What can we say July 13? 5th after Pentecost

    Amos 7:7-17. My first sermon ever, when I was 20, about to enter Div school, and so very clueless about what to talk about, was on this text. Somehow I’d latched on to verse 14, “I am no prophet,” and I assured my hapless listeners that “I am no preacher.” He’s preaching and – he’s right, he’s no preacher. Amos is of course distancing himself from those professional prophets who were mere yes-men for the establishment, who curried royal favor and profit – and who, no doubt, believed firmly and passionately in what they were saying! Firmness and passion, and being able to stir a crowd to cheer, are not signs that you’re actually speaking a word from God.

   I’m not a hold-up-an-object-lesson kind of preacher, but Amos was. A familiar construction item: the plumbline, used to detect if a wall under construction was straight enough. I love the opening of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. Mason/builder Tom began work on a cathedral: “At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been resentful when the master builder warned him that his work was not quite up to standard. 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, the merest variation from 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.”

   Israel’s wall, Israel’s life, is far from perfect. The lean is disaster waiting to happen. Amos comes to name it. The prophets, and even many of Jesus’ sermons, call into question (for me) the standard I was taught and have lived with lo these many years: a sermon is “good news.” Where’s the good news? Amos’s sermon is unflinchingly bad news. When we get askew with God’s good news way, it’s bad news for us. Does that preach?

   Marvin Sweeney points out that ’anak could mean “plaster” – as if God is a renovator. The walls of the kingdom’s lavish sanctuary and palace were in superb condition – or so they presumed. Marianne Williamson suggested that when we invite God into our lives, we expect a decorator to appear to spruce the place up a little. But instead, you look out the window, and there’s a wrecking ball about to tear it all down and start over.

   Colossians 1:1-14. Unless you quibble over authorship, Paul (I’m okay with him as author here, and a sermon’s no place to dispute the issue anyhow) dubs himself “an apostle by the will of God.” Not for the sermon, but in your own soul: are you a preacher “by the will of God”? If so, in some mysterious way, does that alter not just what you say but how you prepare, how you field praise or criticism?

   Timothy is a “brother,” and these brothers have siblings in Colossae. Church as big extended family – which may explain why we don’t always get along so well. Sibling rivalry, competing over toys, resentments, favoritism, secrets… Families get undone. Yet families are families, stuck with one another, intimate to the end.

   Verses 3 thru 8 form a single sentence in the Greek! Paul gets on these rambles… Paul is amazed by what has unfolded in the church in his absence. As Christopher Seitz suggests, “Paul is witnessing the church being born before his eyes and without his missionary exertions… a development not foreseen by Paul.” I wonder if we might hope/pray/even preach for the same in our day? Indeed, Paul is in prison as he writes. Could this imprisonment have “its own sacramental efficacy and providential intention”? (Seitz).

   A ringing message of Hope bursts forth in all this. I recall being delighted in some phase of my reading when I found Martin Luther King, Jr., late in his life, saying “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful,” and Christopher Lasch’s spot-on wisdom: “Hope doesn’t demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope appears absurd to those who lack it. We can see why hope serves us better than optimism. Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst; the worst is what the hopeful are prepared for. A blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

   Or Henri Nouwen (in Here and Now): “While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, with the deep trust that God will never leave us alone but will fulfill the deepest desires of our heart. When I trust deeply that today God is truly with me and holds me safe in a divine embrace, guiding every one of my steps, I can let go of my anxious need to know how tomorrow will look, or what will happen next month or next year. I can be fully where I am and pay attention to the many signs of God’s love within and around me.”

   Hope, for Paul, “bears fruit.” Are you fruitful? Is your church fruitful? Nouwen again distinguished between productivity and fruitfulness in Our Greatest Gift. When we no longer can work or earn, we can still be fruitful, by speaking words that will be recalled, by dying in a way that is a gift to the living. It’s not just churning out this or that, but bequeathing something that is you, that is love manifest, that lingers beyond you and what you happened to get done.

   And then I can’t help but contrast this text with all the prayer requests with which I am peppered, most about health or a job. Paul’s prayer? “That you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work, and as you grow in the knowledge of God.” Pray that for me, for yourself, and for your people.

   Luke 10:25-37. So easy to misfire on the Good Samaritan. One of my preaching rules (enunciated in my The Beauty of the Word) is never ever to say what people expect you to say. On this story, they expect you’ll say Don’t be in too much of a hurry to stop and help somebody! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It’s way more complicated. I recall teaching New Testament to some adolescents at a Catholic camp years ago. To get them thinking, I asked With whom in this story do you identify? – hoping they’d say, Ah, not just the busy dudes, and not just the helpful Samaritan, but the guy beaten up by the side of the road. 

 

  St. Augustine’s approac? Jesus is the stranger who stoops down, binds up our wounds, and takes us home. Alternatively, Jesus is the one beaten and bloodied – to save us. My adolescent boys, snickering and not in the spirit of things, blurted out We’re the guys who beat him up and left him! Light bulb on in my head. Indeed. Who’ve we wounded, even unwittingly, and left behind?

   In my sermon earlier this year on this text, trying to undercut political divisions, I suggested that whether we cheer or moan what's going on politically, ours is to be attentive to those beaten up and left by the side of the road. Period. No question. Check out the sermon for more...

   The strangeness, the enemy-ness of the Samaritan, the enmity between his people and the Jewish people, is interesting, but fishing for modern parallels is a challenge. Jesus’ punchline is that the neighbor is the one “who shows mercy” – and to those who haven’t earned it or even seem like fitting targets of mercy. In our mercy-less world, any giving or receiving of mercy, genuine mercy, feels miraculous, counter-cultural. Take note: the guy who was beaten up would have loathed the very guy who stopped to help him!

   I love that this is one of Jesus’ made up stories – which are the best, truest kind! In Israel, you can actually visit “the Inn of the Good Samaritan” – which isn’t a real place... I love this photo of my daughter Sarah, aged 8 (and now a pastor herself!), with Jason Byassee (great theologian and teacher), at this spot! A terrific quote, if it helps: G.K. Chesterton wrote, “St. Francis loved everybody, but especially those others disliked him for liking.” Who is hard to love? and who is the stranger?

What can we say July 6? 4th after Pentecost

    My snarky side, yet backed up by years of experience, snarls that on the Sunday close to July 4, our people exercise their much-vaunted freedom of religion by freely not materializing for worship. Alas. Last week’s text spoke quite directly to freedom, and how freedom theologically construed is vastly different from freedom American-style. I’ll refer you to my “Jesus and July 4” blog from yesteryear, which still holds – not to be preached, but as background music for us as we preach, and live as the people of God. Of course, it's even dicier now with some weird mix of rancor, numbness, some people giddy, others chagrined but feeling oh so very helpless. I do remind us that Christianity was born, and thrived in an environment of intense political oppression. Everybody loathed those in power.

   I believe I will preach on one of my very favorite texts, 2 Kings 5; let me commend to you this sermon I preached last go round. A riveting story of brokenness, humility, hope and healing. Peter Leithart even calls this text “the richest Old Testament story of baptism,” one that “anticipates Christian baptism.” Maybe.

    Naaman was a great, successful man of valor, of substance.  But… there is always a “but” isn’t there? “But” he was a leper. Robert Alter, in his great new translation of Scripture, renders tsara’at as “skin blanch,” the main symptom being loss of pigmentation, not lesions and lumps. Only the very bold preacher would dare to suggest that his problem is being white!

    He probably cloaked, with armor or sheer reputation and might, his humbling disability, as we usually hide our brokenness. His unsought humility was mirrored to him in the person of a young woman, who is small of stature, and female; he is a captain, she is a captive. All other healers having failed him, Naaman is desperate enough to follow her tip.

   The not-yet-humbled Naaman rumbles up to Elisha’s house reining in his stallions, bearing gifts, expecting to pay his way to healing, to grease a few palms. He’ll come out for me (the Hebrew of “for me” is emphatic). The wealthy and powerful grouse about the poor feeling entitled; but who feels more entitled than the wealthy and powerful? Such a barrier against God’s grace!

     Elisha is unimpressed. After all, once you’ve seen chariots and horses blazing with fire, riding not across rugged terrain but soaring above the clouds (2 Kings 2), a bunch of steeds pulling a cocky chieftan atop wooden wheels just doesn’t raise your pulse. Not deigning to come out, Elisha disses Naaman, enraging him. Naaman was prideful, but perhaps pride was all he had left. Much as we might do in the privacy of the doctor’s or therapist’s office, we’ve dressed well, and mention some cool thing we did last night – but obviously we have come not for banter, but to be healed, to reveal the “but,” to expose what hinders us, hoping, blushing.

   Fascinating:  Elisha could have come out; he could have made the trip himself to Damascus; he could have healed at a distance. But he let Naaman come to him. When Joseph’s brothers were hungry, he could have shipped food to them, but he let them come. Joseph didn’t want them merely to fill their bellies; he wanted to heal the relationship. Elisha didn’t want Naaman merely to be rid of leprosy; he wanted him to be more deeply healed. By not even paying him the courtesy of coming to the door, Elisha reverses the sorry tale Jesus would tell of a rich man not coming to the door to help out a poor leper!

      Elisha’s prescription isn’t courteous either: bathe in the Jordan. Pilgrims to Israel chuckle when they see the Jordan, hardly a river at all, more of a stream, a creek. Naaman protests: shouldn’t his cure be more dazzling, perhaps dipping himself in the pools by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or some exotic salve imported from Ethiopia? It’s just water, it’s always been there; it’s all around, it’s what I am made of.

     Faith is the crumpling of pride (as my theology professor Robert Cushman used to say). This morning a friend texted me a photo of the epitaph on Don Knotts's grave, which reads " He saw the poignancy in people’s pride and pain, and turned it into something hilarious and endearing" - and I thought of Naaman. I picture him as tall, strapping, muscular; but maybe he was more like Barney Fife, a bit ridiculous but not to himself. 

Or was he Barney Fife, hiding inside the tall, strapping guy? Is faith, the crumpling of pride, somehow the realization that there is real poignancy in our pride and pain, and it ultimately is endearing?

   Elisha invites Naaman to achieve this humility through something as simple, as obvious, as unimpressive as a bit of water only Elisha or somebody desperately thirsty would think of as powerful. I do not know if Naaman flailed a bit trying to get his whole body under such a shallow, coursing stream. But we know there was a miracle in that water. Sure, the leprosy washed downstream. Yet more importantly, when he stepped up onto the river bank, drenched and dripping, he was no longer a man, but a boy: “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child,” like the little maiden who showed him the way, like all of us when we “become like children.”

    Without romanticizing childhood, we may recognize its virtues: vulnerability, an implicit demand for justice, the way children show their treasures, weep in the open, accept grace easily, suffer no illusions of independence, and are easily amazed. All of Christianity is a kind of return to childhood, a training in humility. All of our gestures seem silly: folding our hands, bowing our heads, kneeling. How do you get ahead or defend yourself acting in these ways? We believe in vulnerability, humility, a bit of flailing in embarrassment. Dipping in a no account river on the suggestion of a two-bit prophet who wouldn’t even answer the door: the foolishness of God is wiser than all of us.

     The humility goes on. Sensing his nascent excitement about Elisha’s God will be compromised at home, Naaman rather charmingly scoops up some dirt to carry back with him, to cling to some piece of holiness in an unholy place. “Elisha does not expect Naaman to abandon the world or withdraw into a ghetto where he can escape moral dilemmas and difficulties” (Leithart). Not only is our post-baptized life full of dilemmas and difficulties; we fail miserably. We cannot heal ourselves, or achieve what God wants of us. But we remember the water, the awkward humiliation – and wasn’t it at precisely that moment of spiraling out of control, of losing all hope and dignity, that a slight rustling of wings was heard, and a whispered message, something like “this is my beloved child,” just a boy, a girl, small, wet, like we were at birth, like we will be when we are greeted at the door by fiery chariots?

   Galatians 6:1-16 tickles me, since it includes Paul’s childlike brag: “See what large letters I make.” Did the Galatians giggle on having these words read to them? Did they want a peek at the parchment from which the reader spoke these words?

    How counter-cultural for us is Paul’s urging his readers to have a “spirit of gentleness,” not the hysterical rancor and exasperated sighing half of Americans have for the other half? “Bear one another’s burdens” – instead of blaming or judging. We all carry this awful burden of political ideology. It’s heavy. Can we bear the other guy’s by not investing it with such weightiness? It’s temporal, far from eternal, the real idolatry that afflicts us all.

   “If those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves.” Of course, we all are something. It’s just what kind of something, what defines that something that is the catch. “Test your own work” – not your neighbor’s! Moses the Black, one of the Desert Fathers, said “If you have a corpse lying in your front room, you won’t have time to go to someone else’s funeral.” “All must carry their own loads,” and gosh, we each have plenty, and could actually use some of that “bearing one another’s burdens,” in love, not in judgment that is.

   Indeed, “you reap what you sow.” This isn’t a stewardship sermon: Give! And you’ll make even more! Those who reap rancor will be consumed by it. Frederick Buechner memorable said that “of the 7 Deadly Sins, anger is the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to save to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back: in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

   Paul encourages his young Christians not to grow weary. I just love what Marianne Williamson said in her fantastic Goop podcast “Who Are You in Crisis?” Gwyneth Paltrow whined of being weary in working for just causes. Williamson chided her, reminding us of how slaves, African-Americans in the 50’s, Jews in concentration camps, and so many others who’ve suffered far worse haven’t had the luxury of feeling tired or taking a break. “You put on your big girl pants and keep going” – something Williamson can say to Paltrow, but that I’d best omit from my sermon!

   And finally Luke 10:1-11, 16-20, not a text I warm up to much. Jesus sends 70 (where did the extra 58 come from??) in pairs (like animals moseying into Noah’s ark!). They are “appointed” (anadeknumi), a word making every Methodist pastor shiver. “The harvest is plentiful”? My sense is that the harvest in this culture isn’t plentiful much at all… It’s hard to get church people to pay attention, much less those outside the fold.

   But still we go, we try, we labor on. “Take no purse, no sandals” – so no minimum salaries or raises for these guys! The simplicity of how we go: their attire reminds me of St. Francis, who went to Pope Innocent asking for authorization for a new order of monks. The charter he presented? We can read it, and it’s nothing but a little listing of Bible verses about what Jesus did and said. Maybe that’s it. No grand strategies, not business-model smoothness, no skills or techniques. 25 years ago our conference required each church to devise a new mission statement. I gathered some key folks, and explained our assignment. One woman laughed out loud and said “That’s easy. We are to do the things Jesus told us to do.” We wrote that down, sent it in and went home. Seriously.

   How kind, thoughtful and anticipatory Jesus’ preparing them that some will welcome you and hear, others will not, will even reject them. Failing in ministry? Jesus saw it coming and sent us anyhow. I do try to be careful when I parse for myself “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me,” as I can get the me in there to the point it overshadows the Jesus in the me, and so they are rejecting not Jesus but me, my unfaithful me, my ego me, my competitive me, my insecure, trying to make my mark me. I hope you do not share this affliction with… me.

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   Check out my book about St. Francis and what he might say to us - preachers and laity - today: Conversations with St. Francis.

What can we say June 29? 3rd after Pentecost

    2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 is a text that, personally, reminds me of the death of my great professor, doctoral advisor and mentor, Fr. Roland E. Murphy. He was a Carmelite – a Catholic order dedicated to Elijah. And as a Carmelite and Old Testament scholar, he died with considerable panache on the Feast Day of Elijah in 2002! This got me to pondering what happens when a great person, a great Bible scholar, a great knower of God dies. I blogged about this, and him. Could a sermon reflect on mentors, inviting people to find or even be one? Can you tell about yours – if you’d lucky, like I am, to have had one?

  {Parenthetically, if you are interested in mentoring as it relates to ministry, you might enjoy this collection of essays I edited with Jason Byassee and Craig Kocher called Mentoring for Ministry: The Grace of Growing Pastors}.

   Elisha has been attached to Elijah since that moment when he was out plowing and he unexpectedly had a mantle thrown over him (1 Kings 19), and when he abruptly left his oxen right out in the field, like Jesus’s fishermen to come, and traipsed off after him. Understandably, he refuses to let Elijah slip away. Twice he declares, “I will not leave you” – reminding me of the terrific scene at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, when Samwise Gamgee jumps in the water, not knowing how to swim. Barely surviving, he explains, “I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee, and I don’t mean to.” But Elijah will leave Elisha. His strange movements are a clue he prefers to go off and die alone.

   This unfolded “when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind…” Same whirlwind that God used to answer Job? Back then, nobody except or had really heard about eternal life. Being swooped up into heaven? Elisha, humbled, in awe, and pondering what he’ll need without Elijah, asks for a “double share” of Elijah’s power. Somebody counted, and surprisingly enough, Elisha’s miracles are precisely double those of Elijah, 16 to 8! Jesus told his disciples they would do even greater things.

   Elijah departs in the whirlwind? In a flaming chariot? Chariots of Fire is a fabulous movie with many profound moments pondering sabbath observance, and joy. Watch it for fun, and in preparation to preach!

   The mantle Elijah had thrown on Elisha when they first met was the mantle draped over Elisha’s shoulders as Elijah departed. Did it fit? Was it too big? 

Another Lord of the Rings illustration: the wise wizard Gandalf somewhat foolishly left the course of affairs in Middle Earth to the diminutive, fun-loving, timid hobbits. “Despair, or folly?” asked Gandalf. “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!”

   Galatians 5:1, 13-25 materializes in the lectionary just prior to July 4 – with consummate timing, as Americans are days from chattering on about freedom in untheological, even anti-Christian (weirdly) ways. Paul most assuredly does not say You are free! So freely choose God! or God gives you freedom and hopes you’ll choose good instead of sin. No, it’s that Christ sets us free, implying we are (as Augustine, Luther, Wesley, Barth, all the great theologians have clarified) most assuredly not free. Our wills are bound, shackled, to sin, self, world. Our only hope is to be liberated by the miracle of God’s Spirit – and once free, it’s not so we might do as we wish, but so we might then bind ourselves freely and joyfully to God, to do God’s bidding – as Wesley put it, My life is no longer my own.

   Take note of his counsel: do not submit “again” to the yoke of slavery. You were, maybe even just this morning, a great submitter to this yoke of slavery, which is mere “self-indulgence,” which Paul says is a grave misuse of freedom. Paul’s words, genius or inspired, recognize that a battle is being waged in the soul. Do we even notice any longer? Flesh vs. Spirit (which isn’t visible vs. invisible). “Flesh” is idolatry (and today’s most popular idolatry is political ideology!), jealousy, anger, dissension (sounds like my denomination!) vs. the Spirit, which is tangible, real life as motivated by God’s Spirit.

   “Don’t bite and devour,” which we love to do, even in the privacy of our own minds. I love Frederick Buechner’s thought: “Of the 7 Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back: in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

   “Eat fruit, not others!” The “fruit of the Spirit” is one of those shining moments in Scripture we could ponder forever. People ask What is God’s will? Galatians 5:22 could keep you occupied every minute for decades. I’m especially fond of Phil Kenneson’s thoughtful book, Life on the Vine. Jesus said “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16), and “My Father is glorified when you bear fruit... I have said these things so my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:8).

   Thomas Merton said “a tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” Am I like a tree? My life is not my own: I depend on the sun, the rain, the grace and power of God which I do not control, but only soak up as precious gifts. I live in the light, but my roots go down deep where it is dark - so perhaps I need not fear the darkness? What is growing on my branches? Am I bearing fruit? or am I just some driftwood that used to be a tree?

   Holiness is not a matter of gritting your teeth and trying really diligently to do what God requires. We may grit our teeth, and we do try hard. But I am not able to do what God wants of me, I am not capable of the life God wants for me. A changed life is the gift of God's Spirit. Paul described this new life, the life for which we were made, as “the fruit of the Spirit.” Not “the fruit of my good intentions,” but the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”

   Not only are these not against the law. They are not the law! Paul does not say, “You must be joyful, patient, faithful.” Rather, if we just calm down and let the Spirit have its way with us, we discover to our delightful surprise traces of joy, peace, gentleness in our lives, all gift, all the work of God in us. These nine (love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) are what trees look like when giving glory to God, swayed only by the wind of the Spirit, watered by the grace of Baptism.

   A preaching possibility: lift up a story, a face, a short biographical sketch of someone who lives such a fruitful life. Whom do you know – in your world or in history, who has been loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, gentle? Notice how a joyful person is also a patient person, the kind person is peaceful. They feed off one another, depend on one another.

   Consider joy, so different from happiness. Like all fruit, joy requires time, tending, maturity. Evelyn Underhill notes that “it is rather immature to be upset about the weather... Pursuing the spiritual course, we must expect fog, cold, persistent cloudiness, gales, and sudden stinging hail, as well as the sun.” Joy is about consistency in the spiritual life. Joy knows God is incapable of drifting away from us, and the very fact that we turn our heads and grope after God in the dark is God’s gift that gives birth to joy.

   Luke 9:51-62 is (to me) hilarious. They didn’t welcome us – so, “Lord, shall we command fire to come down and consume them?” (picking up on consuming and getting consumed in Galatians 5, and Elijah’s over-zealous slaughter of the prophets of Baal, 1 Kings 18).

   My denomination’s slogan is “Make disciples!” – which sounds fun… but Jesus explains what disciple life is like. “Foxes have holes,” but we have no place to rest. “Let the dead bury their own dead.” Disciples put their cozy past behind. For St. Francis, it meant a ferocious break with his own father Pietro. For you, it means…. What? For your people, it means… What? Hard not to think of John Wesley, missing his own wife’s funeral – although his failure wasn’t entirely out of zeal for the Lord!

   “When the days drew near for him to be taken up”: as we see in Luke, volume 2 (Acts 1), the climax of Jesus’ work is his ascension, when he leaves the church behind to be his Body, just as Elijah left Elisha to carry on after him. Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem: in the first half of his ministry, Jesus is an actor, in control, impressive, striding across the stage of history – but then in part 2, he is increasingly passive, acted upon, headed to die. He is “handed over.” This (as W.H. Vanstone pointed out in The Stature of Waiting) is the plot of our lives: we are active, but then late, we are increasingly passive, acted upon – and that is Jesus’ glory, and our glory (so counter-cultural…). More to come (and I think this is a perfectly valid way to wind up a sermon… Stay tuned for the rest of the story next week and in the weeks to come!).

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  Check out my non-leadership leadership book, Weak Enough to Lead.

What can we say June 22? 2nd after Pentecost

    1 Kings 19:1-15 is amazing. Elijah, in the aftermath of his astonishing crushing of the prophets of Baal, comes to a hard, dark moment at another mountain far to the south. Jonathan Sacks, as so often is the case, has helped me rethink what really is an awful text. Are we to cheer when well-meaning religious men are slaughtered – by God no less? Sacks passes along what Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher had said. Reading all of Scripture, and then attentive to details in 1 Kings 18, he points out that God did not actually command Elijah to challenge the Canaanite prophets, and God certainly did not direct Elijah to slaughter them. Prophets are not to intimidate or terrorize others; compulsion and force are not God’s ways. Elijah’s “zeal” for God was not holy. God was fuming with Elijah afterwards, which is why he wound up alone on Mount Horeb. Elijah had to learn the hard way the extreme dangers of religious zealotry. His show of strength impressed, but with catastrophic results.

   Is Sacks's reflection a stretch? The God who allegedly tossed down thunderbolts in chapter 18 is the one who shows up very differently in chapter 19! As an antidote to all religious leaders (even me?) who can be ruthless: a pointed sermon or a snarky blog post, dispatching others who think wrong? Elijah (is he whining or boasting?) declares “I have been zealous for the Lord.” But God does not ask us for titanic displays of zeal. Aren't clergy tempted to be impressive, relevant, popular? Elijah’s big moment had zero lasting impact.

   Misguided or not, the very effort to carry out God’s will can be exhausting. After a hard, hot day of trudging through the wilderness, he slumps down under “a solitary broom tree.” Even the pitiful little tree is lonely! Then Elijah cried out “It is enough!” (1 Kgs 19:4). The Hebrew isn’t three words and four syllables, as in “It is enough!” With crisp brevity, really nothing more than a grunt, Elijah emitted a yelp, a groan, one word, one syllable only: rav! Croaking in exhaustion, burned out: rav!

   His next word was just as abrupt, emphatic, just a single syllable even in English: “Now!” I’ve had enough; I want it to end – “Now!” So harrowing, this urge toward death – now. Why was he so weary and disillusioned? Was it the vicious hounding from Jezebel, Ahab and their henchmen? Was it his own hard-headedness? Was God to blame? It was God who got Elijah into this mess in the first place. Leadership grows weary. Where is the blame to be laid? Is it the job? Is it the circumstances? Is it God?

   God hardly soothes Elijah. He’s not offered a sabbatical of R&R. Instead, he somehow has to withstand a wind storm so strong it broke rocks into pieces, and then an earthquake, and then fire – which Elijah had welcomed in his contest with the 450 prophets! But now? 1 Kgs 19:12 reports that the Lord was not in the wind, earthquake or fire. Doesn’t this interpret 1 Kings 18 as Maimonides and Sacks did?

   After setting God far apart from the storm and fire, the writer tersely adds, “and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” Older translations rendered this “a still small voice,” which to me can run us into sweet sentimentality. The Hebrew (qol demama dakka) is better: there was silence, total, crushing, deafening silence. What kind of response to Elijah’s cry was the hollow nothingness of total silence? Aren't there whispers in our heads that are not of God? Condemnation of others, or of self? Coveting is a big "small voice" in the head... The "silence" translation may not only be closer to the Hebrew, but what is required for us to nestle up close to God.

    There is so much ambiguity in this (and every) silence. Is God refusing to speak? Is it a test? How often do leaders look for some sign, some obvious word, but are greeted with nothing but no word at all? Is it an invitation into something deeper in the heart of God? Mother Teresa said “God is the friend of silence,” and most great mystics have probed and learned to delight in the quiet that is at the core of God’s being. When we listen for God and hear only silence, especially if we are alone, does it feel like loneliness – or solitude? Isn’t solitude a razor’s edge from loneliness and yet different by light years? Solitude is being quiet, and alone, but with God. If Sabbath is a time to be quiet with God, then perhaps silence is the most tender, restful way God is with us.

   This "still small voice" or "total, deafening silence" was enfleshed for me when my older daughter Sarah showed me her first ever tattoo. After announcing she'd gotten one, and that I was maybe the only dad who might understand and appreciate it, she pulled back her hair and showed me those Hebrew words, qol demama dakka, just behind her ear. It took me a minute... What a powerful image: the ear, right where we hear, it's God's small voice, or really better, that agonizing, wonderful silence. {Sarah joined me for an online Bible conversation about Elijah a few weeks back!}

   God's silence is... okay, even good, perhaps stupendous, tender and beautiful. Silence for us is perhaps our most important labor for God and others. Proverbs repeatedly suggests that the fool chatters on, while the wise listen. Robert Caro, the great biographer of Lyndon Johnson, interviews people - and reports that his greatest tool in interviewing is silence. People will talk if you give them the space. So his notebooks from interviews constantly have jotted in the margin, in huge letters, SU, SU, SU. Shut up. Don't talk. Listen. Wait. Silence.

   I am even wondering now about Neil Postman's classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he diagnoses and laments how politics and religion have become entertainment. I was asked to speak at opening assembly of our Vacation Bible School just this week. My talk was preceded by a snappy, loud, fast-moving video about Manna! - making it sound fun and dance-able. The problem with making our faith entertaining, to hold kids' (or our) attention? It's never rav, it's never enough - and we miss the SU, the quiet. Thomas Merton said "Let us have quiet homes." Is my VBS urging this? or countering this?

   Psalm 42/43. This pair was originally a single Psalm, one of the most eloquent and moving in all of Scripture. My Old Testament professor, Fr. Roland Murphy, suggested to me one day that this Psalm may well have been composed at a fabulous waterfall just outside Caesarea Philippi. This video was part of a Bible study series we filmed in Israel a while back, a beautiful rendering of the Psalm at that Banyas waterfall! Water is scarce, a national treasure in Israel to this day. Did the Psalmist watch as a deer, sniffing the air, found its way to this spot to drink? – a vision of our thirst for God?

   Much grief is articulated in powerful images. Tears as my food. Waves of sorrow like the billowing of the water in this place. My soul is indeed cast down. The solution? There, “from the sources of Jordan and Mt. Hermon” (where the snow melts to form this headwater of the Jordan!), the Psalmist longs to return to the temple “with the throng.” It is his memory of being in God’s holy sanctuary, and his determination to return there, that is his hope, his strength, the only reason to go on. Lovely stuff.

   Galatians 3:23-29. What to do with Paul. The law was a disciplinarian – but no more? The paidagogos (do you hear “pedagogue” in there?) in Paul’s world would have been a personal slave attendant, with a duty to teach the young manners, to use a switch if necessary, to take him to school, to test his memory. James D.G. Dunn renders this “babysitter”!

   The law isn’t trashed for Paul. I assume his intent is for us to move from an external understanding of God’s will – it’s laws, rules, you study, you try to do it – to an internalization: it’s not something outside you you embrace, but something in you; it is you. He deploys the clothing image, which rightly reminds us of early baptismal practices. After a season of learning and preparation, you shed your dirty work clothes, descend into the baptismal pool, emerge washed, and are then enfolded in a new, white robe. I think of the little shower tags we got from Resurrection UMC, which hundreds of our people hung in their bathrooms: “As I enter the water to bathe, I remember my Baptism. Wash my by your grace, fill me with your spirit, renew my soul. I pray that I might live as your child this day, and honor you in all that I do.” 

We later devised our own closet tags, to pray while dressing: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” etc. I love giving people simple, practical ways to pray, to envision their life with God during their daily routine!

   Lastly, Paul’s stirring declaration that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; you are one in Christ Jesus,” gets misconstrued, and then we fail at the main thing. There were, of course, still Jews and Greeks, women and men. It’s the division, it’s the rankings that are shattered. Differences are not abolished; God loves diversity! It’s the end of bias, hierarchy, chauvinism – an end to segregation. On this score, we are manifest failures. But it’s still God’s way, and the more we approximate this, the closer we are to God (and the less we approximate this, the further we are from God as well).

   Luke 8:26-39 has a comical edge to an otherwise darkly tragic yet redemptive story. Jesus has clearly strayed from Jewish territory (a rarity for him), as this town has a pig farm. Where exactly was it? The textual variants on the name: Gadara, Gergesa, Gerasa… Amy-Jill Levine (The Gospel of Luke) humorously suggests that as gerash means to “expel,” the place could be dubbed “Expelledville” or “Exorcismburg.” The preacher has space to explore the torment of the man. Is it severe mental illness – which they didn’t understand then, and which churches often can’t embrace and cope with today? John Calvin wondered why the spirits kept this man among the tombs, and concluded it was “to rend him with unending terror at the gloomy spectacle of death” (reminding me of Ernest Becker’s classic The Denial of Death, in which he explores how fear of death drives all human behavior, anxiety, dysfunction, etc.).

   Jesus speaks, not to the man, but to the host who've taken him over. Pádraig Ó Tuama wisely points out that “When we are toward the end of ourselves, we begin to believe that we are only what we struggle with.”  The tormenting spirit/spirits’ name? Legion. Provocative: could mean it’s a few thousand, and that the spirits are like an armed force. Also, theological eyes see here and everywhere that cosmic warfare is unfolding – so it’s never just this or that conflict, but the powers battling it out through us and history. You also have to acknowledge that the real Roman legions were a huge psychological and physical affliction for the people. What’s wrong with you? The oppressive society, regime, whatever.

  The demons plead not to be cast into the abyss – in the sea nearby, where the disciples just in the previous scene pleaded not to be tossed during the storm! Ironically, this legion doesn’t want to go there, but then madly and ironically that’s where they stampede once inhabiting the pigs.

   Their unity, in a day when church people talk a lot about unity, is striking. Logicians refer to the “Gadarene Fallacy,” which is the mistake of supposing that because a group is together and in good formation moving steadily in the same direction, they must be on a good path. And of course, the economic consequences to a healing: how often in Scripture is someone healed and rage rises because of lost profits? Acts 19 and the silversmiths, their business model of selling figurines of Artemis, stymied by a healing, and turmoil ensues. David Lyle Jeffrey’s comment is funny, and on point: “That the price of pork bellies was bound to jump higher wouldn’t much cheer those with no hogs left to sell.” Luke-Acts is repeatedly attentive to the very real economic impact of Jesus.

   Touchingly, Jesus tells this man, returned to his right mind, to go home. I wonder how hard that was for him. Tuama suggests that “Jesus was asking the man to live with courage, to treat those who had treated him as an animal with a dignity of humanity. It must have taken generosity, imagination, and bravery.”

  ** Much of this Elijah section is excerpted from my book about biblical and modern leadership, Weak Enough to Lead.

What can we say June 15? Trinity Sunday

   Before we explore the Trinitarian nature of the lectionary readings for Trinity Sunday, we should stand back and notice that, if the Trinity is a thing, if the Trinity is the thing, then all texts are Trinitarian, all Sundays are Trinity Sunday. A preaching booboo this week might be to attempt an intellectual explanation of the Trinity. Save it for the classroom. In the liturgy, in sacred space, we don’t disentangle, analyze and explain the Trinity. We worship. We listen. We join that Holy Circle. We let the Trinity speak for itself.

   In last year’s post on Trinity Sunday, I speak of my theology professor’s agony trying to theologize about this, how the structure of a musical chord helps us make sense of things, how visuals like the Rublev icon help (or don’t) – and more. I would strongly commend to you now the video of a conversation I had with the brilliant and pastoral theologian Jason Byassee on “God as…Trinity.” It’s really good. Let’s also turn to this week’s lections:

   Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31. In my Wesley 1 Volume Commentary on Proverbs, I wrote this (speaking of all texts being Trinitarian and how that complicates but also enlightens things!): “In one of the Bible’s most eloquent, puzzling and theologically robust passages, Wisdom isn’t a goddess, although she sounds a little like one! Translators struggle to capture the nuance of qana: the Lord ‘created me’? or ‘possessed me’? or ‘had gotten me’? It’s not that God made things and also made wisdom. Wisdom was already with God, in God, prior to creation. Wisdom was the pattern for and reason in God’s creating. Wisdom here isn’t practical virtue; wisdom is cosmic in scope, divine in its essence, comprehensive, omnipresent, as personal as your mother.

   Christians think of the opening of John’s Gospel, where the Word (logos) was in the beginning, with God, through whom everything came to be, and persists as light and life. Way back in the Iron Age, the poet of Proverbs 8:22-31 perceived the depths of wisdom, or was inspired to write beyond his capacity. Even now we can’t exactly explain all the words. We are gazing very closely now into the mind and heart or God, into the recesses of time and space, into the wisdom that was among the Trinity, always.

   All we can do is read, marvel, and notice a few details. Vivid images of water depths, mountains settling, God appointing boundaries for the oceans titillate the mind. This isn’t a physics textbook, but there is no conflict with science. If the universe is billions of years old and we see pinholes of light at night that began streaming toward us light years ago, if subatomic particles buzz blindingly and together fashion the petal of a rose, if DNA plus time and meals concoct the face of the child who just smiled at me, then we begin to discern wisdom at the heart of the macro- and micro-processes that are our world. Wisdom was the tender power that crafted such beauty. To be wise is to be in sync with the origins of the universe, with the intent of the earth, with the rhythm of creation.

   Ellen Davis thinks Proverbs 8:22-31 might have inspired Michelangelo’s painting of creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. God’s left arm embraces a woman. Is it Eve? Mary? Or Wisdom, present with God at the moment of creation?

   Wisdom says that in creation she was ‘having fun.’ The Hebrew may mean ‘frolicking’ or even ‘doing cartwheels.’ Wisdom isn’t just useful. It’s fun, joyful. God isn’t somber. There is joy and delight at the heart of everything, and in our destiny. No wonder the Latin word for school, ludus, also means ‘play.’

   In the early Church, the Arians, seeing Christ as this Wisdom, insisted qana should be ‘created,’ arguing that Christ, whom they adored, was yet one more creature. The Athanasians squashed this notion, going with qana as ‘had,’ that Christ was equally pre-existent as God the Father, fully divine. The author of Proverbs would have been baffled—and may have laughed or turned a cartwheel at such a ferocious debate over what is beyond all imagining.”

   Psalm 8. One of our favorite Psalms, memorable, eloquent, ponderable more than explainable. I think of Francis of Assisi and a statue of him I love where he is lying on his back. He would climb steep paths to get up higher to pray. He slept out under the stars, and did so when there was virtually no ambient light, no artificial halogens. So as he lay on his back, drifting off, he could see what we can no longer see: a dense array of pinpoints of light, a flurry of meteors streaking, the deep darkness that is not dark to God at all. He would have known Psalm 8 by heart.

   When he got to the line which asks, “What is man… and the son of man?” he would have thought, not of himself, so small against the canopy of space and the openness of the fields, but of Jesus. Newer, inclusive translations miss this nuance – that Christian readers read “What is man” not a the male pray-ers down here, but as Jesus!

   What Francis understood about Jesus is that the Most High, Glorious God was not content to hover so high, to remain aloof. That Most High, Glorious God exhibited his glory by coming down, in the humble form of a man, Jesus. Actually, at first the infant Jesus. “Out of the mouths of babes”? Jesus’ first cry, Madeleine L’Engle suggested, sounded like the ringing of a bell. The height of God is measured by the smallness of Christ come down in the infant Jesus. The prayer for God’s will is, like some zoom lens, focused down on something small, tender. God came down from his Most Highness because God loved, God loves – and so God’s will is always about love, bending down, humble, serving.

   Romans 5:1-5. I keep imagining Paul, pacing, thinking out loud, grimacing like Tom Langford, dictating to a scribe what we now read. He had to be uber-inspired as he sorted things out without the benefit of a New Testament or even one volume of theology on his shelf. He’s not figured out a Trinity yet, but he wrestles with the idea of “peace with God the Father through Jesus,” and “the Spirit poured into our hearts.” I wonder if a sermon might look like Tom Langford, and we simply restate, with uhs and sighs, the notion that we are at peace with God the Creator, through the agency of Jesus (his cross being, perhaps, like a wooden bridge from us into the heart of God, as Catherine of Siena suggested) – and as we weigh all this, our hearts pulsate with joy and energy, the Spirit not so much an emotional jolt but an undercurrent of understand, insight, aha!

     And then I always like to repeat Paul’s stunning litany – and maybe without explanation: “Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.” I might pause there and say hope might not disappoint? Or rather, segue into what Christopher Lasch taught us about hope’s ability to cope with disappointment, and how it is so very different from optimism: “Hope doesn’t demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope appears absurd to those who lack it. We can see why hope serves us better than optimism. Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst; the worst is what the hopeful are prepared for. A blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

    Optimism depends on us; it’s Scarlett O’Hara’s naïve view that things will somehow be better tomorrow. Hope depends on God; it can bear tomorrow being worse.

   John 16:12-15. Christian thinkers would have been lame intellectually if they had not concluded that the Trinity was most assuredly the threefold God witnessed in Scripture. John, especially at that long filibuster postponing going out into the dark to be betrayed and killed, bobs and weaves between speaking of God the Father, himself, and the Spirit. In this short text, this multifaceted Spirit is the Spirit Of Truth, whose vocation is to guide us into all truth. Not to have an emotional high, and not to know how best to wield our absolute truths as blunt instruments to judge or punish others.

   This text reveals part of the rationale of thinking of the Spirit as the “shy member” of the Trinity (Who thought of this? Vladimir Lossky? Frederick Dale Bruner? Did they get it from someone else?). This Spirit is like the backstage lighting guy you don’t see, who doesn’t seek attention, but does his/her work to make the Son and the Father look good. “He will glorify me.” What this Spirit highlights so we can see is – well, is it Jesus? Or God the Father? Yes, both, as Jesus makes utterly clear. Jesus isn’t God the Father walking around down here. But they are one. If you see Jesus, you see directly into the heart and mind of God. And there’s the Spirit, their bond, or as St Bernard of Clairvaux titillatingly put it, “the kiss between them.” Hence the quirky title of my little book on the Holy Spirit: The Kiss of God.