What can we say January 26? 3rd after the Epiphany

  This week's texts are pretty much about what happens what Bible is read out loud to people!  Nehemiah 8:1-10. When I was discovering the life of faith in vibrant community during my college days, we sang “The Joy of the Lord is your Strength” (yes, this one) – clapping along to its chipper melody. The songbook had Nehemiah 8:10 in parentheses, which made it feel really biblical! I never looked it up though.

  Context, context. Ezra, who seems like a deadly serious priest, somehow gets word out to the masses that there will be a public reading of Scripture. The Law, the Torah – and in the “seventh month,” Tishri, latter September for us, the ultimate high feast month, including the Feast of Tabernacles and the Day of Atonement. Not in the temple, but at the Water Gate (still being excavated, but massive!), facing across the Kidron Valley toward the Mt. of Olives. The hill must have formed a bit of an amphitheater, the stone wall of the gate a sounding board backdrop.

   Preachers more clever than I might figure out what to do with the inevitable echo of "Watergate" from modern times, the Nixon break-in fiasco, and Monica Lewinsky's home in DC! Reading God's Word is the end to secrecy, infidelity, the truth coming out?

   Had they not heard this text for some time? They didn’t own Bibles; most were illiterate. Ezra reads – for hours, sunup until noon. Clearly not the entire Torah, which would require more time. What portions did he select? Laws about holiness? Probably. Stories of Adam and Eve, or Abraham offering up Isaac just up that hill, or the parting of the sea, the manna? The drama: they stand, they raise their hands, they bow, they weep.

   We learn that “interpretation” was provided as he read. Were the Levites translating into Aramaic for those who didn’t know its ancient kin, Hebrew, any longer? Were some expository remarks prepared? I wonder about a sermon where I simply read portions of the Torah to my people. Can I trust the Scriptures, even or maybe especially the Law, to elicit that “joy of the Lord” which is genuine “strength”? The Psalter is about joy in reading, and our Gospel reading similarly depicts Jesus simply reading from such a scroll.

   Psalm 19 certainly finds immense joy in this Law! Psalm 19 is pretty inviting for a sermon. I preached on it during our Psalm series in the Spring (watch here). We begin with Creation, big creation, like from 15 billion years ago, inviting us to be in awe, not because it’s photogenic, but because it reveals God’s mind and heart. There’s music in the air… Ancient people believed the stars left music in their wake as they streamed across the sky. Science says No, but then we miss the awe, the joy. Paired quite naturally with this is the Psalm’s pleasure, sheer delight in the Law. Not a burden, not to make us chafe, but the marvelous gift of the God who created so we then can be created, re-created as beautiful people in sync with God’s lovely, sweet ways in the world.

   This law is “perfect,” reminding me of a lovely reflection from Kathleen Norris. She was asked by a priest if she'd pray for him. She fretted about whether she could do this well or not: "I realized that was my pride speaking, the old perfectionism that’s dogged me since I was a child. Well, or badly was beside the point. Of course I could pray, and I did. Perfectionism is one of the scariest words I know. It is a marked characteristic of American culture, a serious psychological affliction that makes people too timid to take risks and causes them to suffer when, although they’ve done the best they can, their efforts fall short of some imaginary standard. ‘Perfect’ isn’t about striving for impossible goals. It is taken from a Latin word meaning ‘complete, entire, full-grown.’ To those who originally heard it, the word conveyed ‘mature’ rather than what we mean today by ‘perfect.’"

   1 Corinthians 12:12-31a. One of my main points in The Beauty of the Word is the reminder to us to preach not merely to individuals but to the Body, not focusing on the solo listener out there, but speaking to the Church as church. To me, that’s even more interesting that poking around the various gifts enumerated here by Paul. After all, his list isn’t exhaustive, but representative.

   This Body, this coalescing and organizing of the gifted, is a supernatural entity, as Ben Witherington reminds us. “Diversity” can be one of those code words that divides us (as clarified beautifully in my podcast with Amanda Ripley on her great book, High Conflict). Whether we use the word or not, we recognize that diversity simply is. God made us with more diversity than we realize.

   The Corinthians were confused about their bodies. Paul counters by declaring You are a Body! Pagans used this image to reinforce upper-class ideology; you’re part of the body, so stay in your place. Paul does his theological origami on this image, lifting up the weakest members as the key to the functioning of the whole!

   Luke 4:14-21. Jesus taught in the synagogues around Galilee. You can see all the way across, with glimpses of little towns, some of them now excavated – like Magdala, where we can now visit the ruins of that synagogue where Jesus taught, and one Mary Magdalene heard him and traipsed off after him. We forget Jesus wasn’t some new thing. “Today Scripture is fulfilled.” God’s old thing continues, or climaxes, or is enfleshed in Jesus. But he’s a Bible guy, as in the ultimate expression of the whole book, and also as someone who knew the book and taught it himself. No wonder artists over the centuries have depicted him holding a Bible!

   Context, context, context: Jesus has just returned from being tempted in the wilderness, far to the southeast, barely surviving a brutal bout against heat, brigands, predators, and the devil himself. After the harrowing, he wanted to get back home – understandably. But not really to rest up or escape the troubles of the world for a while.

   Jesus went to the synagogue – “as was his custom.” I will mention, but hopefully not nag, that Jesus and all people close to God through history have made it their custom to be in God the Father’s house.  No single Sunday wins the day. Attending sometimes is an exercise in frustration.  It was Sabbath. Jesus went.

    No one there knew where he’d been, or what he’d endured. Church people might remember this when they see someone not entirely hospitable on the pew, or someone who is in a chilly mood. We are attentive to the ways people have been through a lot they’ve not shared with us (at least not yet) – and we welcome, accept, bear, love, and understand.  It’s our custom, right?

    Nazareth is where Jesus was “brought up.” I’ve often thought that the greatest proof that Jesus was really the one is that his brother James and his mother Mary wind up as disciples. If anybody knows you have feet of clay, it’s the family, the neighbors who knew you when you were a little kid, an adolescent. I might linger on this thought for a few moments… like those Gnostic gospels that narrate Jesus being picked on as a child, retaliating, and then relenting.

   Imagine the drama in Nazareth: “He unrolled the scroll.” This would have taken some time – so is suspense building? It also would have been heavy, a physical challenge to unroll the thing to just the right location he’d chosen. The greatest of the Dead Sea scrolls is the complete scroll of Isaiah from roughly the time of Jesus! This artifact is 24 feet long, and 50 pounds in weight! For Jesus to take it in his hands, and unroll it all the way to chapter 61? This would have taken some time, and a good bit of physical strength. In my sermon I will simply ponder this amazing moment, the pregnant pause as people waited – and perhaps how reading and understanding Scripture for us takes a lot of time, and considerable effort and strength. AND:   The Isaiah scroll, quirkily enough, was the first one found at Qumran – as if God wanted us to find this one first, and ponder Jesus’ reading from one just like it. Scholars didn’t find it either! Some shepherd boys, messing around, peeked into a cave. One threw a rock in, and heard a clatter. Who will find God’s word? And how?

  Jesus reads from Isaiah 61. Was it Jesus’ choice – which would tell us a lot about him? Or was it the lectionary reading for the day – which would tell us a lot about God’s coincidental timing in play here?  Isaiah 61 is a text about being sent on a remarkable mission – and it’s about God’s people returning from exile. N.T. Wright has helped us understand how Jesus’ ministry is the fulfillment of Israel’s long yearning to return home from exile writ large.

   The lectionary lops off the important second half of the story – that the crowd nearly assassinated him for connecting the ancient text to the present day, and to himself! But the preacher can (and should?!) still go there. 

  This is fascinating: the initial response of Jesus’ lifelong friends was that “all spoke well of him.” “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” – which has a touch of irony, doesn’t it? Like, Yes, but… Jesus could’ve basked in their praise – but instead went on a little rant about Elijah and Elisha in which he exposes the lackluster faith in Israel, the homers, and how God sought out and healed the despised foreigners instead.

  No wonder they got mad. The preacher might explore the ways we may not really want Scripture to be fulfilled. We like to read it in a safe classroom, or hear about it, or pick and choose moments in Scripture that pander to us. But the fulfillment of the biblical vision? Scares the daylights out of us – and we may recoil in rage.

   Talk about physical strength: they grabbed not a heavy scroll but Jesus’ own body and hauled him out to the edge of town, ready to throw him off a cliff. When I take groups to Israel, we visit the “precipice,” an impressive dropoff with astonishing views. Reading well past the lectionary’s cutoff (which we should in this case), Jesus narrowly escaped (again!) – and in verse 30 we read the startling notice that “Passing through the midst of them, he went away.” The mob, about to hurl him off the cliff, still angry, stood helpless as he simply walked, not sprinting or desperately scrambling, among them, and safely home. Reminds me of the little noticed moment in Gethsemane when the soldiers stormed up to arrest Jesus. “When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he,’ they drew back and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). Jesus’ physical presence must have been something.

   Back to Jesus’ reading from Isaiah: if we were like St. Francis of Assisi, we’d make this our to-do list. And Jesus’ reading also shows us how to be the Body in the Epistle reading. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove has reflected (in his book Reconstructing the Gospel) on Jesus' first sermon - and what it tells us about his priorities, and what ours probably should be too: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19).

    Jonathan points out that churches, for some reason, ignore this mission, and instead we build up and support "an institution where people like us show up to receive spiritual nourishment. Whatever material ministry the church engaged in was secondary... Works of mercy are imagined as auxiliary ministries. But what if the church was something else? What if it was the movement Jesus invited people into when he invited them to join together in setting the oppressed free?"

  His church got out a map of Goldsboro (where he was a pastor) and drew a circle with a 2-mile radius around their building and said "This is where we're called to set the oppressed free. Whatever is enslaving people, we commit to fighting it by the power of the Spirit."

  What if your church, if my church, laid out a map and drew a circle with a radius of 2 or 5 miles, and asked this question: Who's oppressed, and why? And what can we do (besides the frequent resort to blaming or ignoring)? What enslaves people? Alcohol? Work pressure? Outsized expectations? Lousy work environment? Racial prejudice?

   And then we make it our business to join Jesus in his business of bringing good news to those places and to those people, to work for freedom and recovery. That, indeed, would be the reconstruction of the Gospel, the dawning of God's kingdom right here, where we live, work, and worship.

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   Check out my new 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 January 19? 2nd after Epiphany

    Preachers always want, on this weekend, to make note of Martin Luther King, deploying some story from his life or some of his remarkable words – especially during these days when race as an issue is up for grabs, as if it reared its head just a few months ago. We have great, hopeful texts this Sunday!   Isaiah 62:1-5. God’s promise of vindication feels as perilous as it is alluring. God’s reversal of suffering is a vital hope – but would we have the disposition not to sink into a nya nya nya nya nya taunting in return? And yet, after so much shaming Israel has undergone, and others in our world (to whom we don’t generally preach!), vindication is only healthy and holy.

   The imagery shimmers with beauty: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” You wonder if the average Israelite ever saw a shiny crown or a bejeweled diadem. In 1953, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the heavy St. Edward’s Crown, of 22 carat gold, a foot tall, velvet and ermine, set with 444 precious stones, her scepter also of gold, with 333 diamonds. When she knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord, did she ponder the crown of unmatched beauty that Jesus wore as he trudged to Calvary and breathed his last? I wonder how heavy it felt on Charles's head?

   Israel, and we in the Church, value words over things, always. The long-shamed Israelites are promised a new batch of adjectives: once Forsaken and Desolate, now they are Delightful and Married. For all its woes, marriage looms for us, not as the ideal life, but as a potent image of what the divine intimacy with us can be. Ponder what theologians have done with the erotic but not pornographic Song of Songs over the centuries! The vindication might look like King’s last speech in Memphis, getting to the Promised Land, or his Lincoln Memorial speech envisioning hand-holding and justice rolling down all over the place.

   1 Corinthians 12:1-11. January is a get-serious month for lots of churchgoers. The residual joy of Christmas, it’s cold and ark out, New Year’s resolutions – so perhaps urging folks to think about their place within the Body and to get with it is helpful to the church, and to them and the world. I’m the outlier who worries that the way we talk about “spiritual gifts” might be tinged with a little paganism – which is Paul’s concern! Are my native strengths, unearthed in interest and ability inventories, really “spiritual” gifts? Do I do what I like, and what I’m good at, for God? Yes – but the spiritual gifts might be alien to my nature, surprising to my preconceived notions, something hard or uncomfortable, something I’m no good at, something noticed only in my brokenness. Remember Leonard Cohen’s line? “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

   It’s all about the “common good” (verse 7), the Greek sumpheron literally meaning “bearing together.” Uphill battle for the clergy, persuading hyper-individualists that it’s all about the common good, the health of the Body, not me and my satisfactions. Martin Luther King, Jr. was endowed with remarkable gifts – not so he could get rich and famous, but for the building up of the community.

   And in such divided times, politically and religiously. Why not just divide and go be with Christians like us? Hans Urs von Balthasar cuts to the quick: “We cannot find the dimensions of Christ’s love other than in the community of the church, where the vocations and charisms distributed by the Spirit are shared: each person must tell the others what special knowledge of the Lord has been shown to him. For no one can tread simultaneously all the paths of the love given to the saints: while one explores the heights, another experiences the depths and a third the breadth. Noe one is alone under the banner of the Spirit, the Son and the Father; only the whole Church is the Bride of Christ, and that only as a vessel shaped by him to receive his fulness.” Church division impairs and eviscerates the Body, and shrinks our knowledge of God, much less our ability to do good for God and to bear witness to a divided world!

   John 2:1-11. This wedding scene is profound beyond any preacher’s abilities, a mystery we can ponder forever. I might set the stage with some dumb humor. If you go to Cana today, they sell little pottery contraptions obviously equipped with some dye inside so that when you pour water in the top, it comes out red. And then there’s the kooky greeting card I’ve received too many times to count where the policeman has pulled a priest, asking him “Reverend, have you been drinking?” Reply: “Just water, officer.” Policeman: “Then why do I smell wine?” Priest: “Good Lord! He’s done it again!”

  One of our earthiest Jesus stories: so mundane, attending a wedding, with his mother. He’s a little snarky with her – and we have to notice that her words to the hosts, “Do whatever he tells you” (verse 5) is the best counsel ever. Wine requires time, aging, vintaging – but Jesus’ batch is ready, and tasty immediately. Is he showing off, still maturing from a Bruce Almighty-ish dazzler to a more mature raiser of the dead and healer of the blind?

   Jesus’ first miracle: he’s not on stage, just one guy in a crowd of guests. Easy for the preacher to say Be sure he’s on your guest list! Or Can you notice Jesus in a crowd? Or Jesus blesses love, relationships, commitments being made. How many of his parables touched on wine and wedding feasts? He’d been to weddings, drank and produced the wine – so he knew.

   The story begins in disappointment, in there not being enough. Isn’t this the spiritual malaise for our people? They don’t think they have enough, or that they are enough. Jesus bolts from the gate clarifying he’s not about scarcity but abundance. He doesn’t produce just enough wine, but way, way more than is required, just as he made so much bread (John 6) there were basketsful left over. Sam Wells theologizes brilliantly on abundance, how there’s more than enough with God, and for us (in God’s Companions, especially). God gives us everything we need, and more. Not everything we want, but what matters. Indeed, God gives, gives, and gives, more and more, more than enough – and it’s a celebration, a party, a feast. That’s why the first miracle is at an extended festive celebration – as a hint that Christianity isn’t some dour, boring, stiff thing, but immense joy.

   Rudolf Bultmann points out that John is less interested in the miraculous per se, but rather on the revelation of the glory of Jesus. And as Wells ponders things, John 2 “is a story of the inadequacy of fallen creation being transformed by the generosity of God. Can we who preach come up with a story to match the marvel here? It’s hard, in our flattened, pedestrian, dull world.

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   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 January 12? The Baptism of the Lord

    The renewal of Baptism we do on this day, as much as any service all year, moves me. Seeing the people in line, dipping a finger into the font, touching their foreheads, mouths, making the sign of the cross occasionally, each one bringing some hope, expectation, hopefully zeroing in on the whole point of a new year. I love the people coming, standing in line, many largely clueless about the deep meaning of it all, yet eager to receive, to be blessed. A mystery, in the best sense.

   Sometimes, instead of preaching the obvious text of the day, I like to ponder the texts the characters in the obvious text knew and loved, and that may well have resonated with them on the day of the obvious text. 

   Isaiah 43:1-7. Jesus, and John knew their Scriptures – so did this eloquent moment in Isaiah occur to either or both as Jesus stepped into that stream, and a voice was overheard from heaven? “Do not fear, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.” So insistent! “When you pass through the waters, through the fire…” The Jordan waters were overflowing with historical memory as Jesus passed through – and there’s some fire in the way the Baptism is narrated! Then, Isaiah revealing God’s words: “You are precious in my sight – and honored! And I love you!” Pondering this, we realize the Baptism was super-special, but in full continuity with the heart of God for centuries, the latest chapter in a long narrative of “Don’t fear, I call you by name, you are precious.”

   Acts 8:14-17. With no New Testament, no catechism, no books of theology, it’s no wonder the early Christians were baffled and utterly mixed up about Baptism. In the Holy Spirit? What? You only baptized using Jesus’ name? What an egregious error! I could theologize about Baptism, the Spirit’s role in it, etc., but this little text leaves me a little cold, and maybe baffled with the first guys standing around with quizzical looks.

   Luke 3:15-17, 21-22. Open up your Gospel parallels, and you notice Luke is onto some interesting stuff. “As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning…” Not just seeking to repent and be cleansed, but rippling with anticipation, and asking a lot of questions! – which must be good, despite clergy and parent compulsions to be answer-people. The Greek rendered “questioning” is dialogizomenon. They were dialoguing! I’d love to listen in on those conversations! Fitzmyer translates this nicely: “They were piqued with curiosity.”

   Unlike many of our baptisms, nothing sweet unfolds, no grinning families posing for Facebook. There’s a purifying, judgment, the fire. Søren Kierkegaard’s ribald mockery of thinly religious people bringing infants for the sacrament, Karl Barth’s decision to oppose infant baptism (including for his own children!) after his jarring pastoral experience of its trivialization – or Annie Dillard’s jaunty counsel that we should wear crash helmets in worship: countless thinkers shout to awaken us to the weightiness of baptism.

   Luke understates the physical baptism itself, instead fixing our attention on what Jesus did immediately afterward (and it's the afterward that is depicted in the Saint John's Bible!): “When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying.” He was praying. And then – then! – the heavens opened. The Greek verb borders on the violent: schizomenous is more like “ripped open” (captured, maybe, in Giotto's messiness at the top of his fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel, depicted above). If something opens, it can close easily. But if it’s ripped open, lots of luck getting it closed! Through that permanently ripped open heaven, the Spirit descends on Jesus, “in bodily form” Luke says, like a dove. And the voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Is it a faithful theological move to turn that “You are beloved” on the congregation?

   The question, Why did Jesus need to be baptized? - answered eloquently by Barth, "no one came to the Jordan as laden with sin as he," our sin, that is... assumes there are levels of goodness. Jesus must be "good enough" not to need baptism, whereas scuzzy sinners need it plenty. I may drift to Fr. Greg Boyle's new book, The Whole Language. His interactions with former gang members, homies, is riveting, and healing. They feel like krap, including when they hear clergy speak of the burden of sin. He always responds, "God sees son, not sin," or "You are beautiful, you are good, you are wonderful." What does God say to Jesus wading in the Jordan? Not Well-lived! or Well-repented, but Beloved. Dare we suggest God sees Son, not Sin in us? 

   The dove transports us back to the ark, the bird of redemption as the perilous floodwaters subsided, an airborne sign of God’s presence, and assurance. Notice this is the first, and maybe the clearest, mention or explication of the Trinity in Scripture. No wonder we use the Trinitarian formula in Baptism! No theological postulates or explanations about this Threeness in God. It’s a story, it’s all relationship, everybody else gets drawn in.

   Theologians have fretted over why Jesus was baptized, being sinless. Clearly he comes to the river to be one with us, to bear the sins of others, indeed of the world. I’d fret more over the idea here that the heavens were visibly opened. Everybody got a glimpse into whatever’s up there. Streets of gold, pearly gates, angelic choirs with harps? I can’t preach on the heavens being ripped open without recalling Martin Luther King’s last sermon in Memphis: “It’s alright to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism.  But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here.”

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   Check out my book from last year, 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.