What can we say January 5 / 2nd Christmas? Epiphany?

    What to do with January 5? There are 2^nd after Christmas lections, and then many churches (like mine) will observe Epiphany. Let me touch on several of the texts in question, all just fascinating. All in some way wrestle with mystery.

   Ellen Davis (in Preaching the Luminous Word) noticed that the Church of All Nations next to the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem has a sign that sternly warns, “No explanations in the church.” That’s directed to the tour guides, of course – but as Ellen muses, “We’d all do well to heed it. We in the church have been baptized into the mystery of Christ; so long as we attend to God, with every heartbeat we are drawn more deeply into a mystery that infinitely exceeds our understanding, a mystery of mercy that goes beyond even our wildest hopes and imaginings. So no explanations in the church; rather, let us speak softly and with wonder, as befits a holy place.” I’m trying more soft speaking, silent pauses, some stammering in 2022.

   Ephesians 1:3-14. There is so much theology and wisdom packed into this 202 word sentence (yes, these 12 verses are one run-on sentence in the Greek) – impossible to diagram! Paul’s zeal for God and the people bursts over the edges, as if he couldn’t stop rambling, could stick a period anywhere.

   Some cool details: God has “made known the mystery of his will.” That’s perfect (and the subject of my book, The Will of God). God’s will isn’t a hunch you feel. It’s been made known – and yet it’s still a mystery, not as in puzzling, you can’t figure it out, but mystery as in beyond the prosaic, something profound, mystical, beyond what we can reckon and just get done easily.

   “Saints” – not superhuman spiritual heroes, or prissy avoiders of earthly pleasures, of champion do-gooders. The saint is one whose thinking and living at least strives to be different, special, not blending into the mobs out there. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says holiness is simply making space and time for God.

   It’s aspirational. We dream of being what Paul calls us: holy. Mary Oliver’s words always move me: “Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. Oh Lord, grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” Isn’t Richard Rohr right? “We don’t have to make ourselves holy. We already are, and we just don’t know it.”

   “Chosen”? Americans think of choice as limiting - as if you choose which cereal among many in the store to buy, or the bachelor choosing which bachelorette pleases him. Ephesians does this over and over: you aren’t on the outside looking in with God. You don’t have to go find God and get God. You can be confused or even uninterested. God chose you. God is in you. Preachers should and can boggle their minds with this: Want to know how amazing you are? God chose you “before the foundation of the world.” That’s right: when God thought, Let’s make a universe with galaxies and nebulae! God also thought of you, God decided you would be you. And for the noblest conceivable purpose: that you would live with God’s Spirit in you. Go outside tonight. Gaze up into the heavens. Billions of years ago, when God imagined the vast cosmos, God was already making plans for you.

   Adoption. I love Kelly Nikondeha’s marvelous theological reflections on this! Adopted people often want to find their birth parents. Why? “We want that dark corner illuminated. We imagine our own transformation at the revelation of our true origin. What goodness might be unlocked, what possibility unleashed?” Isn’t church a quest to discover our true origin? Nikondeha offers a picturesque retrospective on what being adopted was about: “A woman scooped me out of the white-wicker bassinet in the viewing room of the adoption agency and claimed me as her own. Her physical emptiness prepared the way for my fullness.”

   Does the birth mother “abandon” her child? Or is it a “relinquishment”? So different. Abandonment is unfeeling and cruel. Relinquishment may be the highest form of love – as Jesus, certainly feeling abandoned by God, relinquished his divine power and his life.

   Isaiah 60:1-6 is way more than “Rise and shine and give God the glory glory…” The vision is way higher, cosmic in vastness. God’s project isn’t me feeling better or getting saved. It’s the redemption of the created order – and it is God’s act, illustrated well by the common distinction (Christopher Lasch, Martin Luther King, Jr.) between optimism and hope. Optimism is the sunny dream that tomorrow will be better, and it’s up to us to make it so. Hope can hold it together even if tomorrow is worse; hope trusts in the larger, longer future – and it’s up to God, not us. Ours is, as our text puts it, to “stand.” I saw a doctor ask a woman to stand as he told her her husband had just died. We stand (and argue about it!) for the National Anthem. We stand at the end of worship. This standing in the soul is all about dignity, readiness, an eagerness to see and be ready to move.

   I think of Oscar Romero’s words, which I might use as my benediction: “When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt. Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong, to face the world’s difficulties.” Isaiah envisions a great gathering of the nations (not just our neighborhood!) – and in my blog 2 years ago I suggested the feel might be (corny as it seems) kin to the dramatic ending to “Field of Dreams” – 

or visually, John August Swanson’s “Festival of Lights.”

   Ephesians 3:1-12. Paul doesn’t write from the comforts of a library or his home. He’s a prisoner – literally! And figuratively: he’s a prisoner to Christ’s will. We can think of so many in history who’ve wound up in prison, like Paul, because of their commitments to do good for others: St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas More, Jean Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela… too many to name or number. Playing it safe, being a law-abiding citizen? God called Paul, and God calls us to something higher, riskier, more courageous.

   It’s probably worth recalling, every now and then as we read anything from Paul, that he was the perhaps the greatest but surely the unlikeliest of early Church leaders. He wasn’t a slacker or an impious, blatantly sinful guy. He was quite pious – and an implacable, aggressive, angry foe of the early Christian movement. “Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace which was given me by the working of his power.” What a mystery! – such a radical about-face. That’s what grace does. That’s how powerful God’s work is, and can be even in us today. Any of that in your calling? You became a minister – by choice? Or by the gift of God’s grace?

   Paul’s mission, and the Church’s, is “to make all people see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God.” The mystery, the secret that is now out in the open, is God’s plan for the unity of all, for dividing walls to be broken down, for all hostility to cease. The Church witnesses, not by chatting about such things, but by simply living out the mystery of a people unified in Christ. 

Stephen Fowl points out that “the very existence of the gathered body of Jews and Gentiles reconciled to God and each other in Christ makes known the manifold wisdom of God.” As we sing, “They will know we are Christians by our love,” not for the people who are like us, but for the people the world can’t believe we can love. We show the world a better way.

   We’re not good at this. But it’s God’s work, and if we let God’s Spirit achieve this in and through us, the world will be in awe, and eager to join us. Fowl wrote that “the attractiveness that first drew Gentiles to God should be even more attractive in the light of this reconciliation.” That is, unlikely people were drawn to Christ, and that religion looks even more alluring when the unlikely enjoy unity with the others…

   …which makes me wonder about racial reconciliation. The biggest shock of religious history might just be that black Americans actually believed in the slaveowners’ God! That says a lot about the marvel, the attractiveness of Christianity. So then, what if we white and black Christians genuinely became close to one another and pulled off reconciliation in our country. Who then could argue for a second that Christianity is a lame religion? Everyone would know This really is flat out amazing, compelling, a difference maker, a blessing to all

   Matthew 2:1-12. The magi arrive. Not as in “wise men still follow him,” but astrologers! – an art, an alchemy condemned in Judaism and Christianity! Yet, so eager is the Christchild to be found, and by everybody, that these deluded ones find their way to Bethlehem, and the Scripture, Bible-is-Clear! people miss out. He’s a Capricorn? 

   It’s a tad irreverent, but the bawdy scene in “Life of Brian” when the magi show up at the wrong house might help us see that there’s some sarcastic humor tucked inside this text. Or maybe Owen Meany’s remark while singing the gory 4^th stanza of “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying? Doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.”

   We also have that great line in The Shack: Mack asks Jesus, “Do all roads lead to you?” He replies, “Not at all. Most roads don’t lead anywhere” – and then adds “I will travel any road to find you.” The road our people have just taken may veer them away from the Christ child: the frenzy of gift giving, decorating, entertaining – as if when Jesus was born the angel said “Thou shalt shop and travel and party in his honor!” Mike Slaughter put it well: “Christmas is not your birthday.” How do we delicately remind people that Jesus’ way is one of truth, simplicity, welcoming strangers – and even suffering? Just as The Shack begins with the murder of a child, so Jesus’ story features the slaughter of children. Jesus enters a world where paranoid powers harm children. Explore a few of the ways in your sermon.

   The notion of God going to any and all lengths to find us: Peter Shaffer’s great play, “Amadeus,” notes how the official court composer Salieri is devoured by jealousy when he hears Mozart. Overhearing the Adagio in E flat, played from Mozart’s first and only draft, completed entirely in Mozart’s head, Salieri was staggered: “It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God,” or rather, that Mozart heard his rapturous music from heaven, and merely wrote it down, as if by dictation. Offended by Mozart’s sophomoric, immoral behavior, yet awestruck by his talent, he later said “God needed Mozart to let Himself into the world.” God surprises us by showing up in church, but out there also, in holy people but also the questionable characters, in what seems obviously religious but in countless other manifestations.

   Ray Barfield muses on the way Aristotle believed stars left a trail of music as they travelled through the heavens. Science has said No they don’t – and yet now we’ve lost the joy in delighting in the stars and their movements. “Children look at the night sky and say, ‘I want to go there.’ If we ask, ‘Why?” the only answer that makes sense is, ‘I just do.’ They are not merely interested in seeing variations on the rocks that they find in their back yards.”

   What astral phenomenon did the magi see? Halley’s comet? A supernova? Check out the great scene (view here! – trust me, 3 minutes well-spent!) in Pasolini’s Italian film, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” where the magi show up in the daytime, and have silent, tender interactions with Mary and her baby.

***

   Check out my book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.

 

What can we say December 29? 1st after Christmas

    Low attendance warning!! December 29 follows December 26, Boxing Day, not a day for fighting, but a day to box up gifts to give to the unnoticed people in your world: the mailman, the grocery clerk, the garbage pickup guys. A lovely custom, preachable (if we avoid trivializing the rare, seasonal spurt of kindness which should go on all year). It's also St. Stephen's day - if you think folks are in the mood to hear about the first Christian martyr!! Of course, if you're still doing Christmas in the pulpit, I refer you to my blog, "Preaching Christmas," with loads of illustrative material.

   1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26. Somehow this time zone just after Christmas has an Old Testament feel to me, although I’ve no idea why. Each year, Hannah would take her son a little robe – like a Christmas gift, the bathrobe a child would wear to open gifts, a new outfit for the poor. Samuel is reported to do what Jesus was beginning to do the day after the first Christmas: growing in stature, wisdom and favor with God and the people (echoed in Luke 2:52). I wrote a short chapter on Jesus’ very earliest days as an infant in my book, Birth: The Mystery of Being Born, which I’d commend to you.

   Psalm 148. I preached on this eloquent text a few weeks back, and it could easily be adorned to fit the day after Christmas by riffing on the infant Jesus as the pinnacle and purpose of all the wonders of Creation, or that the universe and the earth were concocted by God to serve as the theater in which God would dazzle and safe us all by becoming flesh in it. Much of my Psalm 148 sermon focused on St. Francis of Assisi. On him, for this day, we could add that he created history’s first manger scene in the village of Grecchio. Imagine no one ever having heard of such a thing – but he gathered the people, friars, animals, and preached a beautiful sermon about Jesus’ first cry sounding like the bleating of a lamb. His tender love for the infant Jesus is ours to emulate.

   Colossians 3:12-17, another lovely text, the one read at my wedding! The “put on…” admonitions work well with the little robe Hannah delivered to Samuel, or the swaddling clothes in which the Christchild was wrapped. Do we invite people to think about any clothing they might have received for Christmas as these holy traits of compassion, kindness, meekness, forgiveness when they get dressed in the morning? A few years back, we printed this text on little hanging cards for people to drape over their clothing racks, to envision themselves dressing for a holy life - along with Jesus' command to "Go into your closet and pray." Boom. Done. Every day you can please Jesus in this way!

   Luke 2:41-52. How can the lectionary add a dozen years to the boy Jesus in a single day? Fascinating text, but honestly… He’s some sort of prodigy, but let him lie in the manger for a few days at least! The magi haven’t had time to show up yet. All the more reason to go with the Psalm, or Hannah and Samuel, or even the Epistle.

What can we say December 22? Advent 4

    {Winding up this 4-week season, you might still appreciate my generalized “Preaching Advent” blog on the nature of homiletics during this season, with lots of illustrative material that could work any Sunday; and also a general “Preaching Christmas” blog}

   Less than a week until Christmas. I wonder about exploring what it’s like just before a child is born. I remember Lisa feeling profoundly uncomfortable. We were semi-confident, but anxious. New life was almost there, but not quite, well-formed and ready to live but not yet visible to us. An ordeal was coming – yet the promise of wonder. The ordeal had begun, crowded in there, early pangs already squeezing hard. Somehow Advent is like that, the spiritual life is like that. All of life really is like that.

   Micah 5:2-5a isn’t a crystal ball prediction of the location of Jesus’ birth 8 centuries before. Micah was from a village (Moresheth-Gath) much like Bethlehem – lying out in the country not far from the capital city of Jerusalem. The Assyrians rampaged toward Jerusalem and crushed the little villages – because of the idolatry and faithless policies of those in corridors of power in Jerusalem. So Micah is resentful, having fled his hometown, left behind in ruins, to take shelter in the Holy City – which saved its own neck but not theirs. Imagine the welcome when he threatened that “Zion shall be plowed as a field.” Weren’t small town peeps in Bethlehem a little intimidated by yet resentful of the big city power brokers?

    Hope, Micah declared, would come from this other small town, David’s hometown, famous to us, the one we sing about at Christmas, but a backwater in those days. David was the little one, the unlikely choice among Jesse’s sons (1 Sam. 16) – and in the same way, Micah tells the powerful that their only hope is from the small, weak, unlikely place. Gospel logic always works this way. God is ready – indeed, God has always been ready to rectify human power and its foolishness. Micah speaks of this God “whose origin is from old, from ancient days.” William Blake depicted God as “the ancient of days.”

   Francis of Assisi: as his passion for Jesus grew, and as his father’s disgust with his son’s choices grew, Francis eventually had to abandon his earthly father and choose instead his heavenly Father – and a new family of “friars” (meaning “brothers”) in his new family of God with its peculiar but life-giving values and habits.

   Francis is well worth exploring on December 23, as he created history’s first manger scene. In my Conversations with St. Francis, I wrote this: A year before his death he was visiting a friend in Greccio. He asked Giovanni to erect history's first manger scene: a straw crib, oxen, donkeys, and an image of the infant Jesus. The townspeople gathered on Christmas Eve, bearing torches. The friars sang hymns, medieval carols – and how I wish I knew what they sang! I try to imagine their voices echoing from the mountain’s edge down through the valley. I especially try to imagine Francis’s voice, for on that night, overcome with emotion, he preached – and listeners said his voice sounded like the bleating of a lamb.

   He picked up the infant figure, held it in his arms, and some said they thought they saw the child come to life. This little town of Greccio had been transformed into O Little Town of Bethlehem, far away geographically but very present in spirit.

   Francis’s devotion to the humanity of Christ was tender; he understood that God was not aloof. God didn’t show off with overwhelming power. God became small, vulnerable, inviting us to love, and to be as tender as God’s own heart, power redefined as affection and song. On that glorious night in Greccio, Francis ordered that all the animals be given a double portion of food. How odd for Francis, as he was famous for his fasting. Advent should be something of a fast that ends in a festive banquet come Christmas night.

   Hebrews 10:5-10 amazes me. Jesus rarely speaks in the Epistles – but does here, evidently quoting Psalm 40!! The Hebrew says “You have dug ears for me,” whereas the Septuagint/Greek says “You have made a body for me.” Jesus doesn’t just hear God’s Word, but is himself a full-bodied enactment of God. It’s all about God’s will; it’s all about sacrifice. Jesus on his pilgrimages to Jerusalem saw sacrifices in the millions. He knew the frustration. Tom Long points out how we bring our sacrifices to God: “Lord, didn’t I give myself serving with the youth group? Lord, didn’t you notice I hired a minority in my company? Lord, I come to church, Lord I’m doing my best?” It’s never enough, is it?

   Jesus, through the author of Hebrews, says “You have prepared a body for me.” Is it his incarnational body? Or is it Mary’s, through which he comes into the world? I love the blood and sheer sacrifice of Mary’s body to usher Jesus’ body into the world. Rachel Marie Stone (in Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light) we read, “A girl was in labor with God. She groaned and sweated and arched her back, crying out for her deliverance and finally delivering God, God’s head pressing on her cervix, emerging from her vagina, perhaps tearing her flesh a little; God the Son, her Son, covered in vernix and blood, the infant God’s first breath the close air of crowded quarters… God the Son, her Son, pressed to her bare breast… God the Son, her Son, drank deeply from his mother. Drink, my beloved. This is my body, broken for you.”

   I love these thoughts. And! The brokenness, the sacrifice, is of us, the church, the Body of Christ. How? can be explicated for your time and place.

   I love it that our Psalm isn’t in the Psalms, but a song on the lips of Mary after the tender, beautiful visitation with Elizabeth while both were pregnant (Luke 1:46-58). I focused on Mary on Advent 3, and I’m sticking with her in Advent 4 – just days before the birth! My daughter was given a stole depicting Mary. So lovely! Why isn’t she on more stoles?

   Luke 1:39-45. Mary, quite full of God’s tangible grace, visits the other miracle mother bearing John the Baptist. What a moving moment! There’s no moral, not takeaway. The preacher can invite people just to ponder them standing there, embracing, gazing, loving, conversing, just sitting together, waiting, anxiously yet hopefully, together. Elizabeth’s words, of course, have for centuries been repeated zillions of times by Catholics praying the rosary.

   And then Mary sings – our “Psalm.” Luke 1:46-58: We have anthems with the fancy Latin title “The Magnificat.” But I love to reflect on the simple fact that Mary sang a simple song of immense trust in God, and hope for the world. What did her voice sound like? Did Elizabeth join in? Harmonize? Smile? If you have a copy of my little book about Christmas music, Why This Jubilee?, you might look through my sections on Mary and her life, faith and hope just prior to Jesus’ birth.

   Again, a short sermon is in order – and let it be reflective, marveling over Mary, her mood, her steady trust, uncertain but confident in God. No takeaway, no moral, no lesson. We ask folks to get “lost in wonder, love and praise” as we linger over the “round yon virgin.”

***** 

  For more on Micah, see my little What Does the Lord Require?

What can we say December 15? Advent 3

    Fo Lo, the days are hastening on! Advent 3 presents us with 3 solid texts. More booming threats from John the Baptist as the Gospel – but it’s Advent 3 already! Philippians 4 is profound and lovely – but not very Christmasy or Adventish now, is it? Finally, Zephaniah 3:14-20 is powerful, and is our church’s overarching text for this entire Advent season. I’ll point you once more to my general blog with lots of illustrative, seasonal stuff on preaching Advent, “God Became Small,” and then ahead to my similar blog on Preaching Christmas Eve/Christmas.

   In both locations, you'll find musings on Mary. My sermon this Sunday will be entirely devoted to her, what we know and sense of her, her unique calling that is surprisingly common to us all (God asking her to let God take on flesh in her, to become real through her), how she was a ponderer, how she above all others had to let go what was beloved - and more. This thoughtful, profound 30 minute conversation with my friend Rev. Alisa Lasater Wailoo is providing me with more than enough food for thought. No big moral takeaways. Just reflecting on Mary: that's what I'll do Sunday. She must be pretty darn important and worth pondering!

   Zephaniah 3:14-20. {I preached on this great text 2 weeks early - if you'd like to see/hear what I did with it!} This obscure prophet, during the tumultuous days of the great reforming King Josiah, killed far too young at age 39 (and how many greats died at 39? Martin Luther King, Bonhoeffer, Flannery O’Connor, Malcolm X, Chopin, Pascal), stands up and declares a season of immense hope and joy is coming. Political uncertainty, guilt about but attachment to the false idols that had crept in, confusion, and terror at the impending assaults of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians left the people numb, flailing.

   Our theme for Advent is found in verse 20: “At that time, I will bring you home.” Play on this notion of home, tell stories of home, unearth great quotes about home, it’s sappy but what everybody’s hungry for, especially come mid-December! In Why This Jubilee? I wrote a little reflection on “I’ll be home for Christmas,” noting how many of our carols mention “home.” We have a hankering for home. In our uprooted, mobile society, many don’t know where home even is, or parents have died and the old homeplace isn’t home any more. God placed this yearning in us so we might seek after God, realizing at some point that even the best home, the homiest home anywhere here isn’t quite home enough for our rich, God-instilled cravings. We wait, we long, we yearn for God to bring us home. That’s the message of Advent, right?

   There’s also a weird quirk in verse 17 that I believe I’ll play with – as God let the quirk in for some reason, right? The Hebrew is corrupt, admitting of various renderings and nuances. RSV says “He will renew you in his love.” The Hebrew might just as likely mean “He will betroth you in his love,” a thought-provoking image, but it may also mean “He will be silent in his love.” Boom. God’s love is in the silence, it feels like silence – but isn’t most real love just that way, just sitting, being still?

   And one more option! The Hebrew could just mean “He will plow you in his love.” Yes, the verb meant what it seems to imply – but I might poke around what a plow does, how it cuts and turns but prepares us for new growth. Which is the whole point of Advent, right? Rev. Sarah Howell-Miller (yes, my daughter) wrote a fabulous song called “The Plow” (watch/listen here!). The lyrics gets at the heart of Advent, although it’s not an Advent song proper:

   Pain cuts like a plow into the ground / the ground of your being, the earth of your heart / Watch the soil turn, churning and hurting / Preparing for new life to start.

   Why dig so deep? Why make me bleed? / I’ve grown attached to this grass and these weeds / One day, I’m told, a garden will grow / But all that I’m doing is kicking up stones.

   So, furrow the ground, and furrow your brow / Nobody promised that you’d never fall / Wipe off the sweat, take a deep breath now / And leave yourself spaces for awe.

    Once you complete the tilling and weeding / The barrenness might break your heart / But listen in close, still there’s a pulse / The heartbeat of myst’ry that cannot be known / This desolate dirt, the lungs of the earth / Are sighing in labor and groaning for birth.

     The power of God’s song, the Gospel music: Martin Luther King, Jr., once preached on “How the Christian Overcomes Evil,” deploying an illustration from mythology. The sirens sang seductive songs that lured sailors into shipwreck. Two, though, managed to navigate those treacherous waters successfully, and King contrasted their techniques. Ulysses stuffed wax into the ears of his rowers and strapped himself to the mast of the ship, and by dint of will managed to steer clear of the shoals. But Orpheus, as his ship drew near, simply pulled out his lyre and played a song more beautiful than that of the sirens, so his sailors listened to him instead of to them.

  “Let not your hands grow weak” in verse 16 is similarly tantalizing. Aging parishoners will look down at their laps in immediate recognition. I remember dreading the greeting line at the end of worship at my first two parishes. The men were mostly laborers, with huge, muscular hands, which would inevitably crush my small, weak hands – sometimes making me wonder if they were making a point.

   What are weak hands? Zephaniah is urging the people on in their work, of course – but I wonder if we mis-define hands and their functions. In my first book, Yours are the Hands of Christ, I asked What did Jesus do with his hands? as a clue for what we might do with ours. I told the story of my Aunt Zonia, who had some disability in her hands. They were gnarled, and she couldn’t really hold anything. But I adored her hands. She held mine when I battled a fever while staying with her. She would point to the groceries in the car and ask me to carry them, making me feel useful and needed. She folded those hands in prayer, and managed to flip through her Bible to find stuff. Weak hands? Strongest I’ve ever known.

    Why not let our hands grow weak, but continue to pray, hold onto one another, and do whatever we’re able to do in hope? Zephaniah says “He will rejoice over you in gladness” and “He will exult over you with loud singing.” Our singing echoes not just the angels, and Christian congregations and choirs through the ages. God sings. In my sermon, I’m just going to ponder this, marvel over it, invite my people into a quiet space to relish the thought.

   Philippians 4:4-7. My comments on this last go round still stand. It’s the ultimate in why we read Scripture slowly – and to ponder that Paul dictated it slowly with Roman guards overhearing! Check out my 3 year old blog on how Rejoice! and Have no anxiety! and giving thanks and making requests to God all interlock and issue in something fruitful.

   Luke 3:7-18. Again, I have little to add from last go round, when I tied this text’s “ax at the root of the tree” to Shel Silverstein’s wonderful children’s story, The Giving Tree. As for me, I’ll be giving this Sunday over to Mary, as we light her pink candle and ponder her discomfort, hope, isolation, love and determination. Such beauty. The closest one to Jesus. The first disciple who let him take on reality in her life.

***

   Check out my book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.

What can we say December 1? Advent 1

    I grumble every year about the Advent lections, fully understanding it’s not Christmas yet, but puzzled that the RCL concoctors seem virtually allergic to Mary, surely the most Advent-ish of all characters. Year C is the worst of the lot, harsh apocalyptic on Advent 1, with Advent 2, 3 and 4 stuck on John the Baptist. I love his pivotal role in Advent and was gifted by a listener with the world’s first John the Baptist greeting card after mentioning he’s big in the story but absent on the cards! But sheesh. 3 weeks?

   I am struck by Kate Bowler's remarks in her new book Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! "Advent is a season of charity and conscience and hospitality. We are all welcome precisely because our savior wasn't. We tell the story of an immigrant family, no room in the inn, rulers who want him dead..." which is "why Advent is not simply beautiful. It causes our hearts to ache."

   I’ll post each week on the lectionary texts, but my best use to you will be my general blog on preaching Advent called “God Became Small,” full of illustrative stuff from literature, history, film, and art. 

   Also! My little book of theological reflections on lines and characters in Christmas carols might bless your people and your preaching! Why This Jubilee?: Advent Reflections on Songs of the Season.

   So, our Advent 1 texts. Jeremiah 33:14-16. So lovely. God fulfills God’s promises – an idea we individualize way too much, making it all about us. It’s God’s promise for the people of Israel, God’s promise to fulfill God’s large plans for the redemption of all of creation. The Hebrew for “promise,” incidentally, is “the good word,” and I like that a lot. It’s less God committing to some prescribed pattern or timeline, but God being true to God’s own good speaking.

    The pledge is that “a righteous branch will bring justice and righteousness.” The Hebrew is so very rich: righteousness (tzedekah) is way more than good behavior, but enters into the Christian lexicon as dikaiosune, a right, righted relationship with God. And mishpat, justice, isn’t fairness or just desserts, but rather the poor being cared for.

    Jeremiah’s laconic vision is stirring. Jerusalem will “live in safety.” So basic, something we take for granted but most people in the world cannot. Simple safety, not secured by policies and guns, but only by God’s redemptive healing. The city is even given a new name: Adonai zidkenu, “the Lord is our righteousness.” Try city council where you live and see if you can get this name change! How lovely, such a holy, trustful identification of who we are!

   You have to love Heidi Neumark’s notion that she loves Advent because “it is a reflection of how I feel most of the time” – and that is a mood of longing. Indeed. Your people, no matter how cocky or self-assured they may pretend to be, are longing people. And they know despair, which Reinhold Niebuhr described as “a failed attempt to secure security for yourself.” This is where we live, all of us, all of us longers.

   1 Thessalonians 3:9-13. Acts 17 narrates how a riot was touched off there when Paul came! – and now Paul is grateful for them. His gratitude is linked to joy, as it always is and must be. Joy isn’t fun or happiness times seven. It is the grateful life, understanding how in the thick of trauma and sorrow there is light, and goodness.

 

     Fascinating: Paul tells how he is praying for them. We say “I am praying for…” with little to no specificity. Perhaps we are asking God just to help the person, or to further what the person needs or wants. Paul prays that they will see one another – so basic! – and that “what is lacking” in their faith will be restored. I recall in seminary learning the distinction between fides qua and fides quae, between faith as the content of what we believe versus faith as the mood, the posture of faith in the believer. Is his prayer that they will be doctrinally advanced? Or that the intensity of their faith will be augmented?

   Yes. It’s their total response to God. He piles on adjectival terms: “increase and abound.” Is he being redundant? Or trying in words to capture how fabulous, how deep, how extravagant it all can be? What is lacking (hysterema) is the polar opposite of fullness (plerouma). And what is this “fullness” he’s after in his prayer for them? It is love – not a feeling you have or don’t, but that agape love that is grounded in God’s love, a deep and unflappable commitment. And he prays that God will “strengthen their hearts in holiness.” Do we ever pray for holiness in ourselves, or others? What a perfect prayer, so Advent-ish! Instead of asking God for favors in our unaltered lives, we pray for ourselves and for others simply to be holy.

   And why? As a bracing for, and an embracing of the Lord’s coming. If the Lord is coming, if we believe such a thing, then do we pray for trifles, success or comfort? or something far larger and more enduring?

   And then we come to the un-Christmasy apocalyptic Luke 21:25-36. Jesus, on the Mt. of Olives, overlooking the holy/unholy city of Jerusalem that will be his doom and glory, Jesus envisions… what? The obliteration of history? N.T. Wright has persuasively argued that Jesus was expecting judgment on Jerusalem, not an end to history.

  Jesus speaks of what Fitzmyer calls “apocalyptic stage props,” signals to the reader that we are into bizarre, symbolic territory far beyond the realm of the doable, the practical, the historical. I wonder if we experience some of these (the confusion and distress, the natural calamities like “the roaring of seas and waves,” with our climate issues and perilous changes! – all reminders that this world is temporary and not to be relied upon all that much).

   Reflecting on the nature, sky imagery, Kathy Beach-Verhey (in Feasting on the Word) spoke of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” He began as a pastor himself. The preacher might ponder the apocalyptic sky, the small town, the church steeple, and Kathy’s words: “The famous painting elicits differing reactions from those who admire it. Some see it as a daunting image of a frightening sky, others as something bold and beautiful, others as a glimpse of God. Like van Gogh’s great painting, Luke’s apocalypse elicits different reactions… and this is what Jesus offers on this First Sunday of Advent.”

   You might love, or tremble at Jesus’ courage, and encouragement: “When these things happen” – so terrifying to the world – “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” We are those who need not cower. We can embrace trauma and hardship and horrifying uncertainty, because we know God’s “got the whole world in his hands.”

   It’s way bigger than me and my salvation. Sharon Ringe suggested picturesquely that “the ‘redemption’ that is promised is not a private lifeboat to save a few privileged folk while everything else is destroyed. Rather, redemption is equated with the coming of God’s reign, which spells transformation, healing, and wholeness for all of life.”

   In the meantime, we should “be on guard,” “not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness, and worries…” My daughter and I visited the Bolton Priory in England – a lovely place, with a ruined gothic sanctuary. As we entered to take photos, a woman handed us a prayer card and invited us to something higher than tourism. The card contained this prayer:
  “Humbly and sorrowfully I crave thy forgiveness ... for every weakening thought to which my mind has roamed ... ” This notion of weakening thoughts bears some examination and pondering – perhaps especially during this season of preparing for the coming of the Lord.

***

  My new book, Everywhere is Jerusalem: Experiencing the Holy Then and Now, has lots of preaching fodder, and touches on Adventish and Epiphany themes. Abingdon also created a study guide and video! Good for you, good for groups!

What can we say November 24? Christ the King

   Pentecost (or “Ordinary Time”) ends with anything but an ending. The long story of the Christian year “ends” with a crowning – reminding Tolkien fans of the grand climax to The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn is finally the king, although he and the rest bow to the smallish hobbits, who are the true heroes of the story. Tolkien totally got biblical royalty and theology. 

      The shape of Christ's kingship begins next week, in silence, waiting, hope hidden in a womb, then a cry, the vulnerable being held tenderly. Jesus got bigger, but never in a muscular, threatening way, always humble, vulnerable, downright laughable and puzzling, so un-powerful did this powerful one seem. His crown was of thorns, his entourage common criminals and poor fishermen, his throne a cross, his palace a tomb. When explicating this week’s texts, it’s this King, not any other, who is the lens through which we read and preach.

   2 Samuel 23:1-7. Robert Alter speaks of this poem’s “mystifying features” which suggest “great antiquity,” suspecting (unlike most historical critics!) the poet might really have been David himself. If so, it puts a quirky twist on the “sweet singer” image, which pious books and preachers seem fond of applying to David. Did David actually, late in life, say this about himself? Those who knew him, who’d witnessed his tawdry behavior, who’d borne his violence, would shudder, or snicker.

    Walter Brueggemann is right: this poem masks the ambiguity of what a real king behaves like earlier in the story. Yet the ideal persists, the dream lingers. Kings should be life, fruitfulness, light and joy. And it’s God’s faithfulness, not the uprightness of kings, that sustains history. Such a king, unlike David and his progeny, is coming – the one who indeed proved to be “like light of morning, like the sun rising,” the one revealed as king Easter morning.

   Revelation 1:4b-8 is a perfect text for such a Sunday. The feel of this turn of the year is apocalyptic. The year ends, a new one opens before us, and the curtain is pulled back for us to delight in a peek into eternity, which isn’t endless time so much as the constant presence of “the one who is, was and is to come.” Eugene Boring points out that it was said “Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus will be.” But John – not just being but action, presence: “he comes.” Our God loved so much God could not remain aloof in heaven, but had to come down, to be with us.

   Eugene Peterson, in his brilliantly titled book on Revelation, Reversed Thunder, explicates this text by noting how we think of the Bible as something to use, instead of a means to hear God. And if we dared to hear God through it, we realize Scripture isn’t courting our favor or trying to please, but seeks to subject us. But how?

   Barbara Brown Taylor’s great sermon, “God’s Daring Plan” (in Bread of Angels), should be reviewed now! She envisions God in heaven informing the angels of his plan to come down. They plead with him not to do it. “The baby idea was a stroke of genius, it really was, but it lacked adequate safety features.” I wish I could preach like this: “Once the angels saw God was dead set on this daring plan, they broke into applause… While they were still clapping, God turned around the left the chamber, shedding his robes as he went. The angels watched as his midnight blue mantle fell to the floor, so that all the stars collapsed in a heap. Where the robes had fallen, the floor melted and opened up to reveal a scrubby brown pasture speckled with sheep and a bunch of shepherds. It was hard to say who was more startled, the shepherds or the angels…”

   Indeed. Jesus is God’s “witness,” translating the Greek martus, yes, like martyr. God’s coming provokes hostility and ends in suffering – but doesn’t really end at all.

   The empire’s army detail couldn’t keep this one in the grave. Jesus is the “ruler of the kings of the earth.” Really? How much more politically subversive can you get? We’ll see Pilate in our Gospel reading tremble a bit before this vulnerable, weak one. The preacher must play on the irony: it is the bloodied, beaten weak one who is “omnipotent.” The Greek is pantokrator – 

which is the way Christ is dubbed in so much classic art, as in the painting at St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai. Jϋrgen Moltmann, in his best pages of The Crucified God, explores how omnipotence is way inferior to love. Omnipotence can only be feared and obeyed; love can be… loved. Even better is the comment on our passage from G.B. Caird: “John has learned from Christ that the omnipotence of God is not the power of unlimited coercion but the power of invincible love.”

   John 18:33-37. My friend, the archaeologist Shimon Gibson, has definitively revealed to us where this trial before Pontius Pilate took place: not in the traditional praetorium along the Via Dolorosa, but along the western exterior wall of the city, where Herod’s impressive palace was located. Pilate would have stepped out onto the platform before the huge crowds pressing in from the countryside, not down narrow urban lanes.

   The conversation about kingship, in so few words, opens up deep wells of emotion, underlying meanings, nuances and shifting tides of power! Raymond Brown notices that “the accused criminal asks questions as if he were the judge, and from the first words of Jesus, it is Pilate who is on trial! Pilate is a man who is facing the light and who must decide whether he will prefer light or darkness.” For my tastes, the feel is captured marvelously in Jesus Christ Superstar, especially the fantastic 2000 Gale Edwards production. Watch this! Fred Johanson is pitch perfect as Pilate, strong, muscular, impressive, yet with an undercurrent of uncertainty, then defensiveness, a grief that can still retaliate.

   I don’t know how to “illustrate” all this in a sermon. I’m not sure the preacher needs to. The story is the story, and it’s plenty sufficient, it works as is, doesn’t need dressing up. It is worth pondering that “king,” on this Christ the King Sunday, was far from Jesus’ preferred way of thinking of himself.

*****

  Check out my book on hymns - more the theology of certain lines in hymns than their composition: Unrevealed Until Its Season. Couched as a Lenten study, readable any time.