
Surely the greatest truth is that these victims are all sinful people, exactly like us. They were taking care of business. They were going to church, taking a bath, cleaning the house, dropping off the kids at practice. They were doing what made their lives not so different from ours. One group died while approaching the temple to worship the Lord becoming religious and political martyrs. The others were victims of an engineering failure as horrid as the I-35 bridge collapse in the twin cities a few years ago. It seems that the only thing that connects them is their humanity, their status as the Children of Adam.
This is one thing that makes us different from them. We too are the Children of Adam, and we are the Children of Christ. We have an opportunity these victims did not have, we can share in a life in Christ, a life in the resurrection that they could not.
Christ calls us to participate in His holy work, the work of reconciliation of all creation. We are called to prepare our very beings through confession. Bending our selves to the ways of the Lord we become able to bear fruit through the Lord our God. Joyfully, the parable that follows helps reveal truth vital to our ability to bear good fruit, the fruit of the Spirit.
We read of a landowner who had a fig tree planted in his vineyard. There are some things that we need to remember about these ancient landowners. They were very rich men. They were men with the power to do as they wished with their land and their people. This isn’t so different from rich men in every time and place.
Too, many landowners were absent from their lands much of the year. These farms tended to be kept by lease holders, share croppers of a sort. This is not so different from what we know in our age of corporately owned farms. Perhaps the only difference in the last 2,000 years is the speed of communication and the quality of information between the farmer and the landowner.
Landowners are the Lords of the Manor and Lords of the Lands. Their whims could move worlds, their fancies could change lives. Their eyes on the bottom line can move jobs overseas and their accounting can ruin the retirement funds for thousands of workers.
There is a hired gardener in this story too. The gardener is like the lessee or the share cropper. This is the one who tends the vines and the trees. This is the one who knows the soils and the plants and cares for all of the matters of the Master’s land. Again, this person is not so different from many who work the land in every time and place.
If the gardener seems like a simple person, it is only because the wisdom this person carries is so old and without nonsense that all pretense has washed away and all that remains is plain and simple truth. These basic truths haven’t changed in 2,000 years, but there is an even deeper understanding of the truth that comes with time and revelation.
These are the working farmers. These are the folks who tend the land. Their whims can’t move a dry pea across the hard ground; but by their work, what to some looks like arid land can bear great fruit. These are the people who carry the torch and till the land. These are the people who bring in the crop and present it to the landowner.
Erich Auerbach, a German Jewish scholar who immigrated from Germany to Turkey and then the United States before World War II wrote, “God’s grace is infinite, but so also is God’s justice, and one does not negate the other.”[1] The Lord God Almighty will come as the landowner to judge the fruit of our labor. Should our lives not bear fruit, then God’s judgment will be upon us.
In the same hand comes the Lord God Almighty tends and sustains us as the farmer tills the land. The same Lord will tend the soil and provide the best possible conditions for us to thrive. And as in the end of this parable, this graceful farmer also reminds us that judgment is upon us. If we bear no fruit, we will be cut down and our only use will be as kindling for the fire.
It’s not so much a question of whether or not we will be judged, because we will be judged. The question is how we will be judged by the Lord our God; and as we see through this reading we will be judged in the same way as the fig tree, by the fruit we bear, in our case the fruit of the Spirit. As the tree, to be able to produce good fruit, we must be willing to be humbled by our lord. The gardener works hard to prepare the soil around the tree, but the tree will have to bear the indignity, if you will, of being prepared.
The tree will have the soil around the roots prepared. This will involve shovel and spade. There will be digging around the tender roots of what makes us what we are to make it so we can grow. This digging will be too close for comfort. There is bound to be some times when the shovel will nick a root or worse, causing what we might think an irreparable scar. Still, the gardener knows how to work the soil. The gardener knows how to prepare us to get the best results.
Then the gardener will give us the best food so that we may provide the best fruit. This sounds wonderful when we read it like this, “the best food…” This is when we get to remember that in this parable the best food is manure. Yes, in order to provide the best fruit we have to be humble enough to be covered in the part of beef that’s not for dinner. We want to receive the best of all things from the Lord, we hear of the feast at the table of God; and in this case the best of what we can receive what comes from beyond the hindquarters of livestock.
In the words of the German worship and liturgy author Rudolf Peil: “The gospels that prepare for Lent indicate the springtime labor that must be done in the vineyard of the soul. The soul must be harrowed by penance and contrition in order that the divine seed of the holy season of Lent may bring forth an abundant harvest.”[2]
In this Lenten season, we travel with Jesus from the countryside to the temple to the cross and to new life. Only by this special revelation, only in the words and works of the Christ are we able to repent in ways the victims of Luke’s tragedies only prayed to know. Only in the words and works of Christ can we repent in ways that the world around us seeks, wishes, and needs to know. Only by Christ in this life and in the life to come do we know eternal life.
This repentance, spoken of so gloriously in the words of the prophet Isaiah, made real in the person and work of Jesus Christ, this repentance turns us to be able to bear good fruit. Yet it is not enough that we turn once and forever to the word of God written, proclaimed, and incarnate. As my friend pointed out, the Word of God is made new everyday. Our Redeemer lives and His revelation is not dead either. So let us not simply turn to God, let us return again and again to the signs and sacraments of our faith in Christ everlasting.
Other Resource:
“Feasting on the Word, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.” Edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Year C, Volume 2. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009, pages 92-97.
[1] Auerbach, Erich, “Dante, Poet of the Secular World.” Translated by Ralph Manheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
[2] Peil, Rudolf, “A Handbook of the Liturgy.” Translated by H. E. Winstone. New York: The Crossroad/Continuum Publishing Company with permission of Herder and Herder, 1960.
Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
A good friend of mine strongly believes that whenever we study scripture, new things open to us that had escaped us in the past. He never speculates why, I figure there are many reasons. Maybe sometimes there is something else in the passage that caught our eye in the past, so there is still a morsel on the bone waiting to be devoured when we read it again. Maybe we think we understand it, but then something happens which makes us reconsider our earlier reading. Maybe it’s something that just seemed so obvious in the past that there is new meaning in the present.
Well, I had one of those epiphanies over our gospel reading.
Verse five reads, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Suddenly I’m reading this and wondering just what in the world that means, “Just as they did.” In reading other translations, this distinction isn’t as obvious. It’s tempting to go with a simpler translation, treating the issue like an ostrich with its head in the sand, and ignoring it; but that’s not what we’re called to do. So what does it mean?
Let’s begin with looking at the Galileans and the eighteen killed at Siloam and see what’s so special about them. We come to this question at a disadvantage; because these stories don’t exist anywhere else in scripture. These events in Luke’s narrative are described nowhere else. The only things we know about these events is what we can gauge from Luke’s description and a little background knowledge.
The Galileans were killed with their sacrifices. While Luke’s gospel is silent on this issue, the others speak of Jesus cleansing the temple, toppling the tables of the money changers, and scattering the livestock. The reason for the money changers and the livestock at the temple was to provide animals for sacrifice and a way to purchase them. It would have been very difficult for anyone to bring livestock flawless and worthy of sacrifice from home to the temple, so enterprising entrepreneurs set up a market so that sacrifices could be purchased once people reached the temple.
This knowledge allows us to be quite certain that the blood of the Galileans that was spilled and mingled with their sacrifices did not take place in Jerusalem’s countryside; it took place at the temple. So the Galileans are more than simple victims of Pilate’s brutality. They are martyrs to the petty anger of a despot in the courtyard of the temple, in the front of the holiest place in Judaism.
So who were the eighteen killed at Siloam? The tower of Siloam was most probably at a corner of the great wall of Jerusalem by the pool of Siloam. It is to this pool that Jesus will send the blind man of John 9 to wash after the Lord restores his sight.
There is nothing particularly special about this pool. There is nothing particularly special about a tower falling. There is something particularly horrible about the death of eighteen people at this pool when the tower falls, but it certainly isn’t the same sort of death faced by the martyrs from Galilee. Perhaps they were doing their ritual cleansing; preparing to enter the temple, but that would be speculation.
On one hand we have the victims of a brutal dictator and on the other victims of a construction accident. What in the world is the connection between these two? Why is Jesus using these two examples warning us that we may perish “just as they did”?
Surely the greatest truth is that these victims are all sinful people, exactly like us. They were taking care of business. They were going to church, taking a bath, cleaning the house, dropping off the kids at practice. They were doing what made their lives not so different from ours. One group died while approaching the temple to worship the Lord becoming religious and political martyrs. The others were victims of an engineering failure as horrid as the I-35 bridge collapse in the twin cities a few years ago. It seems that the only thing that connects them is their humanity, their status as the Children of Adam.
This is one thing that makes us different from them. We too are the Children of Adam, and we are the Children of Christ. We have an opportunity these victims did not have, we can share in a life in Christ, a life in the resurrection that they could not.
Christ calls us to participate in His holy work, the work of reconciliation of all creation. We are called to prepare our very beings through confession. Bending our selves to the ways of the Lord we become able to bear fruit through the Lord our God. Joyfully, the parable that follows helps reveal truth vital to our ability to bear good fruit, the fruit of the Spirit.
We read of a landowner who had a fig tree planted in his vineyard. There are some things that we need to remember about these ancient landowners. They were very rich men. They were men with the power to do as they wished with their land and their people. This isn’t so different from rich men in every time and place.
Too, many landowners were absent from their lands much of the year. These farms tended to be kept by lease holders, share croppers of a sort. This is not so different from what we know in our age of corporately owned farms. Perhaps the only difference in the last 2,000 years is the speed of communication and the quality of information between the farmer and the landowner.
Landowners are the Lords of the Manor and Lords of the Lands. Their whims could move worlds, their fancies could change lives. Their eyes on the bottom line can move jobs overseas and their accounting can ruin the retirement funds for thousands of workers.
There is a hired gardener in this story too. The gardener is like the lessee or the share cropper. This is the one who tends the vines and the trees. This is the one who knows the soils and the plants and cares for all of the matters of the Master’s land. Again, this person is not so different from many who work the land in every time and place.
If the gardener seems like a simple person, it is only because the wisdom this person carries is so old and without nonsense that all pretense has washed away and all that remains is plain and simple truth. These basic truths haven’t changed in 2,000 years, but there is an even deeper understanding of the truth that comes with time and revelation.
These are the working farmers. These are the folks who tend the land. Their whims can’t move a dry pea across the hard ground; but by their work, what to some looks like arid land can bear great fruit. These are the people who carry the torch and till the land. These are the people who bring in the crop and present it to the landowner.
Erich Auerbach, a German Jewish scholar who immigrated from Germany to Turkey and then the United States before World War II wrote, “God’s grace is infinite, but so also is God’s justice, and one does not negate the other.”[1] The Lord God Almighty will come as the landowner to judge the fruit of our labor. Should our lives not bear fruit, then God’s judgment will be upon us.
In the same hand comes the Lord God Almighty tends and sustains us as the farmer tills the land. The same Lord will tend the soil and provide the best possible conditions for us to thrive. And as in the end of this parable, this graceful farmer also reminds us that judgment is upon us. If we bear no fruit, we will be cut down and our only use will be as kindling for the fire.
It’s not so much a question of whether or not we will be judged, because we will be judged. The question is how we will be judged by the Lord our God; and as we see through this reading we will be judged in the same way as the fig tree, by the fruit we bear, in our case the fruit of the Spirit. As the tree, to be able to produce good fruit, we must be willing to be humbled by our lord. The gardener works hard to prepare the soil around the tree, but the tree will have to bear the indignity, if you will, of being prepared.
The tree will have the soil around the roots prepared. This will involve shovel and spade. There will be digging around the tender roots of what makes us what we are to make it so we can grow. This digging will be too close for comfort. There is bound to be some times when the shovel will nick a root or worse, causing what we might think an irreparable scar. Still, the gardener knows how to work the soil. The gardener knows how to prepare us to get the best results.
Then the gardener will give us the best food so that we may provide the best fruit. This sounds wonderful when we read it like this, “the best food…” This is when we get to remember that in this parable the best food is manure. Yes, in order to provide the best fruit we have to be humble enough to be covered in the part of beef that’s not for dinner. We want to receive the best of all things from the Lord, we hear of the feast at the table of God; and in this case the best of what we can receive what comes from beyond the hindquarters of livestock.
In the words of the German worship and liturgy author Rudolf Peil: “The gospels that prepare for Lent indicate the springtime labor that must be done in the vineyard of the soul. The soul must be harrowed by penance and contrition in order that the divine seed of the holy season of Lent may bring forth an abundant harvest.”[2]
In this Lenten season, we travel with Jesus from the countryside to the temple to the cross and to new life. Only by this special revelation, only in the words and works of the Christ are we able to repent in ways the victims of Luke’s tragedies only prayed to know. Only in the words and works of Christ can we repent in ways that the world around us seeks, wishes, and needs to know. Only by Christ in this life and in the life to come do we know eternal life.
This repentance, spoken of so gloriously in the words of the prophet Isaiah, made real in the person and work of Jesus Christ, this repentance turns us to be able to bear good fruit. Yet it is not enough that we turn once and forever to the word of God written, proclaimed, and incarnate. As my friend pointed out, the Word of God is made new everyday. Our Redeemer lives and His revelation is not dead either. So let us not simply turn to God, let us return again and again to the signs and sacraments of our faith in Christ everlasting.
Other Resource:
“Feasting on the Word, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.” Edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Year C, Volume 2. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009, pages 92-97.
[1] Auerbach, Erich, “Dante, Poet of the Secular World.” Translated by Ralph Manheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
[2] Peil, Rudolf, “A Handbook of the Liturgy.” Translated by H. E. Winstone. New York: The Crossroad/Continuum Publishing Company with permission of Herder and Herder, 1960.
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