(Luke 20:27-40)

For much of the Gospel of Luke, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to cancel Jesus.  For anyone who might need a quick refresher, the Pharisees were the reform movement in Judaism at that time.  Their goal was to teach Israel to obey God’s word well enough that God would bless his people and make them an independent nation again with an heir of David on the throne in Jerusalem.  As part of this, they created the institution of the synagogue, which is the model for church as we know it, to teach the word of God to the people of God.  They were held in high esteem by most Jews for their knowledge of Scripture and their personal holiness, even though most Jews weren’t interested in matching the Pharisaic standard of personal holiness.  The scribes, meanwhile, were the religious scholars of the day; modern translations often refer to them as “teachers of the Law” or “lawyers.”  The reason they’re always mentioned in tandem with the Pharisees is that most of them, understandably enough, were Pharisees.

So, for maybe fifteen chapters now, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to trip Jesus up.  You might say they’ve been playing a long-running game of “Jesus Jeopardy” . . . and they’re riding an unbroken losing streak.  They are the anti-Ken Jennings.  Here in Luke 20, their great rivals the Sadducees decide to try to take advantage of their ongoing failure.

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(Luke 17:5-10)

Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon in which I spent a fair bit of time talking about all the connections between the gospel reading for that morning and the preceding two chapters.  This is not that sermon.  Luke gathered a fair number of sayings and brief scenes which he wanted to use that didn’t belong to any larger collection of stories and sayings; he dealt with them by inserting them between the main sections of his narrative.  Luke 17:1-10 is one such insertion, comprised of four brief scenes of Jesus teaching his disciples; the compilers of the lectionary, for whatever reason, have given us two of the four.

I thought at first about just doing one of those two.  It’s easy, if a biblical text seems to lack unity and coherence, to chop it up like a butcher into chunks of disconnected meat.  Several major commentators on Matthew, for instance, take this approach to the Sermon on the Mount.  One of the things Regent taught me was to resist that easy assumption and look for connections and structure; so I decided to see if I could find a common thread between the two parts of our passage this morning.  Spoiler alert:  I think I found one, as you’ll see in a little bit.

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(Luke 16:1-8)

The great problem in preaching many Scripture passages is that we think we already know what they mean—usually an interpretation we find easy and comfortable—so we don’t need to listen to them.  That is not the problem this morning.  Luke 16:1-8 is a problem parable, and our problems begin with the way our Bibles present it to us.  The chapter break at 15:32 leads us to separate this parable from the one immediately before it and connect it instead with the poem that follows.  We fail to see the deep connections between it and chapter 15 because, hey, it’s a different chapter!  We take 16:9-13 as an interpretive key to our parable this morning—see the lectionary, which actually assigns all thirteen verses for this Sunday—when it’s actually transition and introduction to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.  As a consequence, we read verses 1-8 as a parable about money, which completely jams us up, because on that basis it seems clear Jesus is praising the crook for being a good crook.  That is not what’s going on.

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Note:  I have preached on this passage four times now; some things evolve, others do not.  This message is a direct reworking of the message I preached at Warsaw EPC in October 2019.

(Luke 9:51-62)

The title of this message is Follow Me!; there are two reasons for that.  One, that is everything in this passage.  If you wanted to sum it up in one sentence, that would be it.  Two, while it might seem to you that I’ve just said something boringly obvious, it actually means a lot more than you might realize on a surface reading.  Indeed, it means everything, as I hope you will see.  To that end, those of you who know me well will not be surprised—indeed, I’m sure many of you are confidently expecting—to hear me draw on the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey more than once this morning.  For those of you who don’t, feel free to ask me afterward.

The first thing we need to understand here is that this is the hinge of the gospel of Luke.  To this point, Jesus has had a spectacular ministry career.  He’s established himself as a teacher who speaks with authority, he’s done stunning miracles—everything is rolling along beautifully.  And then, instead of capitalizing on his success as any smart preacher would, Jesus tossed it all aside and—as Rich Mullins put it—“set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem.”  This begins the section of Luke commonly known as the Travel Narrative, which continues into chapter 19.  In these chapters, every interaction and every incident happens on the way to the cross.

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