What can we say December 18? Advent 4

   Beyond this week's texts, check out my "God Became Small: Preaching Advent" blog with thoughts on how to preach this peculiar season, with loads of illustrative material; and also, looking toward Saturday and Sunday of this week, the same sort of thing on "Preaching Christmas."

    Isaiah 7:10-16. I wish I could time-travel back to chat with Matthew and others in that circle of the very first Christian Bible scholar-theologians and listen to them explain their affection for today’s Old Testament text. I can go back in my memory to my Religion 101 class. My deeply religious friend got apoplectic when the professor tried to explain that the Hebrew here (ha-almah) wasn’t “a virgin” but “the young woman.” Why do people cling so fiercely to the notion that prophecies are predictive? The text is far richer than any image of Isaiah gazing into the divine crystal ball and foretelling what would happen in 700+ years. What help would that have been to Ahaz or the Israelites anyhow? They were under extreme duress, with hard decisions looming.

   The glory of Isaiah 7:10-16, which doesn’t detract from Mary and Jesus, but actually adds a profound, unexpected, even political dimension? Pressured by the Assyrian juggernaut, Ahaz is flailing about, suspecting a treaty might help, but might not. But to do nothing? – which is Isaiah’s counsel, or at least that’s what “Trust God!” had to feel like.

   God curiously urges Ahaz to ask for a sign. Our people are fond of signs (usually in place of diligent Bible reflection, spiritual formation, Christian conversation and prayer!) – leading them into what Bruce Waltke (Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion?) called “the Hunch method.” The dream house I’ve driven by every day for years has a For Sale sign! It’s a sign from God we should buy it! A hunch, baptized. People never see a poor person with three poorly clothed children crossing the road and think Hmm, it’s a sign: God wants us to adopt an impoverished immigrant family.

   My comic mind flits to The Life of Brian, where the crazy crowd pleads for a sign. It’s his shoe he dropped. It’s the juniper berries; a woman asks for another sign and gets upbraided, “Do not tempt him, shallow one, isn’t the miracle of the juniper bushes enough?”

   Ahaz, wrapped in a cloak of temporary piety, refrains: “No, I will not put the Lord to the test.” 

I love Martin Luther’s view on this: “Impious Ahaz simulates a holy attitude… Thus hypocrites, when it is not necessary, are most religious; but when they ought to be humble, they are most haughty.” Ahaz may have rightly suspected that the sign to be given would not suit his power-grubbing, politically-advantageous fantasies. Your people likely feel weary of the bickering and inanity they see among politicians. Share with them Isaiah’s ding of Ahaz: “It is too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also?” You’re weary of politics? Think how exhausted God must be!

   The unasked for sign is the last thing Ahaz wanted: “The young woman” – in Hebrew, ha-almah – will have a child. Which “the” woman? One standing nearby? Isaiah’s wife? Isaiah must have exasperated Mrs. Isaiah by his choice of baby names, like Mahershalalhashbaz, Shearyashuv, their names being prophecies. Another made-up, prophetic name is announced for this child: Immanuel, familiar to us now but a bizarre one back then – meaning, as we know, “God with us.” Ahaz wanted more, like a legion or thicker walls around Jerusalem. Instead, the infant-sized promise that God is with us. This is the heart of Advent and Christmas – and the whole Gospel.

   Sam Wells wisely has shown us that the most important word in the Bible, and in all of theology, is with. God is with us – which is way better than a dazzling fortune-telling of what will happen centuries from now. God is as with us as this child is with its mother right now. God is with – not the magical fixer or divine insulator, but just with us, always. This then informs how we do ministry: we don’t fix people, we aren’t charitable toward people, and we certainly don’t pity them; we are with them. If you’ve not yet, read A Nazareth Manifesto. Best theology book in a decade.

   Romans 1:1-7. It would take some derring-do to preach on the prologue to Romans on Advent 4!

And yet, Jesus shows up, and apostles happen! And “obedience of faith” – what a phrase!! Right out of the chute, Paul declares it’s “among all the Gentiles” – oh my! He’s writing to “all God’s beloved in Rome” – of all places! The epicenter of the corrupt, lost world Jesus invaded and came to rescue.

   This Gospel was “promised beforehand.” Just as with Isaiah, it’s not that the Gospel was predicted long ago. God’s eternal plan, God’s constant manner of being, God’s own heart, always laboring, always loving, culminating in the Jesus moment – not a backup plan, not a last ditch effort, but God’s holy intention from the commencement of creation itself. Michelangelo’s creation of Adam depicts God with a woman and child tucked under his left arm – a visual of God’s eternal, beforehand promise and way.

   Notice the words we’d find in a theological dictionary, all piled on top of one another, as Paul tries to explicate the revolution that Jesus touched off: servant, called, sent, set apart, good news, holiness, grace, obedience of faith. All this “by a spirit of holiness” – the same one that came upon Mary! He probably anticipated that his listeners, once the letter was wrapped up, delivered, and finally read aloud in Rome, were people of low social standing. So he speaks to them of being “slaves” – maybe a step down for many of them! – with no rights, no standing, and yet with the ultimate standing, the freedom and nobility of being God’s family!

    Paul’s allusions to the Shema and various Psalms remind us that in the days leading up to Jesus’ birth, Mary and Joseph were still devout Jews (as they would be after the birth too!), doing things like reciting the Shema, and singing Psalms. Jesus, in utero, would have heard his mother’s voice doing so, muffled a bit, but rejoicing his infant heart.

   Matthew 1:18-25. A text so familiar: better to be the docent pointing to its wonder than to try to explain it or make it relevant or devise some moral takeaway. To me, three little things here are noteworthy, if I’m the docent pointing to the wonder. The angels anticipates their fear. Yes, Mary and Joseph had good cause to fear, as do we, always. And yet Scott Bader-Saye’s wisdom comes to mind. Noting how, in our post-9/11 culture, security is everything, and so we wind up living timid lives: “Instead of being courageous, we are content to be safe… We fear excessively when we allow the avoidance of evil to trump the pursuit of the good… Our overwhelming fears need, themselves, to be overwhelmed by bigger and better things.” Joseph and Mary’s fears certainly were.

   Joseph astounds. The text speaks of him as “righteous,” caring tenderly enough for her to avoid shaming and ostracizing her. Joseph is a quiet example of mercy. He’s just quiet. In the pageants, he doesn’t get many or any lines. He just stands there, holding the donkey reins, gazing at mother and child. I want to be like him, just close to them, watching, watchful, grateful.

   Matthew reminds us of the child with the prophetic name at Isaiah’s court, Immanuel, God with us – and then clarifies how this nickname jives marvelous with the proper name to be given to this child: Jesus, yeshu‘a, which means either “Lord, help!” or “the Lord saves” – or both. Madeleine L’Engle said Jesus’ first cry sounded like the ringing of a bell. Jesus is one with the cry of all humanity. And Jesus is the divine reply to the cry of all humanity, in his cry, in his being Immanuel.

*****

  My best exploration of the birth/coming of Jesus theologically, and personally, is in Birth: The Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series) - with an extensive (for me!) exploration of Mary's experience, Jesus' birth, and his very first days on earth.

What can we say December 11? Advent 3

   Beyond this week's texts, check out my "God Became Small: Preaching Advent" blog with thoughts on how to preach this peculiar season, with loads of illustrative material; and also, looking toward the end of next week, the same sort of thing on "Preaching Christmas."

   * And if you're Methodist, or just interested in us, I released a blog last week on the question of voting and division: "Christ was born! - so Methodists could Vote?"

    I defer to the pink candle over the lectionary, as I’m determined, 3 Sundays into Advent, to give Mary considerable attention. It’s not just her week, with the 3^rd candle. It’s her season. Waiting for the Lord to take on reality, to become flesh in her life, in our lives. That’s Advent.

    So Luke 1:49b-56 provides. I’ll back up to v. 39 and ponder the Visitation, the remarkable, unsurpassed in beauty fellowship of hope. Mary, Elizabeth, needing to be together, the children to come with some recognition of one another, even in utero. No takeaway. No moral. We just watch these two – and reflect on Mary’s song. She sang! What did her voice sound like? I picture, not a big vibrato soprano, but a clearer, simpler maybe 2^nd soprano or alto.

   Her song startles, upsets, turns the placid world of piety upside-down. She sings not of sweetness or the giddy delight of having a baby, but of might, of mercy, God scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty. Put this woman in jail! Hide her away someplace safe – not for her but for us!

   The opening, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” amazes. She magnifies the Lord, but not artificially. She is like a lens, a prism: please, see the Lord largely in me. Maybe even in the other lectionary texts.

   Isaiah 35:1-10. I like to reflect on our lections that Mary knew as her Scriptures, and try to divine what her perspective on them might have been when she was so very pregnant. The prophecy of Isaiah must have thrilled her with its inspiring vision of the transformation of nature. “They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God” – so whereas Isaiah was thinking of an eschatological revolution in nature, Mary might have been dimly, courageously, hopefully aware that the child pressing against her belly, in her very own body, would be the glory and majesty of God about to appear. She would be the lucky one to see the glory and majesty first.

   Surely the prayers, “Strengthen the weak hands, make firm the feeble knees” must have resonated with her in her exhaustion, carrying extra weight, with her daily chores, having made an arduous journey to visit Elizabeth. Isaiah 35 prays for those with “fearful hearts,” encouraging them to “be strong, do not fear, here is your God, he will come.” I just love how Amy Grant sang her surmises of what must have gone on in Mary’s heart during those days: “I am frightened by the load I bear, in a world as cold as stone Must I walk this path alone? Breath of heaven, hold me together, lighten my darkness. Help me be strong, Help me be, Help me.”

   Did Mary ponder the “highway of the Lord,” where “even fools cannot get lost”? Her journey to Elizabeth’s home must have been arduous. No GPS, no helpers, much to fear. How much courage did she have? How eager was she to be with Elizabeth, her friend, her elder, her mentor?

   Of course, the tone of Isaiah shifts, as does the music I hear in my head. A powerful alto thunders in with Handel’s text taken from Isaiah: “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened…” Oh my. My soul just rushed from the quiet by a well in backwater Nazareth to a concert hall in London. Notice all the singing in Isaiah’s text. The ransomed don’t just trudge back to Zion; they sing their way home. Mary was a singer – although I’ll never picture her as the alto with the big vibrato.

   On the way home during Advent, the preacher could do worse than invite people simply to ponder the holiness, the faith, the courage, the anxiety, the hope, the isolation, the uncertainty that was Mary, mother of our Lord. So much beauty. There’s no takeaway, no lesson, no “point.” We just ponder. I think my best preaching dares to do such a thing.

   James 5:7-10 has the lovely Advent-ish counsel, “Be patient until the coming of the Lord.” His analogy is of the farmer waiting for the crops to come in. Who requires more patience? The farmer? Or the pregnant mother? Fortunately both take time, and yet the wait has its own agonies, like the life of faith. Here’s a playful question I may pop into my homily: if James, this James, was the brother of our Lord, did he for a moment reflect on his own mother – Mary also! – pregnant with his brother Jesus, or with him? 

Had she sung to him, to them? Another reverie may be in order, no takeaways or points, just inviting people to gawk at the tenderness, the beauty, the holiness of the holy family.

    “Strengthen your hearts.” Sounds like the common fare of secular gurus. James explains how, and why: “The coming of the Lord is near.” It’s not “Be strong,” but “The Lord is coming – so be strong.” Massive difference. And you have to love James’s practical, churchy counsel: “Don’t grumble.” If you are patient for the Lord’s coming, there’s just no space or energy for grumbling.

   Matthew 11:2-11. More John the Baptist! He’s now in prison, not active any longer, only listening for rumors of what’s happening. Jesus knows and sends a report: what’s going on out here is stunning. How many times through history have those imprisoned for their faithful labors been stuck inside while God’s work is still unfolding out there! And you have to admire Jesus’ framing of things. It’s not “Tell him I’ve got it,” or “I’m being amazing out here, I’m the Messiah, after all!” Instead, it’s what Jesus (and John!) cared about: not identity, but what’s actually transforming the lives of people. I think of this amazing podcast about John Garland’s ministry at the Mexican border (“Maybe God: Can Loving ‘Illegals’ Save our Souls, part 2”) where he says it’s not so much doing something for someone, but just being there to bear witness to the beautiful thing God is doing. 

*****

  My best exploration of the birth/coming of Jesus theologically, and personally, is in Birth: The Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series) - with an extensive (for me!) exploration of Mary's experience, Jesus' birth, and his very first days on earth.

What can we say December 4? Advent 2

   Beyond this week's texts, check out my "God Became Small: Preaching Advent" blog with thoughts on how to preach this peculiar season, with loads of illustrative material.

   Both our Old Testament and Gospel texts play on images of shoots and branches, the defiant growth that emerges even out of a seemingly dead stump. John’s vision is more violent, an ax whacking away at what only seems to be sturdy and living.

   Isaiah 11:1-10 interests me with its obsession with virtue – something we aren’t obsessed with at all, even in church life. I constantly return to one of the incandescent moments in Mark Helprin’s marvelous Winter’s Tale: in this thoughtful ramble on wealth, fame and possessions, Hardesty’s father says “Little men spend their day sin pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths 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. 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 the strengths by which we can stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.”

    Maya Angelou suggested that “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” Notice the word “practice.” Courage, honesty, integrity, wisdom, character: these virtues are to be practiced, like skills. And I’m unsure about his, but Pádraig Ó Tuama reports that in American Sign Language, “the sign for courage implies strength that comes from the body, with both finger-spread hands beginning at the chest and moving out to form the letter ‘s’ for strength.” What is interesting is that the sign for ‘fear’ in British Sign Language uses the same finger-spread hand and touches the chest. It occurs to me that courage comes from the same place as fear, and where there is fear, there is the possibility of courage.”

    Fear and courage. That’s Advent.

    I’ve written before on Matthew 3:1-12 and will reiterate a few thoughts now. Years ago, I heard a great sermon suggesting you never see John the Baptist on any Christmas cards – and yet he’s the pivotal way in to all the Bible’s Christmas stories! A Church member heard me say this and devised for me history’s first (only?) John the Baptist Christmas Card!  It really is a season of “confessing sins” (a superlatively Advent-ish thing to do). Maybe we’d prefer not to be dubbed “You brood of vipers!” – but is this the case? “Bear fruits worthy of repentance” – and “Do not presume…” How much presumption is there in the Christian religion – and especially at Christmas!

   I always wonder if Shel Silverstein’s children’s book might, oddly, help us think about the ax being at the root of the tree. Do you know The Giving Tree (which works well at Christmas with a cut tree in your house, right?)? The tree provides shade and apples to a young boy, until he grows up and drifts away – only to return in need of wood for a house, then wood for a boat to go far away, and then for simply a stump on which to sit: a hard journey indeed – for the boy and for the tree!

   Trees amaze. Richard Powers's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory, is about nine quirky misfits who eventually unite to protect trees - which are enormously important in the environment and the economy! 

    J.R.R. Tolkien loved trees as a child, and as he wrote The Lord of the Rings, especially with his Ents who spoke slowly "because anything worth saying was worth saying slowly, and anything worth hearing was worth hearing slowly." His grief was heightened by the ravaging of forests for the big ironworks and war munition manufacturing in Birmingham - mirrored in Isengard, Saruman's domain and factory of evil.

    Trees matter in Scripture - in today's readings, in Psalm 1 ("like a tree planted by the water"), in Jesus' apprenticeship with is dad as a woodworker, and even in the cross itself (Nikos Kazantzakis, in The Last Temptation of Christ, envisioned Jesus being forced to craft crosses for the Romans!).

   After John’s fuming is done, Luke reports that “with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” We sure believe in preaching as Good News – but clearly, for John the Baptist and Luke, the “good news” isn’t something sunny, positive, cheerful, or happy. It’s about vipers and axes, giving away one coat if you have two (so isn’t a closet purge in order?). 

****

   Check out my book, valuable for preachers and laity during Advent, Why This Jubilee? - reflections on carols, sacred and secular.

Young Karl Barth Preaching, Offending, and Reassessing

    I laughed out loud a few times while reading Christiane Tietz’s wonderful new biography of Karl Barth. Once was during her recounting of his first pastorate in Safenwil. Full of Gospel zeal, he encountered (for the first time in his life) real people with profound social and economic troubles. His sermons began to veer toward what some regarded as “political,” and he was deemed by quite a few to be “socialist.” The common folk cheered all he had to say.

   But not Walter Hüssy, the grown son of the local factory owners who had financially paid for the bulk of the church building’s construction a few years earlier. He penned an open letter to Barth, published in the town newspaper: “Barth’s agitating speech was an attempt to sow discord between employers and employees. The owners after all are those who pull the cart, and need some elbow room.”

   Barth replied, in the same newspaper: “My honored sir, may I loan or give you a few good books where you can teach yourself some things? You address me in my role as pastor, that I should have a mediating effect. That would suit you! With your permission however, as pastor I set myself a different program, over which I owe no accounting to you. You may be older than I, but nonetheless you are still young enough to develop better insights. I sincerely wish you that.”

   The following Sunday, the church was packed beyond capacity! The slugfest was all the talk of Safenwil. The paper published an anonymous column entitled “The Red Danger in Safenwil,” noting Barth’s subversive agitation, and stating uncertainty whether he was really a good Christian or not. The Hüssys promptly departed the church – with their large donations.

   His professor of theology in Basel, Paul Wernle, corresponded with him, leading him to rethink not the content but the tone of his remarks. Wernle suggested he’d answered “crudeness with crudeness and rudeness with rudeness.” Pondering this, Barth admitted “When I read Hüssy’s attack, I didn’t feel any personal offense, but a desire to fight: take up the sword of the Lord and Gideon! I didn’t intend anything but to run down an enemy of a good cause. But now, fourteen days later, as the smoke has cleared, I must acknowledge that I behaved in an Old Testament-like fashion. My gesture appears less heroic now, and I can sense all the egocentric aspects that contributed to it.”

   He resolved to do better next time. On this, he never made significant progress. Preaching five years later, he asked out loud if Safenwil didn’t need a different pastor, “a pastor from whose sermons the love of God emanates with such power that you have to feel it, that you are moved. I apparently am not able to speak to you in such a way, because apparently in myself there is something very deeply not in order with God.”

   I am moved by these words, and hope they were genuine. Barth, I believe, trusted so firmly in the power of the Word to effect change that, when he observed a listlessness, a lack of response in his people and the town, he looked within seeking an explanation.

   Soon thereafter, he grew more acerbic: “You wish for me to be a false prophet, the pastor who pleases the people. To have a pastor in this village means to have eternal unrest in the village, a person who in the most uncomfortable way will continually question everything and give unexpected replies to all questions.”

   And so, bugged by all of this, but also mortified by theologians who could curtsy to the German war efforts, he wrote his Epistle to the Romans, called by theologian Karl Adam “a bomb on the playground of the theologians.” A new congregation gathered around him: countless young theologians and pastors around the world breathing in his fresh new life. And his days of pastoring in a small village were over. Should we say … thankfully?

   For all of us screwing up the courage to say what we need to say, and searching for the right tone, in some little church somewhere, we want what is within us to be "in right order," and we want to speak truly - even if they do not ask or pay us to stir up eternal unrest. For me, noticing a titan like Karl Barth walked this same difficult road, is encouraging. 

***

  Check out Will Wold's "Preacher Lab" podcast, on which I was his guess in his latest episode - talking about the preaching life, of course.

What can we say Nov. 2, All Saints / 22nd after Pentecost

   We will observe All Saints’ Day on November 2. If you are, let me refer you to my blog from the last time regarding All Saints – with lots of reflections, illustrations and suggestions. The 2025 All Saints lections we’ll get to below. Right now, I want to touch on the Nov. 2, not-specifically-for-All-Saints texts.

    Haggai 1:15-29 would have been terrific for Reformation Sunday. The prophet tries to jostle the people out of their sleepy-headedness, out of their weary discouragement, and to rebuild the temple. The date he spoke? October 17, 520. I love the scholarly precision we find in the commentaries! Most standing there could not recall the former temple and its splendor. Could Haggai? Joshua and Zerubbabel (a name that is just so fun to say out loud!) could not as they’d been born in exile. Silver and gold will be required; the Lord claims it’s all his anyhow.

     The image we carry is that the temple they did build in response was modest, even shabby. But it can’t have been too shabby. It appears to have been a smidgeon larger than Solomon’s, and it stood for exactly 500 years until Herod took it down to replace it.

   2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 12-17 would be tough to preach, with the ominous Godless One stalking the people. Mind you, the notion of such a godless one being puffed up above all other objects of worship might give us the shivers, given all going on in our culture and wider world today. Luke 20:27-28 is (for me) another hard text to warm up to. Another good reason to stick with the All Saints’ lections!

   Ephesians 1:11-23 is one of those lovely texts that don’t require much explaining; it’s more eloquent just to linger over them. I certainly wouldn’t try to make such powerful words “relevant” or any such nonsense. They speak beautifully for themselves. I hope my people will notice I cherish these words, that I am personally awed by them. I hope to sound like a docent in a museum, pointing with gawking delight. Maybe my people will get caught up in the mood! The luxurious, lavish verbiage had to be mind-boggling to the early Christians, meager as their resources and prospects were. Frank Thielman is right: “Words that emphasize God’s meticulous planning pile up one upon another – purpose, work, counsel, will – how privileged are we!” Heirs, inheritances, riches, glory, destiny... 

   That last word, “destiny,” begs for a parenthesis. The old “God is in control” notion is ridiculous, of course. I love how Markus Barth (Karl’s son!) clarifies how personal this destining is: “It pertains exclusively to the relationship of the Father to his children. If no wise human father would treat his children according to a schedule fixed before their birth, how much less would the Father who is blessed in Ephesians 1:3-14!”

   The responsibilities of even the most fabulous heirs were driven home to me at the World Methodist Council in 1986 when Donald English reported on attending the wedding of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew – and how the couple, immensely wealthy, able to do whatever they might wish, had bowed and pledged fealty to the crown, to the “rights and responsibilities” that went with being a royal couple.

    I love Paul’s “prayer report” here. It’s not so much that What we asked God for was ‘answered.’ What intrigues is the content of his prayer – that the recipients, the objects of his praying, might have a “spirit of wisdom and revelation,” that their “eyes of their hearts might be enlightened” (reminding me of St. Francis’s constant prayer during his season of conversion, “Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart, and give me, Lord, correct faith, firm hope, perfect charity, wisdom and perception, that I may do what is truly your most holy will.”

   Paul also prays for 3 things (Do you wish people prayed this for you? for one another?): (1) the hope to which he has called you, (2) the God’s glorious inheritance, and (3) the magnitude of God! Do we get such prayer requests? What if we did? The hope business: Emily Dickinson suggested that “Hope is the thing in the soul with feathers…” – but is it in the soul? Or is it more about God? Markus Barth, again: “The emphasis lies not so much on the mood of the person hoping as on the substance or subject matter of expectation.” It’s the thing hoped for. Christopher Lasch (in his marvelous The True and Only Heaven) clarified that optimism is the fantasy that all will be better tomorrow, and it depends on us; but hope is the ability to deal with tomorrow if things aren’t better – and it depends not on us but on God.

   Luke 6:20-31. Unsure nowadays whether to sing David Haas’s wonderful “Blest Are They,” after the trouble he got into. His text is also the far more beloved Matthean slant on the Beatitudes. Luke’s is tougher, adding the “Woe” moments absent in Matthew. We’d probably prefer Jesus bless the “poor in spirit” instead of more simply Luke’s “poor.”

   Clarence Jordan shrewdly pointed out that the poor prefer Luke, while the rest of us delight in Matthew! Jesus spoke to the poor, the nobodies – and blessed them. They were accustomed to being cursed, ignored or blamed – as we see in our world today. How amazing was Jesus? For All Saints’ Day, it’s hard not to hear the line “Blessed are those who mourn.” We come mourning, indeed – but we grieve as those who have hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Again, I trust the reading of the names in God’s holy place more than I trust my frail words to express the hope of the Gospel!

   Robert Schuller tried to modernize the text with the rubric “The Be-Happy Attitudes.” But Jesus isn’t issuing commandments, much less doling out advice for a chipper life. He blesses, he embraces, loves, knows, recognizes, and gives hope to the hopeless, to the people nobody else wants – and then he brings down a Woe! on the big dogs, those who think they’re somebody, and especially the self-righteous. Jesus’ words are light years from the conventional wisdom of our day. He doesn’t say Blessed are the good-looking, the successful, the well-connected, the white Americans, and he doesn’t say Woe to the immigrant, the unemployed, the lonely or the homeless. The preacher has one more chance just now to chip away at the façade of thin, culturally-mashed-down thinking, and open the window into Jesus’ revolutionary worldview.

***

  Check out my new book on the Psalms, The Heart of the Psalms - with study guide for your lay people, and good preaching stuff!!

What can we say October 30? Reformation Sunday?

   If we observe Reformation Sunday, it's wise not to get nostalgic about Luther, who after all was creating the biggest division in church history! It's the way he and all reformers know how to look forward, as on a watchtower, for the new thing God is about to do, which is in continuity with the old thing, as old as Habakkuk and from creation's first sunrise, God has been doing. We have a weight upon us. And in the texts to come, it's about being / becoming "worthy" of the call - which will never happen if we don't grasp, as Zaccheus did, that there are economic and lifestyle implications to welcoming this Lord into our homes.

   When I arrived as pastor at my 2nd church, they had organized small groups all over the parish for me to go and listen to them share "What's wrong with the church?" Such a bad idea. Yet there's so much wrong with the church, always. And ironically, some of what people find to be wrong with the church is precisely where our strength lies. Examples abound. I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's words: "Why should men love the church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of life and death, and of all that they would forget. She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft. She tells them of evil and sin, and other unpleasant facts."

   And for denominations that divide into traditional vs. progressive? Thomas Merton's wisdom is spot on: "The biggest paradox about the church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution."

   Near the end of Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s best (maybe? my opinion?) novel, we find this reflection on memory and death: “But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting so long.” On God we wait, using the time to learn, be exposed, grow, change our minds.

    Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4. Habakkuk is just fun to say out loud. When the apostle Paul, and then the Talmud replied to the question posed to Jesus, “What’s the great verse in the Bible?” both zoomed to Habakkuk 2:4. The image and setting are compelling in every age. The decline of one empire, Assyria, only yields another brutal, oppressive power, Babylon, signaled by the battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE. Nothing new under the sun – and yet heightened anxiety and terror.

   God calls Habakkuk and lays on him a massa, translated innocuously as “oracle,” when it literally means “burden, weight.” God’s message is heavy, something to be pondered (pondus is something heavy you carry). He’s not in a comfortable chair bearing this burden, but on a watchtower, like a sentinel, scanning the horizon for – more disaster? Or the coming of the Lord? I think of “On the Watchtower,” maybe preferring Jimi Hendrix to Bob Dylan.

   Habakkuk names the distortion of “justice,” mishpat, that marvelous Hebrew word that doesn’t mean fairness but rather a justice where the marginalized, those left out are included and cared for: this is the just society and people! That much-quoted verse, 2:4 (the primary text for Romans, cited in 1:17, then also showing up in Galatians 3:11 and Hebrews 10:38) fascinates: “The righteous shall live by faith.” Habakkuk and the Israelites heard “the righteous” as those who doggedly adhere to God’s Torah. They “live,” that is, carrying on day by day. Their “faith” is their faithfulness to community and Torah-living.

   Paul morphs all of this in an eschatological and salvific direction. The “righteous” are those right-wised, put into a right relationship with and by God. They live – now, but will live eternally. Their faith is the gift of belief, trust – and Karl Barth is wise to remind us that it is Christ’s faith, his faithfulness that saves, not our faith or faithfulness.

   Indeed, in commenting on Paul’s reference to Habakkuk in The Epistle to the Romans, Barth’s words catch fire as we read them a century later: “The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths.” The Church’s activity “is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself. The people of Christ know that no sacred word or work exists in its own right: they know only those words and works and things which by their negation are sign-posts to the Holy One.”

   Habakkuk would shout down an Amen from his watchtower. Our Habakkuk text is deeply suggestive of what the righteous person is not: he is not puffed up, she does not rely on herself. Habakkuk can help us not mis-read Paul. Faith for him clearly is not a one-time decision, but a constant walking, renewal regularly, a lifestyle, an attitude, practical.

   2 Thessalonians 2:1-4, 11-12. Not sure I’ll preach on this among the lections – but so intriguing to notice how, as is often the case, Paul’s prayers aren’t for some ailment, or for his friends to get a better job or find a spouse. No, he prays “that our God may make you worthy of his call, and may fulfill every resolve to do good and work of faith in power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.”

   Luke 19:1-10. “A wee little man was he.” The song tempts us to trivialize this remarkable encounter Jesus has with a rich tax collector in Jericho. The ruins of Herodian Jericho are eloquent if tragic witnesses to the grandeur that once was that city. Zaccheus, the small one, illustrating how Jesus welcomes the little ones, how “They are weak, but he is strong,” even the marvelous hobbits Tolkien created from the shire as the hope and future of Middle Earth.

   This man’s name: Zaccheus. The Hebrew, zakkai, “the righteous one,” suggests his parents had this dream of goodness for him. If he wound up (as Christian tradition suggested) as the first bishop of Caesarea, he did prove to be that zakkai. Did his parents live long enough to know? Was his life as a rapacious tax collector a lunge toward compensation for his being short? “Little ones to him belong.”

   Zaccheus’s climb up that tree: he was, we can be sure, a climber. I think of Danny DeVito when casting calls are made for him! As a climber, was he in the tree merely so he could see? So he could be seen? Was he late to the party? Short people could see if they arrived early enough to be in the front. After his transformative meal with Jesus, did he then follow up the steep highway to Jerusalem with the throng to join in Palm Sunday? Was he one in that crowd? I love sermons, and try to preach them, that simply dangle such possibilities.

   Luke’s punch line zooms in on what matters: “The Son of man came to seek and save the lost,” not the clever or well-placed or even the church members, Bible readers and believers. Jesus and Zaccheus broke bread together, in the home of what to Jesus was a stranger – and nothing was ever the same. There most clearly are economic implications to meeting up with this Jesus! Did Jesus order him to make outlandish reparations? Had Zaccheus, on meeting Jesus, hung his eyes in shame? Or was he motivated by the giddy joy of connecting with this Lord who was eager to “eat with tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 15:1)?

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  In my book on saints and heroes of the church (Servants, Misfits & Martyrs: Saints and their Stories), I have a good bit on Martin Luther and other reformers. My gratitude soared when my church history professor, David Steinmetz, told me he gave this book to his mother so she'd understand what he'd spent his life doing. Lots and lots of illustrative stuff in here for preachers, I am sure.

Guest preaching - in Poland

 I had the rare and delightful privilege of preaching in Krakow on Sunday. Check out video and text. It was short - but with the translator it took twice as long!!

Two New Books Helping Me Rethink How I Preach

   Two very different books I’ve read lately have struck me as potentially helpful to me and maybe to you in the vocation of preaching. One is a semi-fictional narrative of a few months in Johann Sebastian Bach’s life, the other by a political speechwriter on great speeches that were, as the title suggests, Undelivered.

   First, on what didn’t get delivered: Jeff Nussbaum has written speeches for dozens of leading politicians in pivotal situations. Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches that Would have Rewritten History takes us on a tour of huge speeches that, for various reasons, didn’t get delivered. Eisenhower, if D-Day had failed. JFK, if they had bombed Cuba instead of blockading at sea. Helen Keller’s stinging diatribe on women’s rights. Nixon refusing to resign. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 victory speech. King Edward’s refusal to abdicate the throne. John Lewis’s pre-edited speech from the march on Washington in 1963.

   There is enough illustrative material here to keep a preacher busy for many weeks. But more importantly, Nussbaum explains how speeches are put together, why they work (or don’t) – and thoughtful inquiry into who’s listening, what time it is, when boldness or restraint are called for. How things are structured: his sequence of Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, Action is more helpful than any I've ever read in preaching manuals. He has an insightful discussion of whether and when we use We or I or You. And attention to little prepositions matters: would John Lewis speak of a march in America, or on America? I kept taking notes to help me rethink how I preach. I wished Nussbaum had taught preaching when I was in school – or today.

    I started with the audiobook, and wished I had the hard copy. But then the audio has real audio of Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, the fiery Emma Goldman. I now own both, and am glad.

   And then a very different read: James Runcie’s fascinating The Great Passion. It’s a novel, but tracking closely with reality. The story of a 13 year old, grieved over his mother’s death, not really wanted by his father, coming to Leipzig to study music. The school’s cantor, J.S. Bach, notices his voice, and takes him in not only as a student but into the Bach family home. It’s sort of a look at how the St. Matthew Passion came together from composition to performance from the perspective of inside the household and among singers and players. That’s how and where preaching comes to be: from somebody who lives in a home with people and situations and weariness and issues.

    A few passages struck me as revelatory for us: “Every time I walked through the streets of the town, I found it strange to contemplate the lives of others going about their daily business, with food to buy, medicines to fetch, debts to collect, money to earn. They were quite unaware of the time, anxiety and dedication we gave to the Passion, or how important we all thought it was.” You’re wrestling a Word from the Lord to the ground as you drive or walk, and no one has a clue. Reminded me a little of Tuesdays with Morrie: on learning of his mortal cancer diagnosis, he looks out the doctor’s window. “Outside, the sun was shining and people were going about their business. A woman ran to put money in the parking meter. Another carried groceries. Morrie was stunned by the normalcy of the day around him. ‘Shouldn’t the world stop? Don’t they know what has happened to me?’”

    The narrative of the Passion’s debut performance feels like my goal in preaching: “The story was the one we all knew. But what the Passion did was to make us feel that it belonged to all of us, here in Leipzig, for the first time. It was not a theological lecture, or a piece of rhetoric, or even an account of an event in the history of Palestine. It had become our story. It was happening now, during this performance, in the present tense, and I could see, on the faces of the congregation below, that they recognized they could do nothing more important than listen because they had become part of it all.” Can my sermon make them feel this story belongs to us, here, now?

    And then, although many citizens weren’t there, “It felt as if all Leipzig was in attendance: saints and sinners, old and young, contents and malcontents, the newly in love and the recently rejected; the disappointed, the forlorn and the forgiving: all God’s creatures, alone and together, hoping that, by listening to this music and being present at this service, they would allay the fear of death and be forgiven their sins and failings.”

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

What can we say August 28? 12th after Pentecost

   Summer's over. Back to school - or whatever the transitions may be for our people. How to tap that mood? Jeremiah offers plaintive warnings about losing your way. Hebrews gives us good cause not to be afraid - and Luke ponders with whom we hang out. All key in peculiar ways.

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

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

   “You take on the character of the god you follow” (Walter Brueggemann). We become what our pursuits are, what we pay attention to. If we pursue God and substantive holiness, we become just that. Fascinating: our searching, our quest defines who we become! The preacher is wise to ask, Who are the vain recipients of our devotion? – and it’s such a long list. Political ideology, for sure. Things. Others. Self. Institutions – which Brueggemann hears as collapsing in this text. The church itself can be a vain recipient of devotion.

   On idolatry, and gods who are nothing reducing you to nothing, Thomas Merton, writing in 1965 but fitting today: "The great sin is idolatry. It is almost completely unrecognied precisely because it is so overwhelming, total. It takes in everything. Festishism of power, machines, possessions, sports, clothes, all kept going by greed for money and power. The Bomb is only 1 accidental aspect of the cult. We should be thankful for it as a sign, a revelation of what the rest of our civilization points to: the self-immolation of man to his own greed, and his own despair. Unless man turns from his idols to God, he will destroy himself, or rather his idolatry will prove itself to be his destruction."

   It’s about asking the right questions, and digging past the obvious. “Where is the Lord?” (a good question) needs modifying, since it’s not just any Lord, but “the one who brought us up out of Egypt.” The Lord isn’t a genie in a bottle or a personal assistant or an energy drink.

   Verse 8 should haunt all clergy: “The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’ Those who handle the law did not know me.” Can we answer well Jeremiah’s question “Do people change their gods?” Well of course they do, we do, we have, and will! “Can a nation change its god?” Nation can become the god, or it’s idolatry when we think we can compel the nation to follow a god of our own imagining. A sermon could explore the bogus gods we fixate on, and dream upon. We’re in a double fix: not only has God been forsaken, but the new fake deities gut us. Is Jeremiah pointed to a “cracked cistern holding no water”? We think our religiosity or busy-ness will hold water. What are the modern parallels for such cisterns?

   Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 is rich with homiletical potential! “Let mutual love (philadelphia!) continue” – but should we instead say “Let mutual love begin”? This Greek, philadelphia, reminds me of the Tom Hanks film by that name – about a man suffering from HIV and AIDS, simply asking, in those early days, for fairness, acceptance, justice and love. The goal of philadelphia isn’t merely enjoying people like us, but philoxenia, love for strangers.

   Why love them? We strangers have been loved. And, Hebrews, like Genesis 18 (Abraham and Sarah welcoming the strangers by the Oaks of Mamre), reveals that God has this quirky way of using the stranger to test us, to let God’s self be made known to us, for new life to come through them, the them who should be we/us. Tricky thing is, even if you think the stranger might be that angel, a divine visitor, you more likely think, Ehhh, probably not. Maybe to grow toward this philoxenia, the stranger we may need to learn to welcome is that stranger within, the me that is restless, feeling inadequate, exhausted, dislocated.

   “Be content”? The sermon must expose Madison Avenue and all advertising for what it is – a constant clamor of Do not be content! You need more, newer, different gadgets, stuff, clothes, experiences. Contentment isn’t even Okay, now I possess enough of those things. The Greek arkoumenoi means enough, sufficient – and then clarifies resides in God’s promise never to forsake us. Flannery O’Connor once spoke of the Eucharist, noting how it’s not much yet it’s more than enough: “It is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” 

   Kate Bowler’s terrific No Cure for Being Human, and then her devotional Good Enough probe this spiritual challenge and invitation with humor and wisdom.

   “Remember those in prison – as if you were in there with them.” Part 2 of that is bold. Not Pity them, or Pray for them. Envision yourself as in prison – in an act of solidarity, and the realization that we are all in bondage!

   What is an “undefiled marriage bed”? Two lie down: is the defilement lust (even then)? Dominance? Judgment? Iciness? Welcoming a stranger in this place is defilement! Listeners will suspect homosexuality might be in play here – and it must be the case that even those who totally embrace same gender relationships and marriage have to recognize that those beds too can be defiled in the same way straight beds are. “Let marriage be held in honor by all”? Thankfully it doesn’t say “traditional marriage”!

   Notice the proximity of hospitality to strangers and marriage. Isn’t Hebrews inviting couples to have missional marriages? Not asking God to make us happy or keep the peace, but What is God calling us, as a couple, to be and do? Is philoxenia our relationship’s mission statement? How to begin such a quest? Our Gospel lesson keeps it simple – but it’s oh so counter-cultural.

   Luke 14:1, 7-14 is my favorite text that stands so well on its own I’m tempted merely to read it, let folks ponder it in silence, then read it again and sit down: “When you host a dinner, do not invite those who can invite you in return, but invite the poor, maimed, lame, blind” requires zero finesse.

   Spiritual people love that old Moravian blessing, “Come, Lord, Jesus, our Guest to be. And bless these gifts bestowed by Thee.” But if Jesus pulls up to your table, he asks who’s there, who isn’t there, and why.

   Our beloved The Bible is clear! Or We stand with Scripture! people avert their gazes, or scramble to rationalize. Notice Jesus doesn’t say Don’t only invite those who can invite you in return – but flat out, Don’t invite them! Sheesh. Jesus isn’t devising a program to feed the hungry – although he urges us to be sure they are fed. He’s on a mission to save our souls. I often say If you only hang around with people like you, you become arrogant and ignorant.

   I also love to tell this: I think of people who have with some grandiosity walked into my office with a ham, or a food gift card, asking me to get it to some poor person. On bad days I’d say Thanks! On better days I’d say Find someone and deliver it to them yourself. On my best days I’d say Take it home, and invite the people you have in mind into your home and share it with them. That’s a Jesus-y meal, right? Can you tell a story, even from your own having dinners, that might paint the picture?

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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.