What can we say September 4? 13th after Pentecost

   Jeremiah 18:1-11. Grand opportunity for the preacher to learn some things, let someone discover her or his new calling, and engage the arts. Find a potter. A total stranger really will talk with you! – and interview him or her about pottery. This pandemic sermon includes this video of me talking with a potter (starting at the 9:30 mark)… It’s all super interesting theologically. Pottery is dirty work, but the dirt really becomes beauty. Centering is required, as is "opening up," not to mention trimming, firing, etc. Clay gets “spoiled,” so the potter “reworks” it. If it’s “wonky,” the potter has to “redeem” it. The potter is never sure how it will turn out; the clay “talks back” to the potter.

   The whole “dirt” business: this is quite literally what we are. Elizabeth Achtemeier put it cleverly: “We are dirt,, but God values us more than mud.” I think also of the great moment in James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. Sister Gee is flirting with Kevin Potts Mullen: “That’s my job, Officer. I’m a house cleaner, see. I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don’t like me. It don’t set there and say, ‘I’m hiding. Come get me.’ I got to go out and find it to clean it out. Same with you. The fellers you seek, crooks and all, ain’t saying ‘Here I am. Come get me.’ But I don’t hate dirt for being dirt. You can’t hate a thing for being what it is. I reckon it’s not fair to call someone living a wrong life a problem, or a mess… or dirt.”

   Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18. What a preachable Psalm – if you promise not to over-explain things (the subject of a special blog I wrote recently)! Omniscience is a thing with God, but that’s no bracket on human freedom, or even on chance occurrences – which clearly happen! In my book, Birth: The Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series), I suggest we all do what this Psalmist did: ponder that we all once were microscopic, fragile, dependent, vulnerable little next to nothing wonders – and find ourselves in awe over God and the sheer fact that we made it when we may well not have.

   Jason Byassee links this text, the “shadow of the barely formed self in the womb,” to Gollum (close to the Hebrew golem in the Psalm!) in Lord of the Rings. This shadowy creature “is an image of us when we clasp anything other than the living God, thinking it will make us live. The psalm’s word is that even our golem self our not-formed-in-holiness self, is not unknown to God God treasures us at our worst.”

   Does the Psalmist keep feeling this urge to flee – which he declares is impossible? Jonah fled. We all flee in one way or another – but as Francis Thompson expressed it in his “Hound of Heaven,” “I fled him, down the nights and down the days; I fled him, down the arches of the years; I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from him, and under running laughter… from those strong feet that followed with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy…”

   There’s so much here. “When I awake, I am still with you”? When we awake, we… check social media? The vitriol over enemies (which the lectionary foolishly lops off!)? Eugene Peterson suggested that these harsh Psalms pleading for vengeance are how you “cuss without cussing.” Offering it all up to God instead of harboring rage or judgment, or enacting it: this is God’s way. Anne Lamott’s notion is huge: “We can be sure we have remade God in our image when God has all the same enemies we do.”

   This text is about adoration and awe, with no “must” stuck in (the way Pro-Life people have politicized it!), reminding me of Thomas Merton’s thought on writing that fits preaching: “To write is to love; it is to inquire and to praise, to confess and to appeal. To speak out with an open heart and say what seems to me to have meaning. The bad writing I have done has all been authoritarian, the declaration of musts… The best stuff has been more straight confession and witness.”

   Philemon. A whole book as the lectionary epistle! For Labor Day, how could we reflect on unjust labor of any kind, given Paul’s appeal for this slave to be freed? It’s a confidential letter to a friend – but then it was certainly read aloud in the church. What pressure was Philemon under to liberate Onesimus once his fellow believers heard Paul’s words! How manipulative is Paul here? Instead of claiming apostolic authority, which he possessed, he dubs himself “a slave,” that is, one with Onesimus!

   Was Paul’s request granted? F.F. Bruce answers “Yes, or the letter would not have survived.” We even have the tradition that Onesimus became the bishop of Ephesus!

   Luke 14:25-33. No sweet Jesus here, inviting hatred of father and mother. We can handle the text, but dare not ignore it. Francis of Assisi is one of a horde of Christians who shattered their own families in order to follow Jesus. The moment Francis, being sued by his father Pietro, gave all he had back to him and swore his sole allegiance to God as his Father. I know I have a very personal story that fits this mold - and the question is always whether to tell something so personal and agonizing or not. It embodies the text quite vividly, but can distract from the main point?

    This taking up the cross isn’t grimacing and praying hard or doing without a few things for Jesus. Joel Marcus, in his great Anchor commentary on Mark, directs us to what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to say about going to death row in the Gulag – which is what taking up your cross would have meant: From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the threshold, you must say to yourself: My former life is over, I shall never return. I no longer have property. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious to me. I can’t re-use those words often enough in preaching.

   Jesus eases back a little from death row to counting the cost of building a tall tower. If I have time, I’ll refer to Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, in which Tom, the mason, ruminates on what it means and requires to build a tall cathedral: “He had worked on a cathedral once. At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been angry and resentful when the master builder had warned him that his work was not quite up to standard: he knew himself to be rather more careful than the average mason. But then he realized that the walls of a cathedral had to be not just good but perfect. This was because the cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean in the walls, the merest variation from the absolutely true and level, could weaken the structure fatally. Tom’s resentment turned to fascination. The combination of a hugely ambitious building with merciless attention to the smallest detail opened Tom’s eyes to the wonder of his craft. He learned about the importance of proportion, the symbolism of various numbers, and the almost magical formulas for working out the correct width of a wall or the angle of a step in a spiral staircase. Such things captivated him.  He was surprised to learn that many masons found them incomprehensible.”  What if we thought of our life with God, our pursuit of holiness, our determination to be the church, in such thoughtful terms?

   One wrinkle though. If we ponder the cost of building, we might assemble lots of wood, bricks, shingles, nails, carpenters, painters, etc. – whereas the cost of discipleship, the cost of a holy life, is more divestment than assembling. You unload the stuff you have. Well, maybe you do keep the carpenter!

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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.