What can we say September 11? 14th after Pentecost

    Does the date, 9/11, still resonate deeply with people? Are there constructive ways to connect the grief with the dream, even tying it to what's going on in other places today - without the "Never forget!" and fear-mongering moods that have reshaped politics ever since? Can we even notice how "security" has trumped in over all other concerns since then - making us timid to do bold things, perhaps especially for God? 

   How does 9/11 raise in a peculiar way basic questions about God? You might be interested in the series we just commenced: Good Questions / No Easy Answers - including plenty sparked by 9/11! Is there a God at all? What about other religions? Does God protect us? Or is God in control? What is God's relationship to nation?

   Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28. How to preach these texts of unmitigated judgment? Tempting to blast the people I’m frustrated with… but Walter Brueggemann reminds me that there is an intense “sadness” in this indictment. The people are indeed “foolish,” and they have skills – in doing evil. Like a heartbroken parent, Jeremiah is united with God’s heart in weeping over this state of affairs – and I sense Jeremiah has a vulnerable sense of solidarity with them, not distant in his judgment, but finding himself inside their larger circle.

   What a vivid image Jeremiah employs: the burning east wind is a ruach, the same as God’s creative wind, and the breath in us, and even God’s Spirit. In the face of national foolishness, God’s Spirit is dry, harsh, unbearable. Jeremiah is thinking of the sirocco, the violent wind that scorches from the Arabian desert to the east. George Adam Smith described it in his diary: “Atmosphere thickening. Wind rises, gale blowing air filled with fine sand, horizon less than a mile, sun not visible, grey sky with almost no shadow.” Thinking of this ungentle breeze, David Grossman entitled his harrowing book about the destructive violence of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis Yellow Wind.

   Is our God a sirocco? Does God unleash horrors on us out of the swirl of God’s wounded, grieved heart? Or is it that God created the world with an order that isn’t flouted without consequences – and so when we get sideways with God, there are terrors? Martin Luther distinguished between God’s proper work and God’s “alien work.” Wrath is simply the goodness, the grace of God, but how it comes at us when we are at a bizarre angle or entirely out of sync with God. If we pray for God’s Spirit, will it be a cool, life-giving breeze, or a harsh, burning wind of judgment? Are our social anxieties, our political issues, fretting over security, family division, international strife and injustices abounding all instances of the harsh east wind of God’s sorrowing over us? Can I tell this in a way that moves my people to repentance (which Jeremiah himself didn’t get done!)?

   Psalm 14 lyrically exposes similar foolishness. It’s not intellectual atheism, but the more practical and insidious living as if there were no God. Brueggemann speaks of this one “whose conduct is disordered and without focus, because it is not referred to God.” Atheists seem really smart, actually - but the Psalm, in pondering those "fools who say in their hearts, There is no god," are characterized as "none who do good." Israelite theology is all about how you live, not any speculations you might have.

   Ellen Charry helpfully cites the Midrash on Psalms: “An architect who built a city making secret chambers and hiding-places in it, and then was made governor of the city. When he set out to catch the thieves in the city, they ran off and sought to hide themselves in the hiding places. He said: ‘Fools, would you hide yourselves from me? I am he who built the city! I know the way in and out better than you.’”

   1 Timothy 1:12-17. I first paid attention to this text when, on a retreat years ago, somebody handed me a little card saying “I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord, because he counted me trustworthy in making me his minister” – 1 Timothy 1:12. My gut reaction was “This translation must be out of kilter, or tendentious in some way.” But the sense is Paul’s, expressing surprise and gratitude that, yes, God chose me to be God’s minister. I have had hundreds of these printed over the years. I stick them in notes written to clergy, I hand them out when I speak at clergy events, and I keep one in my car, one on my desk, and one in my sock drawer just to encourage and remind me.

   I once heard a preacher lunge into the vicinity of what Paul does here. I didn’t know him at all – but heard him declaring at some length “I am a worse sinner than any of you.” Hard not to scratch your head and wonder what he was harboring inside… Sermon didn’t go anywhere good. Luke Timothy Johnson spots the glory tucked inside Paul’s manipulative message: “The mercy shown Paul was not simply forgiveness of past behavior, but the gift of power that enables him to live in a new way.” Read slowly: Paul says “I received mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief” – the latter 2 we usually think of as what disqualifies you from receiving mercy!

    Luke 15:1-10, so familiar, so easy to trivialize. I preached on this in March (out of lectionary sequence!). Luke (humorously to me) mentions “tax collectors and sinners” – as if “sinner” was an occupation! I’ll never forget the evening we had my former coworker and constant friend Rev. Alisa Lasater Wailoo, pastor up in Germantown, Pa. now, back for a program. I opened by asking her a question she didn’t know I would ask: Who is God? She answered with the lost coin story –that God is like this woman, down on her hands and knees, searching diligently in the cracks to find that one lost coin, to find us. 

   The sheep story echoes this. It’s not sufficient in God’s Kingdom to say, Hey, we have 99, that’s not bad. No, we even risk losing the mass in hand to search out the one that’s lost. I chuckle over the Mitch Hedberg comedy routine: you’re in a restaurant, and they call for the Dufresne family – but no reply. They move on to the next name – but Mitch wants to hunt for the Dufresnes: “They’re not only lost. They’re hungry.” The one sheep is lost, and hungry…

   This little parable tells us all we need to know about God, and how to be the church. Notice the Joy in God’s heart! Years ago I heard someone I can’t recall preaching (isn’t this the way? – and a humbling realization for us who preach!) who used this evidently true story as an illustration. Several families were camping out west someplace, and as it was getting dark, when getting ready for dinner, they noticed a little girl named Cathy wasn’t there. Their search gradually became increasingly frantic as night began to fall. “Cathy! Cathy! Cathy!” everyone was shouting as they fanned out. Hours passed as their terror mounted. Finally, almost at dawn, someone stopped shouting “Cathy!” and got really quiet – and heard the soft sound of a whimpering child. There was Cathy, suffering from some bruises, scrapes and exposure. They took her to the closest hospital where she was treated, and then her family was home that night. Her dad tucked her into bed, kissed her goodnight, turned out the light and was about to close the door when he heard her voice. “Daddy?” “Yes, sweetheart?” Perched on her elbow, she smiled and said to him, “I bet you’re glad you found me.” He replied, “Oh, if you only knew.”

   Last time around with this text, we hid pennies all over the church yard and building for people to find (or not) – and I recounted what Annie Dillard reported from her childhood in Pittsburgh. As a 7 year old, "I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe… The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny?… But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days." 

****

   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.