Bible Study at 11am

Bible Study at 11am
The Lessons Appointed for Use on
the Feast of St. Francis Sunday
Friar and Deacon, 1226
October 11th
• Job 39:1–18
• Luke 12:13-21
Preface of a Saint (3)
The Collect
Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may, for love of you, delight in your whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Old Testament
Job 39:1–18
"Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you observe the calving of the deer?
Can you number the months that they fulfil,
and do you know the time when they give birth,
when they crouch to give birth to their offspring,
and are delivered of their young?
Their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open;
they go forth, and do not return to them.
"Who has let the wild ass go free?
Who has loosed the bonds of the swift ass,
to which I have given the steppe for its home,
the salt land for its dwelling-place?
It scorns the tumult of the city;
it does not hear the shouts of the driver.
It ranges the mountains as its pasture,
and it searches after every green thing.
"Is the wild ox willing to serve you?
Will it spend the night at your crib?
Can you tie it in the furrow with ropes,
or will it harrow the valleys after you?
Will you depend on it because its strength is great,
and will you hand over your labour to it?
Do you have faith in it that it will return,
and bring your grain to your threshing-floor?
"The ostrich’s wings flap wildly,
though its pinions lack plumage.
For it leaves its eggs to the earth,
and lets them be warmed on the ground,
forgetting that a foot may crush them,
and that a wild animal may trample them.
It deals cruelly with its young, as if they were not its own;
though its labour should be in vain, yet it has no fear;
because God has made it forget wisdom,
and given it no share in understanding.
When it spreads its plumes aloft,
it laughs at the horse and its rider."
Commentary from Enter the Bible from Luther Seminary
SUMMARY
Chapter 39 presents a series of vignettes that show God’s loving care even for wild animals that are of no direct value to human beings. God takes great delight in the animals and provides them with the nourishment that they need.
ANALYSIS
In chapter 39, God speaks of a variety of wild animals: the mountain goat, the ostrich, the wild ox and the wild donkey, the hawk and eagle, and the war horse (though not technically ‘wild,’ it delights in human battle). With the exception of the horse, these creatures are outside the realm of human control and are of no use to human beings. God makes exactly that point in 39:9-12, a passage about the wild ox. Unlike their domestic cousins (cf. 1:3), the wild ox and the wild donkey will not serve Job; they will not work in Job’s fields or bring in the harvest. Neither will the other animals listed in the whirlwind speeches.
God’s speeches depict a created order that is radically non-anthropocentric (that is, not centered on human beings). They invite Job to a place of humility; he is just one among many creatures. But they also invite Job to wonder at the beauty of creation, as God describes with pride the places and creatures God has made. Job is the only passenger on this tour of the cosmos. So while he is not the center of the world, he does have a place in it, invited to delight in the world as God does.
While these speeches may not at first glance seem helpful as an answer to Job’s suffering, they do take his eyes off himself and expand his vision beyond his suffering to see that the world is a bigger place than he ever imagined. These speeches also answer Job’s curse on the day of his birth back in chapter 3. Job had cursed what God declared ‘good’ and he tried to undo creation, if only imaginatively. In the whirlwind speeches, creation is reestablished and life continues despite Job’s suffering and despite Job’s maledictions.
In these speeches, God also implies that there are limits to human understanding and control. Given that, one might be tempted to despair and dread about what the future might bring. In this chapter, however, God also assures us that we can trust our Creator. God loves the creation, and God will provide for the needs of all creatures. If even the baby mountain goat is watched and loved by God, then surely the same is true of human beings who are made in God’s own image. Jesus once spoke in a similar way about a God who has his eye on even the sparrow ( Luke 12:6-7).
The Gospel
Luke 12:13-21
Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Commentary on Luke 12:13-21 by Meda Stamper (Working Preacher)
The parable of the rich fool (or “barn guy,” as I always think of him) at the heart of this week’s text illustrates simply and memorably the futility of choices made in isolation from the love of God and neighbor.
It reflects a central theme in Luke and in Jesus’ preaching, the problem of wealth in the context of the holy kingdom where closeness to God is life and attachment to things reflects soul-stifling anxiety and fear.
The parable emerges from Jesus’ response to a request from someone in the immense crowd of Luke 12:1 that Jesus arbitrate between him and his brother in the matter of an inheritance. Jesus not only denies the request but makes it the basis for a warning against greed and a reliance on wealth for security of the soul (Psalm 49, another lectionary passage for this Sunday, has a similar message; see also Colossians 3:2, 5). Inheritance, greed, and accumulation of wealth all figure in the parable and in its interpretation in the verses that follow the lectionary text (Luke 12:22-34); these verses are linked to 12:13-21 by the word “therefore” and by the focus on what makes for life (the word translated “life” there and in 12:20 is translated “soul” in the inner dialogue of the rich fool in 12:19), a connection reinforced by references to barns, treasure, possessions, and eating and drinking. Luke 12:22-34 never appears in the lectionary, so it is worth including it in this Sunday’s worship, if possible, but even if it isn’t read, it should be taken into account as part of Jesus’ response to the problem raised by the brother in the crowd and as the antidote to the predicament of the greedy fool.
At the heart of the parable is an abundant harvest, which might be a good thing, but we suspect from the start that this is unlikely because we know from Jesus’ introduction of the landowner that he is rich. The best hope Luke offers the rich in this Gospel comes in the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10), who seeks out Jesus and then welcomes him enthusiastically when Jesus invites himself home with Zacchaeus for dinner. While everyone is grumbling that Jesus is off with sinners again, Zacchaeus promises to give half his possessions to the poor and to pay back anyone he has defrauded fourfold. Zacchaeus is a special case among the rich of Luke in that he is also a member of a marginalized group, tax collectors, who are portrayed sympathetically throughout and treated kindly by Jesus. Other references to the rich are almost uniformly negative and almost always contrasted with positive references to the poor: God sends the rich away empty in Mary’s prophetic poetry (Luke 1:52-53); they have “a woe on them” (as a cousin of mine used to say) in the beatitudes (6:24), where the poor are given the kingdom of God; they are portrayed as beyond hope in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where in response to the rich man’s request that Lazarus be sent to warn his brothers, Abraham says that if they haven’t listened to Moses and the prophets, they won’t be convinced “even if someone rises from the dead” (16:31); and finally the very rich ruler seeking the way to eternal life lacks only one thing, that he sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, and that appears to be the one thing he cannot do. It is nearly impossible for the rich to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus concludes (18:24-25), but he ends the episode on a note of hope (18:27): “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.”
That is the situation for the rich of Luke’s Gospel, so we are not hopeful about how the rich landowner will handle his abundance. Confronted with the happy problem of a bumper crop, he consults with himself, with no thought of God or neighbor, and concludes that the answer is to build bigger barns for his crops and his other goods. Then he looks forward to congratulating his soul on this decision, as he and his own soul with all that accumulated wealth spend many happy years eating, drinking, and making merry.
God, overhearing the rich man’s conversation with himself, cuts short these dreams of merriment: “Fool,” says God. The word occurs elsewhere in Luke only in Luke 11:40, with reference to the Pharisees; there too foolishness is associated with greed and with the neglect of justice and the love of God. In our text, there is no time for the rich fool of the parable to make amends because his soul/life is coming to an immediate end, which no amount of accumulated wealth can forestall. “And whose will it all be then?” God asks, returning to the notion of inheritance raised by the brother in the crowd but from another angle. Jesus concludes that this is how it always is for those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God. The two notions, storing up treasure and being rich toward God, are verbal forms with the same roots as the noun “treasure” and adjective “rich.” In other words, it isn’t a question of something we happen to have or a characteristic among many. We actively choose to do one thing or the other, to be rich with barns or rich with God, to serve God or mammon (Luke 16:13).
Like the story of the rich ruler where God’s grace has the last word, so here also Jesus’ teaching ultimately transcends the greed and God-less treasure of the parable to move in a hopeful direction with Luke 12:22-34. With a shift in perspective, we lift our eyes up to the birds and out to the lilies of the field. We turn away from treasure that corrupts and is corruptible toward the kingdom and fullness of life, which we already know from Luke 10:25-37 is rooted in wholehearted love of God and neighbor. In this alternative message about God’s faithfulness, Jesus recognizes that what underlies excessive accumulation is most often anxiety and fear. So Jesus offers the antidote to accumulation of too much empty treasure in the promise that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give the kingdom itself to his little flock. And the way to collect treasure of the heart suitable for that kingdom isn’t the earthbound, inward-looking way of the barn guy but the soaring, beautiful way of the one who lives and loves generously, lavishly, and with joy.


Optional parts of the readings are set off in square brackets.
The Bible texts of the Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel lessons are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.
The Collects, Psalms and Canticles are from the Book of Common Prayer, 1979.
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