What can we say February 23? 7th after Epiphany

      I cannot imagine why a preacher would forego the Old Testament lection for this Sunday – ever, but especially now, given the severe splintering we’re experiencing in society, and in the church.  Genesis 45 is the theological high water mark of the Old Testament, and is a peer of even the best the New Testament has to offer.  Reconciliation should be the fixed point in all our thinking, imagination, labor, and prayers. 

     I would commend to you the resources we pulled together back in the winter as our church engaged in a two month long, intensive series on Reconciliation, featuring Christena Cleveland and her investigations into the hidden forces that keep us apart, why African-American spirituals still speak across the racial divide today, how a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird can help us, ways to understand people who are different, paths to interact on politics, and more – as we fulfill Paul’s commission to us to be reconcilers, just as we are reconciled (2 Corinthians 5), as individuals, within families, communities, our denomination, and the nation and world.

     I would also commend to you a stunning Ted Radio Hour podcast featuring Suzanne Barakat, a Muslim striving for reconciliation after her brother and sisters-in-law were brutally killed in Chapel Hill.  I was listening in my car, and had to pull of the road until I stopped crying.  This could work in a sermon on this text well; further down I’ll get to the climax of Lord of the Rings and Good Will Hunting – but the text really doesn’t need any help.

     No biblical story narrates the grief, time, joy and miracle of reconciliation as powerfully as the drama of Joseph.  The emotional intensity of the climax in chapter 45 is intense, and you have to let it be intense, and feel it in your bones; let the story take your breath away or they won’t feel it either.  The Egyptians overheard Joseph’s sobbing in the next room; people in the pews had best hear it in the sanctuary.  The weeping and embracing are just astonishing, and so beautiful – and I can’t help at some point racing ahead to the riveting moment when Joseph is reunited with his father; “he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a long time” (Gen. 46:29).

     You can’t just plop down in chapter 45 either; the backstory matters.  Without over-explicating every detail, the preacher has to pick up where the story begins, in chapter 37, with a pathetically dysfunctional family, Joseph’s dream that was from God but felt like sham arrogance, the brothers’ cruel dispatching of him and then the wretched way they shattered their father’s heart, Joseph’s rise, and then fall, and then rise in Egypt.  Don’t assume people know the story, but then don’t expend twelve minutes retelling it either.  Urge your people to read it at home, promising it’s better than House of Cards or Game of Thrones.

       Here’s an interesting detail from the Hebrew: of all his sons, Jacob loved Joseph best – because his deepest affection was for his mother Rachel, not the other mothers of his other boys.  And so, Jacob dressed this son, not in an “amazing technicolor dreamcoat” (as in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical - which is such silliness compared to his other work!), but (as the Hebrew puts it) in “long sleeves.” The other brothers wore short sleeves, meaning their labor was in the fields, in the heat, where briars would get tangled in long sleeves. Joseph was established in the house with those long sleeves, in a position of comfort and power over the brothers.  It was that long-sleeved garment of privilege denied them that they bloodied and handed to their father.

   Marilynne Robinson has reflected so profoundly on the backstory - those years between when they did what they did to Joseph and the rediscovery. How did Jacob live with those ten sons? He never asked if they had done away with Joseph – “a question too terrible to be asked, a confession too terrible to be made, and Jacob growing old in this silence.” And, with them, did Jacob shiver when he recalled being himself a horribly flawed sibling? “Since the presumed death of Joseph, Jacob would have noticed a grim bond among them that excluded him. And he would not have been able to put aside the bitter knowledge that sons can deceive their fathers. Alone as he had been with his guilt as he stood absurdly disguised, lying to blind old Isaac, he might find a semblance of it in the tense caution of their dealings with him.” And isn’t Robinson right about Jacob’s reunion with Joseph? “But the days of many years have been full of dread and loss and grief and suspicion, and no ending can be happy enough to change this.” Boom. Brilliant.

     To focus on chapter 45 I wouldn’t spend too much time on Joseph’s character – which isn’t really the point.  He has considerable brilliance, and a moral compass we do not see often in our days.  But that would be to moralize a theologically robust story.  The shock of God’s way comes when the famine compelled the brothers to go down to Egypt, the breadbasket of the world. In a stunning plot twist, it was Joseph from whom they had to ask for food. He would give them far, far more. Naturally they didn’t recognize him; but he recognized them. After dallying with them a bit, he dismissed his entourage from the room, let loose long pent-up emotions, gathered himself, dried his tears, and revealed his secret: “I am Joseph, your brother.”

     When I preach on this, I let the emotion drip, I leave time for it to flow around the room and into the souls of people.  His next words?  “Is my father alive?”  Again, in a pre-cell-phone era, he did not know, and hoped against hope; the brothers, who had despised father and brother, had to feel the gut-wrenchingness of his question.  Mind you, the Bible doesn’t tell us how they felt!  So we have space to find our own emotions from our own life stories in there somewhere – without reading in so much you don’t hear Joseph’s story any longer.  The brothers had to be stricken with shock, horror, guilt, trepidation, remorse.

     But how did Joseph deal with those who had treated him and his father so cruelly? His words must have taken light years to sink in: “Do not be distressed; don’t be angry with yourselves because you sold me here. For God sent me here to preserve life” (Gen 45:5). Even after the glorious reunion with his father, and then even after Jacob’s death, Joseph said the most remarkable thing: “Do not be afraid. You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, so that many people should be kept alive” (Gen 50:20). Joseph forgave; he cast their common, broken life into the hands of God’s larger intentions. Testimony to God’s miracle – in the big story, but then also in Joseph’s gentle disposition.  Who is capable of what he just said to them?

     Notice the brothers weren’t given a “second chance,” another crack at getting it right. They never got it right; they never made up for what they had done. God did not depend on any attitude change among the brothers. God quite simply used the evil they perpetrated and transformed it into good.

     Not that God caused them to do evil: God did not make them sell their brother or break their father’s heart. But God gathered up their misdeeds, the broken will of God, and pieced it all together for God’s good purpose. Joseph’s leadership was defined by seeing, understanding, and then articulating this. He brought healing to the fractured family, and food to a hungry world – or rather, his leading was God’s imperceivable, mysterious use of his life, and then his awed witness to it.  It’s so important to get this nuance: in my Will of God book, I carefully distinguish that God uses evil but doesn’t cause it; and we need to say God uses every evil for good.  Some evils are just evil, and it eviscerates and trivializes the suffering to try sunnily to claim God brings some good from it.

   Joseph's refusal to enact his power reveals indirectly the heart of God. Marilynne Robinson once more: PIf human beings are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint,” and then that, “to refrain, to put side power, is godlike." Philippians 2 anyone? She continues: God “can change and not change,” and “immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency.”

     Leadership expert Ron Heifetz speaks of the need for leaders who climb up into the “balcony” and see larger patterns in the workplace.  Joseph was caught up far higher than the balcony; he was granted a view from heaven itself.  Claus Westermann (in his Genesis 37-50 commentary) wisely noticed that God did not merely use the evil of the brothers; God could have done that without the brothers ever meeting up with Joseph. No, “God’s plan is to bring the evil devised by the brothers to good in such a way that there can be forgiveness.”

     So many threads to follow.  Reconciliation takes time, a long time.  Reconciliation isn’t forgive and forget; it’s genuine healing – for everybody involved.  Joseph needed the healing as much as the brothers and their father did.  The beneficiaries of this reconciliation?  Not just this family, but people who had never known them!

     If ever a text shouted to the preacher “Trust me!” it is this one.  You don’t need to make it relevant; it’s more relevant than anything you can devise.  You don’t have to make it interesting or funny; it’s the greatest story ever told.

     I might touch on “Joseph could control himself no longer.”  We are control freaks – but the healing comes when we yield control and let the emotions roll.  The emotion isn’t Oh, I feel God! but rather, Wow, God is releasing, and healing my emotions!  Think of the joy when the hobbits are reunited in Rivendell after the ring is destroyed at Mordor (The Return of the King); J.R.R. Tolkien told a friend that when he wrote this scene, his tears kept smearing the ink.  He never saw the video of course, but Peter Jackson handled this so well.

     Or the scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean embraces Will and keeps repeating, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.”  Very Genesis 45ish.  Of course, the climactic scene of all climactic scenes is the cross (“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good”) – or is it the resurrection? Or that breakfast reunion by Galilee (John 21)?

   1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50 contains what we United Methodists read at the graveside – fittingly so. Theologically, we might wonder how much we Christians acknowledge bodily death, and thus bodily resurrection, with cremations and inurnments often before the funeral service proper. Paul doesn’t blush over the idea of a deceased body – which for him isn’t just reality but the palpable precondition of resurrection! I’m not sure if the sermon is the best time to help our people understand that Christianity isn’t about the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body – not a resuscitation, but a resurrection, a transformation of the body, which is still and always a body, a “spiritual body,” not one or the other.

   Luke 6:27-38. When Jesus commands, it’s all love, all beauty, all hope. “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:8). Jesus dares to dream we might just become perfect in love in this life – a Methodist, if I’ve ever seen one!

   Jesus’ invitation to Love our Enemies could not be more shocking, radical, and unsought in our day. We are proud of our rage. We feel quite entitled to our anger – which weirdly feels like goodness, which reveals how very far we have strayed from the way of our Lord. Our rancor is rooted in idolatry: as I’ve said repeatedly for years now, today’s idolatry is our political ideology, which induces fear and anger, proving it is not of God. Love your enemies. Do not judge, or pity, or criticize, or demean, or avoid them. Love them. Preach this constantly.

   “Give to anyone who begs.” But how? Via donations to helping agencies? What do we give? Spare change? Or simple kindness? I’ve seen several saints in my lifetime who knew how to handle the random beggar on the street. You don’t avert your gaze. You don’t plunk down a dollar. You stop, ask What’s your name? How might I pray for/with you?

   The Golden Rule may be Jesus’ least Jesus-y and yet most popular, most American saying. But it’s not a tit for tat deal. Jesus invites us to dig deep into our need for kindness, for mercy, as the simplest motivation to be kind and merciful to others.

   “Expect nothing in return” (verse 35) is huge, and underrated. Christian blithely say You get so much out of helping others! As if it’s a deal for us, like the old Kingdom Assignment scheme of investing some money for God. What do we expect for the good we do? At least some gratitude, right? Or for the recipient to get it together? Can’t we understand how such giving isn’t really giving at all? Vaclav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia, said “Hope is the ability to do something simply because it is good, whether it stands a chance of succeeding or not.” Or of giving us whatever we seek for ourselves, like gratitude, feeling good about ourselves or the difference we’re making in the world.

   Not judging: should be easy, since we’re no good at it, and it’s not our responsibility! In all of Jesus’ admonitions here, “It is not merely social reciprocity, but self-transcending gratitude for the mercy of God” (David Lyle Jeffrey). And that pithy proverb in v. 38, “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over”? My grandmother used to say that. I wonder what it meant, and how it felt to her? It’s okay for the preacher to leave this question dangling.

   A whole sermon or a lifetime of sermons could dwell on Mercy in Luke 6. Pausing over this is haunting, and hopeful. Name it, and every listener realizes I never get much mercy. I never give that much either. Let me close with an excerpt from my “Merciful” section in my book, The Beatitudes for Today: How distant is “mercy” from all the ad campaigns with which we are peppered?  They curiously pander to me, saying “You deserve only the best mattress,” “You deserve a new car,” “You deserve a week in the Bahamas.”  These billboards do not know me, but they drive me away from mercy, which has nothing to do with deserving.  We are so practiced at self-justification, at rationalizing and explaining.  We feel entitled.  I’m owed a good life, and if I don’t get it, I get busy blaming somebody.  And so mercy is a stranger.  Even when we talk about heaven:  Mr. Jones, an elderly do-gooder at the Church dies; and what do people say?  “If anybody gets into heaven it will be Mr. Jones.  Look at all he did!”  And we never find ourselves inside the circle, kneeling, embraced by the loving arms of the Father; we stay outside, spectating, looking in, never knowing mercy.

     What is mercy?  Think back over your life.  Mercy is not something we define so much as something for which we cry out in desperation.  A kid is about to pound the daylights out of me on the playground – and what was I required to say out loud?  “Mercy.”  A terrible, horrible mistake has been made, smashing a well-arranged life, and your regret is so intense, no strategy can extricate you from the mess, and the only cry left to make it “Mercy.”  You gaze at the crucifix, and you keep looking, letting it nestle jarringly down into the marrow of your self, and finally you get it, and the only plea you know you must make, but that you can make, is “Mercy.”

     Deep inside, don’t you crave mercy? to be loved despite your craziness, to be handled tenderly?  And don’t we need to be tender, merciful, forgiving to others?  We are such hard, tough, cool, smooth, crusty people – but how sad, how tragic.  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.  We are not very open to mercy, and so we are not so merciful, and so we receive no mercy.  Jesus anticipated this Beatitude would have to be reflexive – just as he did when he taught the disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Forgive as we forgive; the merciful shall receive mercy.

   How hard is it to be merciful?  Mercy is not doing nothing.  The Greek word eleos suggests the connotation of pouring out, the way we might pour out a flask of oil.  Mercy is a pouring out.  Mercy is when I unscrew the lid on what is precious to me and pour it out on you.  I may not think I have all that much to pour out, but the merciful pour anyway, thinking only of the wounded one who needs the healing balm of mercy.  Noting how beleaguered Jesus’ listeners were, Bonhoeffer adds, “As if their own needs and their own distress were not enough, they take upon themselves the distress and humiliation and sin of others.  They have an irresistible love for the downtrodden, the sick, the wretched, the wronged, the outcast, and all who are tortured with anxiety.  No distress is too great; no sin too appalling for their pity.  If any man falls into disgrace, the merciful will sacrifice their own honour to shield him, and take his shame upon themselves.  In order that they may be merciful, they cast away the most priceless treasure of human life, their personal dignity and honour.  For the only honour and dignity they know is their Lord’s own mercy, to which alone they owe their very lives.”

     This wisdom bears repetition, and much reflection.  The merciful are far less interested in their own honor than in mercy; their only honor is mercy.  The merciful do not get tangled in a thicket of who deserves what, or calculations of whether their mercy will be productive or not.  The merciful are merciful because they have received mercy from the same Jesus who said “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”  Bonhoeffer saw the heart of this thought:  “Only he who lives by the forgiveness of his sin in Jesus Christ will rightly think little of himself.  He will know that his own wisdom reached the end of its tether when Jesus forgave him.”

     Mercy eludes those who are shocked and mortified by sin or suffering.  The merciful get so absorbed in God’s mercy that they see sin and suffering differently.  The merciful are never offended by anything, for they have lost interest in sin, so fascinated are they by God’s mercy.  The Beatitudes truly are a ladder.  For it is only the poor in spirit who can be merciful.  Those who mourn know more keenly than anyone else how to be merciful.  The meek have no reason not to be merciful.  Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness understand that mercy is the food and drink.

     “Merciful” is not just an inner attitude, although it is an inner attitude.  “Merciful” is something you do.  You plan to get busy being merciful, but then you are prepared at a moment’s notice to let the schedule be shredded, for like that Good Samaritan, you see somebody beaten up by the side of the road, and instead of guessing why he’s in the pickle he’s in, instead of being so ultra-responsible as to be punctual for your next meeting, you are merciful.  Otherwise we live merely in earshot of Jesus, and never get close to the one who said, “Blessed are the merciful,” the one who was and is Mercy itself.

     How revolutionary!  How liberating!  Mercy frees me from self-centeredness.  Pouring myself out of my own ego trap is the way to joy.  Wendy Farley put it pointedly:  “Liberation from the tedious weight of one’s own miserable little ego is not necessarily self-sacrificing but can be profoundly fulfilling.”  Mercy frees me from the need to “fix” whatever is wrong.  Mercy is able quite simply to love, to be compassionate, whether the hurt is curable or not, whether the wrong can be righted or not.  Mercy can just stay with the one in need of mercy.

   And in mercy, I show respect, I shed dignity on the one whose self-respect and sense of dignity have been shredded.  Mercy does not spout forth all the answers.  Job’s friends are not very merciful friends, for they pontificate theologically about the presumed causes of his suffering, when really he needed friends to weep and sit in the dirt with him.  Mercy has no need to justify or explain.  Mercy never trivializes suffering with trite explanations of “why.”  Mercy listens, gets inside the other’s skin, letting the tears soak into your own shoulder.  For as we show mercy, and receive mercy, our hearts are purged and we are awestruck to glimpse some purity inside.

What can we say February 9? 5th after Epiphany

   Three great texts this week! Isaiah certainly, and probably 1 Corinthians also, are well worth the preacher exploring devotionally, apart from sermon preparations; both speak deeply to the clergy!

   Isaiah 6:1-13 is intriguing in so many ways. An unusually precise date and political context are provided, reminding us that Isaiah’s words aren’t the fruit of rumination, reflection or study. God spoke to him. And clearly he speaks to the political and social turmoil of his day, just as we preachers must, however delicately, however boldly we try to be courageous yet nonpartisan. Nobody called Isaiah nonpartisan…

   Isaiah 6 might challenge or heighten how we think about worship. He’s in the sanctuary, which is splendidly appointed. The room, its iconography and décor all come to life – but apparently no one else noticed. The prophet sees what others don’t see; the preacher must see what others don’t see or can’t see, or at least not yet. Did God come his way (as I’ve assumed)? Or was he what Walter Brueggemann called “an earthly intruder into the heavenly scene”?

    Might worship be as holy, as “hot” as it was for Isaiah? I remind my people periodically of what Amos Wilder wrote – so they might catch the vision: “Going to church is like approaching an open volcano where the world is molten and hearts are sifted. The altar is like a third rail that spatters sparks, the sanctuary is like the chamber next to the atomic oven: there are invisible rays, and you leave your watch outside.” Or Annie Dillard’s lovely thought: “I do not find Christians… sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”

    Isaiah’s response to God’s immense holiness? He is awestruck (do we get awestruck? – as church people or even as pastors?), and as a reflex of that can only mutter “Woe is me.” Isaiah is no doubt a pretty good person, maybe even quite holy – but in the searing holiness of God’s presence, he realizes his woeful inadequacy. He is “reduced to nothing” (John Calvin). Maybe we miss out on God because we get too chummy with God. May talk of calling (here or in our Gospel) only begins when we are struck dumb by the holy God. Why after all did those fishermen traipse off after a guy they'd just met?

    The called are awed - and then saddened. We hear God, and then hear what God hears; we "let our hearts be broken by the things that break the heart of God" (World Vision founder Bob Pierce). When grownups are dissed or wounded by someone, we get mad, we want to get even or flee. Children though get sad, and they still want to love. Spiritual maturity is in the sadness, not the anger, in the love in the face of rejection. Isaiah is asked to exit the temple and re-enter a world that will make his heart, one with God's, sad. The awe will help...

    But he’s not shattered; being reduced to nothing, realizing our meekness is the opening for grace. Brueggemann again charts a move in this text “from the vision of splendor to the awareness of inadequacy to readiness for dispatch.” “Here Am I, send me” – and we Methodists will sing #593 (after opening with my lifetime favorite hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy”!).

    Any response to any call from God, large or small, lifelong or just for Sunday afternoon, requires new habits, a new discipline. Listeners shrink back, as this sounds like taking medicine or something unpleasant. I just read Tommy Tomlinson's wonderful book, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America, in which he reports on how hard it is to lose weight, the psychological dynamics, etc. Dropping the first few pounds required self-understanding, including why he'd resisted discipline for so long: "It felt like so much work. It is work. But the loose life - the life that looked like so much fun - turned out to be a fraud. It got me to 460 pounds. It threatens my life. It limits me more than a disciplined life ever could." The cost of discipleship vs. the cost of non-discipleship - maybe an idea that will preach?

   What stuns me, and might be a great help for all of us, is that God frankly informs Isaiah his ministry, which he must engage in, will in fact fail. We fret over failure; we worry about exhaustion. Otto Kaiser captured the hidden message in Isa. 6: “The preacher of the gospel, who faces the apparent failure of his ministry, and who is therefore tempted to despair, may recognize from the example of Isaiah that he is required to be wholly on the side of God in his heart, to let him be used by him as a tool, in whatever way God pleases.” – which yields “a peace and a freedom independent of outward success or failure.”

   I'm enjoying Tom Shippey's book about the Vikings (the early medieval raiders, not the football team!). What is striking about their eloquent poetry is the way they honor and celebrate death and loss. There's little poetry about their many victories. But being crushed? They believed that "the only thing that could make you a loser would be giving up." In battle, the odds stacked against you? "What was the best was showing you could turn the tables, spoil your enemy's victory, make a joke out of death, die laughing." Such people are "impossible to daunt." The Vikings weren't Christian, but it's hard not to think of Christ's death - and our mission, our calling, Isaiah-style.

    For clergy and for your laity who feel they are failing, who are surely exhausted by the frustrating labor that is striving for God’s kingdom here on earth, I would urgently commend Marianne Williamson’s flat out brilliant Goop podcast. I’ve listened to it four times, and will again. It gives me courage, and good sense. Of course, Isaiah’s words are sealed up, and they do have an afterlife beyond his own life. A sermon may have zero impact today or tonight or this week. But years later? After you and I are dead and gone? Who knows?

    1 Corinthians 15:1-11 strikes me as a neglected but hugely important text. It’s like the creed used by the earliest Christians, has that poetic cadence, etc. What a lavish claim: people saw Jesus – not just a handful of biased guys with a vested interest, but to 500. It’s like a dare: go ask them! Hard to fool 500 about something like a resurrection. Clearly, the resurrection in question was no myth or spiritual insight. It’s physical, a real body, albeit a “spiritual,” transformed body – and it was sufficiently awe-inspiring (like Isaiah’s flying seraphim and cherubim!) as to incite less than brilliant fishermen to risk life and limb preaching the Gospel all over creation.

   And I love it that James is named. If anyone could step up to cast aspersions on the divinity or even glorious status of Jesus, it would be his brother. They'd grown up together, shared chores, got in quite a few spats. How did James feel when his brother achieved fame? Was he like Luke 15's older brother, staying home with mom, doing the right thing? No greater "proof" exists of Jesus being whom the Gospels claim he is than that his own sibling became a follower.

   Paul adds his own personal testimony. I suspect in our culture, so bogged down and confused by novels/movies like The DaVinci Code (Sir Leigh Teabing, played by Ian McKellen – Gandalf, right?? – sure looks smart and right, but it’s sheer fiction) and all those bestselling Christ-hater books, for the preacher to be able to say I know the questions, the speculations, the critics; but I, as a guy, not officially your preacher but as a person, I really do believe Jesus rose from the dead. I’ve staked my life on it. And it’s not just a belief qua belief. It is “the good news” – “in which we stand.” We stand, we don’t sit, we don’t observe. We stand up. As I have standing in, stand up for.

   And then Luke 5:1-11. Archaeologists, in one of the most amazing excavations in history, found a fishing boat in the Sea of Galilee dating to the time of Jesus. Wish it said S.S. Simon Peter on the prow! This is a boat Jesus most certainly saw. Might have stepped into it. A real boat – and so Jesus’ calling to these fishermen, for me, takes on a reality. Nothing mythic or spiritual.

    The story about the huge catch of fish is doubly interesting: Jesus does his miracle thing, but probably more importantly, their fishing business has never been better! David Lyle Jeffrey (Brazos/Luke): “At the absolute peak of their success as literal Genessaret fishermen, they forsook all and followed him.” Real guys with a business that’s booming, finally – and they abandoned all that to trek off to… well, they had no idea where, or what would happen, or how it would turn out.

    Of course, the church fathers made a big deal that a sanctuary might just look like a ship that’s upside down. The Latin word for boat, navis? Like the “nave” of the sanctuary? We are a boat. The Jesus boat, cast out onto the waters of the world, fishing for people, saving lives, bringing them safely to shore. Corny? Yeah… and holy.

What can we say February 2? 4th after the Epiphany

    Jeremiah 1:4-10. What a dazzling text! Hopefully, the preacher will reflect on her own call – perhaps not in the sermon, but in devotion and preparation. You were called… when? How? Circumstances? Was it earlier than even you realized? You may well have agonies and regrets like Jeremiah! Owning your calling liberates you to help people hear their calling. And given Jeremiah’s full story, it’s a long, tough road of sorrows, frustrations, lack of success and constant questioning.

   It’s not an accidental, oh if you get around to it sometime, should you choose to do something for God sort of thing. Jeremiah was called, not in his mother’s womb, but before. It’s not some predestiny. God made him, his parents, all of us, and for the sole purpose of living into the calling. We think responding to the call is some deeply spiritual thing, but it’s really just realizing God is God. Walter Brueggemann points out, on Jeremiah 1, that “the accent falls not on the personal struggle of the man, but on the substantive sovereign word of the Lord.”

   My book, Birth: the Mystery of Being Born, explores life in utero. You once were ridiculously small, mini-microscopic, entirely vulnerable, hardly a chooser. Doesn’t God’s call predate your independent choices, or even hearing? A fetus can detect sound at about 26 weeks! Can it hear God? At 26 weeks, still eggplant-sized, you may well have attended worship, overheard the hymns (if muffled) – and you were nourished on the Eucharist. When I hand a pregnant woman the body of our Lord and say "The body of Christ, the bread of life," it flashes through my mind that the child in there can hear me, albeit in a muffled way. I want to say "The body of Christ, given for y'all." Already worshipping God, part of the Body.

   Typically, like Isaiah, Jonah, Moses, Mary and everybody else, Jeremiah has solid reasons he can’t be used by God. In his case, he’s just too young – a youth, a child, a na’ar, age unspecified. God is never impressed by why we can’t do what God asks. It’s as if God prefers to ask those who have good cause. It’s God. It’s not ability, but availability.

   Easy to say something corny about youth – but hearing younger voices, which the elderly might dismiss as naïve, unrealistic, or exuberant, is the way to life. Greta Thunberg is only the most famous of countless people who are just too young, but who awaken in the elderly who will listen the truths and vocations they abandoned for lousy reasons. Does a youth read the Scripture? Dare you involve a youth in the sermon, asking what God might be asking of the church?

   It’s profound, and God’s way, that the call is to uproot and breakdown, to build and plant. We’d rather God just build and plant. But uprooting and tearing down has to happen first. Marianne Williamson said that if you invite God into your life, you think he’ll show up like an interior decorator to spruce the place up a little – but then you look out your window, and a big wrecking ball is swinging your way. The whole thing has to be torn down to the foundations.

  Jeremiah nixes the fantasies of those who cry that religion and politics don’t mix. Jeremiah’s life and ministry didn’t just happen during the reigns of Josiah and Jehoiakim. He was directed their way, to their policies and the foolish public behavior of God’s people. And what a moment in time! Josiah ushered in soaring dreams and immense success – political, economic, and even religious. But then, tragically he was killed at age 39 (like Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O’Connor, Frederic Chopin, Amelia Earhart). What a plunge into darkness was the reign of his successor, Jehoiakim. Faked religion, cruelty to the needy, idolatry and suppression of prophecy. In both settings, Jeremiah proclaimed a message of repentance and hope.

   1 Corinthians 13:1-13. How we fulfill our calling, and our calling itself, are clarified by Paul in this famous chapter. Lovely that it’s read at weddings. But Paul didn’t pause in dictating Corinthians thinking, Gosh, I’ll compose a poem they can read at weddings. Richard Hays: “The first task for the interpreter of 1 Corinthians 13 is to rescue the text from the quagmire of romantic sentimentality in which popular piety has embedded it.”

   This is one of those texts that doesn’t need much explaining. The preacher can repeat this line or that line, and let it linger, speaking with its own explanatory power. It should be framed though in pointing out that Paul was aiming to reform the confused Corinthians regarding who’s special, who’s really a worshipper and who isn’t. It’s ethical. It’s character formation. Paul would groan or laugh at the way we perceive love as a feeling or mood. It’s action. Discipline.

   I like to ponder how church life, even administration, budgets, boards and meetings, are or could be about love; we shot this video a couple of years ago on love in church structure and administration. Jesus said the whole law is summed up in the command to love. So why not take it up any and everywhere?

   As Corinth was famous for its production of bronze vessels, Paul’s remark about the clanging cymbal would be resounded with them. And that they also made the world’s best mirrors (which weren’t so good in ancient times!) adds some depth to his notion of the way we now see through the glass, the mirror, “darkly.” The Greek is en ainigmati – enigmatically! – as in a riddle. We can see and know God, but not with utter clarity. Not falsely or incorrectly or confusedly, but inducing us to strain always to see more clearly. Love is like that, love that is a character always in formation, re-formation. Or do we do something with Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised - which shows us only our heart's desire?

    Love can be daunting. In A River Runs Through It, the pastor, who lost one of his sons, preached that “Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.”

   This text can profitably read as a little poetic biography of Jesus. The thought occurred to me years ago that Mary, his mother, just might have heard Corinthians being read aloud in worship when she was an older woman. Did she think of her son, the people he touched, his manner, and his crucifixion when she heard these words?

   Luke 4:21-30. Last week we heard the happier opening to this dramatic moment. And I preached on the full story - kind of getting wound up, if you'd like to check it out. No one threw me off the roof afterwards... Jesus, star young Torah student, reads aloud in worship! It’s confusing why the people get so upset. At first blush, it’s because he says the words are fulfilled now, today, here, in him. We’re never sure we really want God’s Word to happen, really, now, here, in us.

   But it’s more. His rumination on the text implies that his activity will be welcomed among the strangers, the foreigners, implying they, his townspeople, are like the persecutors of the prophets of old. Ouch. Try this in worship. You guys won’t hear, but I could get a homeless person or an immigrant or a queer person or… to open up easily to the Gospel. They hauled Jesus right to the precipice outside the city. Did he remember being tempted by the devil to throw himself off the top of the temple? Here we go again! Did he, as he gazed out over that beautiful Jezreel valley, think of Moses looking over the Promised Land? Martin Luther King had a vision of that promised land on the last night of his life in Memphis – and the next day they threw him over the edge, on that balcony.

     And what moment is more mystifying, or more tender and flat out beautiful, than that Jesus simply turned and walked right through the middle of the angry crowd. They stood aside, like the waters of the sea for the people of Israel to pass! – foreshadowing that remarkable moment when the soldiers ramble up to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane – but as soon as he says simply “I am he,” they fall to the ground. What is this power Jesus has? Don’t dare attempt to explain it. Just report. Let it hang in the air. The crowd parted. Jesus walked calmly through. What was that? The lingering silence provides the answer.

***

   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 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.