Slipping one over
We had a passage from First Kings this morning at the 8 a.m. mass. The guest preacher, here to give a two-night mission tomorrow and the next day, even quoted from it: “God is not in the turmoil but in the peace,” he said. Good punch line for his message about how to be impervious to the slings and arrows of 21st-century life by buying into Jesus as Lord and Savior. But the passage was a ringer, imported without benefit of clergy-approved lectionary. We were supposed to hear this from First Samuel beginning:
In those days, Saul went down to the desert of Ziph
with three thousand picked men of Israel,
to search for David in the desert of Ziph.
And then Saul and his 3,000 picked men went to sleep, even the sentries, and David sneaked into their camp with his friend Abishai. They found Saul, the king of Israel, asleep, his spear stuck into the ground next to him. Abishai urged David to stick Saul into the ground next to it, but David wouldn’t do it, because Saul as “anointed” was out of bounds for sticking. David did take the spear, however, and next morning yelled to Saul’s camp to come and get it, obviously as proof that he could have killed Saul if he wanted to but didn’t because he was anointed.
What the preacher does with that, I am not sure, and what this one did with the substitute passage was fine. But did he order up the substitute, replacing the lectionary’s? Can he do that? Can the pastor do that if he wants to? It’s issues like this that keep the old ecclesiastical pot boiling.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 2/18/2007 11:35:00 AM
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