What can we say June 18? 3rd after Pentecost

    Genesis 18:1-15 (21:1-7). I love the charming and ancient fresco in Ravenna depicting the visit of the three strangers to Abraham and Sarah under the Oaks of Mamre. What a lovely place-name! Trees mark the spot! It’s hard not to interweave chapter 17’s details of the same moment – and (my seminary training notwithstanding!) it isn’t illegitimate to do so either!

   Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sees Abraham (after the foibles of Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah) as “a new human type.” Until now, people viewed God’s command as “a constraint from which they strive to break free.” For Abraham, God’s command is his life. He calls him the “unheroic hero,” as it’s not about him, but about God. He’s flawed, laughable at times. And then the last laugh comes.

   Three strangers. Of course, Christian theologians have lunged toward the Trinity. But why not simply think “strangers.” The Triune God is active any and everywhere, including when strangers materialize. Isn’t mature spirituality seeing strangers, noticing them, and maybe discerning something angelic or even divine in them?

   These three somehow though know of Sarah’s impending pregnancy – and they can even read her silent thoughts just inside the tent. Robert Alter’s rendering is vivid: “Sarah no longer had her woman’s flow. And Sarah laughed inwardly, saying ‘After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure?’” The laugh, yitzak, is cynical, and ironic – since we know the baby is coming, and that his very name Isaac, yitzak, means laughter. The sermon just has to play on this, how we might snicker at the possibility of new life, and then how when it comes we laugh – for the joy, or even at ourselves for our prior snickering.

   How to preach hospitality – in an unsafe world? The question isn’t Do we do hospitality? but How? Children learn "Don't talk to strangers." But isn't it like "Don't cross the road?" Once you're grown, you've learned how to. Can grownups learn to talk to strangers? Isn't hospitality a kind of curiosity? And a kind of humility?

   How to preach impossibility? Easy for the preacher to rattle off jargon about God doing the impossible. But I doubt many people I preach to expect anything extraordinary or beyond human capacity from God – and that’s likely because I as their pastor don’t expect so much either.

   Romans 5:1-11. Paul is finally warming up to his greatest eloquence after his midrashic meanderings about Abraham and faith. Every time I imagine Paul pacing around a room, dictating this letter, I get slackjawed with wonder. There was no New Testament, no theology textbooks – and off the top of his head he came up with this! Inspired, sure. Still amazes me. What was the secretary thinking? Wow, this guy is on fire today. I ruminate on this in sermons sometimes. No takeaway, no go-thou-and-do-likewise...

   I like Michael Gorman’s new commentary on this (and most other Romans texts!). Romans 5 forms a “bridge” between the 1^st 4 chapters and the next 4 – so it’s pivot. Our text forms an “artfully composed chiastic form,” shaped like the Greek letter chi (X):
   A (v 1-2a): Justification as peace thru Christ

     B (v 2b-5): Hope for future glory

        C (v 6-8): Christ’s death as God’s love

     B’ (v 9-10): Hope for future salvation

   A’ ( 11): Reconciliation through Christ

This matters, since Christ’s death is the center, the fulcrum, of God’s justifying, reconciling work. And “reconciliation isn’t something separate from justification”; they are used in the “same breath.”

   Faith: is it ours? (as most would assume) or Christ’s (as theologians think)? Paul stressed that the initiative is always God’s alone, and even its completion. “God’s grace is the means of justification, and faith is the mode of justification.” Hence it is “not mere assent but is robust: a sharing in the faithfulness of Jesus” (Gorman).

   Notice how for Paul “the road to glory is bumpy and has a cruciform shape: it includes, or will include, suffering.” The “will” matters; it’s not “might,” which we would prefer!

   Romans 5, the preacher should note, is entirely in first person plural. It’s not I have peace with God, or you, you individual person out there, have access to God. It’s we: we who are part of the Body. God doesn’t intend for us to do this alone. The logical consequence of all Paul has declared in chapters 1-4? Peace. C.E.B. Cranfield reminds us that eirene isn’t “subjective feelings of peace (though these may indeed result), but the objective state of being at peace instead of being enemies.” It’s a fact. Done. And not by you but by Christ, and at immense cost to himself.

   James K.A. Smith, in his marvelous On the Road with Saint Augustine, paints a homiletically intriguing picture of what our pursuit of peace is: “Like the exhausted refugee, fatigued by vulnerability, what we crave is rest (‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you’)… Joy, for Augustine, is characterized by a quietude that is the opposite of anxiety – the exhale of someone who has been holding her breath out of fear or worry or insecurity. It is the blissful rest of someone who realizes she no longer has to perform; she is loved. We find joy in the grace of God precisely because he is the one we don’t have to prove anything to. "

   "But it is also the exhale of someone who has arrived – who can finally breathe after making it through the anxiety-inducing experience of the border crossing, seeking refuge… The Christian isn’t just a pilgrim but a refugee, a migrant in search of refuge.” He then invites us to imagine Augustine’s City of God “as a tent city, a refugee camp… Think of Dadaab in Kenya, the Sahrawi camps in Maghreb.” Not my usual image of the City of God - but there it is. 

   “Obtained access” in v. 2: F.F. Bruce vividly explains that the Greek, prosagoge, means “the privilege of being introduced into the presence of someone of high station.” Verse 3: “We rejoice in our sufferings” – which is aspirational more than true. 

   There is beauty in suffering; Ray Barfield spoke at our church on just this (check out his little book, Wager: Beauty, Suffering, and Being in the World, on this). People know if you press them: “I was with my mother when she died, and it was a beautiful moment” - although care is required in talking this way, as some haven't had that beautiful experience, and suffering for many is brutally ugly...  Paul has in mind some origami in the soul that suffering initiates. His lovely litany is memorable, and worth repeating (or cross-stitching): “Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope.” I’m tempted to edit Paul a little by inserting the word “might” or “sometimes.” Suffering can make you bitter or mean. Why does it produce character and hope sometimes, and not in others? It's too cheap just to say "If you have faith, if you trust God." Isn't community involved? Doesn't God have mercy on is when suffering drowns us in depression?

   “Hope does not disappoint.” Christopher Lasch clarified how optimism, the sunny view that tomorrow will be a better day, and it’s up to us to make it happen, is vastly inferior to hope, the substantive faith that all will be well, even if tomorrow is worse – for this future is in God’s hands ultimately.

   I may fiddle around with the “poured out” image from v. 5, a picturesque image of the lavishness of grace. Jesus’ blood poured out, pouring coffee in the morning, the pitcher pouring water into the baptismal bowl, Jesus pouring water over the disciples’ feet, the bartender pouring you a drink, the woman pouring oil over Jesus’ head, the priest pouring wine into the chalice, your mother pouring you a glass of milk, a waterfall, water over a dam, a garden fountain. Is there a way all of these and more not only symbolize but actually are the pouring out of God’s goodness?

   “While we were still weak” reminds me of a terrific story. In 1980 I was running “Helping Hands,” a ministry to folks in need at Myrtle Beach, S.C. Our most problematical guy was named Belton. I drove him to the job I’d helped him get; when I came back for lunch he’d quit. I bought him groceries; he sold them to buy queludes. He tore up the temporary living quarters we found for him. Finally the board and volunteers met to decide how to cut him off, I think. All was proceeding in that direction until a woman said “You know, the Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves.’”

   Everyone nodded, except a very old, frail woman, who countered: “That’s not in the Bible. That’s Ben Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack.” I was impressed. She then opened her New American Standard Bible to Romans 5:6 and read “While we were helpless, Christ died for the ungodly.” And she added “That would be all of us.” The vote was unanimous. We’d keep doing whatever we could for and with Belton. I wish I had a happy ending, like He got on his feet, went back to school, and now is an executive at Bank of America. But no. We hung together another month or so, and then he just vanished. Did we fail? I don’t think so. We kept one of God’s helpless children alive a little longer, which is good. And God’s other helpless, ungodly children got a refresher course in theology from the physically weakest but most spiritually astute one in our group.

   Matthew 9:35-10:8 (9-23) provides an intriguing snapshot into a turning point in Jesus’ ministry – between when he dazzles the crowds and draws a following to his sending out his followers to continue, expand and even augment his ministry. Matthew reports that Jesus has been curing “every” disease and “every” sickness – which can’t be reality. Donald Hagner calls the “every” here “hyperbolic and symbolic.” People still had cancer and Alzheimer’s and tooth decay and deafness after Jesus left town. If anything, his healings weren’t so people could feel better, but so serve as object lessons for his sermons. His #1 cure was for blindness – and he always then pointed out how the righteous people thought they could see but couldn’t.

   This Jesus, the one who wept when Lazarus died and prayed in intense agony, had “compassion” on the crowds. The Greek esplanchnisthe connotes a twisting pain in the entrails, a writhing, intense emotion. It’s a common translation for the Hebrew riham, which means “womb” and then the pangs the womb underwent during the agonies of childbirth. Watch a woman in labor: that’s how Jesus felt when he saw the crowds, total strangers – and yet he knew them so intimately.

   He didn’t blame them for their plight, or pity their lackluster, colorless, futile existence as the utterly impoverished and despised people in the Roman empire. He understood that they were “harassed and helpless.” How harassed are your people? By their employers, by heartbreaking friends and family, by the chipper Facebook culture that depresses them, by the rancor of political ideology, by ads, by loneliness. The Greek for “helpless,” errimmenoi, means literally “cast down to the ground.” The preacher portrays, imitates and embodies Jesus himself by simply naming the miseries and niggling frustrations people undergo all the time.

   In Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus, besieged by throngs seeking help, sings “There’s too many of you; don’t push me; there’s too little of me; don’t crowd me.” He needs help, more of himself. In our Gospel, Jesus asks his laborers to pray for more laborers! How do we join him in this prayer today? By poking around for laity who’ll get busy? Connecting with non-church people who might turn out to be the naïve, zealous type of new Christian who doesn’t know to be a lazy Christian yet? Or even investing time with sharp young people, middle- and high-schoolers, college students, and daring to ask if they’ve thought about ministry? I became a laborer in the field because an Episcopal priest took an interest in me, somebody with a zero religious resume, and asked if I’d thought about ministry. Never, ever… but it planted a seed that grew years later.

   What does the relationship with Jesus look like? I’m fond of “following” as the image. Jesus goes, I try to stay close. He sets the path, I simply trail behind in his wake. In Matthew 9, Jesus looks at his followers and “sends” them. That is, without him – unless you count spiritually or mystically. They have to figure out where and how to go, and what to do. They have “authority” – but what would that be for us? Not an M.Div. or that some bishop laid hands on me. It’s something more organic in me, or despite me. Maybe it’s just being fool enough to try: is that the authority? Is it trying to get out of the way and let Jesus be where I am?

   I love it that the Gospels provide names of the twelve – although the lists are happily inconsistent. A dozen – with some wiggle room. They are in stained glass in my sanctuary, and little biographies (95% of which is total guesswork/fiction!) are posted in our children’s building.

   Jesus, unhappily for me, directs them not to go to Gentiles but only to the Jews. I wish he’d urged the opposite, given anti-Semitism and often strained relationships with Judaism. Hagner reminds us that this limitation is “temporary,” as Matthew’s Gospel later on sends Jesus’ people to the whole world. Maybe, if you're white, we translate this into our world as We begin with white people. So much to work on in here before we can connect and change out there - although dithering on self for long is so lame.

   Maybe we do go to the Jews first – not to proselytize, but to find common ground. As you saw above, my greatest learning in Scripture lately is from Rabbi Sacks (who died just too young for my tastes and homiletical needs!). In our city of Charlotte, we have more in common, and can work more effectively with the synagogues than with many of the churches – including my own cantankerous Methodist denomination!

   St. Francis heard Jesus’ words about “take no bag, no silver,” and he and his friars (Italian for “brothers”!) did just that. I can't get there. I'm taking my bags, checking out my pension portfolio, garnering funds. I can only stand in awe, with a restless sense of penitence and yearning.