What can we say July 6? 4th after Pentecost

    My snarky side, yet backed up by years of experience, snarls that on the Sunday close to July 4, our people exercise their much-vaunted freedom of religion by freely not materializing for worship. Alas. Last week’s text spoke quite directly to freedom, and how freedom theologically construed is vastly different from freedom American-style. I’ll refer you to my “Jesus and July 4” blog from yesteryear, which still holds – not to be preached, but as background music for us as we preach, and live as the people of God. Of course, it's even dicier now with some weird mix of rancor, numbness, some people giddy, others chagrined but feeling oh so very helpless. I do remind us that Christianity was born, and thrived in an environment of intense political oppression. Everybody loathed those in power.

   I believe I will preach on one of my very favorite texts, 2 Kings 5; let me commend to you this sermon I preached last go round. A riveting story of brokenness, humility, hope and healing. Peter Leithart even calls this text “the richest Old Testament story of baptism,” one that “anticipates Christian baptism.” Maybe.

    Naaman was a great, successful man of valor, of substance.  But… there is always a “but” isn’t there? “But” he was a leper. Robert Alter, in his great new translation of Scripture, renders tsara’at as “skin blanch,” the main symptom being loss of pigmentation, not lesions and lumps. Only the very bold preacher would dare to suggest that his problem is being white!

    He probably cloaked, with armor or sheer reputation and might, his humbling disability, as we usually hide our brokenness. His unsought humility was mirrored to him in the person of a young woman, who is small of stature, and female; he is a captain, she is a captive. All other healers having failed him, Naaman is desperate enough to follow her tip.

   The not-yet-humbled Naaman rumbles up to Elisha’s house reining in his stallions, bearing gifts, expecting to pay his way to healing, to grease a few palms. He’ll come out for me (the Hebrew of “for me” is emphatic). The wealthy and powerful grouse about the poor feeling entitled; but who feels more entitled than the wealthy and powerful? Such a barrier against God’s grace!

     Elisha is unimpressed. After all, once you’ve seen chariots and horses blazing with fire, riding not across rugged terrain but soaring above the clouds (2 Kings 2), a bunch of steeds pulling a cocky chieftan atop wooden wheels just doesn’t raise your pulse. Not deigning to come out, Elisha disses Naaman, enraging him. Naaman was prideful, but perhaps pride was all he had left. Much as we might do in the privacy of the doctor’s or therapist’s office, we’ve dressed well, and mention some cool thing we did last night – but obviously we have come not for banter, but to be healed, to reveal the “but,” to expose what hinders us, hoping, blushing.

   Fascinating:  Elisha could have come out; he could have made the trip himself to Damascus; he could have healed at a distance. But he let Naaman come to him. When Joseph’s brothers were hungry, he could have shipped food to them, but he let them come. Joseph didn’t want them merely to fill their bellies; he wanted to heal the relationship. Elisha didn’t want Naaman merely to be rid of leprosy; he wanted him to be more deeply healed. By not even paying him the courtesy of coming to the door, Elisha reverses the sorry tale Jesus would tell of a rich man not coming to the door to help out a poor leper!

      Elisha’s prescription isn’t courteous either: bathe in the Jordan. Pilgrims to Israel chuckle when they see the Jordan, hardly a river at all, more of a stream, a creek. Naaman protests: shouldn’t his cure be more dazzling, perhaps dipping himself in the pools by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or some exotic salve imported from Ethiopia? It’s just water, it’s always been there; it’s all around, it’s what I am made of.

     Faith is the crumpling of pride (as my theology professor Robert Cushman used to say). This morning a friend texted me a photo of the epitaph on Don Knotts's grave, which reads " He saw the poignancy in people’s pride and pain, and turned it into something hilarious and endearing" - and I thought of Naaman. I picture him as tall, strapping, muscular; but maybe he was more like Barney Fife, a bit ridiculous but not to himself. 

Or was he Barney Fife, hiding inside the tall, strapping guy? Is faith, the crumpling of pride, somehow the realization that there is real poignancy in our pride and pain, and it ultimately is endearing?

   Elisha invites Naaman to achieve this humility through something as simple, as obvious, as unimpressive as a bit of water only Elisha or somebody desperately thirsty would think of as powerful. I do not know if Naaman flailed a bit trying to get his whole body under such a shallow, coursing stream. But we know there was a miracle in that water. Sure, the leprosy washed downstream. Yet more importantly, when he stepped up onto the river bank, drenched and dripping, he was no longer a man, but a boy: “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child,” like the little maiden who showed him the way, like all of us when we “become like children.”

    Without romanticizing childhood, we may recognize its virtues: vulnerability, an implicit demand for justice, the way children show their treasures, weep in the open, accept grace easily, suffer no illusions of independence, and are easily amazed. All of Christianity is a kind of return to childhood, a training in humility. All of our gestures seem silly: folding our hands, bowing our heads, kneeling. How do you get ahead or defend yourself acting in these ways? We believe in vulnerability, humility, a bit of flailing in embarrassment. Dipping in a no account river on the suggestion of a two-bit prophet who wouldn’t even answer the door: the foolishness of God is wiser than all of us.

     The humility goes on. Sensing his nascent excitement about Elisha’s God will be compromised at home, Naaman rather charmingly scoops up some dirt to carry back with him, to cling to some piece of holiness in an unholy place. “Elisha does not expect Naaman to abandon the world or withdraw into a ghetto where he can escape moral dilemmas and difficulties” (Leithart). Not only is our post-baptized life full of dilemmas and difficulties; we fail miserably. We cannot heal ourselves, or achieve what God wants of us. But we remember the water, the awkward humiliation – and wasn’t it at precisely that moment of spiraling out of control, of losing all hope and dignity, that a slight rustling of wings was heard, and a whispered message, something like “this is my beloved child,” just a boy, a girl, small, wet, like we were at birth, like we will be when we are greeted at the door by fiery chariots?

   Galatians 6:1-16 tickles me, since it includes Paul’s childlike brag: “See what large letters I make.” Did the Galatians giggle on having these words read to them? Did they want a peek at the parchment from which the reader spoke these words?

    How counter-cultural for us is Paul’s urging his readers to have a “spirit of gentleness,” not the hysterical rancor and exasperated sighing half of Americans have for the other half? “Bear one another’s burdens” – instead of blaming or judging. We all carry this awful burden of political ideology. It’s heavy. Can we bear the other guy’s by not investing it with such weightiness? It’s temporal, far from eternal, the real idolatry that afflicts us all.

   “If those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves.” Of course, we all are something. It’s just what kind of something, what defines that something that is the catch. “Test your own work” – not your neighbor’s! Moses the Black, one of the Desert Fathers, said “If you have a corpse lying in your front room, you won’t have time to go to someone else’s funeral.” “All must carry their own loads,” and gosh, we each have plenty, and could actually use some of that “bearing one another’s burdens,” in love, not in judgment that is.

   Indeed, “you reap what you sow.” This isn’t a stewardship sermon: Give! And you’ll make even more! Those who reap rancor will be consumed by it. Frederick Buechner memorable said that “of the 7 Deadly Sins, anger is the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to save to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back: in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

   Paul encourages his young Christians not to grow weary. I just love what Marianne Williamson said in her fantastic Goop podcast “Who Are You in Crisis?” Gwyneth Paltrow whined of being weary in working for just causes. Williamson chided her, reminding us of how slaves, African-Americans in the 50’s, Jews in concentration camps, and so many others who’ve suffered far worse haven’t had the luxury of feeling tired or taking a break. “You put on your big girl pants and keep going” – something Williamson can say to Paltrow, but that I’d best omit from my sermon!

   And finally Luke 10:1-11, 16-20, not a text I warm up to much. Jesus sends 70 (where did the extra 58 come from??) in pairs (like animals moseying into Noah’s ark!). They are “appointed” (anadeknumi), a word making every Methodist pastor shiver. “The harvest is plentiful”? My sense is that the harvest in this culture isn’t plentiful much at all… It’s hard to get church people to pay attention, much less those outside the fold.

   But still we go, we try, we labor on. “Take no purse, no sandals” – so no minimum salaries or raises for these guys! The simplicity of how we go: their attire reminds me of St. Francis, who went to Pope Innocent asking for authorization for a new order of monks. The charter he presented? We can read it, and it’s nothing but a little listing of Bible verses about what Jesus did and said. Maybe that’s it. No grand strategies, not business-model smoothness, no skills or techniques. 25 years ago our conference required each church to devise a new mission statement. I gathered some key folks, and explained our assignment. One woman laughed out loud and said “That’s easy. We are to do the things Jesus told us to do.” We wrote that down, sent it in and went home. Seriously.

   How kind, thoughtful and anticipatory Jesus’ preparing them that some will welcome you and hear, others will not, will even reject them. Failing in ministry? Jesus saw it coming and sent us anyhow. I do try to be careful when I parse for myself “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me,” as I can get the me in there to the point it overshadows the Jesus in the me, and so they are rejecting not Jesus but me, my unfaithful me, my ego me, my competitive me, my insecure, trying to make my mark me. I hope you do not share this affliction with… me.

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   Check out my book about St. Francis and what he might say to us - preachers and laity - today: Conversations with St. Francis.

What can we say July 13? 5th after Pentecost

    Amos 7:7-17. My first sermon ever, when I was 20, about to enter Div school, and so very clueless about what to talk about, was on this text. Somehow I’d latched on to verse 14, “I am no prophet,” and I assured my hapless listeners that “I am no preacher.” He’s preaching and – he’s right, he’s no preacher. Amos is of course distancing himself from those professional prophets who were mere yes-men for the establishment, who curried royal favor and profit – and who, no doubt, believed firmly and passionately in what they were saying! Firmness and passion, and being able to stir a crowd to cheer, are not signs that you’re actually speaking a word from God.

   I’m not a hold-up-an-object-lesson kind of preacher, but Amos was. A familiar construction item: the plumbline, used to detect if a wall under construction was straight enough. I love the opening of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. Mason/builder Tom began work on a cathedral: “At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been resentful when the master builder warned him that his work was not quite up to standard. 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, the merest variation from 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.”

   Israel’s wall, Israel’s life, is far from perfect. The lean is disaster waiting to happen. Amos comes to name it. The prophets, and even many of Jesus’ sermons, call into question (for me) the standard I was taught and have lived with lo these many years: a sermon is “good news.” Where’s the good news? Amos’s sermon is unflinchingly bad news. When we get askew with God’s good news way, it’s bad news for us. Does that preach?

   Marvin Sweeney points out that ’anak could mean “plaster” – as if God is a renovator. The walls of the kingdom’s lavish sanctuary and palace were in superb condition – or so they presumed. Marianne Williamson suggested that when we invite God into our lives, we expect a decorator to appear to spruce the place up a little. But instead, you look out the window, and there’s a wrecking ball about to tear it all down and start over.

   Colossians 1:1-14. Unless you quibble over authorship, Paul (I’m okay with him as author here, and a sermon’s no place to dispute the issue anyhow) dubs himself “an apostle by the will of God.” Not for the sermon, but in your own soul: are you a preacher “by the will of God”? If so, in some mysterious way, does that alter not just what you say but how you prepare, how you field praise or criticism?

   Timothy is a “brother,” and these brothers have siblings in Colossae. Church as big extended family – which may explain why we don’t always get along so well. Sibling rivalry, competing over toys, resentments, favoritism, secrets… Families get undone. Yet families are families, stuck with one another, intimate to the end.

   Verses 3 thru 8 form a single sentence in the Greek! Paul gets on these rambles… Paul is amazed by what has unfolded in the church in his absence. As Christopher Seitz suggests, “Paul is witnessing the church being born before his eyes and without his missionary exertions… a development not foreseen by Paul.” I wonder if we might hope/pray/even preach for the same in our day? Indeed, Paul is in prison as he writes. Could this imprisonment have “its own sacramental efficacy and providential intention”? (Seitz).

   A ringing message of Hope bursts forth in all this. I recall being delighted in some phase of my reading when I found Martin Luther King, Jr., late in his life, saying “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful,” and Christopher Lasch’s spot-on wisdom: “Hope doesn’t demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope appears absurd to those who lack it. We can see why hope serves us better than optimism. Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst; the worst is what the hopeful are prepared for. A blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

   Or Henri Nouwen (in Here and Now): “While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, with the deep trust that God will never leave us alone but will fulfill the deepest desires of our heart. When I trust deeply that today God is truly with me and holds me safe in a divine embrace, guiding every one of my steps, I can let go of my anxious need to know how tomorrow will look, or what will happen next month or next year. I can be fully where I am and pay attention to the many signs of God’s love within and around me.”

   Hope, for Paul, “bears fruit.” Are you fruitful? Is your church fruitful? Nouwen again distinguished between productivity and fruitfulness in Our Greatest Gift. When we no longer can work or earn, we can still be fruitful, by speaking words that will be recalled, by dying in a way that is a gift to the living. It’s not just churning out this or that, but bequeathing something that is you, that is love manifest, that lingers beyond you and what you happened to get done.

   And then I can’t help but contrast this text with all the prayer requests with which I am peppered, most about health or a job. Paul’s prayer? “That you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work, and as you grow in the knowledge of God.” Pray that for me, for yourself, and for your people.

   Luke 10:25-37. So easy to misfire on the Good Samaritan. One of my preaching rules (enunciated in my The Beauty of the Word) is never ever to say what people expect you to say. On this story, they expect you’ll say Don’t be in too much of a hurry to stop and help somebody! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It’s way more complicated. I recall teaching New Testament to some adolescents at a Catholic camp years ago. To get them thinking, I asked With whom in this story do you identify? – hoping they’d say, Ah, not just the busy dudes, and not just the helpful Samaritan, but the guy beaten up by the side of the road. 

 

  St. Augustine’s approac? Jesus is the stranger who stoops down, binds up our wounds, and takes us home. Alternatively, Jesus is the one beaten and bloodied – to save us. My adolescent boys, snickering and not in the spirit of things, blurted out We’re the guys who beat him up and left him! Light bulb on in my head. Indeed. Who’ve we wounded, even unwittingly, and left behind?

   In my sermon earlier this year on this text, trying to undercut political divisions, I suggested that whether we cheer or moan what's going on politically, ours is to be attentive to those beaten up and left by the side of the road. Period. No question. Check out the sermon for more...

   The strangeness, the enemy-ness of the Samaritan, the enmity between his people and the Jewish people, is interesting, but fishing for modern parallels is a challenge. Jesus’ punchline is that the neighbor is the one “who shows mercy” – and to those who haven’t earned it or even seem like fitting targets of mercy. In our mercy-less world, any giving or receiving of mercy, genuine mercy, feels miraculous, counter-cultural. Take note: the guy who was beaten up would have loathed the very guy who stopped to help him!

   I love that this is one of Jesus’ made up stories – which are the best, truest kind! In Israel, you can actually visit “the Inn of the Good Samaritan” – which isn’t a real place... I love this photo of my daughter Sarah, aged 8 (and now a pastor herself!), with Jason Byassee (great theologian and teacher), at this spot! A terrific quote, if it helps: G.K. Chesterton wrote, “St. Francis loved everybody, but especially those others disliked him for liking.” Who is hard to love? and who is the stranger?

What can we say July 20? 6th after Pentecost

    Amos 8:1-12. Another object lesson, this time a basket of fruit. Wolff thinks they are figs – almost anticipating the way Jesus picked on the poor figs! More bad news in our preaching world where somebody made up the standard of good news! Wailing and corpses are coming.

   It’s yet one more of those texts where God sees the people worshipping, making their sacrifices, observing holy days – and God sees the dissonance, the hypocrisy, and is annoyed by the worship which they presume God enjoys. Amos reaches into the minds of his listeners who seem very devout. And yet they ask themselves, and maybe one another, “When will it be over so we can get back to the market??” “When will this sabbath end?” The mantra I’ve used in preaching is their faith is pasted on the outside of an otherwise unchanged life.

   Interestingly enough, once the worship is done, they want to “buy the poor with silver.” Haunting allusion to enslaving. De Kirkpatrick, in his psychological study of slaveowners, notes how they propped it all up with Bible and piety, not to mention denial, rationalization, even feeling a noble obligation to do what they did for God, and for the blessing of the slaves themselves. They were “psychological acrobats” – but then, aren’t we all?

   Amos asks (v. 8) “Should not everything mourn?” We should begin to mourn now, the kind of mourning that might prompt deep conversion, for if not we will surely be mourning later.

   Colossians 1:15-28 debunks any DaVinci Code nonsense that it took the oppressing church 3 centuries to make up Jesus being divine. Here, a mere 2 decades after his death, with plenty of people walking around who’d seen him, Jesus is regarded as pre-existent, there at Creation, above all and in all and beyond all. It’s poetry – as we need elevated language to speak of such elevated realities; the prosaic won’t do. Scholars debate if this was a hymn or not. Surely they sang or chanted it, and mere words, even poetry, can’t get at the marvel, the transcendent wonder that is Christ. That the early Christians believed this, with no theology books, just blows my mind.

   Christ is the “image” (eikon, like icon!) of God. Accustomed to handling coins with the emperor’s image, pretending to be divine, believers saw Jesus as being fully stamped with God. There is a subversive, even treasonous element in this text, as Christ is what only the emperor was supposed to be.  

   On the image: “Christ, as God’s image, is the knowable and approachable manifestation of God in creation” (Jerry Sumney). This reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s fascinating notion that St Francis did for Jesus what Jesus did for God by being “a splendid and yet a merciful Mirror of Christ. If St. Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis. It is really very enlightening to realise that Christ was like St. Francis... St. Francis is the mirror of Christ rather as the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is more visible.  Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable.”

   Notice the joy in all this – for God! Verse 19’s verb, eudokeo, can mean “take pleasure in” or “resolve,” prompting Sumney’s thought: “God resolved to dwell in Christ and God took pleasure in residing in Christ.” Also, theologically speaking, Christopher Seitz is spot on: “Paul did not redefine Jewish monotheism. He saw into its heart and grasped its inner logic.”

   Luke 10:38-42 puts Colossians 1 into homey, narrative form, how it’s embodied in one home. 

There’s a funny comment on our text in Amor Towles’s great new novel, The Lincoln Highway. Sally snarkily remarks “If ever you needed proof that the Bible was written by a man, there you have it. I am a good Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ… But I am not willing to believe that Jesus would turn his back on a woman who was taking care of a household. I don’t blame Him. I blame Luke. From a man’s point of view, the one thing needful is that you sit at his feet and listen to what he has to say, no matter how long it takes, or how often he’s said it before. By his figuring, you have plenty of time for sitting and listening because a meal is something that makes itself. Like manna, it falls from heaven. Any woman who’s gone to the trouble of baking an apple pie can tell you that’s how a man sees the world.”

   Poor Martha, although a holy hosts of Christians have taken after her! It’s the Feast of Tabernacles, on which to this day people welcome you into their homes for fabulous meals. I love Sarah Ruden’s rendering: “Martha was bustling about with the extensive work of hospitality.” Imagine Martha’s sighs, cutting stares, raised eyebrows. She doesn’t even speak directly to her sister, but goes at Jesus, not simply with “Tell her to help me,” but asking backhandedly “Lord, don’t you care?” Jesus doesn’t rise to her bait to upbraid Mary for just chilling at his feet. She is illustrating what love for God looks like – as Luke is still explicating Jesus on “love God, love neighbor” after using the Samaritan story to illustrate the latter, now Mary is a witness to the former. And to (we might suggest) how to pray, not “Lord hear our prayer,” but “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”

   Jesus’ reply to Martha is gracious, gently firm. Calling her by her name (twice!), he exposes what’s going on inside her, what she knew but couldn’t properly diagnose: “You are anxious.” As are almost all of us! He adds “You are anxious… about many things.” That’s part of anxiety, isn’t it? It’s this, but also that, then the imagined possibility and another dreadful thing, as if a crowd of worries climb on our shoulders. “One thing is needful.” Is the one thing Jesus himself? Listening to his words? Being near him? A focus on love for God and not getting sucked into the vortex of busy-ness?

   David Wilcox has a funny song about the way someone gives you directions and adds, “You can’t miss it” – which he calls “the kiss of death.” Can’t miss it? Just try me. If life really is one thing, if there’s a main thing, the one thing you can’t do without, then it should be a “You can’t miss it” – but we get this nagging feeling that we have in fact missed it, misplaced it, never quite figured it out.

   This is the spiritual life: not God helping with our thicket of endeavors and worries, but a narrowing of our gaze, getting to a singleness of heart that wants one thing and is satisfied with that one thing. It’s being still, quiet, listening, pondering.

   Here’s something fascinating, and funny. Occasionally, in early Greek manuscripts, we find little booboos where the copyist altered a letter or two – or where a different word is inserted perhaps to explain a custom nobody understood any longer. In several semi-early manuscripts, Jesus is reported to have said, not “One thing is needful,” but “A few things are needful.” I can’t know how that happened – but my suspicion is that you had monks living together in a community. Some were so prayerful that they didn’t get their chores done, leaving them (like Mary did) to others (like Martha).

   So the abbot, in pursuit of tranquility and just getting the house in order, crossed out “one” and instead chided his monks with “A few things are needful,” like your prayers but also washing the dishes and picking potatoes. Like that abbot, we have stuff to do. God is patient with us, and grateful we at least know the one thing and strive after it, however ineptly.

   And of course, Luke's genius shines in the way he glues together all he's gathered about Jesus. He follows up on "love God / love neighbor" with the Good Samaritan (neighbor), then Mary and Martha (God). Lovely.

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  Check out my non-leadership leadership book, Weak Enough to Lead.

What can we say July 27? 7th after Pentecost

    Hosea 1:2-10. On the prophet Hosea, and his quixotic marriage to Gomer, watch this great conversation I had with Donna Claycomb Sokol of Mt. Vernon Place United Methodist a few weeks back. Parents of young children will not want you talking about God directing Hosea to marry a – what? All the words scholars use to translate get trapped in filters. If it’s that awful, that morally bankrupt, how did the word get through to Hosea himself?

   Was she such a woman already, and Hosea married her? If so, was she a simple businesswoman selling herself? Or was she part of the cultic apparatus featured in the Ball worship industry? Or did Hosea marry her, and then she stumbled? The gender and womanist issues make talking about it even thornier. How were women mistreated, abused, and used in those days? And today? If she is judged here, if her children are symbols of judgment, who’s being judged really? Her? The men? The society? And so if there’s mercy, does it let the men off?

   All these questions intrigue, and aren’t finally answerable – and so the preacher might best simply raise them. Too many sermons feel some compulsion to answer questions and tie them up in a nice bow – but if Jesus was an example to us, then the raising of good questions is a fabulous sermon. Besides, in this case, Hans Walter Wolff is spot on in reminding us Wolff: “In Israel, the concern for divine oracles dominated any interest in the ‘biographical.’”

   Hosea’s oracles are agonizing and offensive to bear. Is human infidelity to God really like crass adultery or selling one’s very body? The Bible tells me so. It’s bodily. It’s intimate. It’s your usually hidden self. And Hosea is thinking the people of God as a nation, a community, not just this or that random Israelite sinner. The indictment is stunning, and therefore the mercy is even more so.

   Two final thoughts. Israel worshipped Yahweh alongside neighbors who were devoted to Baal. I feel pretty sure it unfolded as follows: Israelites, new to the land, were still picking up farming tips from their Canaanite neighbors, who advised them, plow, get the rocks out, plant seed, fertilize, weed. The Israelite farmer, laboring hard, after a few weeks asks, Hey, I’ve done all that but it’s not raining! The Canaanite says, Come on down to the Baal worship center and make sacrifice – and there are these women there… Israelite shudders and declares, I would never go there or do such things! But no rain. In desperation, one night he tiptoes off when no one is looking, pays a tribute to Baal, admires the dancing – and then next day a cloud rolls in with even a brief shower. He’s hooked. Do the deities of our culture not hook us in just this way?

   And then: the children bearing those awful names, like those Isaiah gave his children, not names at all but words of judgment. Little Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah and Lo-Ammi had to go to school to be bullied and mocked. Clergy are on good ground to ask, not in the sermon but when home alone, what is the carnage to my children for me being one daring to tell God’s truth in a broken world? I devoted a chapter to this in my Weak Enough to Lead.

   Psalm 85 is a profound and elegant text! Summertime is a great time to preach Psalms – the texts that some of our Hall of Fame preachers spent more time preaching than anything else (Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon!); check out my book with Clint McCann, Preaching the Psalms. There’s much wisdom and profound theology in the first 9 verses. “You forgave the iniquity of your people” – not a long line of individuals, but the people as community. “Revive us again” – but why? “So your people may rejoice in you,” not “so they will feel better or get into heaven or lower their anxiety.” “Show us your hesed” – a Hebrew word well worth introducing. And “He will speak peace to his people,” which Jesus did after waking up in the boat and after materializing in the locked room once resurrected.

   It’s verse 10 that you can linger on. “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.” The poet personifies hesed, emet, zedek and shalom as having one joyful reunion, a hugfest, conjuring up for me that climactic scene in Return of the King, the exuberant laughter when Frodo awakens in Rivendell to the arrivals of Pippin, Merry, Logolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Gandalf and Sam; Tolkien reported that as he wrote this scene, his own tears of joy splattered onto the page. Small, these virtues, winning after severe danger and only at the end of the day. There’s a kiss – so tender, the mouth that speaks and consumes and smiles touching another.

   Mark Helprin’s luminous lines (in Winter’s Tale) come to mind: “The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.” This Psalmist, relishing what he’s inspired to write, presses on with more: “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground; righteousness will look down from the sky.”

   Colossians 2:6-19. Usually I find lections in Colossians to be incandescent. Paul (or his diligent student writing in his name) is white hot inspired and eloquent. Here, Christ as “the fulness of deity,” not just a fair representation of God, “dwells in bodily form – and in him you too are brought to fullness.” Just saying these words to our people is powerful, opening massive doors into the open air and light of God’s presence. God isn’t the ineffable, omni- this or that far away; it’s intimate, personal. “God has chosen to provide us with a ‘dial tone,’ and it is not an ‘abracadabra’ but a name with a history of judgment and forbearance known within a specific relationship of trust and obedience and failure and forgiveness” (Christopher Seitz).

   Paul is expansive about truth, but it isn’t just any old kinda true or truthy thing. There clearly are rival versions, fake truths, not mutually supportive or overlapping with the true Truth. The challenge in this text is deciphering what Paul is countering, what was going on in Colossae – but does it matter? “A modern historical-critical difficulty in recovering the religious world of Colossae reveals a kind of accidental benefit of wider appropriation” (Seitz). His readers and their neighbors do seem to suffer an intellectual idolatry, so smart, almost gnostic, knowing insider stuff others are too dim-witted to grasp. Christ is for the brilliant, but isn’t accessible through brilliance.

   Luke 11:1-13. Let me commend another conversation I had, this time with Prof. Rebekah Eklund, on Jesus and… Prayer, especially this “Lord’s Prayer.” Primo stuff. Jesus’ model prayer undermines most praying by our people, although it’s hardly worth scolding them for it. Even the whole idea of praying “for.” There’s a bit of a “for” in Jesus’ prayer, but I think he’d invite us to pray. Period. Not for this or that.

   The ask, “Teach us to pray,” implies we have lots to learn. Bonhoeffer says it’s not only what we want to pray that matters, but what God wants us to pray. The Psalms, and Jesus, are our tutors. Beginning with the Father/Abba. The “daddy” angle gets overdone, although it’s not wrong. I was moved deeply what I watched ZOE’s Reegan Kaberia preach on “our father” to a group of Kenyan orphans who had just entered his program; they were in tears as well. God as father to the fatherless. God as father to those with vacant fathers, or cruel fathers, or even stellar fathers. Martin Luther paraphrased this: “Although you could rightly be a severe judge over us, instead through your mercy implant in our hearts a comforting trust in your fatherly love, and let us experience the sweet savor of a childlike certainty that we may call you Father.” 

Rembrandt’s painting of Jesus’ best story sparked Henri Nouwen’s best ever book, The Return of the Prodigal, which clergy should read, not for sermon material, but for the healing of their own souls.

   And I’m increasingly drawn to Karl Barth’s realization that in Jesus’ time, a son was apprenticed to his father. You learn the business, developing skills. I’m an apprentice in God the Father’s kingdom! Of course, Francis of Assisi was being apprenticed into his father Pietro’s lucrative cloth business when he gave it all up to enter the business of God, Jesus’ Father.

   There’s so much preaching stuff tucked into this text. Who was it who first said “Thy kingdom come means My kingdom go”? “Thy will be done” is echoed in Gethsemane, and the “on earth as in heaven” carries me to Martin Luther King’s final sermon in Memphis: 

   “It's all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis.”

   Forgiveness? So much to unpack there – and I’m still chuckling over what Willie Jennings said to me in our “Jesus and… Race” conversation: 

  When his father taught him to use various tools, he warned him to watch out, that he might hurt himself or something else if he didn’t learn how to use each one rightly – and isn’t it so with forgiveness? The temptation business must be tempered by “The Lord tempts no one” (James 1:13), noting a test is different from a temptation. Is Jesus really praying “Deliver us from the evil one”? The verb “deliver” gives the preacher a lot of fodder. What else gets delivered? The mail, yes, a package – and a baby!

What can we say August 3? 8th after Pentecost

    Hosea 11:1-11 is one of the Bible’s tenderest, most revealing moments. Hosea, after all he’d been through with his marriage, and his children, and the people, priests and government leaders, listens in to a tempest of turmoil in God’s own heart. His words sound like a creed, rehearsing Israel’s history with this Divine heart – so less a list of things to be believed, but a relationship to be acknowledged with immense gratitude.

   God’s accusation against sin morphs into a lament, the agonizing breaking of God’s heart. Maybe like a parent coping with a grown child, the mind drifts back to infancy and childhood, when the child was dependent, helpless, not useful at all. Hans Walter Wolff: “The first event in the life of young Israel worthy of report is that Yahweh loves him.” Indeed, “Hosea was the first to use the word ‘love’ as an interpretation of the election of God’s people.”

   The Divine condescension is so moving: like a tall parent bending far down to feed and nurture the wee one. And then wrestling – maybe like Jacob wrestled with God? – with what to do. In the Ancient Near East, the sophomoric, moody deities bickered among themselves, and their actions often conflicted with one another. Enlil might toss down a thunderbolt while Ea yearns to rescue the people – who only experienced their deities as capricious. Israel’s experience has been – or could be again – like a child with mom or dad. Yahweh absorbs all the conflicts the Ancient Near Eastern gods argued about into God’s very own heart, bearing the rage, the sorrow, within, and finally acting against God’s own just judgment.

   Should Israel hear God’s plaintive “How can I give you up?” they might presume upon such mercy and continue in their bad behavior. But if God’s people ever really reckon with the depth of God’s condescension, God’s tender mercies, God’s patience, the only reply can be “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

   Colossians 3:1-11. Paul segues into his next section. “Since” you have been raised – not “if.” And “you” is plural: “Since y’all have been raised, seek the things above.” Things? Seek the One who is above. It’s not the goodies of heaven, but being near Jesus Christ. Notice how repetitive Paul is with the word “Christ” lest we misplace our dreams of what’s above! What is lethal in me, in us, must be removed, put to death. God is invited to be the surgeon, to cut out whatever malignancy threatens to kill us.

   The “neither Jew nor Greek” presented itself just last month (June 19) on Galatians 3. I’ll reiterate: there were, of course, still Jews and Greeks, women and men. It’s the division, it’s the rankings that are shattered. Differences are not abolished; God loves diversity! It’s the end of bias, hierarchy, chauvinism – an end to segregation. On this score, we are manifest failures. But it’s still God’s way, and the more we approximate this, the closer we are to God (and the less we approximate this, the further we are from God as well).

   The new reality can elude us. Thomas Merton, ever helpful, wrote this in his Journal: "For the 'old man,' everything is old: he has seen everything or thinks he has. He has lost hope in anything new. What pleases him is the 'old' he clings to, fearing to lose it, but he is certainly not happy with it. For the 'new man' everything is new. Even the old is transfigured. There is nothing to cling to. The new man lives in a world that is always being created, and renewed. He lives in life."

   Luke 12:13-21. Vintage Jesus here! Two brothers bickering over their dad’s inheritance (which people swear they’ll never do – until the last parent dies!!), and one asks Jesus to lean in on his side. Jesus doesn’t take sides, or say “Be fair now.” Instead? “Beware of covetousness.” Really? It’s not coveting if he just wants what’s rightly his – is it? Jesus cuts to the heart of even a just claim: “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Recoil if you wish, but even our fair claims can expose how hitched our hearts are to things, wealth, more. I’d love to explore the quirky phrase, “all kinds of greed.” There’s not just one kind, is there!

  True to form, Jesus has a story to match: a farmer had a bumper crop. I remember last year, several church members told me they’d had unusually productive years – and brought a check for the church! Not the farmer in Jesus’ parable. Jesus takes us inside his head for an intriguing inner chat: “He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do?’ He said to himself, ‘I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones…’ And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have plenty laid up now for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, be merry.” Jesus’ humor is subtle: the guy calls his soul “Soul.” The whole scene is so insightful, funny in a way, telling in every way.

  Just as he’s plotting bigger barns, he drops dead. God isn’t punishing him for his plan, or for his productivity. God isn’t punishing him at all. His time simply is up. “Fool” indeed. All lost in the moment of death. “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” Would Jesus allow you can lay up treasure and be rich toward God? Or is it an either/or? Jesus believes and warns us that in the soul it’s a zero sum game. There’s only so much of you to invest. Will it be the earthly or the heavenly?

   In this context, Jesus continues: “Do not be anxious” – leading us to intuit that in Jesus’ deep wisdom, it is the gathering, augmenting, and protection of things that induces much anxiety. Since he’s out of doors, Jesus beckons them and us to look around: “Consider the birds. They have no barns! Aren’t you more valuable than the birds?” I’m not really sure of the answer to this… St. Francis preached to birds as if they were his equals.

  Notice Jesus asks way more questions than he gives answers. “Which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life?” We can subtract from that span, in both quality and quantity! Still glancing around the hillside, Jesus continues: “Consider the lilies… Even Solomon was not arrayed like one of these.” What a brilliant rhetorical choice! Solomon – not only the richest guy ever, the most splendid dresser ever, but the one who stumbled into idolatry and led others there too.

  Jesus isn’t scolding. His tone of voice must be so very tender, his eyes overflowing with love: “Fear not, little flock.” And his way for them to shed fear? Not locked doors, or better weapons. “Sell your possessions and give alms.” My fear level shrinks as my generosity widens. An unforgettable image: “Provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old.” Surely someone was standing near him with an old leather pouch, worn to threads by years of coins in, coins out. A new purse not subject to aging, or wear and tear is one that holds “treasure in the heavens that does not fail.”

  His clincher: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” I want my heart in heaven even while I live down here. As we sing some Sundays, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”

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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.