Sunday, May 22, 2022
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Schuyler, NE
Sixth Sunday of Easter
watch this service online (readings start around 13:41; sermon starts around 20:08)
r-e-c-y-c-l-e, recycle… ♻️
I spent this last week hanging out with other clergy friends at the Festival of Homiletics, the preaching conference I go to every year. And it’s fairly easy to tell when I’ve been spending more time than usual with other clergy folks, because I notice that it affects the way I talk – I find myself using a lot of those five dollar words they teach us in seminary, words like: soteriology, kerygma, eschatology, exegesis, and so on.
One of these words that you might hear used by particularly nerdy preachers (like yours truly) is the word “pericope” (it looks just like the word “periscope” without the ‘s’). Pericope is a word that’s sometimes used to talk about a section of scripture – it’s basically like how we use the term “reading” or “lesson.” The word comes from the Greek for “a cutting-out” – which kind of evokes this image of someone snipping out passages of scripture and then pasting them somewhere else.
The group of people who put together the three year series of readings that we follow – the lectionary – are responsible for cutting out the texts that we read together each Sunday (kind of makes them sound like scriptural scrapbookers, haha). Most of the time, it’s pretty obvious why they choose to cut texts where they do – perhaps there’s a story or a parable with a clear beginning and ending or a section all on the same theme. But sometimes, like with our readings for today, the place they choose to cut something doesn’t make much sense to me at all.
Like with this gospel reading especially. The way it’s cut, we’re missing a lot of the context. And without seeing the larger context that this piece is cut out of, it’s hard to tell where Jesus is even going with all the different things he says here. He says some stuff about loving him and his Father and keeping their word, then he says some stuff about the Holy Spirit and some stuff about peace, and finally he hints at something bigger that’s about to happen.