What can we say November 5? All Saints Day

    I will sometimes in this blog refer you to the previous time in the lectionary cycle the texts for the day / season came around (click here!), as I’ve not accrued much more wisdom! I'll assure you there is much good stuff there! – although I will add a bit that will be more timely (I hope). Peace and courage to you as you preach All Saints (I assume that’s your choice) on November 5.

   I have, while working on a new book (tentatively titled Everywhere is Jerusalem), been pondering places that hallow death – but not in a heroic sense. The American cemetery at Normandy has plenty of grief, but suggests heroic sacrifice. So what places simply speak into tragic death with no implied heroism? The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia. All have a sacred quality – the word “sacred” being key, not implying suffering’s over and all is well, which is what Christians do way too quickly with death, All Saints, and Good Friday. God hallows death. Jesus makes such places and moments sacred, not by the glory that’s around the corner, but by simply being in it with us, by living and dying into the horrific, evil, unjust suffering. Yes, we have hope – but we dare not trivialize death, loss, the consequent loneliness and pain. Especially on All Saints, which can rush a bit, can’t it? Not to depress, but to embrace, and to be honest in the face of all that crushes the human spirit in death. It's only when we've done so that we can speak of the hope. I think...

   So the hope is still there. Let me refer you to my Festival of Homiletics lecture, "Hope as Arsenic," on when we offer to much, or not enough, or the wrong kind of hope. Very important for us who preach!!

What can we say December 3? Advent 1

    Advent comes around every time this year! I keep reposting my fairly widely read and hopefully helpful post, God Became Small: Preaching Advent – with loads of illustrations, and reflections on how preaching is peculiar during this season.

   I have frequently groused about the Advent lections themselves, as if some theologically prissiness has overwhelmed wise choices? Determined not to be Christmasy – which is fine – we extend the apocalyptic, and give John the Baptist a wide swath, even as our people are longing for Mary, Joseph, the pregnancy, the longing… which I get, and which matter to me spiritually.

   So prior blogs on my grumblings over Advent 1, and my ruminations on the texts for this year’s Advent 1.

   I am thinking to go off lectionary and do a mini-series (just 4 weeks…) on the Isaiah 9 bit (put to marvelous music) of the messianic titles: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” People hum this text in their heads - from Handel's Messiah! I love the ramp up to these words, especially "and his name shall be CALL--ED" - as if making "called" into 2 syllables reminds us something big, unusual, hifalutin is coming!

   Endless questions intrigue me. What is his counsel exactly? Is God’s “mighty-ness” what we in our world think of as might? The titles seem to be applied to Christ – but it’s “everlasting Father,” not Son. What do you do with that? And it’s the “prince,” not the “king” of peace. Why? All these, in my view, get subsumed under Isaiah’s ultimate kid name, which gets applied to Jesus in Matthew – that fabulous, theologically hopeful nickname Emmanuel.

   More later…

What can we say November 26? Christ the King

    On these marvelous texts, I’d push you toward not one but two prior blogs on them, as they differ in interesting ways (as I look back on them now!). Here’s one, here’s the other. Lots of interesting stuff. I am moved, today, but Ezekiel 34:16: “I will feed them with justice.” Wow. What an image. Feeding – not with bread, or cool foodie items, but justice, which might be what we really are hungry for? And then in Ephesians 1: Hope is something you’re called to, not something you just have. I’ll ponder that, and preach about it somehow this Sunday!

   I do blush when I think of the sermons I've heard suggesting how Christ reigns powerfully over history, the nations, etc. Christ's reign is only powerful by its lack of power, its gentle compassion, its subversive humility. His palace is a lowly manger, his crowd one of thorns, his retinue a bunch of clueless dudes fleeing for the exits, his armies the poor and pitiful of the world. As Marilynne Robinson puts it in her soon-to-come reading of Genesis, if human beings “are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint. To refrain, to put side power, is godlike.”

   I also suspect it's a false lead to ask Are we saved by grace? or by works? If you stick very close to Jesus, you will find yourself near those he cared about - and you can't help caring about them as well. We may well say that Jesus comes to each of us as the one who is "hungry, imprisoned, thirsty..." - and it is to! When we recognize his immense grace in this, we can't help but stick very close to him, and so involved in his care for those the world despises or would simply neglect, faulting or pitying them.

What can we say November 12? 24th after Pentecost

   On these 3 texts, I’ve commented in the past as wisely as I know how – except that now I would add these thoughts on Joshua and Thessalonians:

   Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25. I found myself commenting on this moment in not one but two places in my new book coming out next year, Everywhere is Jerusalem.

Here’s excerpt #1.

   Near Jacob’s well, where Jesus stood with the Samaritan woman (John 4) is the small village known in Bible times as Shechem. Roughly twelve hundred years before Jesus befriended that Samaritan woman there, Joshua (Moses’ successor) gathered all the tribes of Israel, forty years removed from Egyptian slavery, and made one of the Bible’s great speeches. A challenge. An invitation – to them, and to us.

   As a kid, I was given the impression that the Israelites rolled into the Promised Land and, like a German Blitzkrieg, conquered the whole region. We didn’t need fancy scholarship to show us otherwise. Mark the conquered places on a map. They didn’t win much ground at all, and what territory they captured was not the most fertile. There were Canaanites all over the place, wealthier, with more power – and a religion that lured Israelites repeatedly into idolatry.

   Knowing the challenges to come, Joshua (in the book named for him, in chapter 24) rattles off a profound history lesson of how they got there, going back to Abraham, into days of cruel slavery in Egypt, through decades of wilderness wanderings, God sticking with them despite their foolishness. Noting a veritable mall of other gods that would be peddled on them, he urges them, “Fear the Lord. Serve him faithfully. Put away the other gods. Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

   I’ve stood in that field where he uttered such words. Wherever you stand or sit, right now, you have to make a decision, and a hard, serious one. It’s not some vague spirituality or sliding into a pew now and then. Choose your God or your gods! Take a stand; make this journey – and live it, with courage, grit, patience, maybe making that definitive decision again. And again.

   And here’s excerpt #2:

   How often does the Bible itself urge keeping some distance from our beloved ancestors and their cherished but flawed beliefs? Joshua, thirty seconds before his glorious declaration that “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15) invites the Israelites to “put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the river” (Joshua 24:14). Could it be our journey involves finding a new space, different from, and closer to the truth than the spirituality of our parents, even the most beloved? They may have instilled in us the very faith we have to ask such a question! Or perhaps, as Jonathan Sacks suggested (in his last book, Studies in Spirituality), our parents may have been on their own journey to a new space that was truer than that of their parents. God called Abraham away from the idols of Ur; but his father Terah went with him, at least halfway to Haran (Gen. 11:31).

   1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Paul speaks eloquently here of “hope” – a topic over which I have obsessed. What is it – really? Do we give people enough? Too much? Let me commend to you my lecture on this from this year’s Festival of Homiletics, which (after Kate Bowler!) I entitled “Hope as Arsenic.”

 

What can we say August 20? 12th after Pentecost

    Genesis 45:1-15. Who would relinquish the chance to preach on the OT here? I have not found a way to improve upon what I wrote on Genesis 45, which I regard as the theological high water mark in all of Scripture, not just the Old Testament, the last time the lectionary favored us with this riveting, emotional drama. So I refer you there… where I ponder this story with illustrations from Rivendell (Lord of the Rings!), Good Will Hunting, J.D. Vance, and Andrew Lloyd Webber! I neglected there to touch on Psalm 133: Genesis 45 illustrates how we flail and brothers don’t love or dwell in unity; and the exceedingly high cost ad the labor of reconciliation required for unity.

   Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32. I was floored recently when I reviewed a video featuring Tim Keller – whom I've admired, but now he's gone – saying he had high hopes for Christianity abroad, and some for evangelicals here, but he’d pretty much given up on mainline Protestantism in America. So very human, such giving up. Paul hasn’t given up, even on the Jews who’ve not just been a different version of Christianity from the one he’d prefer; they’ve flat out rejected Christ! It’s not Paul’s hope, of course. It’s what he knows about God.

   “God has not rejected his people he foreknew.” There it is. God made Israel, called them, destined them – so they cannot be lost. God’s claim on Israel is (after the lectionary skips right over 25 crucial verses!) “irrevocable.” Romans 9-11 is a rich text rife with possibilities for an in-class Bible study – but to preach it? It’s so complex, there’s so much ambiguity (and not just in the commentaries!).

   Matthew 15:21-28. Oh my, that peculiar episode where the woman won’t take No for an answer, upbraiding Jesus himself. She asks for mercy – for her daughter, of course, but then any parent who’s watched a child suffer needs mercy too. What to do with this blunt repartee? Floyd Filson, in his 1960 commentary on Matthew, suggested that he winked at her when he spoke these words, implying insider status for this one. Or was it a clever ploy on Jesus’ part to evoke deeper faith in her, or those watching?

   Jesus did come to Israel – not for them alone but so they might be spurred on to their mission to be the light to the world. Morna Hooker, noting how Jesus confined his attention to the Jews, suggested that “the Gentile woman requests a cure outside the context of Jesus’ call to Israel; she seems to be asking for a cure which is detached from the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, merely taking advantage of the opportunity provided by the presence of a miracle worker. This is perhaps the reason for Jesus’ stern answer; his healings are part of something greater and cannot be torn out of that context.”

   Joel Marcus is mindful of the history of bad blood between Tyrians and Galileans – and how the farm produce of Galilee so often wound up in Tyre, while the peasants in Galilee went hungry. So Jesus’ words make a bit of compassionate sense. Or should we suggest, as many have, that Jesus had a growing moment, a learning experience, a maturation in himself? Mistakenly, he turned her away – and her persistence cracked open a bit of hardness in Jesus’ Jewishness to leave space for a desperate Gentile? Depending on the height of your view of Jesus’ humanity, this may or may not work.

   Luke tells us "Jesus grew in wisdom" (chapter 2) - so I'm okay with Jesus growing in his openness to Gentiles. It's her faith that moves him - and so WHY are we appalled he's so slow to come around when we can be very content with ourselves when confronted with the deep faith of an immigrant, a gay person, a black person, and yet we're reticent to view them as one with us??

   Martin Luther examined this text and thought of the ways Christians are to persist in trusting God, even when God seems to turn his back on them. They must learn to see the ‘yes’ hidden in his ‘no.’  Much wisdom here – although the preacher dare not resort to trifling ideas such as those articulated in Garth Brooks’s crooning “Unanswered Prayers.”

   The woman’s persistence has recently been likened to the persistence of women right insisting on their place in the church. “Nevertheless, She Persisted” became a popular slogan, t-shirt and hashtag this year. Persistence of all kinds is a biblical thing, falsifying the absurd notion of God’s will being associated with “the door was open.” Many open doors we most surely should not walk through. And many closed and bolted doors should be knocked down.

   I am fond of Sheila Nelson-McJilton’s probing sermon, “Crumbs” – cited in Leonora Tubbs Tisdale’s great book, Prophetic Preaching. “Crumbs. That’s all they are looking for. Crumbs. Not the whole life. Not even a slice. Just crumbs. You and I want the whole loaf…” – and then she speaks of our wealth, access, all the poor lack. But then she presses further: “Crumbs. They want more than crumbs because deep in their souls, they know they deserve more. And yet they often do not know who to ask or how to ask…”

   And how often have we said (by our lives if not our words) "It isn't fair to give the bread of the children to the dogs?" We care for ourselves first, the fine wine, the grand destinations, the nice house - but then if we have a few crumbs leftover we'll share with the poor. Or when we do something like make sandwiches for the poor, we buy the cheapest bread and the deli meat that's off-brand and on sale. Crumbs...

****

   Let me refer you to my Festival of Homiletics lecture, "Hope as Arsenic," on when we offer to much, or not enough, or the wrong kind of hope. Very important for us who preach!!