Monday, January 1, 2024

What can we say March 24? Palm Sunday

    For years in worship planning, my staff will ask “Are we doing Palm Sunday? Or Passion Sunday?” My reply is always “Yes.” Is there really a choice? There’s a tragic dimension to the Palms entry, no matter how cute or fun we try to make it. Jesus comes surrounded by great joy but into the teeth of mortal danger; he comes to tackle the powers, and to be killed by them. And there’s a joyful dimension, paradoxically enough, to the Passion. Gruesome, horrific, unjust suffering, transformed by the miraculous way of God into immense life, light, joy.

   Psalm 118 could be preached upon. Even if not, its cadences are well worth mentioning, or even deploying as a call to worship. It’s about a royal victory in ancient times. “This is the day the Lord has made” doesn’t mean Oh, God made a pretty day for me to enjoy, but “This is the day the Lord has acted,” brought deliverance, re-established his people once peril was eluded. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Did Jesus or any of his friends ponder this as he rode right by the huge ashlars of Herod’s temple mount?

   And Philippians 2:5-11 fits the day marvelously as well. I love the little translation quandary that needn’t be resolved but simply pondered: is it “although he was in the form of God, he humbled himself to death on a cross”? or should it be “because he was in the form of God, he…” I lean “because.” Jesus wasn’t pretending to be what he wasn’t, or what God isn’t. Precisely in his humility, in his shattered heart and body do we see the truth about God.

   So Palm Sunday, Mark 11. Stanley Hauerwas is right: "Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem is an unmistakable political act." The crowd does not yet know, and may never understand, that "this king triumphs not through violent revolt, but by being for Israel the one able to show it that its worship of God is its freedom." His action is "a refusal to let Rome determine what counts and doesn't count as politics." Well-said, daunting to explicate in a sermon though, with hearers mired on old-timey Americanish notions about what politics is and what religion (to them, very different) is.

    Subversive, crazed politics though. A king on a little donkey, not a war stallion like Bucephalus (Alexander the Great’s mount) – a borrowed donkey at that. Those following weren’t armed or rich or influential. Dreamers. Martin Luther noticed Jesus road on “an animal of peace fit only for burden and labor. He indicates by this that he comes not to frighten anyone, nor to drive or crush anyone, but to help him and carry his burdens.”

  Pretty courageous, especially since Pilate had just marched his legions from Caesarea on the coast to Jerusalem to intimidate, to secure the city overcrowded at Passover. His stomping regiments, with arms clattering and banners waving high, heading east into the city could not have found a greater contrast that Jesus, donkey hooves clomping on the stone, children holding leafy branches in the air, heading west into the city. The perpetual clash of good and evil coming to its climax.

   Hard to beat the wisdom inside Jesus Christ Superstar's "Hosanna Heysanna..." with the crowd's escalating appeals to Jesus: Won't you smile for me? Won't you fight for me? Won't you die for me? I lucked into a podcast (my "Maybe I'm Amazed") conversation with Tim Rice, who wrote these and all the words for that splendid musical! Lots of insight in there for Holy Week! For Palm Sunday, we feel the jubilation, and yet the painful ironies, the dawning realization on them, and us, of impending doom and what's at stake.

   The shout “Hosanna!” isn’t cheering in church, but a prayer, a cry for help meaning “Save us now!” Mark alludes to the obscure Zechariah – who had given up on human rulers and prophesied that “On that day the Lord God will save them… Lo your king comes humble and riding on a donkey.” What foolish person would draw attention in such a meek, easily-mocked way? There is some mystery afoot here. And we begin to understand that Jesus never protects his own dignity, but is ready to fling it aside to love anybody.

    Imitating Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi strode directly into the jaws of danger. Joining the Crusaders in the battle of Damietta in 1219, he walked across No Man’s Land between the heavily armed Christians and the saber-rattling Muslims – unarmed, barefooted. He was so pitiful that, instead of butchering him, the soldiers hauled him to the sultan, Malik al-Kamil. Francis spent three days with him, befriending him, and bought peace in that region. Well, for a brief time.

   What is the homiletical takeaway? Go thou and so likewise? Hardly. We simply find ourselves in the crowd, excited yet with the hunch that a week of agony for this holy one is beginning. Just before Lent we observed the Transfiguration. No takeaway there. The disciples fell on their faces in awe. I dream of the sermon that has no moral, no lesson, but simply causes all of us to say Wow, Jesus is amazing, so courageous, so humble, so loving, so bold, so holy, so divine. That’s really enough, isn’t it?

   David Lyle Jeffrey reminds us that this colt is untrained, undomesticated, never ridden – and so we’d expect such a creature to be difficult to mount or to stay on task. Instead, he’s docile, cooperative – even amid all the clamor, racket, flapping cloaks and branches. He doesn’t buck, but carried his load beautifully. Luke does linger over the disciples securing this creature. “The Lord has need of it.” It’s thin, and a tad corny, but the preacher isn’t off target to ask “What do we have tied up that the Lord has need of, and could put to lovely use?”

   Who was in the crowd? Had formerly blind Bartimaeus followed him from Jericho? Mary Magdalene surely was there. What about James, Jesus’ brother – who could well have accompanied Jesus’ mother to the triumphant but hauntingly ominous scene. Howard Thurman thoughtfully includes Mary in his pondering on Palm Sunday:

   “I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey. Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes in his father’s shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him this Great Necessity that sent him out on to the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from Isaiah, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.’ I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey.”

What can we say Maundy Thursday?

    Maundy Thursday, one of our holiest 4 nights all year. I can’t preach long at all, for they come, not for a sermon, but for a tangible experience, a real bodily encounter. A little bread. A little wine.

   The footwashing in John 13 is so easy to flatten: Jesus served humbly, so go and serve others humbly (like Pope Francis washing the feet of women, and Muslims!). Since we talk service all year long anyhow, I wonder how on this night to fixate more on Jesus, his remarkable encounter with confused people – and thus with us.

   I love Jean Vanier’s thoughts here (even after learning of his abusive relationships, albeit now with an asterisk…): "Jesus loves us so much that he kneels in front of us so that we may begin to trust ourselves. As Jesus washes our feet, he is saying 'I trust you and I love you. You are important to me. I want you to trust yourself because you can do beautiful things for the kingdom. You can give life; you can bring peace. I want you to discover how important you are. All I am asking is that you believe in yourself because you are a beloved child of God.'"

    I don't usually re-narrate biblical scenes at length, but on Maundy Thursday I invite my people to imagine that first Holy Thursday night. Maybe like Palm Sunday, the disciples were in a buoyant, expectant mood (it was Passover, after all, an evening of jubilation!), while Jesus was mired in a more somber apprehension of what was to come. They sang Psalms - any or all of 113-118. What did their voices sound like? Did Jesus or one of the others lead? Did they harmonize? How did "Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints” (in Psalm 116, our lection for the day!) or “This is the day the Lord has made” (from 118) resonate with Jesus and the rest of them? This is the preaching angle I often suggest: instead of asking about takeaways or relevance to me today, I just ask people to marvel over what happened then.

   Beyond any doubt, Jesus stared at that bread and caught a vision of what would happen to his own flesh the next day. And then he peered into the wine and glimpsed an image of the blood he would shed. How haunting, lovely, gripping, poignant.

   When they ate, what did they think?  We quiz candidates for ordination about their theology of the Eucharist; just to be clear, a struggling seminarian and even the frankly less than average churchgoer today understands more of what was going on that the disciples did. Austin Farrer (in his unfortunately out of print Crown of the Year) put it beautifully:

   “Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples in bread and wine. Amazed at such a token, and little understanding what they did, Peter, John and the rest reached out their hands and took their master and their God. Whatever else they knew or did not know, they knew they were committed to him… and that they, somehow, should live it out.” I like that. We are mystified – but we know we receive Jesus himself, and we are thereby committed to him, come what may. As N.T. Wright rightly suggested, when we eat and drink at the Lord’s table, “we become walking shrines, living temples in whom the living triune God truly dwells.”

   What do our people think as they amble slowly forward? I invite them into what Martin Sheen said to Krista Tippett in an On Being episode: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

   Inclusivity is debated – but how inclusive was Jesus? Jürgen Moltmann (in The Church in the Power of the Spirit): “The Lord’s supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is as open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of ‘the world,’ the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper.”

   In my book Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, I quote these words and then turn to the lovely interview Krista Tippett had a while back with Father Greg Boyle, whose ministry with gang members in California is impressive and moving:  “We’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’ hand and we’ve replaced it with a chalice because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice?”  Then he told how he asked an abused orphan and former gang member in his program, “What did you do for Christmas?” The young man said he cooked a turkey “ghetto-style,” and invited six other guys to join him. When he named them, Boyle recognized them as members of warring gangs. As he pondered them cooking together on Christmas day, he wondered, “So what could be more sacred than seven orphans, enemies, rivals, sitting in a kitchen waiting for a turkey to be done? Jesus doesn't lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends.”

   A few years ago, it occurred to me that my reflections on something as stupendous and tender as Maundy Thursday were growing stale. How to find a new wrinkle? I tend to forget that Maundy Thursday includes Jesus bolting out into the dark to pray in Gethsemane – and being arrested. On that prayer of agony, I am always moved by Jesus Christ Superstar’s “I Only Want to Say.” I’ve made a point over the years of correcting a popular image of Gethsemane – that of Heinrich Hoffman’s “Christ in Gethsemane” (hanging in the Riverside Church, NY) – Jesus praying placidly, well-coiffed, almost as if saying his bedtime prayers. Willem Dafoe captured that searing agony in Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ.

   And then, of course, the poignancy of Judas’s kiss, and the arrest – and I am continually mentioning the detail that I can’t and don’t even want to explain: in John 18:6 Jesus says, “I am he.” What happened next? “The soldiers drew back and fell to the ground.” Wow.

What can we say Good Friday?

    I love Good Friday, or I’m humbled by it, privileged to be in the relatively shadowy room. It’s such a quiet service, no long silences so much as the tone and mood of whatever sounds the choir, readers and preacher make. “Preach” or “homily”: too strong, too grandiose to describe what I try to do. I meditate, and feel the shudder, the sorrow, the beauty and majesty. I prepare not by exegesis but by gazing at and pondering art, whether it’s Rouault or Grünewald or one among so many that avoid being corny or sappy.

   At our church, we always read the Isaiah 52:13-53:12 early. Haunting. Good Friday isn't the time to explicate this complex text and its background. We trust the words to do their thing. And Psalm 22: Jesus' heart-wrenching cry, himself forsaken, and joining his God-forsakenness forever to ours. I try to ponder the horror, the sorrow Mary felt as she watched her son cry out these words she had taught him as a little boy.

   Then we do the Gospel reading in stages, gradually extinguishing lights and then candles until we are immersed in total darkness. On Good Friday, more than any other day, we are humbled by our inability to say anything – just as Jesus was all but silent as he hung for hours. On this day, more than any other, we realize we do not need to make the Bible relevant, or to illustrate it.  We can and must simply trust the reading to do the work it has done for 2000 years.

   Just as the art is better than a chatty sermon, our hymns articulate all this so provocatively. “When I survey the wondrous cross.” I don’t glance at it. I study it, measure it, measure myself by it. “Sorrow and love flow mingled down… Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?” All the paradoxes sung pensively. “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” Yes, his hands, feet and side were gored and gruesome. But the head: the brow, with that poisonously pointed crown, the eyes, looking at the soldiers and his mother, the mouth, thirsting, and speaking words of mercy for the soldiers and provision for his mother. You can fashion a whole meditation / homily just looking at and reflecting on that head – knowing he is our Head.

   We part in silence at the service’s end. I’m not in a chatty mood myself, and I don’t want to let them off the hook by exchanging premature Easter greetings. There’s no moral, no takeaway. Just be in awe. Feel the pain, if you can – as Francis of Assisi prayed constantly before a crucifix: “Lord, 2 graces I ask of you before I die: first, that I might feel, in my body and soul, as far as possible, the pain you underwent in your most bitter passion; and then, that I might feel, in my body and soul, as far as possible, the love that so enflamed you to undergo such passion for us sinners.”

   Talk about answered prayer. Francis prayed to feel the pain. And God gave him the stigmata, wounds in his hands, feet and side that bled intermittently the final 2 years of his life.

What can we say March 31? Easter Sunday

    I can never decide if preaching Easter is one fabulous moment, or a vaguely monotonous drudgery. I mean, it’s Easter. No greater day could be to preach. And yet, they come  - in droves! – yet inoculated against the radical truth of the day, thinking it’s that All Dogs Go To Heaven, that it’s all about flowers and pretty dresses, the flowers blooming in Spring. We’re fortunate – maybe – this year in that Easter is early enough that all may not yet be in bloom.

   I can only point you to two earlier posts on prior Easter Sundays, this one focused on Kavin Rowe’s Christianity’s Surprise – and then this one, that attends to the fact that Easter was “after the Sabbath.”

   Friends, preach well – which is only fitting – on Easter. But don’t be exasperated if, afterwards, the response is a bit tepid. So it was for the first proclaimers of the astonishingly good news.

What can we say April 7? Easter 2

     Easter 2's texts astonish us with the difference resurrection makes. Acts 4:32-35 describes a vital church not much like ours at all. What was the greater miracle for those first Christians? That they coughed up all their possessions to insure no one went without? or that they were of one heart and soul? I've tried in sermons to name this. People nod - but no property changes hands.

   Willie Jennings phrases the issue eloquently, speaking of "the new order of giving rooted in the divine wanting, rooted in the divine desire to join us together... Money here will be used to destroy what money normally is used to create: distance and boundaries between people... God watches and waits to see faith that connects resource to need."

   Psalm 133 is a fitting Easter text: How lovely when brothers dwell together in unity. Or we might today say, How rare. Or How miraculous. How resurrection-like. There is an inextricable link between "No one said any of the things he possessed was his own but they had everything in common" and "And with great power they gave testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" and "There was not a needy person among them." We can talk evangelistic tools or church growth strategies all we'd like; but the early Christians expanded exponentially because their witness was what they did with their possessions. We are so enmeshed, we prefer to keep our own stuff and blame others who don't have enough, or we feel noble if we toss some loose change or some leftover canned goods into a basket.

   Speaking of testimony: in my circles, we do not attend sufficiently to the remarkable epistle text for Easter 2, 1 John 1:1-2:2.  The writer speaks urgently about what they had seen "with our own eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands... We saw it!" Richard Bauckham wrote a fantastic, definitive-feeling book (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) about how the Gospels came to be, and it's all about the piling up of eyewitness accounts.  The earliest Christian preachers could say We saw him, we touched him, if anybody could debunk the resurrection or his lordship, it would be us. 

   I continue to speculate over the role of testimony in preaching. I suspect that while I engage in it, I don't go far enough.  I think people want to hear that Yes, I believe this - as opposed to I've gotten up a sermon for you today. 

   And notice in 1 John the purpose of them sharing what they saw and touched: so we can have fellowship with each other and with God, and so that "our joy may be complete."  Love it: not You better be joyful, but We are joyful.  Joy isn't happiness jacked up a notch or two.  It's so very different - and I would commend to you Christian Wiman's lovely collection of poetry about joy, with his startlingly wise commentary. And, as I've said in this blog repeatedly, the point of Easter is forgiveness, not I get eternal life now.  How much clearer could it be?  1 John goes from fellowship with God via the resurrection to being forgiven and forgiving.

   It’s not OK, he was real, but his mission and theirs is “the word of life,” and the ultimate goal, “so you may be in communion with us.” The Greek koinonia is narrated in Acts, where the first Christians held their possessions in common, and cared for the needy all around. Way more than “fellowship,” the kind church people rightly enjoy where they delight in seeing one another – the big loss during the pandemic! It’s welcoming the stranger, friendship among the unlikely, sacrificial sharing – in short, our relationships being mirror images of God’s with us, and the only meaningful result of God having koinonia with us.

   Quotable, this Epistle text! “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Switch on a light or a candle and see how the darkness flees. Less cherished are other quotables, like “If we boast to be in communion with God while walking in darkness, we are liars.” Verse 1:9 explicates forgiveness, and we needn’t bother with the fineries of what is expiation vs forgiveness vs cleansing, as we’d best first and lovingly persuade our people that it isn't so much that they have a problem, like Apollo 13 hurtling without fuel or air in space – but rather, they are a problem, savable not by human ingenuity though but only by divine intervention. The rescue is the death of the person we saw, heard and touched – and the Calvinists’ TULIP will struggle to explain away the seemingly unLimited atonement in 2:2: “not only for our sins but also for the whole world.” That’s worth quoting, and pondering. We yearn for – and can expect! – forgiveness, not for me, or those I love, but the whole world?

   John 20:19-31. The preacher can set a mood people can understand easily: doors are locked, fear dominates.  And they can't seem to recognize Jesus (Mary Magdalene or the twelve!).  "I think they are blinded by their unfulfilled expectations and their feelings of loss and despair" (Jean Vanier).  To fearful people behind locked doors (pandemic-like?) Jesus speaks Peace into their fear – and hopeful and hard-to-believe word for us obsessed with locks, security systems, urban anxiety, even the proliferation of guns. 

 There’s even a civilizational kind of fear well described by Walter Brueggemann: all people fall into 2 categories, those who fear the world they treasured is crumbling all around them, and those who fear the world they dream of will never come to be. I have found in declaring this that people, even if for a moment, find some common ground.

   There is no fear near Jesus – but this doesn’t mean you can relax. Elie Wiesel famously said “If an angel ever says, ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out: a big assignment is on the way.” Jesus comforts with one hand and then shoves them out into hard labor and danger with the other. These disciples, and ours today, have work to do, requiring courage, and some peace.

   The scars in Jesus’ hands and side, earned when he gave life to all of us, were not blotted out by the resurrection (John 20:27). I love that Jesus shows up, not as powerful but as the wounded one. The wounds are his glory. What do we sing in "Crown Him with Many Crowns”? “Behold his hands and side. Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” His wounds are his love.

   Every time I work at this text, I go to Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, who posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral with this caption: “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini… because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.” Earned scars, earned through the enfleshing of love.

   I’m fond too of the insight Graham Greene shared in The End of the Affair.  A woman notices what used to be a wound on her lover’s shoulder, and contemplates the advancing wrinkles in his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of a scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man from a falling wall.  The scar was part of his character, and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.”

   Jesus breathes on them. Fascinating – especially after the pandemic. Of course we are to think of God’s breath giving life to the first humans (Genesis 2), and the reviving of the dead nation during the exile (Ezekiel 37), not deadly with the Coronavirus, although deadly perhaps to sin, self and a vapid life. I like to ponder that, for Jesus to breathe on them or anybody, they’ve got to be standing close, right next to him. Is discipleship just sticking as close to Jesus as possible, to feel his breath?

   I’m wary of sermons that get fixated on “doubting” Thomas. It’s a thing; I’m unsure if it helps parishoners if the clergy say “I have doubts too!” We’ve all heard sermons about “doubting Thomas.” Doubt is hardly praised in this story. If anything, Jesus dings him, contrasting him with those who haven’t seen and yet believe. He is loved and treated with immense compassion; Jesus invites him to touch the wounds. The Greek is graphic, with Jesus saying “thrust” or “press” or “cast” your finger into (like down in there) my side. Caravaggio captured this in a stunning way…

   I might still want to celebrate doubt, which isn’t a failure of faith but asking darn good questions. Mark Helprin, in Winter’s Tale, writes “All great discoveries are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.” Robert Penn Warren wonderfully said “Here, as in life, meaning is, I should say, often more fruitfully found in the question asked than in any answer given."

   And then Simone Weil: “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth… Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”

   My doubts are less about the existence of God or the resurrection of Christ, but rather about the possibility of forgiveness or the reality of miraculous transformation! – which seems to be what this text is ultimately about, and what Easter in the Bible is entirely attentive to. Jesus is risen, so therefore – you are forgiven, and you go forgive. Startling. If I tell stories of forgiveness, the Amish at Nickel Mines, Pa., or Corrie ten Boom and her sister's executioner, will anyone believe?

What can we say April 14? Easter 3

    How do we get Easter to feel like a season, not just a day? Does it matter? We can invite our people to live into the earliest days of the church, the confusion, then inspiration and buzz of missional activity in the wake of this shock of all shocks. But it’s not a smooth road, is it? Acts 3:12-19, one of those bizarre “Old Testament” readings the lectionary strays into, has dreadful anti-Semitic overtones: “You Israelites killed Jesus.” Daniel Silva’s novel, The Order, is terrific with how the New Testament has fed and still feeds negative sentiment toward Jews. Yom HaShoah, the annual Holocaust remembrance day, is coming up in a couple of weeks...

   Early, post-Easter Christianity thrived because of the exchange and circulation of letters. 1 John 3:1-7 is so lovely. A preacher could ruminate on various aspects of it for weeks. “See what love.” We forget that God’s love isn’t a heavenly mood beaming down on us. It’s historical, real, something visible. “See”: not just glance at, but look, peruse, survey, study. “What love”: the Greek potapos expresses both quantity and quality, so how much love, but also what amazing love, agape love.

   “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” It has been revealed, but not really, not fully. Clearly resurrected life for us won’t be a pleasant continuation of all we’ve dug on earth, golf with regular holes-in-one or, as Tammy Faye Bakker fantasized, heaven as a shopping mall where you have a credit card with no limit. There, “we will be like him.” What was Jesus like? That’s ultimate humanity, your truest self, what you’ll be like… but then John adds, “For we will see him as he is.” I can’t explicate that sentence well enough. I think in my sermon, I’ll just repeat it, slowly, two or three times, and let it linger. For. Seeing him will… make us like him?

   Maybe the beauty of Jesus, the reality of his compelling self, will capture our attention and other interests will just melt away, as we’ve come upon this pearl of great price. This must have been what happened to those fishermen whose family business, Zebedee & Sons, fell apart when they saw Jesus, whom they’d never seen before, and dropped everything to traipse off after him, to go… well, where? They had no idea.

   Luke 24:36b-48 feels like some scribe, fond of John’s Gospel and a tad disappointed by Luke’s version, spliced in a pericope so much like John 20! Suddenly Jesus appears in a room (not that much unlike his behavior at Emmaus!). They aren’t comforted, but startled, terrified. He invites them to look at and touch his hands and feet. I love Sarah Ruden's new translation: "Look at my hands and feet, and you'll know it's me, in person. Feel me over and see, because a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones, as you can observe that I have." 

   It's the scars. Robert Barron, commenting in the lovely new The Word on Fire Bible: "A woundless Christ is embraced much more readily by his executioners, since he doesn't remind them of their crime." So the scars remind of the forgiveness they need (and that he gives). Barron goes on to point out the plot of history and the world: "Order, destroyed thru violence, is restored through greater violence." (Think Rambo, Dirty Harry). Jesus undermines all of this. The scars remind he's not returning a greater violence for ours.

    Speaking of John: every time I work chapter 20, I go to Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, who posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral with this caption: “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini… because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.” Earned scars, earned through the enfleshing of love.

   I’m fond too of the insight Graham Greene shared in The End of the Affair.  A woman notices what used to be a wound on her lover’s shoulder, and contemplates the advancing wrinkles in his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of a scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man from a falling wall.  The scar was part of his character, and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.”

   The scars in Jesus’ hands and side, earned when he gave life to all of us, were not blotted out by the resurrection (John 20:27). Caravaggio painted it graphically. I love that Jesus shows up, not as powerful but as the wounded one. The wounds are his glory. What do we sing in "Crown Him with Many Crowns”? Behold his hands and side. Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified. 

    His wounds - glorified. Beauty. Jesus showed his scars. St. Francis of Assisi, who prayed to be like Christ so seriously that God actually answered his prayer by wounding his hands, feet and side, hid his wounds out of humility!

   The humility of the risen Christ? He’s hungry – and they give him a piece of broiled fish. Eat some broiled fish in preparation to preach. Report on what it tasted like, and what that might have been like for Jesus, and the astounded disciples. Who could have anticipated that over time the Greek word for fish, ichthus, would become a widespread acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior?

   I might just play with this in my sermon. Jonah and the fish. God creating the fish. Jesus retrieving a coin from a fish’s mouth. St. Anthony of Padua, following St. Francis’s example of preaching to birds, preaching to fish, encouraging them to be grateful to God for water, gills, food, that they survived the flood in huge numbers, and found their way onto the boat of the disciples just after they saw Jesus – in John again!

 

What can we say April 21? Easter 4

    Four, not just three great texts! I’ll touch on Acts and the Epistle, then focus on the Psalm and Gospel – on which I’ll be preaching.

   Acts 4:5-12. Think ministry’s hard today? Jesus’ first leaders wound up in jail and on trial! Willie Jennings, noting how we expect Jesus to provide us a life different from Jesus’ own, namely that we will be liked or at least tolerated… “Jesus ended up in exactly the same kind of place that now his disciples Peter and John stand, the judged. But he got there before them in order to meet them there when they arrived and to guide them precisely from that place of being judged. Jesus never sought to escape the place of judgment. He planned to seize it.” Boom.

   1 John 3:16-24. Such a lovely, harrowing, inviting and challenging text! Raymond Brown speaks of the Greek as “infuriatingly complicated,” and he awards it the “prize in grammatical obscurity.” St. Augustine and John Calvin read the passage as about the severity, the high demands of God; Martin Luther, always the contrarian, sees the text as all about God’s mercy. The ambiguity is pitch-perfect, isn’t it? Scripture is obscure; we keep digging; it’s demand, it’s mercy. Life as a follower of Jesus, and life for the Body of Christ, is just like that, always.

   Easy to moralize on verse 17’s hard rhetorical question, How can God’s love be in someone who has stuff, sees someone in need and refuses to help? Is this a sign God’s love isn’t in or with such a person? Is it aspirational? Not fully there just yet? Aren’t there pagans with means who help those in need? And is it a constant helping of those in need, a genuinely sacrificial helping? Or an occasional spasm so you can check this off the list? I think simply raising such questions in the sermon is a good exercise for the listener, and prevents the preacher from wagging a finger of accusation.

   Luther must be right on the mercy since in the next verse we’re called “little children,” not “you grownup dufuses.” Let us love, not merely talking, but “in truth and action.” We might prefer him to have said “action,” and leave off “truth.” What makes love “in truth” beyond “in action”? I can’t interview the writer… but I will explore stuff we’ve heard in recent years, starting with “toxic charity.” What a relief (I suspect) for many of our people to learn there is such a thing, that doing for others can actually cripple them. Just let them be!

   And yet, in what I’m still regarding as maybe the most important theological book of the decade, A Nazareth Manifesto, Sam Wells reveals how the Christian doesn’t mail in or drop off charity, and we also don’t just ignore others because we fear we’ll damage them by our charity. There is a doing for people that diminishes them. There is mission-as-fixing. You have a problem? I’m the solution? – which is an inch from You are a problem. We can do for others. We might think it nobler to work with others, or to be for them. Sam says God invites us, best of all, to be with them.

   Indeed, the seeds of a community’s redemption lie within the community itself. Jürgen Moltmann: “The opposite of poverty isn’t property; the opposite of both poverty and property is community.” We have coffee with someone, not to save them, but to enjoy friendship. Only in this way are they ennobled; only in this way are we ennobled. Could 1 John imply this is the true way to care for (and really with) those in need? Or do we drift even further to Mother Teresa’s articulation of things: we don’t do what we do for other people. We do it to Jesus. Literally.

   Psalm 23 can be risky preaching, as so much sugary sentimentality has attached itself to this overly familiar text. No need to ding people or jolt them out of their warm fuzzy mood on hearing it; hey, I get warm fuzzy feelings from hearing it – especially when we read it aloud, together as a Body, at funeral services. It’s just a matter of the preacher taking them further into what they were sure they already comprehended well.

     A few points of interest. To speak of the Lord as shepherd isn’t flattering to us – although much like sheep, we are foolish creatures, driven entirely by appetite, easily lost and in peril. I heard a preacher years ago say “Sheep nibble themselves lost.”

   And then, the shepherd. We romanticize them as rural simpletons. But rulers throughout the Ancient Near East were called shepherds. As a business, flocks could number in the tens of thousands, so shepherding required considerable administrative savvy. Travellers to the Holy Land have observed that shepherds are a bit rough in appearance, and are quite rough with their sheep. First shepherd I ever saw was wearing an Elvis t-shirt, big green golashes, swatting sheep on the rear end with his stick, and hollering expletives. The Lord is my shepherd.

   The shepherd’s care can be tender and personal. It was common for shepherds to give sheep names. I was never sure, as a child, by that TV program in which Shari Lewis spoke to her little sheep puppet she called “Lamb Chop” – a name that sounds more like a meal than a pet. If you want to ponder the shepherd’s personal care for the sheep, flit over to Jesus’ great story about the shepherd who had hung onto 99 out of 100 – a super high percentage – but was restless until he found that one. Jealous, protective, resilient, doggedly loyal: shepherds. No wonder the angels chose them for their audience when Jesus was born.

   Most pastors are cognizant that “I shall not want” might be better rendered as “I will lack no good thing.” This opens up some reflection on our wanting, what is genuinely good, etc. The “paths of righteousness” – good roads to take, but what kind of righteous, holy, Torah-filled, disciple living is required of those who can truly claim to walk there?

   Someone counted all the Hebrew words in Psalm 23, and it turns out that the word smack dab in the middle is “with.” The center of the Psalm, the center of the life of faith, is “thou art with me.” This bears homiletical reflection. Wells’s A Nazareth Manifesto again: God isn’t primarily a fixer or protector or guarantor of this or that we think we must have. God’s identity and purpose: simply to be with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, not God fixing us or doing favors for us. This then redefines our mission. We don’t do for others or fix others; we are called to be with them – as explicated now in Sam’s companion volume on the nature and mission of the church, Incarnational Ministry.

    “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies” bears some thought. It’s not a taunt (as a scholar I’ll leave unnamed has insisted). From a Christian theological perspective, the Lord’s table is the place where reconciliation begins and ends. When you have a dinner party, do not invite those who can invite you in return (Luke 14). We are to make peace, at table, not with our pals but with those where relationships are broken or nonexistent.

   I had a strange compulsion a while back when preaching on Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd – but what is the antecedent of “my”? Sheep, surely? I tried my hand at putting these words into the mouth of another creature in the pastoral scene: the sheepdog (catch it on YouTube). It’s his shepherd too. I latched onto this because of a lovely quotation from Evelyn Underhill I’ve long treasured: “You want to be one among the sheepdogs employed by the Good Shepherd.  Now have you ever watched a good sheepdog at his work?  He is not at all an emotional animal.  He just goes on with his job quite steadily, takes no notice of bad weather, rough ground, or his own comfort.  He seldom or never comes back to be stroked.  Yet his faithfulness, his intimate understanding with his master, is one of the loveliest things in the world.  Now and then he just looks at the shepherd.  When the time comes for rest they can generally be found together.” I love Underhill, always spot on, always wise, always full of clarity and insight.

     The Lord is the shepherd of us, the Body of Christ. This is more evident in John 10:11-18 – where the emphasis is on the courage, the stick-to-it-iveness of the shepherd. Wolves go on the prowl, but this shepherd doesn’t duck behind a rock. He “gives his life for the sheep.” 

    I am increasingly drawn toward preaching to the Body as the Body, not to each individual sitting there individually. If we are Christ now, if we are his body, then we have shepherding to do.

   The Greek kalos isn’t simply “good,” but may well mean “beautiful,” or even the “model” shepherd. Bonhoeffer was onto something when he showed us how our goodness can be a block to doing God’s will. We want to be good, to keep our hands clean; but God asks us to get our hands dirty for God. Shepherding is dirty work. Out of doors, exposed to the elements, trudging through mud and overgrown fields. That’s Jesus’ beauty, right? And ours, when we are the Church in this world.

   And costly work. Ben Witherington points out that in John’s plot, at this point they are in Jerusalem for the Feast of Dedication,” which celebrated the military victory of the Maccabees: “True leadership does indeed mean laying down one's life for the sheep, as some of the Maccabees had in fact done.” Yet Jesus isn’t fighting the enemy with weapons, but with vulnerability, his own body, the instrument of love.

   What does this text say to us as pastors? Pope Francis reflected on bishops who “supervise/oversee” versus those who “keep watch,” like a shepherd: “Overseeing refers more to a concern for doctrine and habits, whereas keeping watch is more about making sure that there be salt and light in people’s hearts… To watch over it is enough to be awake, sharp, quick. To keep watch you need also to be meek, patient, and constant in proven charity. Overseeing and watching over suggest a certain degree of control. Keeping watch, on the other hand, suggests hope, the hope of the merciful Father who keeps watch over the processes in the hearts of his children.”

   And Jean Vanier pointed out how false shepherds “are more concerned about their salary, their reputation, structures, administration and the success of the group. They use people… They are closed up in their own needs.” And then – what can we say? – Jean Vanier turned out to be Jean Vanier, a user of women. Lord, have mercy.

    Back to the Pope: “To become a good shepherd is to come out of the shell of selfishness to be attentive to those for whom we are responsible, to reveal to them their fundamental beauty and value and help them grow and become fully alive. It is not easy really to listen. It is not easy to touch our own fears. It is a challenge to help others gradually accept responsibility, to trust themselves. When people are weak or lost, they need a shepherd close to them. Little by little, however, as they discover who they are, the shepherd becomes more of a friend and companion.”

   Of course, John gives us that mysterious “I have other sheep not of this fold.” Does he mean other religions? Or as one friend of mine believes, Jesus has people on other planets in other galaxies! Jesus is thinking Gentiles of course – but here we see his abiding, deep desire for unity among God’s people, which is the reality in God’s heart, even if our hearts are divided from one another.

    How to preach all this? Be sure that it looks, when delivered, like this thought from Jason Byassee: “In John 10, an odd text is read in an odd way by an exceedingly odd Savior and dished up for an odd people becoming odder. That is, holier.” A superb goal all of us might keep in mind as we study, prepare, write, practice, deliver, and reflect on what unfolded...