What can we say August 10? 9th after Pentecost

    Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 functions as an overture to Isaiah’s overall message, an intro anthology of his central themes. Not cheerful in tone, not a snazzy attraction for visitors, Isaiah’s mission is the disclosure of Israel’s sin (and ours), the certainty of judgment, and how dire the need is for repentance. Fascinating: our lectionary scoots right past verses 2-9, which expose the extent of Israel’s sin (not a little booboo now and then, but an all-encompassing fallenness!) and the severity of God’s judgment.

   Maybe this is important for visitors and old-timers too; we dare not skip the revealing of sin and summons to repentance. Preaching this is risky, as an appeal to repent can turn out to be a thinly-veiled expression of my frustration and anger at my people, or else a weirdly popular kind of grandstanding where our summons to repentance is nothing but an opaque critique of what we (and the people!) don’t like out there. Can chatter about repentance get shimmied down to what we think somebody else out there ought to be doing? Alternatively, if we internalize, theologically robust and hopeful repentance morphs into a mood of guilt and remorse, with much of the shuv, meaning to make a 180° turn, or even the Greek metanoia, meaning a change of mind.

   Isaiah (whose name means “The Lord saves”) sees a vision. Fascinating: like the author of Revelation, he is vouchsafed a glimpse into heavenly realities, into God’s very presence. Down on earth, the year must be 701 B.C.E.  After the stranglehold of the Assyrian juggernaut, Zion alone is left, and barely. The people foolishly saw its survival as a great blessing, as if God were pleased with them and not others. Always beware any theology that says I made it, they didn’t, God has sure been good to me.

   Isaiah shares with us God’s exasperated assessment of worship. At a recent United Methodist General Conference, I penned a blog on this that went viral – as it wasn’t hard to imagine, after our lovely, moving worship, overhearing God saying “Remove from me the noise of your worship,” as we fought like cats and dogs once worship had ended. Isaiah’s God chides them for the futility of their sacrifices – making me shudder, as we don’t even bother with the sacrifices before we cause God to shudder.

   How gory: their “hands are full of blood” (v. 15). In Israel, worshippers’ hands were not just metaphorically stained with blood. The animal sacrifices would have left bloody traces on their hands, a graphic image indeed. The preacher can play with this: Pilate tried to wash his hands of Jesus but could not. Lady Macbeth could not rid her house of its guilt. Jesus, the bearer of all guilt, died with his own blood all over his own hands. I wonder if this is a Sunday to revive a couple of those old, gory but theological pointed hymns about the blood of Jesus.

   With the numbing horror of so many mass shootings and wars civil and international around the world, this “hands full of blood” image makes you shiver. We need to speak in wise ways on this. I tried to in last Sunday's sermon - echoing some of what I blogged about a while back about the futility of “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims.”

   Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 begins a long, eloquent text, a roll call of heroes of the faith, as if the author was thumbing through Scripture in his mind. I wonder if the preacher might do just that: hold a Bible, start in Genesis, thumb through, mentioning Abel, Abraham, Moses, David. I’d add a few from the New Testament, and church history (“By faith, St. Francis…” “By faith, my grandmother…”).

   People think faith is believing spiritual things, or having religious feelings, or trusting God will do stuff I ask for. Hebrews, with simplicity and yet near-philosophical sophistication, defines faith as the substance (hypostasis, what stands under or supports, a foundation, and thus the real nature of things, with the added nuance of serving then as a pledge, a down payment) of things hoped for (elpizomenon). Hope is always worth repackaging for our people. Late in his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., said “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful.” Christopher Lasch distinguished these well: optimism believes things will get better tomorrow; hope is ready if things don’t get better. Optimism is up to us doing better; hope depends on God.

   Faith is “the conviction of things not seen.” What isn’t seen? Invisible, spiritual realities? Not in the Bible’s understanding. The unseen things are in the future. Our future is secure with God, so faith can live in the uncertainty and even agony of now. Luke Timothy Johnson: “Faith makes actual, or makes ‘real,’ for believers the things that are hoped for, as though they were present… They are understood to be as real, or even more real, than things that can be ‘seen,’ that is, verified by the senses.” Here I love a thought David Steinmetz used to emphasize about Martin Luther – for whom “the organ of faith” was the ear, not the eye. The eye can deceive; we are fooled by what we see (or don’t see). The ear hears – and hears God’s Word, which can be trusted no matter how things look.

   Hebrews jogs back in time to the call of Abraham: “He went, not knowing where he was to go.” God told him to go – where? “A place I will show you.” Jesus called his disciples to go… where? They had no clue. In my Will of God book, I explore this at some length: we want a map, or to know “God’s plan for my life,” when in reality we simply follow, taking the next step. “Thy word is a lamp to my feet” – not a brilliant Coleman lantern, but a Bible-times little pottery lamp that might light up the road for about 4 or 5 feet. You go, you take the next step, then the next.

   Faith is going, moving - as Father Greg Boyle reminds us, “Faith isn't about saluting a set of beliefs. It's about walking with Jesus and being a companion, particularly standing in the lowly place with the easily despised and readily left out.” Is his model of how to be in ministry with gang members a window into how to transform our violent society?

   How poignant is it that Abraham (just like Moses) died not seeing the fulfillment of the promise, not participating in what all of life had been a pursuit of. No, he “greeted it from afar.” Moses did this from Mt. Nebo: Hello, promised land… The preacher would be wise to point to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final sermon (“I’ve seen the promised land… I may not get there with you”) – or Reinhold Niebuhr’s great wisdom (“Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope”).

   Luke 12:32-40 grab-bag of some of Jesus’ short, memorable sayings. A modern parallel would be Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto” (“Every day do something that won’t compute. Work for nothing. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Give your approval to what you cannot understand. Praise ignorance. Ask questions that have no answers. Plant sequoias. Practice resurrection”). No conventional wisdom with Jesus – or Berry!

   For Jesus, not being beaten is being blessed! The thief image is quirky. Jesus doesn’t really burgle, as in ripping you off of your things – although he might aid your shedding of things!

   How tender, Jesus calling them his “little flock.” Humbling for them, too. “Let your loins be girded” means, as Levine and Witherington put it, “Let your long, ankle-length robe be adjusted by the waist-belt to ensure readiness for action or departure.” The “breaking into” of the thief literally means “dug through” – as in the mud-brick walls houses had in Jesus’ day. Such digging requires time and patience; think Andy’s escape from prison in The Shawshank Redemption!

   Jesus forever reminds us to travel light, own little, give with abandon. Laying up treasure in heaven is accomplished not by being pious but by outlandish, generous giving to those in need (as Augustine, Ambrose and Chrysostom understood so well). Wonder why we don’t experience much Jesus or resurrection? Look no further. Can we, we Christian preachers, make even incremental progress on such things – and then maybe invite our listeners to do the same? 

 Levine and Witherington again: “By supporting the poor, disciples obtain wallets that are never empty and that can never be robbed; that is, they heave treasures in heaven. In turn, if they have these heavenly treasures, their heart is directed toward heaven and they no longer will have the cares of the world.”

What can we say August 17? 10th after Pentecost

   Isaiah 5:1-7 feels like late summer, outside, poking around in a vineyard that’s not doing so well, reminding us perhaps of Jesus being annoyed by that unfruitful tree. For us, a winery is a destination. In Bible times, based on what archaeologists have uncovered, wine presses were all over the place, common, as everyday people worked in vineyards, stomping grapes, processing the wine, close to the earth. Gisela Kreglinger, a theologian who grew up in a wine-producing family, has written a fascinating book, The Spirituality of Wine, well worth exploring! A barren vineyard would have raised questions about the roots, the weather, the soil, bugs, or the laziness of workers!

   Our text feels also like a love song, echoing the Song of Songs! But the tenderness turns to critique, with wickedly harsh wordplay in Hebrew: God looked for mishpat (justice) but found only mispach (bloodletting); God sought zedekah (righteousness) but found only ze’akah (a yelp of pain). Memorable, haunting words that cannot have been well-received by the smug who first heard them. Could a clever preacher devise some modern English equivalents?

   If you think you’ll preach on this, drive to a vineyard, get in a conversation with a laborer or two, or the vintner. Ask about frustrations. Get the feel of the place. Get the feel of what God felt. Or ask people around your parish or neighborhood of times they felt they had labored hard but earned nothing but exasperation in return. You’ll be getting close then to the heart of this text.

   Hebrews 11:29-12:2 is a great text, so preachable. Paul says Don’t boast, but Hebrews boasts – rightly – about the heroes of their heritage of faith. How cool is the “time will fail me” in v. 32! – kin to the scene in Sleepless in Seattle, when Jonah springs a phone call with radio therapist Dr. Marcia Fieldstone on his dad, Sam. She asks, “What was so special about your wife?” He responds, “Well, how long is your program?” The preacher can tantalize people by playing on this, and just rattling off names and brief summaries of the exploits of Bible heroes (including those saints who've lived past Bible times!).

   How intriguing is Hebrews’s spin that “They grew powerful out of weakness” – a common biblical theme, and one re-popularized in our day by Jean Vanier, Brené Brown and others, including closer to home my non-leadership leadership book, Weak Enough to Lead. Where’s your power? Not in your skills, experiences or strengths. Look into your weak spots, your woundedness.

   “Lay aside every weight” and whatever “clings.” We’re toting around heavy stuff, like an albatross or huge bags of krap we think we’ll need. It “clings” to you, sticky stuff. Let it go – you who preach, and then invite those to whom you preach to do the same. Go light – because it’s like running a very, very long race. If you aren’t a runner, or even if you are, interview a few runners. 

  Review the text and see what runners say to you about running, discipline, the mental battle, injuries, cheerleading, whatever. Luke Timothy Johnson’s image of an Olympic Marathon is spot on:  “The runners begin far away from the city in some remote place, move through growing crowds and greater fatigue, and finally emerge in the stadium before a massed assembly of spectators who applaud as they complete their final lap.”

   And the “cloud of witnesses” image is so powerful! I preached a few years back at our conference’s memorial service for clergy and their spouses who had died in the past year. I tried to think about tears – which are little droplets of water. What is a cloud, but little droplets of water all together? And that such little droplets are at their most colorful and beautiful – when? – at the end of the day, as the sun is setting. We have lost great ones, and we have tears – but those tears are gathered up into a cloud, and the refraction of light is stunning, lovely.

   It’s all about sticking close to Jesus, who shed his weights of glory to be one of us, one with us. Notice the text doesn’t refer to Jesus as the one “who endured the cross” but “for the sake of joy endured…” Whose joy? Ours? Really his! Jesus did what he did – for his own joy. It gives Jesus immense joy when we enter into this dispensation of weakness, travelling light, gawking a bit over the heroes of yesteryear and striving to be one with them.

   Luke 12:49-56. No sweet, gentle, friendly Jesus here. He’s calling down “Fire!” He brings not peace, not the “comfort” people want so much from church, but “division.” And it’s a most peculiar kind of division, a particular kind of division, not just any old division, and certainly not the political division we suffer from nowadays. Jesus is big enough, serious enough, and radical enough that he’s not a balm to families, but actually divides households, parents against children. So many stories abound. Maybe you have your own. I do. And we have someone like St. Francis of Assisi (who could be an addendum to the Hebrews 11 list!) winding up cut off from his father Pietro because of his following Christ (as depicted so powerfully in Giotto's fresco). Certainly Christian faith doesn’t make families chipper or hold them together. It might, but often does not. Idolatry of the family is one of the naggingly pernicious blockers to people following Jesus – again, growing out of our nasty tendency to think that the Christian life is about being nice, or my goodness, or as a prop to our prearranged, preferred lives. Serious adherence to Jesus inevitably breaks down human relationships.

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  Check out my book, not on how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.

What can we say August 24? 11th after Pentecost

    Jeremiah 1:4-10. I love this text dawning just as school is coming back into session! Last I preached on this (view here) we used a child as our Scripture reader – and he was sensational. Something to help people be wary of, and maybe thus even to name, is the way church people trivialize children and youth, delighting in their cuteness, or deciding about some missional activity “Oh, that would be good for our youth” or “How neat our youth go on a mission trip.” And then they can be coolly dismissive of youthful idealism, chuckling over teenage dreams for the church. I at least like to ask our children and youth what they’d want from church, and announce this to the grownups with the caution that we debunk their notions at the risk of losing our souls as followers of Jesus who did say we should become like children. I love it that Pope John Paul II, at his inauguration on October 22, 1978, chose to speak to the youth of the world, telling them “You are the future of the world, you are the hope of the Church, you are my hope.”

    But Jeremiah’s call came way before is teenage years. God called him in his mother’s womb – or earlier! A sermon could dwell profitably on how we all came to be in our mother’s womb. Hans Urs von Balthasar spoke of “the terrible accidentalness of sexual causation” – how you came to be in some weird mix of intentionality or the proverbial back seat. The act itself, described unforgettably by geneticist Adam Rutherford: “On contact, that winning sperm released a chemical that dissolved the egg’s reluctant membrane, left its whiplash tail behind, and burrowed in.” {All this and more in my book Birth: The Mystery of Being Born in the Pastoring for Life series.}

   What is God’s calling from, in, even before your arrival in the womb? We think of calling as something you hear, dodge or refuse now as a grownup. But way back then, when you were a microscopic next to nothing, God was already calling you. What if parents, on learning of a pregnancy, instead of the dramatic, showy gender reveal, pondered questions like “What is God calling this new life within to be?” St. Dominic’s mother dreamed, while pregnant, that she gave birth to a dog with a torch in his mouth.

   If God is fully present in utero, if God somehow knit us together, if God understands better than we the complex realities of life in the womb and the daunting challenges of the journey ahead, then can we make sense of God’s will, of God’s desire for this fragile, latent person in the making? Is God merely rooting for survival? If mom and dad are already harboring dreams for this child, then how much more will God already be envisioning a holy, faithful life for this disciple-to-be? We think of God’s calling coming to attentive seekers, to young adults or to those in mid-life crisis. But in utero? Isaiah 49:5 teases out the idea that the prophet had been formed in the womb by God “to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him.” Jeremiah countered God’s call by saying “I am only a youth”; but then on further reflection, he began to intuit that God had actually begun calling him from his mother’s womb (Jer. 1:4-10).

   A fetus can detect sound at twenty six weeks. Can it hear God? Does God call particular people, or all people, even in their mothers’ wombs? What is calling anyhow? Is the divine call a voice out of nowhere? Isn’t each person’s sense of divine vocation a symphony of voices that call? Messages overheard from mom and dad, attributes and skills fostered in the womb and later, chance encounters, some church chatter and personal musing mixed in there: we process it all and infer God is asking something of us. Frederick Buechner (who just died, making us all sad, and immensely grateful) famously wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

   Fascinating: the world’s deep hunger is out there, waiting for you to be born and notice; and your deep hunger is already there, festooned in your DNA, destined by the parents you happen to have and the place you’ll happen to live. What if mom and dad began, during pregnancy, to ponder that this unseen child is already being called by God? And what if you and I reminisce a bit and puzzle over what we probably missed back then, and since – that God was calling us, even in utero?

     After all, the infant, in utero, is already worshipping. I’ve handed the Eucharistic bread to many a pregnant woman and wanted to say “The Body of Christ, given for y’all.” As a teenager, Jeremiah engaged in the usual ducking and weaving, dodging God’s longstanding call. Like Moses (can’t speak), Isaiah (not holy enough), Jonah (the Assyrians are unworthy) or Mary (I’ve never slept with a man), Jeremiah is too young. He may just be chicken, as God’s call is for him to upset the status quo, questioning the politics of his day.

   I'm thinking to focus some on "courage," that rarest of commodities. Courage isn't not being scared, but doing the right thing even when you're scared? I love Marilynne Robinson's verbiage: "I think there must be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. Therefore this courage allows us to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying the same thing."

   God’s call here is a famous “chiasm” – the crossing, a downright crucifix of language: “to pluck up, to break down, to build, to plant.” See the criss-cross? We’d rather God just build and plant without the plucking up and breaking down! Marianne Williamson memorably said that when we invite God into our lives, we expect a decorator to appear to spruce up the place a little. But instead, you look out the window, and there’s a wrecking ball about to tear it all down and start over.

   Hebrews 12:18-29 would be tough for me to preach, requiring too much mansplaining… The author wishes that worshippers wouldn’t feel so much terror, so much trembling – but aren’t we too familiar and cozy, even a little picky in worship, in need of a little mystery and trembling? Some of what he is called “reverence and awe”?

    Luke 13:10-17. The woman is sometimes misunderstood as being unwelcome due to gender, or for ritual impurity – but as Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington remind us, this is one more instance of anti-Semitic reading. Women were welcome. The crippled bore no ritual impurity. We could though ask if her physical disability – 18 years of, what, osteoporosis? severe curvature of the spine? worked then as it does in our world. Is the church finally waking up to issues of disability, which really is a social construct? Can we welcome all people? Can we not even in welcoming disenfranchise or stigmatize the so-called physically disabled?

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   Check out my book on preaching - not how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: the Challenge and Wonder of Preaching. 

What can we say August 31? 12th after Pentecost

   Three great, preachable texts. I go Gospel, then OT, then Epistle.  

   Luke 14:1, 7-14. I allude to this passage constantly, as it unveils how thin our alleged attachments to Scripture can be. The Bible is clear! Or We stand with Scripture! melts away (or should) when we notice how utterly uninterested we are in Jesus’ very simple and doable Scripture admonitions like Luke 14. I’m less sure how to preach on this. Here's what I did preaching on this in our recent series reading through Luke.

   What to do with Jesus' very clear words? Just let them linger? Give people a few minutes to jot down whom they’ve eaten with lately? Or had over to their home?

    Certainly Jesus flunked Miss Manners’s course in etiquette. Dinner with him is one faux pas after another! Jesus helps us see how we discern honor and shame at table – of all places! And it’s even more humbling to notice Jesus doesn’t say Don’t only invite those who can invite you in return – but flat out, Don’t invite them! Sheesh.

    Where’s the Good News? Jesus would liberate us from narrow social interactions – and from patronizing versions of mission in his name. For years, my churches have collected food to be sent off somewhere for the hungry. Or I think of people who have with some grandiosity walked into my office with a ham, asking me to get it to some poor person. On bad days I’d say Thanks! On better days I’d say Find someone and deliver it to them yourself. On my best days I’d say Take it home, and invite the people you have in mind into your home and share it with them. That’s a Jesus-y meal, right?

    It’s also Jesus’ intense love for the fullness of our souls that is evident in his dinner commandment. I’ve often said If you only hang around with people who are like you, you become arrogant and ignorant. I know of no exceptions. What better way to shed some arrogance and ignorance than to share a meal, at your own place, with someone very different?

    Jeremiah 2:4-13. God sounds like a wounded lover or fractured parent here: “What wrong did they find in me?” Do we do this – finding fault with God? Or is it exasperation that the God of Scripture isn’t quite the God we’re looking for, or that God is inadequate somehow to the tasks we place on God’s shoulders.

   From God’s perspective, they “went after worthless things, and thus became worthless.” The Hebrew is hebel, featured so provocatively in Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”): hebel is a wisp, a breeze, nothing really, just dust settling. Can I show hebel somehow? Dropping a little shred of paper or some dried up leaves?

     When we as people pursue what is worthless, we ourselves become what our pursuits are. If we pursue God and substantive holiness, we become just that. Fascinating: our searching, our quest defines who we become! The preacher is wise to ask, Who are the vain recipients of our devotion? – and it’s such a long list. Political ideology, for sure. Things. Others. Self. Institutions. I wonder if the church itself, as an institution, might be a curious kind of vain recipient of devotion.

   Jeremiah suggests that we ask the wrong questions, or we fail to ask the right questions, like “Where is the Lord” (which any random person might ask) – and yet it’s not just any Lord, but “the one who brought us up out of Egypt.” Jeremiah wonders if the priests (that’s us, the preachers!) ask “Where is the Lord?” The preacher should ask this question now, later today, tomorrow, every day.

     “Do people change their gods?” Well of course they do, have, and will! A sermon could explore the bogus gods we fixate on, and dream upon – but with Jeremiah’s nuance that “Mine have changed their glory for what does not profit.” Wow. Romans 1 echoes! God’s glory (kabod) is swapped for the unprofitable (yō‘īl).

     Jeremiah explicates, wonderfully, the double fix we are in. Not only has God been forsaken, but the new fake deities exasperate. Jeremiah’s image is that they forsake the living water, the font, the spring of fresh water – did he have one in mind? – for “cracked cisterns that hold no water.” What a vivid image! Can you, the preacher, locate modern parallels for cisterns that hold no water?

    I love Elizabeth Achtemeier’s language: “Given a garden, we choose a desert (Gen. 3), and thirst and heat and fainting, as frantically we look for water from the useless deities of our own making.” Sounds like a mirage to me.

     I recall my dad driving to the beach when I was a child. I’d see the mirage of what I thought was the ocean – but it was merely heat, rippling across the hollow road. But the water was still to come! We were headed to the beach! I wonder if there’s a sermon there: the mirage is deceptive – but we really can anticipate something astonishing and life-giving.

     Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 is a rich, astonishing text!  Our unknown author says “Let mutual love (philadelphia!) continue” – but this makes me wonder if he should have said “Let mutual love begin!” It’s not like we see it all that much. The Greek, philadelphia, reminds me of the Tom Hanks film by that name – about a man suffering from HIV and AIDS, simply asking, in those early days, for fairness, acceptance, justice and love. The goal of philadelphia isn’t merely enjoying people like us, but philoxenia, love for strangers. Why love them? Hebrews, like Genesis 18 (Abraham and Sarah welcoming the strangers b the Oaks of Mamre), reveals that God has this quirky way of using the stranger to test us, to let God’s self be made known to us, for new life to come through them, the them who should be we/us. 

    You have to love the vision of Hebrews here. Remember those in prison – as if you were in there with them. A bold act of imagination, abetted if we heed Jesus’ thought from his last sermon (Matt. 25:31-46) – that when we show up in the prison to visit, we are in the company of Jesus himself!

    What is an “undefiled marriage bed”? Two lie down: is the defilement lust (even then)? Dominance? Judgment? Iciness? Welcoming a stranger in this place is defilement. Listeners will suspect homosexuality might be in play here – and it must be the case that even those who totally embrace same gender relationships and marriage have to recognize that those beds too can be defiled in the same way straight beds are.

   The counsel to “Be content” is almost as numbing as the Bible’s frequent admonition, “Be not anxious.” It’s like piling on! But the preacher has to do what no one else will: expose Madison Avenue and all advertising for what it is – a constant clamor digging into everyone’s soul, shouting Do not be content! You need more, newer, different gadgets, stuff, clothes, experiences. Contentment isn’t even Okay, now I possess enough of those things. The Greek arkoumenoi means enough, sufficient – and then clarifies resides in God’s promise never to forsake us. Flannery O’Connor once spoke of the Eucharist, noting how it’s not much yet it’s more than enough: “It is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

    And finally this formulaic “Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever” – a glorious truth, not to be confused with crazed notions that Church rules or Bible interpretations are the same yesterday, today and forever!

     Luke 14:1, 7-14. I allude to this passage constantly, as it unveils how thin our alleged attachments to Scripture can be. The Bible is clear! Or We stand with Scripture! melts away (or should) when we notice how utterly uninterested we are in Jesus’ very simple and doable Scripture admonitions like Luke 14. I’m less sure how to preach on this. Here's what I did preaching on this in our recent series reading through Luke.

   What to do with Jesus' very clear words? Just let them linger? Give people a few minutes to jot down whom they’ve eaten with lately? Or had over to their home?

    Certainly Jesus flunked Miss Manners’s course in etiquette. Dinner with him is one faux pas after another! Jesus helps us see how we discern honor and shame at table – of all places! And it’s even more humbling to notice Jesus doesn’t say Don’t only invite those who can invite you in return – but flat out, Don’t invite them! Sheesh.

    Where’s the Good News? Jesus would liberate us from narrow social interactions – and from patronizing versions of mission in his name. For years, my churches have collected food to be sent off somewhere for the hungry. Or I think of people who have with some grandiosity walked into my office with a ham, asking me to get it to some poor person. On bad days I’d say Thanks! On better days I’d say Find someone and deliver it to them yourself. On my best days I’d say Take it home, and invite the people you have in mind into your home and share it with them. That’s a Jesus-y meal, right?

    It’s also Jesus’ intense love for the fullness of our souls that is evident in his dinner commandment. I’ve often said If you only hang around with people who are like you, you become arrogant and ignorant. I know of no exceptions. What better way to shed some arrogance and ignorance than to share a meal, at your own place, with someone very different?

What can we say September 7? 13th after Pentecost

   Jeremiah 18:1-11. Grand opportunity for the preacher to learn some things, let someone discover her or his new calling, and engage the arts. Find a potter. A total stranger really will talk with you! – and interview him or her about pottery. This pandemic sermon includes this video of me talking with a potter (starting at the 9:30 mark)… It’s all super interesting theologically. Pottery is dirty work, but the dirt really becomes beauty. Centering is required, as is "opening up," not to mention trimming, firing, etc. Clay gets “spoiled,” so the potter “reworks” it. If it’s “wonky,” the potter has to “redeem” it. The potter is never sure how it will turn out; the clay “talks back” to the potter.

   The whole “dirt” business: this is quite literally what we are. Elizabeth Achtemeier put it cleverly: “We are dirt,, but God values us more than mud.” I think also of the great moment in James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. Sister Gee is flirting with Kevin Potts Mullen: “That’s my job, Officer. I’m a house cleaner, see. I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don’t like me. It don’t set there and say, ‘I’m hiding. Come get me.’ I got to go out and find it to clean it out. Same with you. The fellers you seek, crooks and all, ain’t saying ‘Here I am. Come get me.’ But I don’t hate dirt for being dirt. You can’t hate a thing for being what it is. I reckon it’s not fair to call someone living a wrong life a problem, or a mess… or dirt.”

   Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18. What a preachable Psalm – if you promise not to over-explain things (the subject of a special blog I wrote recently)! Omniscience is a thing with God, but that’s no bracket on human freedom, or even on chance occurrences – which clearly happen! In my book, Birth: The Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series), I suggest we all do what this Psalmist did: ponder that we all once were microscopic, fragile, dependent, vulnerable little next to nothing wonders – and find ourselves in awe over God and the sheer fact that we made it when we may well not have.

   Jason Byassee links this text, the “shadow of the barely formed self in the womb,” to Gollum (close to the Hebrew golem in the Psalm!) in Lord of the Rings. This shadowy creature “is an image of us when we clasp anything other than the living God, thinking it will make us live. The psalm’s word is that even our golem self our not-formed-in-holiness self, is not unknown to God God treasures us at our worst.”

   Does the Psalmist keep feeling this urge to flee – which he declares is impossible? Jonah fled. We all flee in one way or another – but as Francis Thompson expressed it in his “Hound of Heaven,” “I fled him, down the nights and down the days; I fled him, down the arches of the years; I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from him, and under running laughter… from those strong feet that followed with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy…”

   There’s so much here. “When I awake, I am still with you”? When we awake, we… check social media? The vitriol over enemies (which the lectionary foolishly lops off!)? Eugene Peterson suggested that these harsh Psalms pleading for vengeance are how you “cuss without cussing.” Offering it all up to God instead of harboring rage or judgment, or enacting it: this is God’s way. Anne Lamott’s notion is huge: “We can be sure we have remade God in our image when God has all the same enemies we do.”

   This text is about adoration and awe, with no “must” stuck in (the way Pro-Life people have politicized it!), reminding me of Thomas Merton’s thought on writing that fits preaching: “To write is to love; it is to inquire and to praise, to confess and to appeal. To speak out with an open heart and say what seems to me to have meaning. The bad writing I have done has all been authoritarian, the declaration of musts… The best stuff has been more straight confession and witness.”

   Philemon. A whole book as the lectionary epistle! For Labor Day, how could we reflect on unjust labor of any kind, given Paul’s appeal for this slave to be freed? It’s a confidential letter to a friend – but then it was certainly read aloud in the church. What pressure was Philemon under to liberate Onesimus once his fellow believers heard Paul’s words! How manipulative is Paul here? Instead of claiming apostolic authority, which he possessed, he dubs himself “a slave,” that is, one with Onesimus!

   Was Paul’s request granted? F.F. Bruce answers “Yes, or the letter would not have survived.” We even have the tradition that Onesimus became the bishop of Ephesus!

   Luke 14:25-33. No sweet Jesus here, inviting hatred of father and mother. We can handle the text, but dare not ignore it. Francis of Assisi is one of a horde of Christians who shattered their own families in order to follow Jesus. The moment Francis, being sued by his father Pietro, gave all he had back to him and swore his sole allegiance to God as his Father. I know I have a very personal story that fits this mold - and the question is always whether to tell something so personal and agonizing or not. It embodies the text quite vividly, but can distract from the main point?

    This taking up the cross isn’t grimacing and praying hard or doing without a few things for Jesus. Joel Marcus, in his great Anchor commentary on Mark, directs us to what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to say about going to death row in the Gulag – which is what taking up your cross would have meant: From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the threshold, you must say to yourself: My former life is over, I shall never return. I no longer have property. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious to me. I can’t re-use those words often enough in preaching.

   Jesus eases back a little from death row to counting the cost of building a tall tower. If I have time, I’ll refer to Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, in which Tom, the mason, ruminates on what it means and requires to build a tall cathedral: “He had worked on a cathedral once. At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been angry and resentful when the master builder had warned him that his work was not quite up to standard: he knew himself to be rather more careful than the average mason. But then he realized that the walls of a cathedral had to be not just good but perfect. This was because the cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean in the walls, the merest variation from the absolutely true and level, could weaken the structure fatally. Tom’s resentment turned to fascination. The combination of a hugely ambitious building with merciless attention to the smallest detail opened Tom’s eyes to the wonder of his craft. He learned about the importance of proportion, the symbolism of various numbers, and the almost magical formulas for working out the correct width of a wall or the angle of a step in a spiral staircase. Such things captivated him.  He was surprised to learn that many masons found them incomprehensible.”  What if we thought of our life with God, our pursuit of holiness, our determination to be the church, in such thoughtful terms?

   One wrinkle though. If we ponder the cost of building, we might assemble lots of wood, bricks, shingles, nails, carpenters, painters, etc. – whereas the cost of discipleship, the cost of a holy life, is more divestment than assembling. You unload the stuff you have. Well, maybe you do keep the carpenter!

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   Check out my book on preaching - not how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: the Challenge and Wonder of Preaching. 

What can we say September 14? 14th after Pentecost

   Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28. How to preach these texts of unmitigated judgment? Tempting to blast the people I’m frustrated with… but Walter Brueggemann reminds me that there is an intense “sadness” in this indictment. The people are indeed “foolish,” and they have skills – in doing evil. Like a heartbroken parent, Jeremiah is united with God’s heart in weeping over this state of affairs – and I sense Jeremiah has a vulnerable sense of solidarity with them, not distant in his judgment, but finding himself inside their larger circle.

   What a vivid image Jeremiah employs: the burning east wind is a ruach, the same as God’s creative wind, and the breath in us, and even God’s Spirit. In the face of national foolishness, God’s Spirit is dry, harsh, unbearable. Jeremiah is thinking of the sirocco, the violent wind that scorches from the Arabian desert to the east. George Adam Smith described it in his diary: “Atmosphere thickening. Wind rises, gale blowing air filled with fine sand, horizon less than a mile, sun not visible, grey sky with almost no shadow.” Thinking of this ungentle breeze, David Grossman entitled his harrowing book about the destructive violence of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis Yellow Wind.

   Is our God a sirocco? Does God unleash horrors on us out of the swirl of God’s wounded, grieved heart? Or is it that God created the world with an order that isn’t flouted without consequences – and so when we get sideways with God, there are terrors? Martin Luther distinguished between God’s proper work and God’s “alien work.” Wrath is simply the goodness, the grace of God, but how it comes at us when we are at a bizarre angle or entirely out of sync with God. If we pray for God’s Spirit, will it be a cool, life-giving breeze, or a harsh, burning wind of judgment? Are our social anxieties, our political issues, fretting over security, family division, international strife and injustices abounding all instances of the harsh east wind of God’s sorrowing over us? Can I tell this in a way that moves my people to repentance (which Jeremiah himself didn’t get done!)?

   Psalm 14 lyrically exposes similar foolishness. It’s not intellectual atheism, but the more practical and insidious living as if there were no God. Brueggemann speaks of this one “whose conduct is disordered and without focus, because it is not referred to God.” Atheists seem really smart, actually - but the Psalm, in pondering those "fools who say in their hearts, There is no god," are characterized as "none who do good." Israelite theology is all about how you live, not any speculations you might have.

   Ellen Charry helpfully cites the Midrash on Psalms: “An architect who built a city making secret chambers and hiding-places in it, and then was made governor of the city. When he set out to catch the thieves in the city, they ran off and sought to hide themselves in the hiding places. He said: ‘Fools, would you hide yourselves from me? I am he who built the city! I know the way in and out better than you.’”

   1 Timothy 1:12-17. I first paid attention to this text when, on a retreat years ago, somebody handed me a little card saying “I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord, because he counted me trustworthy in making me his minister” – 1 Timothy 1:12. My gut reaction was “This translation must be out of kilter, or tendentious in some way.” But the sense is Paul’s, expressing surprise and gratitude that, yes, God chose me to be God’s minister. I have had hundreds of these printed over the years. I stick them in notes written to clergy, I hand them out when I speak at clergy events, and I keep one in my car, one on my desk, and one in my sock drawer just to encourage and remind me.

   I once heard a preacher lunge into the vicinity of what Paul does here. I didn’t know him at all – but heard him declaring at some length “I am a worse sinner than any of you.” Hard not to scratch your head and wonder what he was harboring inside… Sermon didn’t go anywhere good. Luke Timothy Johnson spots the glory tucked inside Paul’s manipulative message: “The mercy shown Paul was not simply forgiveness of past behavior, but the gift of power that enables him to live in a new way.” Read slowly: Paul says “I received mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief” – the latter 2 we usually think of as what disqualifies you from receiving mercy!

    Luke 15:1-10, so familiar, so easy to trivialize. I preached on this in March (out of lectionary sequence!). Luke (humorously to me) mentions “tax collectors and sinners” – as if “sinner” was an occupation! I’ll never forget the evening we had my former coworker and constant friend Rev. Alisa Lasater Wailoo, pastor up in Germantown, Pa. now, back for a program. I opened by asking her a question she didn’t know I would ask: Who is God? She answered with the lost coin story –that God is like this woman, down on her hands and knees, searching diligently in the cracks to find that one lost coin, to find us. 

   The sheep story echoes this. It’s not sufficient in God’s Kingdom to say, Hey, we have 99, that’s not bad. No, we even risk losing the mass in hand to search out the one that’s lost. I chuckle over the Mitch Hedberg comedy routine: you’re in a restaurant, and they call for the Dufresne family – but no reply. They move on to the next name – but Mitch wants to hunt for the Dufresnes: “They’re not only lost. They’re hungry.” The one sheep is lost, and hungry…

   This little parable tells us all we need to know about God, and how to be the church. Notice the Joy in God’s heart! Years ago I heard someone I can’t recall preaching (isn’t this the way? – and a humbling realization for us who preach!) who used this evidently true story as an illustration. Several families were camping out west someplace, and as it was getting dark, when getting ready for dinner, they noticed a little girl named Cathy wasn’t there. Their search gradually became increasingly frantic as night began to fall. “Cathy! Cathy! Cathy!” everyone was shouting as they fanned out. Hours passed as their terror mounted. Finally, almost at dawn, someone stopped shouting “Cathy!” and got really quiet – and heard the soft sound of a whimpering child. There was Cathy, suffering from some bruises, scrapes and exposure. They took her to the closest hospital where she was treated, and then her family was home that night. Her dad tucked her into bed, kissed her goodnight, turned out the light and was about to close the door when he heard her voice. “Daddy?” “Yes, sweetheart?” Perched on her elbow, she smiled and said to him, “I bet you’re glad you found me.” He replied, “Oh, if you only knew.”

   Last time around with this text, we hid pennies all over the church yard and building for people to find (or not) – and I recounted what Annie Dillard reported from her childhood in Pittsburgh. As a 7 year old, "I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe… The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny?… But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days." 

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   Check out my book on preaching - not how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: the Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.