What can we say September 23? 18th after Pentecost

   This superwoman, the uber-mom described in Proverbs 31 could evoke some sort of sermon – although I wonder if it’s a reading that inflicts some pain on the wife who never gets praised, the one abandoned, the one abused, or the mother whose children never rise up in gratitude. It’s in the Bible, so God wants us to read it. I for one will forego the challenge and preach either on a combination of the Psalter and the Epistle, or just the Gospel.

  Psalm 1. The editors of the Psalter positioned this non-prayer at the head of all the prayers as a signal to show us the sort of life that prayer and worship cultivate in us, and then the sort of life required for the prayer and worship to be fruitful. Translations lunge for “happy” instead of “blessed,” but “happy” is just too tinged with American pursuits and the trivialities of feelings to work well. 

It’s “blessed,” not like the absurd blessings imagined in Bruce Wilkinson’s atrocious Prayer of Jabez (God’s got a warehouse of blessings in boxes for you, you just have to back up your station wagon and pick them up…). It’s a life of peace, contentment, goodness, and hope.

   The company you keep matters. Church ought to be the village for raising our children, and for becoming wise, good people – but too often we become a self-righteous, gossipy enclave eluding the realities of the world and growing knottier and more inward instead of holier and more outward-looking. My repeated phrase lately is “If you only hang around with people like you, you become ignorant and arrogant.” At the same time, keeping the company of those striving for wisdom, goodness, holiness and a boundless passion to save the world? This will save your own soul.

  The Psalmist speaks of meditating on God’s law “day and night.” The very zealous Jews at Qumran kept someone up 24 hours a day meditating on Torah to fulfill this. For us? We can have Scripture on our minds at least a lot of the day – perhaps echoing what Dorothy Day said late in her life: “I tried to remember this life that the Lord gave me – and I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and his visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had him on my mind for so long in my life.”

    The image of the tree planted by water is unforgettable, simple, profound. The tree thrives not because of what we see above ground, but what is transpiring unseen, underground. Such a person “prospers” - which we mis-hear in our capitalist, upwardly mobile society. Again, in a subsistence level economy, it’s about living, at peace, having enough, being part of a community and contributing to it, and receiving from it.

     James 3:13-4:8a (skipping 4:4-6!), our Epistle reading, links beautifully to Psalm 1. How fascinating to contemplate the likelihood that this James is Jesus’ brother – and that he probably heard Jesus’ teachings, such as the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), which are clearly echoed here! Did he, as he became familiar with Paul in the early years of the church, ponder Paul’s thoughts on the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), which also are echoed here! Fruit is being yielded. The Beatitudes, and the Fruit of the Spirit aren’t commandments (like Go be merciful! Go be patient!) – but beautiful portrayals of what a life well-rooted in Christ and the Spirit is like.

     Mercy, peaceableness, gentleness, wisdom, all so very counter-cultural, needing reiteration from the preacher, and tangible portrayals, as we get overstuffed with what James bemoans: ambition, disorder, wickedness, selfishness. Think of anyone you know, and maybe that they know, who fulfills in some measure James’s list of virtues. Tell a story. Or use this lovely quote from Mark Helprin (in Winter’s Tale): “Little men spend their days in pursuit of wealth, fame and possessions. I know from experience that at the moment of their death they see their lives shattered before them like glass. Not so the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. The world goes this way and that. Ideals are in fashion or not, 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.”

    Jesus’ brother speaks of resisting the devil. But how? How do we know it’s the devil anyhow? There is a BS element to the devil’s assailings, and outright deception – probably saying what we want to hear. When is tough going from the devil and when is it from God? In Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, every time young Jesus reaches out for pleasure, “ten claws nailed themselves into his head and two frenzied wings beat above him, tightly covering his temples. He shrieked and fell down on his face.” His mother pleaded with a rabbi (who knew how to drive out demons) to help. The rabbi shook his head. “Mary, your boy isn’t being tormented by a devil; it’s not a devil, it’s God – so what can I do?” “Is there no cure?” the wretched mother asked. “It’s God, I tell you. No, there is no cure.” “Why does he torment him?” The old exorcist sighed but did not answer. “Why does he torment him?” the mother asked again. “Because he loves him,” the old rabbi finally replied.

   Preachers must tell what people will hear no place else: there are evil forces (not our political foes or foreign powers) that are sneaky, and pervert the good and beautiful into the evil and tawdry. It’s silly but I think of Lewis Grizzard’s distinction: naked is when you don’t have clothes on; necked is when you don’t have clothes on and  you’re up to no good. C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters will always be unmatched in wit and wisdom regarding the way we get undone by what is not of God.

   How to resist the devil? Thomas Merton, who suggested the devil wants, above all else, attention – is simply to pay no attention, to turn toward the good and beautiful. Someone else, can’t recall who it was now, wrote that we might think of jiu jitsu, where you use your opponent’s energy to undo himself – so we are still, we know God is God, and evil’s violent lunges whip by us and defeat themselves. 

Or we could do as Martin Luther did and hurl an inkwell (or was it what he was producing on the toilet?) at the devil.

   But then I love today’s Gospel reading, Mark 9:30-37. Jesus, once again, is explaining to them the way of the cross – and just like us, “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask.” Afraid – that he would think they were slow? Afraid – that his talk might just implicate them in the way of the cross? Afraid – just why, really? Worth exploring in a sermon – and better to tease them with three good possibilities and leave them hanging instead of nailing down your one right answer.

   Notice Jesus didn’t reveal he knew their confusion on the road – and while they were on the road he didn’t let them know he overheard their chatter. It was only when they were back in the house (and this is that fabulous stone house archaeologists found in Capernaum with the graffiti proving it was the house! – marked now by the not to lovely church I’ve dubbed The Millennium Falcon) that Jesus asked “What were you arguing about on the way?” Again they were silent. Silence is golden! – and a great virtue in the spiritual life, and yet silence can also be an embarrassment, a cover up, a subterfuge to hide what God knows is in us.

    Typically, like so many clergy, and like the people to whom we minister, their impulse is to be “the greatest.” There’s nothing wrong with striving for excellence – and hearing about “the greatest” I get tickled by those famous Muhammad Ali quotes about being the greatest (the funniest two being “It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am,” and “My only fault is that I don’t realize how really great I am”). The biblical assessment of greatness intrigues: you’re so great you’re a temple of the Holy Spirit, you mirror the image of God to others, you have an eternal, glorious destiny – so the problem comes down to being puffed up about the wrong things, and as the disciples put on exhibit in our text, competing, stepping on others, which is a thinly veiled insecurity and pathetic delight in crushing the other.

 God’s children don’t get crushed, and they don’t crush – reminding me of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quote of Sarah Grimke during her Supreme Court hearing: “I ask no favors for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks.”

    Jesus shows the way with yet another of his child sayings. This time it isn’t “become like a child” but rather “whoever welcomes a child.” I wonder about asking a random child to walk up and join me at the front – picking him or her up, and talking some about love, greatness, friendship, humility. Risky, but the potential is rich. Must be exactly what Jesus did that day in the house in Capernaum.

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 My newest book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available, and my next most recent book, Worshipful, now has an online study guide with video clips. 

   

What can we say September 16? 17th after Pentecost

    I probably won't preach on Proverbs 1:20-33, but there's so much there, especially now that school has begun. People are striving to get good grades, to pile up knowledge, to be smart or even savvy. But where is wisdom?

 Our text personifies wisdom - who wounds like the town crier, or a street preacher.  Find the way to wisdom - which is very different from smarts and skills.  We might be haunted by personified wisdom's message - if we hear it (as God would have us hear it) as directed to our tawdry, superficial, rancorous society:  “Because you have ignored my counsel, I will laugh at your calamity." "Eat the fruit of your way, be sated with your own devices" - which we ravenously do, but to our disadvantage and ruin. The wise aren't richer or higher on the food chain - but they do live "without dread of disaster." 

     Were I preaching on this, I would examine the foolishness of our society, the strange and wonderful way to wisdom - and then find a few samples of people I've known who are wise. One man in my first parish had an exemplary spirit about him. A brick-mason by day, stellar church member on Sunday, and a paragon of wisdom always. I asked him his secret. He, not surprisingly, did not think of himself as wise. He did report that, when he got home from work, he had some chores, and then he ate dinner with his family, they talked about things from the day and in the world that mattered, and then, every evening: "I go down in the basement, and pull up a peach crate, and sit on it and just think for quite a while." I recalled the evening before how I had, after dinner, switched on the TV and surfed for a bit.

    Psalm 116 is a favorite - and was one of the songs Jesus and his friends sang at the Last Supper. But the lectionary lops it off after verse 9, foregoing some of the Psalm's very best lines. In the included section, though, we do have a preachable moment: "I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications." Not "because he answered my prayers" or "I love the Lord because he made my life smooth," but just "He inclined his ear to me." We hear a lot about people wanting to be heard - the downtrodden in society, coworkers who aren't in the power positions, children at home, a spouse who's lonely. Being heard: it's gold, it's at the heart of what Gospel living is about. I suspect being heard is the ironic key to what our Epistle reading commends regarding talking.

    Two items interest me in James 3:1-12, one for the clergy's personal reflection, the other with preaching potential. Jesus' brother interestingly declares that “Not many should become teachers.” I thought, in our Sunday School, with joint teachers in a room and rotations, we probably have 200! - and you can be one if you just sign up. This deeply troubles me - but what to do? James's reason "not many should teach"? Because: "We who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” That thought would diminish our already semi-desperate sign-up schedule... but then I think of myself, and you clergy readers. We dare to teach - and so there is a more stringent judgment on us? Or does it work in a different way?

     In my autobiographical collection of "memories of God," Struck from Behind, I confessed that being in ministry has its pressures - and for the most part, I am grateful, as that pressure to behave, and that pressure to study God thoroughly, have helped me to be a little holier than I might otherwise have been. So instead of fretting constantly over the "fishbowl" (which I do at times), I try to be grateful for the additional, if ridiculous and hypocritical, accountability.

   James 3 will preach though - and it would be a word about our words.  What picturesque images: the bit in the horse's mouth, the tongue, a fire!  How we talk as Christians receives insufficient attention - and so the world is likely to think we talk either sweetly or meanly. Speaking well, speaking faithfully, speaking in a holy manner, speaking truthfully: these are incumbent on us all. It's light years from avoiding cussing or inappropriate remarks. We have Dietrich Bonhoeffer's lovely rule (from Life Together): never speak of someone who is not present. I have the Howell improvement on the Bonhoeffer rule, which is: never speak of someone who is not present, unless you are praising her, or him. 

   In premarital counseling, couples always tell me they communicate well - or want to. Communication, I suspect, while enormously important to any healthy relationship, won't in itself win the day. Some couples communicate quite openly - and wound one another. James's clever image captures the peril and opportunity: the tongue blesses, and curses. Sometimes, what we think is a blessing is actually a curse. A critical remark, masked as constructive helpfulness, can degrade. Saying I'll do it for you! might imply Because you probably would mess it up. Vapid talk about God, parading as piety, quite often takes the Lord's name in vain; consider all the chatter from various religious groups supporting guns or wicked politicians or policies that are loathsome to Scripture. 
 
   And then we come to the Gospel, the high water mark, the turning point in the narrative of Jesus' saving mission: Mark 8:27-38. Here's a sermon I preached on this recently.

Years ago I stumbled upon an audio recording of Henri Nouwen’s A Spirituality of Waiting (which I can’t commend highly enough… just hearing his voice…)  In it, he expanded upon the work of W.H. Vanstone’s profound book called The Stature of Waiting, in which he directs our attention to the peculiar plot of the Gospels.  In the opening chapters of each Gospel, Jesus is in control, he is an actor on the stage of history, dashing off miracles, wowing the multitudes.  Then, in the middle of the story, everything changes.  At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus has ventured far to the north, then turns his face toward Jerusalem, explaining he will be “handed over” and suffer and die.  From this point forward, Jesus is pretty much passive, with only a minor miracle left to do, one now acted upon, no dazzling (except by the powerful vision of compassionate, suffering love).

     This stuns Vanstone and Lewis (and me too) – as we think life’s plot should be toward increasing control, independence – and we loathe any turn toward dependence.  A few years back, on the week I was preparing to preach on this text, a friend who was gradually losing his battle against colon cancer told me, with immense sorrow, “Today they handed me over to hospice.”  We shudder; we pity – but Jesus invites us to respect and relish this backwards plot to our lives, for it was the plot of his life.  Jesus was amazing in his first weeks of ministry.  But the real glory came when he let himself be betrayed, beaten, tried unjustly, when he “never said a-mumblin’ word,” when he refused to come down from the cross or strike his enemies dead but instead forgave them.  Even his resurrection was passive:  he didn’t bolt from the tomb and knock the guards aside; God raised him.

     Everything in us, especially as can-do Americans who cherish our independence above all else, rebels against and shrinks back from this.  But this is God.  We struggle when the 'normal' plot of life takes us from being active, control people to what feels like being reduced to passivity, say in a nursing home or confined to bed, depending on others. Jesus glorifies this way. Yet Peter, like us, chides Jesus for even thinking of such a path.  But Jesus says “Get behind me” – which, ironically, is precisely where we need to be.  We follow Jesus – and you can only follow from behind.

     In Philippians 2, Paul explains God’s ultimate nature:  “Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself” – and I concur with those who translate this not as although he was God he did this humbling thing, but rather because he was in the form of God, he emptied himself.  Jesus isn’t play-acting or pretending for a short time to be humble, vulnerable, and suffering.  Jesus shows us the very heart of God, God’s truest, most core nature when he turns his face to Jerusalem and gets mocked and gruesomely killed.

     You see, Jesus uttered these words about turning his face to Jerusalem to be passive, vulnerable, and to die, not in a church or with a beautiful sunset in the background.  He was in Caesarea Philippi, a place sacred to pagan deities for centuries, then more recently dedicated to the emperor, who was increasingly viewed and treated as a deity strutting the earth.  This artist's depiction of the city in Jesus' day shows temples to the Greek gods, to the emperor, affixed to the cave dedicated to the nature god Pan - which was also believed to be the entrance to the underworld ("and the gates of hell shall not prevail...").  Painting the physical place might help in a sermon; and the theology of the clash between the world's gods and the humility of the true God must be clarified.

Figuring out Jesus' true identity then reshapes ours. We, like him, find ourselves in losing ourselves, in sacrificial love, in donating our most precious selves to God and others.

     Everything in our nature and in society drives us into the self, to ask Who am I?  The riddle is only answered by learning the answer to Who is God?  Shortly before his death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “Who am I? This or the other?” – taking note of his cheerful disposition he presented to his jailers, while knowing inside he was impotent and weak.  The only way he could resolve the dissonance, and the struggle to be in horrific circumstances, came like this: “Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”

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Images by Melanie Rogers, and Georges Rouault

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 My newest book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available, and my next most recent book, Worshipful, now has an online study guide with video clips. 

What can we say July 29-August 26 on John 6?

     The lectionary offers the preacher a high unusual chance to spend not one but five weeks on a single story – albeit a long, complex one: The feeding of the five thousand and its immediate aftermath, the only miracle reported in all four gospels. I’ll offer some comments on the chapter as a whole (and you have to grasp the drama of the whole to make sense of the parts!), and then some thoughts on each section of the divvied up lectionary readings for July 29 through August 26.

   Before my ideas, I'd open with Thomas Merton's Journal entry on this: "I try to study the 6th chapter of St. John's Gospel, and it is too great. I simply cannot study it. I simply sit still and try to breathe. It does no good to use big words to talk about Christ. Since I seem to be incapable of talking about Him in the language of a child, I have reached the point where I can scarcely talk about him at all." More preaching should be a quiet puzzlement, and our talking an almost apologetic, but loving straining after small words.

     In my late twenties, I was present for an unforgettable sermon on John 6 by the inimitable Fred Craddock. He deftly exposed the plot of the whole chapter: starting with next to nothing, Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 – and they responded with exuberant glee. Happy days are here again! The Messiah has come! He’ll turn out nickels into dimes, make our gardens grow, find beautiful wives for our sons, and rout the Romans! But then Jesus shifted the conversation from bread to bread – as in You shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  The people draw back a little, wondering why he’s heading in this direction. And then he turned on them entirely: instead of bread, as in the Word, he explains that “the bread I give for the life of the world is my body.” Now he’s talking about suffering, dying – and they flee for the exits.

     From thousands, now there is only a handful left. Jesus asked the few, Will you also go away? And as Craddock intoned it, they rather pitifully asked, Where would we go? – as if they didn’t really have any place else to go. His sermon, we then realized, was actually about so many leaving the church. Churches in decline – and we clergy all know those who have abandoned the ministry. Will you also go away? Craddock’s final line? I think I’ll stay. I know others have left, but I don’t know, I think I’ll stay. Those of us watching/listening were annihilated, moved – and inclined to stay.

     Why not talk about the decline of the church? Not to warn, or to demoralize, or to amp up people’s efforts to evangelize. We note the numbers, which are the perfect reason to ask Why be here?

     My fellow doctoral student and friend Marianne Meye Thompson reflects wisely on the full 5 weeks of Gospel lections: “John’s portrait of Jesus in chapter 6 fuses traditional material about Jesus’ ministry; allusions to the Scripture about manna, word and wisdom; practice of the Lord’s Supper; and John’s own deep convictions about Jesus. The events of the chapter are set at Passover. Like the first Passover, there is a miraculous crossing of the sea, followed by a time during which God provides manna in the wilderness.” This Passover tie is huge.

     And then she slants in Craddock’s direction: “After eating their fill, the people now want more: more bread, more miracles, more of what Jesus can offer.” Sounds very American to me! – or reminding me of Oliver (in the musical).

 Thompson again: “They are right to ask for more; but they do not yet understand what Jesus wants to give them.” I love her depth of insight, that we are mistaken to think Jesus is only fixated on higher things: “Jesus does not feed people with bread merely as an object lesson to show that he can give them food for eternal life. Rather, Jesus can give food that sustains human life in this world and that provides eternal life because he is the agent of God’s creation of all life.” Material food still matters – for us and for those who don’t have it. After all, in the Synoptic versions of the story, when Jesus sees the hungry people he tells the disciples, "You give them something to eat" (Mark 6:37). The preacher's way into the deep spirituality in John 6 could do through a food ministry your church is engaged in - and perhaps you find a story there that leans into what John 6 is about.

     Jean Vanier sees chapter 6 (which he says is “as difficult as a storm”) as a long journey “from the weakness of the newborn child we once were to the weakness of the old person we will become – growth from ignorance to wisdom, selfishness to self-giving, fear to trust, guilt feelings to inner liberation, lack of self-esteem to self-acceptance… The feeding itself reveals a caring God… Jesus calls his disciples to move from a faith based on a very visible miracle that fulfilled their needs to a faith that is total trust in him and in his words, which can appear foolish, absurd, impossible.”

     And finally I find the evangelical scholar D.A. Carson’s articulation appealing: “At a superficial level, the signs attest that Jesus has remarkable powers; but the signs must never be assessed as anything more than attesting portents. This particular miracle had filled the bellies of the people, and the crowd loved it and were willing on that basis to sign up immediately.” But there are hidden meanings, and daunting challenges… “It will shortly become clear that Jesus not only gives the food; he is himself the bread of life.”

     I think I might help people see this by explaining how all good gift giving is really a giving of self. My mother-in-law died in November. I am positive that every Christmas, and every year on my birthday, she gave me some carefully chosen, valuable gift, beautifully wrapped. But for the life of me, I can't recall what was in any of the boxes now. What I am sure of is that each one was simply the gift of her self, disguised or embodied in a coat or a clock or something or another. Our people, understandably, and very much like young children just before Christmas, want this or that from God. But maturity is realizing that the gift God gives is... God's own self, Emmanuel, God with us.

     And now for just a few remarks on each section, if you are going week by week.

     John 6:1-21/July 29. Four years ago I preached at Duke Chapel on this and focused on the leftovers. Why so much? No mention of them going to the poor; those who just ate were the poor. We might think a better miracle would be for Jesus magically to have produced just enough – but he overdid it… Was it wasted? So much in the spiritual life is a waste – of time? Sam Wells speaks often of the superabundance of God’s mercy. There’s plenty, more than enough.

     Dorothy Day once received a diamond ring as a donation. Instead of selling it, she simply gave it to the next poor woman who walked in. When criticized, she asked “Are fine things only for the rich?” It was a waste – a beautiful waste. 

The preacher can think of moments of extravagance. I preached in Haiti at an ordination a while back. Three of us took suitcases full of oreos for the celebration. Yes, Haitians need much more than oreos. But the sheer delight at the party mirrored the extravagance of God’s grace.

     If you want to point to a miracle, it’s not the multiplication of the food. It’s this: Jesus “withdrew to a mountain by himself.” Solitude, time alone with God, might be more miraculous for our people (and us!) than any wizardry with bread. And the lunge to crown Jesus as king: echoes of Gideon’s refusal, and then the people’s foolish request for a king (and what it cost them – 1 Sam. 8) – and yet how remarkable of God to accede finally to their request for a king. David and his lineage are the ones God uses (despite themselves), culminating in Jesus, who was the king (yes, the same guy who just refused the crown!). We won’t understand his kingship until the crucifixion.

    One more interesting tidbit: as D.A. Carson reminds us, “Jesus ‘blesses’ God, i.e. he thanks God; he does not ‘bless’ the food.” It’s worth mentioning to our folks at some point that the pre-meal prayer doesn’t change or radioactivize the food; we are the ones transformed. And we have a fair guess at the words Jesus used when he prayed over the food in John 6 (and at the Last Supper!) – the common Jewish blessing, “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

     John 6:24-35/August 5.  Jesus offers in effect his own sermon on Exodus 16 – which also directs the people from food (which perishes!) to a higher kind of food, namely trust in God’s provision, and leading from bondage to freedom. And we see deep connections here with the story of the Samaritan woman who wants water and then is given water…

    John 6:35, 41-51/August 12.  We see the first of Jesus’ “I am” statements. Think Moses, burning bush, and God’s merciful provision to us of names, identities, revelations of the character of God. The preacher could seize this occasion to explore all the I ams (bread, vine, water, shepherd, light, door, way) – and perhaps fuse those marvelous identities to our own, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Who Am I?: “Am I really that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I myself know of myself? Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, weary and empty at praying, ready to say farewell to it all. Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!”

     Marianne Thompson helps us hear the shock/offense of Jesus’ words in this reading: “Jesus’ claims may sound familiar to Christian readers accustomed both to thinking of Jesus as God’s Son ‘come down’ from heaven and to hearing ‘eat and drink,’ the words of institution at the Lord’s Supper, but John portrays them as divisive when uttered by Jesus’ contemporaries.” How much of our churchy jargon is nonsense not just to outsiders, but to the casual attender, the first-time visitor, the under-theologically-formed?

     D.A. Carson offers a thoughtful observation on the crowd’s reaction to Jesus: “The grumbling was not only insulting, but dangerous. It presupposed that divine revelation could be sorted out by talking the matter over.” It’s not in our skill set to decide what is revelation and what isn’t.

     Jesus “draws” people to himself. The verb (from helko) can mean “pull or drag by force” (in John 21:6 they drag the net loaded with fish into the boat, and in Acts 21:30 they seize Paul and drag him away!) or “attract” – and while John’s context pushes us toward “attract,” the stronger nuance is intriguing. Carson somewhat crassly but clearly puts it like this: “When he compels belief, it is not by the savage constraint of a rapist, but by the wonderful wooing of a lover.”

     John 6:51-58/August 19. Again, Marianne Thompson’s words above on the graphic nature of and unsettling shocking sense of Jesus’ words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood! No wonder critics in the Roman world misconstrued the Christians as cannibalistic, and crazy.

     John 6:56-69/August 26. See above on Craddock’s exposition of the few who are left being asked if they too will exit. This is the only scene in John where Jesus is in the synagogue (in contrast to Mark, where he’s a regular!). D.A. Carson asks who Jesus’ deserters “take umbrage.” “They were more interested in food, political messianism and manipulative miracles than in the spiritual realities to which the feeding miracle had pointed. And, they were unprepared to relinquish their own sovereign authority even in matters religious.” Jesus does not give them a thrashing. Instead he makes himself even more vulnerable, surrendering himself. Verse 64 uses that theologically rich verb paradidomi, “handed over,” which is the key term in the Synoptics for Jesus letting himself be acted upon. The plot of every Gospel is the same: Jesus strides onto the stage of history as a powerful actor, impressing, impactful; but then he turns toward Jerusalem, no more miracles, quieter, increasingly passive. This is his glory. For us, as John 6:61 puts it, this is an offense, a scandal; the verb, skandalizo, drives us to 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.

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 My newest book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available, and my next most recent book, Worshipful, now has an online study guide with video clips. 

What can we say come August 5? 11th after Pentecost

  Our Gospel reading, John 6:24-35, is also covered in my blog on John 6 as a whole, and with attention to the details of this week’s segment. Our Old Testament readings, 2 Samuel 12 and Psalm 51, continue what began last week, and are covered as well as I’m able in my blog from March 18.
  

   To that I'll add that, this week, we finish our "Faces of our Faith" series - and my character focus is on Nathan. I'm viewing him as a "friend" - not in the modern sense of a fun person or even companion, but as what Aristotle defined as "the opposite of a flatterer." We need truth-tellers (but not people who enjoy telling you off) - who can and care to see the depths of who we are, broken, full of dreams, limited... and they not only love but help us to be wise and holy. To say Nathan speaks "truth" is important, as our culture scoffs at the very notion. But there still is truth, not a weapon against others, but simple facts, and the profound truths of the soul. I need a friend to go there with me. I need to be a friend. The church needs to conceive of itself as a friend. The name Nathan, after all, means "gift."

     Ephesians 4:1-16 is a rich text with, if anything, way too many possible preaching paths. I preached on this text three years ago, focusing then on “One” (called it “One is the Holiest Number,” with some Three Dog Night humor…). In the thick of all the complexity in the world, and divisions in the church, and with other pretenders and usurpers strutting around and claiming to be “the one,” it is liberating, focusing and a great joy to explore the way God is one, and therefore we are one.

   Paul’s admonition that we “lead a life worthy” makes me shiver – but then lends great dignity to life. We are so unworthy. This worthiness must be extrinsic to us, a gift – maybe in the way ordinands learn to say Sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit in us, not the grunting, grinding effort to be good enough. We clergy should ponder this worthiness in our own souls. John Owen’s words haunt me: “The minister may fill his pews and the mouths of the public; but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty – that he is and no more.”

    The worth is linked to the calling. “Not many of you were wise…” (1 Cor. 1), as Paul reminded us. I will preach better and far more faithfully if I recall my calling and how I frame it in my gut. Back then, I didn’t sense a call to run meetings, meet budgets, go to clergy meetings or even preach sermons. For me, I was naively and deeply in love with Jesus, and I simply wanted to do anything he might need from me, any errands he might need to have run, to be someone who would say as clearly as possible Jesus is the One.

   Sometimes evangelical jargon puzzles me – including the way the Christian life is called a “walk.” How’s your walk with Christ? Paul speaks of this life as walking. The Greek word, kin to our word “peripatetic,” means to walk around. I like a “walk around” kind of pastoral administration more than fixed evaluation meetings. Jesus seemed to be someone who walked around – towns, the countryside, etc.

   This calling is itself Hope. “You were called to one hope.” I like that. It isn’t that my calling is to talk about hope, or to cajole people into being hopeful. The very fact that God calls is hope. And it’s not a passive hoping or wishing. St. Augustine said that “Hope has two beautiful daughters. One is anger at the way things are. The other is courage to see to it that things don’t remain the way they are.”

    I was young when I was called. So I wonder if I have matured? Paul speaks of maturity, of growing up. I used to hate it when one of my parents would say “Grow up!” (and I’ve even heard this in adult life when somebody was super-annoyed with me). Growing up in Christ is peculiar: it’s not increasing independence, and certainly not any kind of codependency, but an increasing dependence upon God, or maybe an increasing inter-dependence upon God and others in the Body.

    The Greek term rendered “mature” is teleion, as in meeting the goal, arriving at the end, the telos, the purpose of things. Maturity is marked by certain traits, some of which Paul lists here: lowliness, meekness, patience, forbearing one another, clearly echoing the text read at my wedding, Colossians 3:12-17, and mirroring Matthew 5:1-11.

     When I was researching my book on The Beatitudes, my most delightful learning was to realize these aren’t commandments, but the blessings of life with God. In fact, the Beatitudes are primarily autobiographical: they tell us about Jesus, and thus what those close to Jesus are like. After all, Paul speaks of maturity as rising “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” not any other standard! A bit oddly Paul speaks of us being “no longer children” – in the face of Jesus’ constant counsel that we become like children. Fun preaching possibilities there: how do you balance these two thoughts that don’t really conflict at all?

    The business in Ephesians 4 about ascending and descending: fascinating. When we explore the ascension of Christ, I like to say that the puzzle isn’t that Jesus soared upward and left earth. The real shocker, the way bigger miracle, is that Jesus came down to earth… Our text today seems to imply that doctrine of the descent into hell, although exegetes aren’t so sure. We looked closely at this belief back on February 18 (with help from Gandalf, Buechner, and Pannenberg) – so check that out.

     The doctrine is a valid, theologically shrewd one, the heart of which holds even if you have trouble buying that Jesus left his tomb and travelled somehow to the subterranean underworld to rescue captives.  I might also point you to my Easter sermon, which was dependent on John Dominic Crossan’s lovely thoughts in Christian Century on the way in medieval art, Jesus rose from the dead, not alone at all, but dragging along others with him.

     Speaking of hell, in our text Paul frets over the wiles of the devil. It’s the trickery, the fake news of the way evil comes at us, the BS whisper of whatever we want to hear. C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters still make for fabulous, funny and insightful reading. His demonic tempters know that their “best weapon” is “a contented worldliness.” And then, “It is funny how mortals always picture us putting things into their minds; in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

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 My newest book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available, and my next most recent book, Worshipful, now has an online study guide with video clips.

What can we say come July 29? 10th after Pentecost

    July 29 is a peculiar week in the lectionary. The Old Testament (2 Samuel 11) gives us the first half of what is inseparable from next week’s reading (2 Samuel 12) – both of which fit neatly with the Psalm (51) – and we just explored these texts on Lent week 5 (so look back at that blog).

     And then the Gospel reading is the first of five consecutive weeks of readings that are really just a single story: John 6. Here is a blog on the full story, which has to be read as a dramatic whole – and then you’ll also find there some specific details for each of the Sundays as it’s divvied up between the weeks of July 29 and August 26.

     So beyond the Bathsheba/David/Nathan episode, and the Feeding of the 5000 and what unfolds from it, here are some thoughts on this week’s epistle, Ephesians 3:14-21. When I was in college, I fell in for a while with a group of Christians who were big on prayer “reports.” When they gathered, people would file their prayer requests (which as I recall were remarkably self-absorbed and narrow – help with an exam, romantic troubles, etc.), everyone would pray – and then a time was provided for people to report on what they had been praying, and the results of prayers in earlier weeks. My mother’s surgery went well! I aced the test! And one quite attractive young woman who had caught my eye reported with much enthusiasm that she had been desperate for a parking space the other day; she’d prayed, and someone pulled out of a very convenient space right in front of her just a moment after she’d prayed. I didn’t follow up with her.

    Ephesians 4:14-21 is a prayer report – in the sense that he reports on what he has been praying for them. No prayers for help or comfort or “answers,” but strength in their inner selves. The goal of Paul’s prayer for them, which we might deduce would be a good mission statement for our own lives, is “to be filled with all the fulness.” That’s three big words, and on the heels of four expansive words in verse 18: the breadth, length, height and depth of Christ’s love. I’m reminded of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach…” Did she have Ephesians 4 in the back of her mind? And how do we consumer-oriented people love others, much less God, in such boundless ways?

    I’m also reminded of something in George Lindbeck’s wonderful The Nature of Doctrine. Assessing how theology organizes itself around some key principles, he argues that our Christology has and should have “three regulative principles” – that is, whatever we say about Jesus is accountable to these three rules: the monotheistic principle (that is, what we say about Jesus can’t put the truth that God is one in peril), the principle of historical specificity (that is, what we say about Jesus must be integrally linked to what the real human being Jesus did in history), and the one pertinent to our text, what Lindbeck calls Christological maximalism, that “every possible importance is to be ascribed to Jesus that is not inconsistent with the first rules.”

    Paul is all over that. This whole section is two very long, complex sentences in Greek. He’s not constructing a grammatical masterpiece so much as he’s simply getting carried away, so awestruck is he but the wonder of Christ. He’s “lost in wonder, love and praise.” The commentator Rufold Schnackenburg says “Paul unleashes a flood of thoughts in an intensifying crescendo.” Frank Thielman invites us to picture Paul dictating such long sentences: “When Paul dictated it, he was able by the cadence of his voice to solve the syntactical problems that now face us as we pore over the text in silent study.” I like it when preachers invite us to imagine something simple, like Paul thinking out loud while someone is scribbling down his thoughts - and that becomes our Bible. 

     “What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend?” Words fail us. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” When I turned 60, my daughter Grace made a list, “60 reasons I love you.” When my wife turned 60, I did the same for her – but the list could have and should have been far longer.  Maybe we make lists to praise the wonder, the breadth, depth, height, fulness of the marvel that is Jesus Christ. Again, sermons need not have a moral take-away or a do-able point. The best sermons simply cause us to stammer in awe at the fabulous grandeur that Jesus really is.

     And to invite our listeners to expand their shrunken souls. In the thick of World War II, C.S. Lewis preached one of history’s finest sermons, “The Weight of Glory.” In its opening, he says our problem is not that our desires are too strong – a sense you get from a lot of preaching, that Christianity is throwing cold water on excessive desire. Rather, “it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” Paul promised that God “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph. 4:20).

     So: life in Jesus is huge, fantastic. Somebody unspeakably large is living in you – the preacher, and those to whom you preach, echoing Galatians 2:19, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” How do we realize this wonder we don’t notice, or underestimate? By meditation? Contemplating art? Listening to music? It’s counter-cultural, for sure.

     A clue to help us grow in our praise, and thus to cultivate strength in our inner being, is in verse 18: Paul prays we will ponder this “with the saints.” Indeed, as we enjoy the advantage of 2,000 years of Christian history over Paul, we see much in the saints we can mimic. Thérèse of Lisieux, in the late 1890’s, riddled with illness up to her death at age 23, repeatedly said of her love for Jesus, “To die of love is what I hope for, on fire with his love I want to be, to see him, be one with him forever, that is my heaven – that’s my destiny: by love to live.”

     Bernardo of Quintavalle, a wealthy merchant, invited Francis of Assisi to his home.  After the evening meal, they retired for the evening.  Francis pretended to sleep; Bernard also pretended to sleep, even feigning a snore.  Francis rose and then knelt, praying over and over, all night long, “My God, my all.” His whole life was a manifestation of the height, depth and breadth of God’s nature, heart, grandeur and wonder.

    What is ministry but the demonstration and embodiment of God’s boundless love? Too many ministries skimp, and try to insure the recipients are worthy, and that they only get just enough. Dorothy Day (who was born the same year Thérèse of Lisieux died, and wrote a great little book about her) once received a donation of a diamond ring for her work with the poor. Instead of selling it, she simply gave it to the next person who came in asking for help. Her response to critics who said she should have sold it and given it to the poor (who might remind us of Judas’s criticism of the woman anointing Jesus!)? Who says fine, beautiful things are only for the rich?

    And then Thomas à Kempis: “Lord, in what can I trust in this life? And what is my greatest comfort on earth? Is it not Yourself, O Lord my God, whose mercy is limitless? Have I ever prospered without You? And did I ever suffer ill when You were at hand? I would rather be poor for Your sake than rich without You. I would choose to be a wanderer on the face of the earth with You, rather than to possess heaven without You.  For where You are, there is Heaven; and where You are not, there is death and Hell. You are my sole desire; for You I sigh, pray, and cry… Unless You abide with me, all things that seem to bring peace and happiness are as nothing, for they cannot bestow true happiness. You alone are the End of all good things, the fulness of life, the depth of wisdom; and the greatest comfort of Your servants is to trust in You above all else. My God, Father of mercies, I look to You, I trust in You.”

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 My newest book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available, and my next most recent book, Worshipful, now has an online study guide with video clips.