Psalm
98’s rousing delight inspires – and provides plenty of verbiage for the
kind of sermon I don’t hear (or preach myself) nearly enough. In The
Beauty of the Word, I
express a longing for sermons that are primarily about God, not us (ever notice
how so many sermons are about my faith, my struggle, my mission, my doubt, my
fulfillment, etc.) – and the whole genre of praise is a strange one in our
culture. In praise, we adore, extol and
marvel at God’s greatness, quite apart from what God may have done for me
lately. Great saints have lived into
this – but we functional American struggle, as we long for the useful God.
I’ve
always been so grateful that my Church history professor, David Steinmetz,
explained with unwavering clarity how St. Augustine (in On Christian Doctrine) distinguished between uti and frui love. Uti
is love of use: I love money not because I want to fondle it or paper my walls
with it, but because I use it to get other things I want. Frui
love is love of enjoyment: I love chocolate because… well, I just love it, and
not because of what I get out of it, which is weight gain? Augustine’s question is How do we love God?
Typically, with uti – which
must break God’s heart, our going at God because we want to use God to get
stuff we crave. What if we grow toward frui love – simply loving God because
God is lovable, because God loves and is love?
Chapter 8 in Preaching
the Psalms, which I
coauthored with my friend Clint McCann, weighs in on preaching Psalms of
Praise - and as you know, if you follow my blog, I yearn for more sermons that simply are about God, not us, sermons that invite the people to imagine the wonder that is God, to be caught up in pondering the grandeur, the wisdom, the genius and immense mercy that is in God's heart and mind.
Wiman
probes how joy happens in the thick of sadness or great loss – or even creates
sorrow itself. He cites Liesl Muller’s
poem about hearing beautiful music: “It’s only music… that overwhelmed a young
girl… It happens when we make bottomless love – there follows a bottomless
sadness / which is not despair / but its nameless opposite / It’s not about
loss / It’s about two seemingly parallel lines / suddenly coming together / inside us, in some place / that is still
wilderness.”
It’s Easter, so we can resonate quickly and
happily to Psalm 98’s images: we sing a new song for God “has done marvelous
things… His right hand and holy arm have gotten him victory.” What was Easter about? Not Oh good, we get to go to heaven now! but
rather the vindication of Jesus in the face of intense rejection and
criticism. As the Psalm says, “He has
revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations.” And so we make a joyful noise, deploying
various instruments – and then even hearing the noises of creation as
additional instruments of praise.
Two warnings. I worry that preaching Psalm 98 in light of
Easter will over-baptize the thing and we’ll miss out on original context. The Israelites, knowing nothing of Easter,
sang this lustily, and praised God for various victories, largely national in
character. Which dovetails into worry
#2: it’s not just Easter that we praise God for. The whole divine dispensation, from creation
onward, elicits our praise. I think of
Christian Wiman, narrating his deepening struggles and understandings of God in
the face of cancer and depression (in My
Bright Abyss), telling
us, “I
am a Christian not because of the resurrection. I am a Christian because of
that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human
bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The point is
that God is with us, not beyond us, in our suffering.”
All this fits well with the Epistle, 1 John 5:1-6. I’m unlikely to focus on this in my sermon,
as the writer is reiterating repetitive themes from earlier in the letter once
more (and the Gospel lesson does the same!).
A church member recently contested my claim in a sermon that all people
are children of God, citing this text and its seemingly exclusive reading: “Everyone
who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God.” I suspect that this has to do with people
realizing their beloved status as children of God way more than how people down
here are viewed in God’s own heart.
The
preacher could do well probing “His commandments are not burdensome,” linking
this appropriately to Matthew 11:25-30 (sometimes dubbed “the Johannine
thunderbolt”!) and Jesus’ notion that his burden is light. There are commandments, but the lightness of
the load comes from being in sync with Jesus, whereas the unbearable weight of
carrying all our other burdens and priorities is heavy indeed, perhaps akin to
Sisyphus pushing that enormous rock uphill, only to have it roll down, leaving
him (and us) exhausted (per Douglas John Hall’s diagnosis of the human plight
in Professing
the Faith).
1 John 5’s images of “overcoming the world”
worry me a little, making me think of “prayer warriors” and other Christians
who always imagine a skirmish (or larger conflagration), and claim victories in
God’s name. Yet the image is there, and
real, well-explicated at the end of Romans 8 and also the idea of the armor of
God in Ephesians 6 – and perhaps the preacher could explore how all this has
been played out in music, from “We shall overcome” (the anthem of the Civil
Rights movement!) or “Victory in Jesus!” (which I simply have trouble hearing
without recalling a little church where I preached a revival a few years back
where the throng energetically sang it as “Oh Vick-tree in Jesus”…
The love/obedience theme, paired with good
cause to praise God in Christ, carries over powerfully into the Gospel reading,
John 15:9-17. The heart of the
Gospel maybe isn’t that God loves us, but more primally that the Father loves
Jesus and then, moving slightly toward the periphery which clings closely to
the center, Jesus loves us – and then we, encircling that center, love one
another. This involves keeping
commandments – just as Jesus did. We
aren’t fond of the whole notion of commandment keeping (except when we are
judging others!), we fake-Pauline-people who are saved by grace.
But we forget that Jesus kept his Father’s
commandments, and our attachment to him involves us in the same. The commandments in question aren’t high in
number, but the quality, the intensity is immense. We are to love – but not just having warm,
loving feelings or even actions we regard as loving. We are to love as Christ
loved us – so we measure our love, we shape our love, after the kind of love
Christ had for us, for lepers, for outcasts, for Mary, for the disciples, even
for Judas and Pilate. Jean Vanier can
help: “To love people as Jesus loves them is to wash their feet, to serve them
in humility; it is to help them rise up in truth and love. To love is to lay down one’s life for others,
to place their interests before our own. It is to reveal to them that they are
loved by Jesus. To give one’s life can
mean communicating to another all that is precious. It can mean giving oneself
to another in total trust and life. It can also mean risking my love to save
someone who is drowning… The joy of human life is to leave this earth having
given life to others.”
Jesus clarifies that this is his whole
point – “that my joy may be in you – and that your joy may be full.” It’s not that God makes me joyful. Rather, Jesus’ joy inhabits us; we feed off
his joy as he is with us and in us. I’d
commend Christian Wiman’s new collection of 100 poems about Joy.
His intro is fabulous and wise: he begins by noting how “joy” is a “wounded
word” in need of “healing.” He asks if
joy is an intensification of happiness or something very different – and then
observes that poetry “does not think through such a problem so much as undergo
it.” Joy, when it happens, is very much present, “banishing all the
retrospective and anticipatory mental noise we move through most of the time…
Joy is a flash of eternity that illuminates time.”
Wiman’s profound reflections continue: “Joy
is a homesickness for a home you were not aware of having. A longing you hardly
knew you had has been answered… There’s no forcing it.” He cites C.S. Lewis, who says happiness is a
disposition, but joy is being seized. Happiness “is enlarging one’s self, whereas
joy always involves some loss of self…”
Joy is a “seeing into the life of things,” or a “being released even
from the search for meaning.”
Then
on his last page, Wiman brings it to climax: “Joy: that durable, inexhaustible,
essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to
claim again the word ‘soul.’ That sensation more exalting than happiness, less
graspable than hope, though both of these feelings are implicated, challenged,
changed. That seed of being which can bud even in our ‘circumstance of ice.’
There is no way to plan for, much less conjure, such an experience. One can only try to make oneself fit to feel
the moment when it comes, and let it carry you where it will.” Wiman never names Jesus in all this – but it
all feels very Jesus-y to me.
While
I’ve always been a little wary of people who think of Jesus as their best bud,
their pal, he does invite us in this text to be not servants but friends. “What a friend we have in Jesus.” Mind you, friendship in the Greco-Roman world
wasn’t people of similar interests having fun together. Friends, at least as the philosophical ideal
would have it, were committed to the care of each other’s souls. As Aristotle famously put it, “The opposite
of a friend is a flatterer.” A friend is
then someone who speaks the truth, who builds up your character; you have a
shared commitment to helping each other to become good, wise, and holy.
I’m intrigued by Jesus clarifying that we
don’t choose him; he chooses us. We
think of faith as our free choice – but we are indeed chosen, and if we feel
like we’re choosing him, it is the playing out of his choosing us. This resonates with me, as I am writing a
book that involves a section on balancing our sense of being choosers with
God’s choosing with the utterly embarrassing, humbling truth that the most
important things about us are entirely unchosen. You don’t choose your nationality, gender,
skin color, parents, proclivity to disease, height, birth order, and a zillion other
things that finally determine who you are and how your life will unfold.
Trevor Noah reflects on this in humorous and
heartbreaking ways in Born a Crime;
his fate was largely set by being born of mixed race in South Africa – and his
life story is the playing out of the challenges and hard consequences of that
unchosenness.
And then I get just plain tickled when I
hear Jesus say that “Whatever you ask the Father in my name, I will do.” Sounds like Prayer works! But prayer in reality doesn’t work well at
all – that is, if we think of it as a machine to get God to do favors for
us. My son, when he was little and
learning to pray, scoffed at the requirement that we conclude prayer “In Jesus’
name.” He said, “Doesn’t make
sense. Jesus’ name is… Jesus. So instead of saying ‘In Jesus’ name,’ why
don’t we just wind it up by saying ‘Jesus.’”
I had no reply whatsoever.
Clearly
the hook added to “Whatever you ask,” that hook being “in Jesus’ name,”
fundamentally alters what we ask.
“Jesus’ name” isn’t a magic formula.
It’s a commitment, a discernment, an expression of my full awareness of
Jesus and his agenda. It’s kin to “Thou
shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.”
We dare not pray for things out of kilter with Jesus and his kingdom by
attaching his name to something he’d be appalled, or bored by. We dare to utter the sacred name only when
we’ve immersed ourselves in Jesus’ teaching, the story of his compassion,
healing, crucifixion and resurrection, and have cause to believe we are pretty
much in sync with what he would pray for us, and in us.
On this, I would commend to you James
Dunn’s book, Did
the First Christians Worship Jesus? He carefully analyzes
various texts and concludes that “Christ seems to have been thought of as on
both sides of the worship relationship – as in at least some degree the object
of worship, but also as the enabler or medium of effective worship… Jesus was
understood very early on as the human face of God, the one who made the unseen
God known… The first Christians could
only explain inadequately that to be in the presence of Jesus was to be in the
presence of God – not, be it noted, in the presence of a god, but in the presence of God.”
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