What can we say April 27? Easter 2

    Acts 5:27-32 portrays in a scene of social, political and religious conflict what the resurrected life looks like. Willie Jennings (in his terrific Acts commentary) eloquently portrays Gamaliel as “the quintessential compromised intellectual who reads history from the wrong side and politics from the sidelines.” He goes on to say he is an “exceptional,” an excellent man – so he’s looking for the divine in what is exceptional. No wonder he missed God showing up in the common, in the flesh.

   What determination could be more pertinent today than “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” With political ideology as our idol, our people do this all the time!

   Notice also that God exalted Jesus – but why? So we can get into heaven? No: “So he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins.” In our Gospel reading we stumble on this same dynamic: Jesus is risen, the Spirit is given – so forgiveness can start happening! We are forgiven, we forgive, forgiveness becomes the very air that we breathe. Correcting confusions about forgiveness matters in preaching. It’s not kiss and make up, it’s not letting bygone be bygones, it’s not saying Oh, it doesn’t really matter. It’s costly, daunting labor. Check out this talk I gave to my church trying to open up why and how forgiveness is a huge thing for us. The turnout was massive – indicating there is a real hunger to explore not just the idea but the real happening of forgiveness.

   Like the Gospel lection to come, where the disciples are locked up by choice but locked up all the same, here in Acts the apostles are locked up – setting God up to prove how “the power to incarcerate will be trumped by the power to free” (Jennings). God indeed is “accustomed to moving through locked doors.”

   Psalm 118:14-29. Such a great text. Feels so Jesus-y, so Christian-ish that it’s crucial to try to hear it in its original context before rushing centuries forward to Holy Week! Mitchell Dahood, in his quirky Psalms commentary linking everything to Ugaritic poetry, rightly points out the tenses in verse 17 should be past. It’s not “I shall not die, but live,” but “I didn’t die, I survived.” Preachers might invite our folks to ponder the mere surprise and gift of having made it thus far. ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far… This simply surviving as a cause of gratitude is at the heart of Frederick Buechner’s eloquent wisdom – which I’ll cite below after we look at Epistle and Gospel.

    The rejected stone becoming the corner can be read as who we are to be as the Body of Christ. 1 Peter 2 speaks of the church as “living stones.” And Paul clarifies that in the Body, it is the weakest member who is the most valuable. Do you have stories of a church, or your church, where some unlikely person becomes the most valuable to growth in compassion and joy? I think of a young girl with various disabilities, or a homeless guy who joined and then took on leadership in my very highly-educated and well-heeled church.

   Revelation 1:4-8. I preached on this for Christ the King back in November! Check out my sermon. We probed how Zeus frequently was spoke of similarly: Zeus was, is and will be. With Jesus it’s is (current reality first!), was, and is to come. It’s the coming that’s peculiar, unique, and saving. God, unlike Zeus, doesn’t remain aloof in the penthouse of some Olympian heaven, tossing down an occasional thunderbolt, but he came down. – my sermon from X the King?

   I also took a fresh approach to the Alpha & Omega. It’s the first and last, so comprehensive – but it’s also a different language. Jesus introduces a fresh way of thinking, talking, listening, requiring some re-training, practice, quite a few stumbles but then some startling new mode of communication and living.

   {I'd mention that this year's lectionary is a long read through Luke - so I'll take this Sunday or the next to cover one of the highlights of all of Scripture: Luke 24:13-35, the marvelous Road to Emmaus story. Check out my blog from an earlier year on it.}

   John 20:19-31 is always a fruitful Easter 2 text, and maybe especially in the pandemic setting, people locked indoors – and then Jesus breathes on them! My earlier blog on this text has lots of illustrative stuff, with Rachel Hollis, Graham Greene, Elie Wiesel, Walter Brueggemann, Simone Weil and Caravaggio!

   We can always ponder what we sing: “Crown him the Lord of love; behold his hands and side, those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” How striking that the scars remain – eternally. Jesus breathed on them! Notice afterward they don’t feel emotionally jazzed up! The gift of the Spirit (as we’d divine that) isn’t about how we feel. No: he breathes on them and seems clearly to be granting to them the power to forgive. The historic “power of the keys.” Don’t think this is a fossil from some guilt-ridden religious past. Our power, our opening to forgive, to invite forgiveness, is huge, and always will be.

   Doubts interest us with Thomas. We cherish them, and lionize him! But it’s a clinging to control, insisting I am the arbiter of truth! Of course, we can urge people to doubt their doubts. Thomas’s doubting wasn’t generalized intellectual questions about God, but simply if the risen, quite physical Jesus really is out and about.

   I’ve never tried it in a sermon, but reflecting on “Much more happened that didn’t make it into this Gospel” could be amazing. If you want your first “for example,” read chapter 21! Isn’t the whole history of the church itself the ongoing account of the other things Jesus did, does and even will be doing?

   OK, here’s the Buechner quote: “In one sense the past is dead and gone, but in another sense, it is not done with at all, or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere. A scrap of some song, a book we read as a child, a stretch of road we used to travel, an old photograph. Suddenly there it all is. Old failures, old hurts. Times too beautiful to tell. 

     We are all such escape artists. We are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except what really matters, except for what is going on inside our own skin. We chatter. We hold each other at bay. It is the same when we are alone. We turn on television, or find some chore that could easily wait. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface. We get tired.

   But there is a deeper need, to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive to ourselves, to the long journeys of our lives. So much has happened. Remembering means a deeper, slow kind of remembering, a searching and finding. ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ goes the old spiritual – but we know it. We are to remember it. And the happiness we have seen, too – precious times, precious people, moments when we were better than we know how to be. 

     And then, we will find beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well. We have survived. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. Many times I have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason. Many times I have loved people too much for their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I remember times I might have given up, but I didn’t. Weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far. A love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. We are never really alone.”

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   Check out my book on, not how to preach, but how to continue preaching, The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.

What can we say May 4? Easter 3

     The impact of the resurrection was immediate, and then lingered. John 21 wasn’t long after Easter; Acts 9 many months later. Both are startling and transformative; conversion in both entails commissioning.

    First, John 21:1-19. I love the statue by the Sea of Galilee at The Primacy of Peter, a church built over a flat stone, allegedly the table where Jesus served breakfast to his disciples. This story has so many riveting details. Jesus cooking breakfast? Eating fish together? The fishing: notice in the Gospels the disciples never catch any fish without Jesus’ help!

     The haunting conversation between Peter and Jesus is memorable, and cuts to the heart of what adherence to the risen Christ is all about. Jesus doesn’t ask him Are you doing what I told you to do? or Have you been good? Jesus wants to know from him and from us, Do you love me? Way too much gets made about the variation in the Greek between agapé and philo – as if Jesus yearns for agapé but Peter can only muster philo? These two terms are pretty much interchangeable in John’s lexicon – and Jesus and Peter would have been chatting in Aramaic anyhow.

     Mary Magdalene’s plaintive puzzlement in Jesus Christ Superstar, “I don’t know how to love him,” is a fair starting point. What does this peculiar love feel like? Or look like? By the time Jesus parts from Peter, he has told him and us how.

     But the question itself: I love the moment in Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye surprises his wife Golde by asking “Do you love me?”  Her reply? “Do I what? With our daughters getting married and this trouble in the town, you’re upset, you’re worn out, maybe it’s indigestion. Do I love you? For 25 years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow – After 25 years, why talk about love now?”

    Without oversimplifying, church folks (and clergy) might hear themselves responding to Jesus’ query by saying For years I’ve read your book, sat in your pew, given money, tried to be nice, volunteered at the shelter, gone to seminary…  But do you love me? I wonder about preaching a sermon that might list 3 or 4 simple, doable ways to love Jesus. 

    Of course, the simple fact that Jesus asks him not once or four times but three shows Jesus’ tender care, providing Peter with redemption for the three denials just a couple of nights earlier.

    The shape of this love is explained to Peter, and it has to do with giving up independence, and private dreams, and then being led. It’s not about doing what you want, or doing what you want to do for God, for doing what God wants you to do. 

     Henri Nouwen wrote an entire little book that is a sustained reflection on this encounter in John 21: In the Name of Jesus, which I commend regularly, a poignant expression of what loving and leading are all about. The business about the belt, and going where you don’t wish to go, are for Nouwen a vision of maturity: “The world says, ‘When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted. When you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, and control your own destiny.’ But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”

     The ominous remark about Peter’s death fed the tradition that Peter was crucified upside-down – a curious development, as Jesus invites us not to invert his sacrifice but to be very much one with him. We wish we could follow Peter's career and life - and witness what really happened in his final hour. 

     Our Old Testament reading, which laughably (to me) is Acts 9, reveals something of the nature of the risen Christ. {Parenthetically, I devoted another blog to Acts 9, especially focusing on Willie Jennings's great thoughts on the text! Find all this here.} Not just a dead guy resuscitated, but a spiritual body, a body, recognizable, able to be seen and heard, yet utterly transformed, transfigured. Well after he’s ascended into heaven, the risen Jesus is still on the loose, changing everything. Appearing to Saul. Fulfilling Martin Luther King's admonition that "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend." A blinding vision from heaven works pretty well too.

    In this case, Saul, soon to be Paul. I don’t preach much about instantaneous, visionary conversion – but it is a thing, and I should find fresh ways to speak of it. Do we point to Luther’s dramatic experience when he “felt I was altogether born again”? or Wesley’s warmed heart? Do you have a story? 

   F.F. Bruce points to Sundar Singh’s conversion. After years of hostility to the Gospel, he saw a great light one night (in 1904): “I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ, an appearance of glory and love. If it had been a Hindu incarnation, I would have prostrated myself. But it was the Lord Jesus Christ I’d been insulting the day before. A voice asked, ‘How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you.’ I realized Jesus is not dead but living. So I fell at his feet and received this wonderful peace, and the joy I was wishing for.”

     I love the suggestion, “Go into the city, and you will be told what to do,” which makes me wonder if that’s the word to us, that we discern our calling, the point of being a Christian, when we go into the city, and listen to the challenges and sorrows, the injustices and agonies of where real, and usually unchurched people live, work and play. You won’t take Jesus into the city. He’s already there.

    Ananias intrigues. The greatest of Christians are debtors to someone who ushered them into the Body. Naming yours, or others will make great illustrations. He said “Here I am” – and so perhaps models the readiness for Paul, and for us. We’ll sing #593 from the Methodist hymnal…

     Notice Church isn’t an institution just yet. It’s still called “the way” – and it might be a way, a path, a journey even for us as we reimagine things. Quirky thought: is there any irony that he is at the “house of Judas”? A common name, yes – but foes of Jesus aren’t tossed aside but redeemed in this story. Unlikely instruments everywhere.

     The scales falling from his eyes – symbolic of the spiritually blind now seeing, such a key miracle in Jesus’ ministry – reminds me of Puff the Magic Dragon: “His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain.” Childhood lost – so what did Paul lose when he saw the light? Plenty – and we hear the pain of his loss repeatedly in his letters: family, reputation, the security of the Law, much more.
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[2 Caravaggio paintings above!]

What can we say May 11? Easter 4 / Mother's Day

   Every year I post the same counsel, from my book, The Beauty of the Word, on how to talk about (and not talk about) it being Mother's Day: I’ve heard clergy fight, ignore or even diss Mother’s Day, and I’ve heard clergy extol the wonder of Moms. I suggest that we take into account people with dysfunctional relationships with mom, and syrupy sweet relationships too, but naming both and directing the emotions in that to Christ – and even to his mother, Mary. I like, on Mother’s Day, to launch into a little reflective reverie on her, bearing him in her womb, hearing his first cry, teaching him to walk, reciting Psalms, feeding and nursing him to health, watching him walk away to an unknown life of itinerant preaching, hearing rumors of amazements but also mounting conflict and danger, and then watching him suffer and die. No big moral takeaway. Noting the beauty of Jesus’ story.

    Acts 9:36-43. I’ll never get comfortable with the RCL’s usage of Acts as Old Testament. But what book could be more fitting for a post-Easter season than Acts? Jesus was raised – so believers clustered and did amazing things. Also, we are blessed this year with the stunning new commentary by Willie Jennings. And then, this week’s text is a post-Easter resurrection story!

   Did Dorcas and others in Joppa reflect now and then that they lived in the city where Jonah fled from the Lord? Jennings suggests that this story from Luke “makes a point more powerful for our time than probably for him in his time.” Glory and grief, a life well-lived, “woven in good works,” is lost. Peter simply showing up? “Peter’s presence declares an unmistakable truth: women matter. This woman matters, and the work she does for widows matters to God.” “It is no accident that the first disciple to have this little taste of the resurrection is a woman, because it was a woman who gave birth to the resurrection.” Thanks, Willie.

   I’d refer you to a prior year’s blog, where I link Rosa Parks to this incident, report on a tear-jerker, thriller of a sermon I heard on this text in Kenya, and explore ties to Jesus raising the Centurion’s daughter.

   Psalm 23. Not sure I can improve on my previous post on this famous, almost too-familiar Psalm in which I tie it to Sam Wells’s A Nazareth Manifesto, and my favorite idea about thinking not just of the sheep but the herding dogs who help the shepherd tend them.

   John 10:22-30. Establishing the setting won’t take long, but it matters! The date: the Feast of Dedication, when Jews celebrated the Maccabeans recovering the temple after the “abominable desecration” (Daniel 9:27), the erection of an idol to Olympian Zeus on the altar. Jesus joins such a movement of eradicating false idols, and, as Ben Witherington points out, “Jesus delivers a discourse indicating that true leadership does indeed mean laying down one’s life for the sheep, as some of the Maccabees had in fact done.”

   The location: Solomon’s portico. Of course, Solomon’s temple had been reduced to rubble nearly 600 years earlier! But this eastern portico resonated with his name. As it was winter, this one portico, situation on the east side of the temple courts, open to the center but closed to the outside, would have been the one spot where shelter could be enjoyed from the cold brisk winds from the east – and it would have been quieter so they could hear him teaching!

   We should be attentive to the way Jesus speaks of eternal life. It’s not a reward, or a property by which you keep going after death. It’s all about the relationship with God. God wants us close, always, even after our mortal life has drawn to a close. If then we will “hear the shepherd’s voice,” we’d best listen carefully to him now, sticking close enough to hear. He’s a fiercely protective shepherd we can trust: “No one will snatch them out of my hand.” Precious Lord, please do take my hand. The preacher could ask Who are the body snatchers nowadays? Political ideologues. Advertisers. Mean people. Mean religious people. Those who make the faith boring or judgmental. The list goes on and on.

   And how shrewdly Jesus deal with the pressing question: Are you the Messiah? It’s simply not a Yes or No question, Jesus knows and invites them to ponder with his evasive but brilliant reply. It’s not an identity but a movement, lives transformed. It’s not really about the Messiah at all, but about his sheep being safe and finding shelter and healing.

What can we say May 18? Easter 5

    Acts 11:1-18. Fun, isn’t it, watching Peter and then Paul adjudicate circumcision as a profound theological issue, which for us is a matter of mere preference for new parents? For Jews and Christians in their day, the circumcision question wasn’t some archaic oppressive rite. It was existence, identity, come down literally from God. Peter is, by a dream no less (Acts 10), marshalled by God to change some things, to introduce what was un-introduceable. 

   Willie Jennings puts it beautifully: “Peter must explain the inexplicable. He must suture together a known faithfulness with an unknown faithfulness. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. Peter must lay his body across the line between circumcised and uncircumcised and give witness to its transformation into a bridge.”

   Jennings, considering Peter’s words: “Here, powerful word is presence in weakness.” Peter and his early Christian fellows, we must recall, had no Bible, no theological textbooks, nothing but Peter’s private experience. Methodists, who adore their quadrilateral, must admit that experience is so dicey, as it can be the foundation of much nonsense and meanness. “Yet Peter shows us its proper use, to confront the cult of the familiar – of family, faith, nation, and story.” Jennings’s comment is fascinating, and spot on, I think.

   He goes on to compare what Peter is up to with jazz. There’s a break. The band stops, the soloist must then improvise. Some pressure – and yet delight – right? “Peter brings them to the break, but the Spirit of God carries the time, holding it in silence. God has been keeping time beautifully and faithfully with Israel and now expects hearers to feel the beat, remember the rhythm, and know the time.” How often does Scripture speak, not merely of God doing a new thing, but even of a new song? In this instance, we hear “a word of celebration that a lover and  their beloved have been brought together, the God of Israel and the Gentiles.”

   Psalm 148 occurs regularly in our lectionary – and such a great text, pivotal for St. Francis of Assisi and countless saints through history! I preached on this a while back - and wrote a book imagining Conversation with St. Francis. What is praise? How can we fixate on God not for what God might have done for me lately, but for what is always there?

   Revelation 21:1-6. An easy text, I think, speaking of a new heaven, and a new earth. A few notes for preachers: first, redemption is of all of creation, not merely individual souls! – which implies we have a responsibility now for all of creation, not just me and my heavenly destination. Notice it’s even a “new heaven.” Isn’t the long-existing heaven more than sufficient? God is renewing literally everything, including his own abode!

   Which is… everywhere, as we know but never quite realize. No temple in the New Jerusalem, since God is accessible all over the place. If God is conceived as moving from one place to another, though, the direction is always one way: toward us. Richard Rohr: “Revelation told us that the story of God’s work has never been about escaping Earth and going up to heaven. It has always been about God descending to dwell among us.”

   Revelation envisions our future as a city. Many people, connectedness, a corner shop, neighborhoods, streets where you can stop and visit. I wonder if it’s more like a small town – huge, as lots of people are there, but small, as in everybody knows everybody’s business, in a good way, and everybody is ready to chip in and help, love, encircle.

   How lovely that the writer’s most fabulous image for our intimate, eternal life with God is “a bride adorned for her husband.” Not just pretty – but for God. I think of St. Augustine’s insight on the purity (aspirational!) of the church: “Whenever I have described the Church as being without spot or wrinkle, I have not intended to imply that it was like this already, but that it should prepare itself to be like this, at the time when it too will appear in glory.”

   How cool that the heavenly vision is proclaimed in “a loud voice.” Mustn’t be missed! There’s a real “See!!! Told you so!!!” element here, isn’t there? Preachers, without dissing anybody, are wise to point out to our folks that God says “I am making all things new,” not “I am continuing the life you know.” So much well-fathomed blather about heaven is that we get to keep on keeping on. If we love golf, we’re golfing. If we love shopping, we keep shopping – as Tammy Faye Bakker put it, with a credit card with no limit. But heaven isn’t the endless continuation of the best life we know now. Don’t ding people for hoping for such! Just tease them with the real promise that what’s coming will put out most terrific day or activity entirely in the shade.

   I only recently have thought of the Alpha and Omega language, not merely as beginning and ending, and thus the totality of things, but as real Greek letters in a language you may learn in seminary. Being a Christ person involves a genuinely new and different language and way of thinking!

    John 13:31-35. Jesus gets ever more mystical as John proceeds. It’s all about glory – not fame and acclamation, but transparency to the glory of God, which for Jesus will be crucifixion. In the 4^th Gospel, that is his glory, his crowning moment, the full revelation of who he and thus God is.

   Jesus’ focus, in his teaching here but in his very being, is this “new commandment.” But is it new? – to love? Love is as old as time… So is this a new way to love? A new model or pattern for loving? Kara Slade, in The Fullness of Time, calls Christ “both the explainer and the explanation of what love is.” Her book is a dense, profound exploration of the intersection of science and modes of time with both Karl Barth and Søren Kierkegaard, whose Works of Love she rightly suggests “is intended as a disturbance of any easy assumption on the part of the reader that they already know what love is.”

   He, like all serious-minded Christians, rejects love as “preferential.” For us, love is a command, an invitation, a liberation, not a mood or an impulse or anything so transient. Slade’s collision of science with Jesus style love is spot on when she cites the naturalist (and recently deceased) E.O. Wilson looking at giving up your coat, or turning the cheek, or loving the enemy as “unnatural.” Indeed. Cutting against the grain of evolutionary thinking, not in terms of how we got here biologically, but what we are to be about morally, we don’t celebrate the survival of the fittest. We embrace the unnatural. We are odd. We love, not at all like everybody else.

   Love is a command – something to ponder, always. Then, as Raymond Brown reminds us, “Love is more than a commandment; it is a gift.” Indeed – and ponder that. Not just the gift I receive so I feel loved. The gift that then gives, the power and grace to be one who loves, not preferentially, but unnaturally.

What can we say May 25? Easter 6

    Acts 16:9-15. Again, a New Testament reading serving as the Old Testament? The Acts 16 narrative is a seamless whole, so as it’s segmented, I’ll start on it here, and continue next week. A fabulous, powerful, preachable narrative if there ever was one.

   They “set sail from Troas” – conjuring up images of ancient Troy, not just a prehistoric, legendary battle, but stories that inspired the New Testament culture, stories of nobility, heroic acts, fabulous love, immense passion. This is where Paul hears the call to Europe – and launches out. The itinerary might make us yawn, but ancient people’s jaws would drop: what? You took a “straight course to Samothrace, and the following day to Neapolis”? Unheard of, given the unpredictable winds and waves. The clear intimation is that God was in this, enabling Paul to arrive in record time! The implication is that the Spirit (the “wind”!) is engineering this.

   Philippi was a “little Italy,” where Roman veterans had been resettled as part of the reward for battle. I wonder if they had something akin to Memorial Day, when they thought of their comrades who had died in the battles they had survived? Can a sermon touch on this without glorifying war and country unduly? Perhaps just envisioning the ongoing grief and memorializing that surely happened in Philippi might show we understand.

   They go “down to the river to pray” (think Alison Krauss and O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Rivers, and prayer? Howard Thurman wrote these lovely words: “As a child I was accustomed to spend many hours alone in my rowboat, fishing along the river, where there was no sound save the lapping of the waves against the boat. There were times when it seemed as if the earth and the river and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse. It was a time of watching and waiting for what I did not know – yet I always knew. There would come a moment when beyond the single pulse beat there was a sense of Presence which seemed always to speak to me. My response to this Presence always had the quality of personal communion. There was no voice. There was no image. There was no vision. There was God.”

    There was no synagogue for them to attend on the Sabbath – and so, failing to find a quorum of Jews for worship, they come upon some women including Lydia. She is “a worshipper of God” – which we’d size up as someone not needing conversion! The Greek term indicates she was a God-fearer, interested in Judaism, even prayerful, but not a fully observant member of the community.

   She’s fascinating. A “dealer in purple cloth,” which the wealthy purchased – and so was she at least relatively affluent? Willie Jennings rightly points out that “Here is power put to good use,” as Lydia’s house becomes the church in Philippi (verse 40)! Find stories of wealthy women who’ve made the Kingdom of God happen.

   “The Lord opened her heart” – reminding us clergy that at the end of the day the work of preaching is in the Lord’s hands, not ours. What’s intriguing about this new church in Philippi is its shattering of social convention. Looking ahead (essential in this coherent narrative!), as Jennings writes, “Much of the concrete work of discipleship can be located between these two women,” the businesswoman and the slave girl. People going to the wrong side of town, diverse peeps eating together, doing ministry to the needy together (could we even think of Lydia’s house as the outreach center?): this must have provoked whispers, raised eyebrows, even harsh words.

   No need to give your people a thrashing – but who comes to church? Who doesn’t? Who comes to your home? Who doesn’t? Isn’t Christianity holier, nobler, and more itself when we bridge gaps, when we shatter isolation and segregation? Lillian Smith, in Killers of the Dream, dreamed about our overcoming of division by musing, “If we could realize our talent for bridging chasms.” Or as Jennings puts it, Lydia “draws the new order of discipleship into the economic order” – it’s a “reordering of economies, both civic and domestic.”

   For the rest of the dramatic narrative in Acts 16, click here for next week’s blog!

   John 14:23-29. Whether I preach it or not, I want to ponder, pray, and reflect on Jesus’ remarkable, hopeful words in verse 25: “I am still with you.” Thanks be to God for that! Good cause then to be among those “who love me and keep my word.” It’s aspirational, of course. How good of Jesus to provide the Holy Spirit – the Advocate! Notice the Spirit isn’t a fleeting mood or an emotional rush. The Spirit is the one who reveals the full meaning of Jesus’ words and life.

   So it’s not just “comfort,” probably the #1 reason people give for why they come to church, what they’re looking for. The real Spirit empowers for work, courage, witness, facing hostility, and bringing peace – “not as the world gives.” Or doesn’t! Raymond Brown, noting Jesus plays on the common Hebrew greeting, Shalom: “It’s not the thoughtless salutation of ordinary men – it is the gift of salvation.” This peace “has nothing to do with the absence of warfare, nor with an end to psychological tension, not with a sentimental feeling of well-being.” It’s salvation, an all-encompassing reality. I wonder in preaching if it’s worth clarifying all this. Maybe. Better if I can paint a picture, or share a story. From your own community, or life preferably?

   Back to Jesus’ “I am still with you,” let me share these words I wrote on the hymn “Abide with Me” in my book, Unrevealed Until Its Season. Fitting for this text, I think:

   Some hymns are associated in our minds, by habit or by common use, with particular situations. “Abide With Me” gets sung at funerals. And understandably. Henry Francis Lyte wrote the words when his health was deteriorating rapidly back in 1847. He probably wrote it, or most of it, on the day he surrendered his pastoral work in England to travel to Italy to recuperate. He never arrived, dying along the way in France. And William H. Monk, who wrote the elegiac tune for it did so shortly after his three year old daughter had died. Sorrow, love and a glimmer of hope glow from the embers of this hymn.

   And yet it can and should be a hymn for the living. Lyte probably was thinking of that moment when the risen Jesus had caught up with the two forlorn disciples on the road to Emmaus. When they came to their village they asked him, “Stay with us,” or “Abide with us, for it is evening; the day is far spent” (Luke 24:29). In that moment, it wasn’t a lonely soul asking Jesus to stay. It was a fellowship of three. The Bible didn’t know much if anything about the Holy Trinity, but we do. God is eternally a fellowship of three, abiding, staying, loving, sharing. I love the Rublev icon, which depicts Father, Son and Holy Spirit sitting around a table together. That’s God, this fellowship of three. And just as the Emmaus story invites you, the reader, to join the threesome of Jesus and the other two, so God’s holy club around that table invites you to pull up a chair on that open fourth side of the table.

   The image of Jesus staying, lingering, abiding is a constant in John’s Gospel. Jesus saw two of John’s disciples and stayed with them just before he saw Nathaniel standing under a fig tree (John 1:35-48). Jesus lingered mid-day with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). During Holy Week, as in all his visits to Jerusalem, he stayed at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus (John 12:1-8). On Holy Wednesday, we don’t know what Jesus did all day. Probably he just abided at home with his three friends. Then at the last supper, Jesus invited his friends to “abide in me as I abide in you” (John 15:4). They overheard his prayer, including that he abides in the Father and the Father abides in him (John 17:21). He was nearing his end. But the abiding is for them, for the rest of their lives, for the life of the church.

   Every day, dusk and darkness remind us that our mortal lives are brief. “Fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens.” Indeed, “other helpers fail.” And so faith is turning to God, “help of the helpless.” Loss and death are not merely my own, but the death of others I’ve loved, others I’ve never known, nameless victims of evil, not to mention the death of dreams and illusions, heartbreak, aging – and even transitions like graduation or retirement that we celebrate, and yet are losses. In the thick of all this change, loss and unwelcomed newness, the hymn teaches us to look to God, “O Thou who changest not.”

   Indeed: “I need thy presence every passing hour.” Isaac Bashevis Singer wryly wrote that “I only pray when I am in trouble. But I am in trouble all the time.” Jesus told us to become like children, and if this means anything at all it reminds us that we are as dependent upon God as little children are upon their parents; a toddler doesn’t fancy herself to be independent, and delights in dependence, as we might as we ask God to abide with us. Incidentally, “abide” can also mean “tolerate” or “bear,” as in “I cannot abide his behavior.” Grace is that God abides us, abiding with us.

   The final stanza is haunting. “Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes.” What is the first thing you see after birth? Most likely, your mother, who bore you in agony and gave you life. What is the last thing you see? We hope it might be family, our children perhaps. The hymn asks to see the cross. The death of our Lord. God become one with us in our mortality. What comfort, what profound company we keep in the hour of death. God is with us, always but most shimmeringly then. The cross is gloom, but we pray that it “shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.” Have you pondered the cross, not merely as an erect piece of wood on which Christ dangled, but as a compass, as a roadsign, pointing not left or right or north or south, but upward, toward God?

What can we say June 1? Easter 7

    Acts 16:16-34. I'll preach on this - and am pondering a structure in which I'll begin at the end: at midnight, with singing in jail. Then backtracking: how did they get there? The slave girl's liberation. And then back to Lydia (last week’s lection!) - and the fact that God had called them to come there, and ask what challenges God's call entails, but then how the joy and peace come.

   How humorous: Paul encounters a possessed woman, evidently traipsing around after him, and he gets annoyed! Like the demons who recognize who Jesus is, this possessed slave girl knows who Paul is! Was Paul annoyed by her bellowing? Or by the system that puts a girl in such a predicament – a slave for the profit of others? Yes?

   Background: for centuries, people had travelled to Delphi (a stunningly picturesque place!) to consult the Oracle there - which was a temple where the priest would lead you to speak with the Pythia, the "pythoness," a woman who would breathe subterranean hallucinogenic fumes, and utter (allegedly) the words of Apollo. A famous case: Croesus, king of Lydia (fitting for Acts 16!) asked the oracle if he should cross the Halys and attack Cyrus's army. The response, "You will destroy a great empire," excited him. Then he asked if he would rule long. Her reply, "Your foe is but a mule." He crossed the river and was thrashed by Cyrus. Yes, he did destroy an empire - his own. And Croesus didn't parse that a mule is a mongrel, and so was Cyrus (his mother a Mede, his father a Persian). Delphi was so profitable that they set up branch establishments in cities around the empire - including Philippi.

   Once this enslaved pythoness was healed, the reaction of the citizens in Phillipi – a “little Italy” of relocated Roman veterans – tells us about early Christianity and raises a question about our purpose today as Christians: “These men are disturbing our city… They are advocating customs that are not lawful.” Light years from us blessing America and the status quo. Shouldn’t this top the job description for today’s pastors? “Disturbing our city”? “Advocating customs not lawful for us”? Paul clearly didn’t get the memo about keeping politics and religion separate… And so they are imprisoned in what must have been a cold, hard, dark stone cavern with zero amenities.

   “About midnight.” This could serve as a lovely cadence for the sermon! Paul and Silas, “about midnight,” instead of whining, they sing. In The Children, David Halberstam tells about the night in 1961 in a Jackson, Mississippi jail. A young civil rights protester with a stunning voice began to sing.  The cells grew quiet, enthralled by James Bevel’s solo.  The white prison guard demanded quiet.  But Bevel sang on.  The guard arrived at the door and asked for the radio:  “No radios allowed in here – you niggers ought to know that.”  Bevel replied, “You ain’t getting the radio – not this one.”  And then he continued singing “The Lord is my Shepherd.”  The guard, uncertain if he felt anger or faith, walked away.

   God opens the prison. Can’t verse 26 be a sermon? “The foundations of the prison were shaken.” Not just Paul and Silas, but all the prisoners! Willie Jennings, in his wise and provocative commentary on Acts, suggests that “the disciples of Jesus cannot escape our necessary confrontation with prisons.” Our society labors under the illusions that prisons make us safe, that prisons are and enforce morality. God overturns all this. Acts 16 questions all systems that overly imprison those who need not be there – like ours. Jesus shows us how people come to be treated as criminals. We serve a God who was unjustly arrested, charged, sentenced and executed.

   The jailer asks, “What must I do to be saved?” He’s kin to the guards at Jesus’ tomb! The door’s open. Did Jesus’ guards get to ask? Paul exits, but he doesn’t scramble away. Jennings: “Paul will not go quietly into freedom.” It’s a matter of justice. Paul demands redress as a Roman citizen. Jennings alludes to Nelson Mandela’s release from decades in jail. F.W. de Klerk informed him suddenly and quietly he’d be taken to Johannesburg and released – a matter of government/PR expediency. Mandela objected. He wanted his release to be public. He sought public dignity. Instead of being taken to Johannesburg, his preference was, “Once I am free, I will look after myself.”

   Ponder the Philippian church. Meeting in the home of relatively wealthy Lydia, we have her, a slave girl, and a middling government official, the jailer – and his wife and children. The Jesus movement fashions churches that cross social boundaries – and then there is a unity in Jesus that the world thinks impossible, which comes into play in our Gospel lection!

   John 17:20-26. Jesus prays for those who have not yet believed! How hopeful. Including… us! Of course, we are thus also the object of his prayer when he asks God his Father the we be one. Denominations cockily divide, sure they are God’s holy guardians of truth – rather Gnostic-like. Jesus-style unity isn’t uniformity. It’s togetherness in difference. God made us different, and delights in difference. Division is on our side, not God’s. Check out my blog on Jesus’ prayer for unity and things Methodist in particular forget when they get ready to split, including great wisdom from Peter Leithart, Francis Schaeffer, Christina Cleveland, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Ephraim Radner, Hans Urs von Balthasar and more!

   Why does unity matter? You can make the case that divided, very different churches offer more open doors for the wide variety of people God seems to have created. Pentecostals for the bodily emotional, Catholics for lovers of order, Greek Orthodox for multi-sensory folks, and so forth. Jesus pinpoints why it matters: “so that the world may know.” Boom. The world won’t know the oneness of God and the intimacy between God and Jesus and thus with us because we are divided, we are the anti-answer to Jesus’ own prayer.

   No use going on a rant about all this – except to name the embarrassing sin that division, and our lean toward sides in church life, and invite all of us into a season of confession and repentance, not celebrating our side won or pouting that our side lost, nothing but a mirror image of how it goes with our culture’s idolatry, political ideology.

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What can we say June 8? The Day of Pentecost!

    Acts 2:1-21. The RCL adds “or Genesis 11:1-9.” It’s both, at least in all ancient people’s minds. My previous year’s post on Pentecost Sunday has my best thoughts and illustrative material, from St. Francis to Gandalf to Julian the Apostate.  To those thoughts I would add these, which are fresh and making me rethink things…

   We’d best be careful to speak of Pentecost as the “reversal of Babel” – which could imply diversification is a bad thing. God used human guile, pride and overreach to fashion a wonderful tapestry, so Pentecost is less the reversal of Babel but the growing into God’s new way? There is understanding at Pentecost, not sameness. It’s not that everyone suddenly spoke Greek or Aramaic, and certainly not Latin, the language of empire! They kept their own tongues, and stories!

   God clearly delights in diversity and understanding – which today doesn’t happen miraculously in an instant. Understanding, getting the hang of language, and cultures and ways, takes time – and is no less a miracle because of it! Willie Jennings speaks of Acts 2 as “the epicenter of the revolution,” “the revolution of the intimate.” God breaks everybody open so they can be a radical new, welcoming, fully engaged community. Notice it was no grand strategy on the disciples’ part. God just did this. It was uncontrollable – like the wind, with immense if unseen power.

   Jennings wryly points out that they might have asked for the Holy Spirit – but not this! This is real grace, “untamed grace.” He hears an echo of Mary learning the Spirit had “overshadowed her.” The Spirit transforms not just the ears, but mouths and bodies. God is like “the lead dancer, taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying Step this way.”

   Learning a new language (do you recall sitting nervously in language class?) is humbling – but so beautiful once you get the hang of it. You could learn someone else’s language to dominate them, and history has witnessed plenty of this – or the dominant people declaring “You must speak our language, not yours!” Learning a language though can be love, to be fully with others.

   Thinking of the spread of the church, not unlike the spread of people after Babel, and those who precursors showed up at Pentecost, I recall Mark Noll’s great wisdom: “Christianity appears more and more as an essentially pluralistic and cross-cultural faith. It appeared first in Asia, then Africa and Europe. Immediately those who turned to Christ in these ‘new’ regions were at home in the faith. When they became believers, Christianity itself became Asian, European and African. Once Christianity is rooted in someplace new, the faith itself also takes on something from that new place. It also challenges, reforms and humanizes the cultural values of that place. The Gospel comes to each person and to all peoples exactly where they are. You do not have to stop being American, Japanese, German, or Terra del Fuegian in order to become a Christian. Instead, they all find rich resources in Christianity that are perfectly fitted for their own cultural situations. It is by its nature a religion of nearly infinite flexibility because it has been revealed in a person of absolutely infinite love.”

  And Pentecost is learning whether to talk at all! Thomas Merton's pondering is intriguing: Merton: “The mystery of speech and silence is resolve in Acts. Pentecost is the solution. The problem of language is the problem of sin. The problem of silence is also a problem of love. How can one really know whether to speak or not, and whether words and silence are for good or for evil, unless one understands the 2 divisions of tongues – Babel and Pentecost. Acts is a book full of speech. The apostles down downstairs and out into the street like an avalanche… Before the sun had set, they had baptized 3000 souls out of Babel into the One Body of Christ.”

   Romans 8:14-17 intrigues, although it will at most be background music for Pentecost. A quirky question I have: “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” was quoted at me once by a church member grousing that I’d spoken of non-Christians as God’s children. I’ll hear that – but I then in reply do want to ask, How many achieve that high bar of Yes, I am so very led by the Spirit? Really?

    I’ve written in other posts about Kelly Nikondeha’s marvelous theology of adoption. And we do need to hear Paul in verse 17: “if we suffer with him” doesn’t mean, probably not, if by some remote chance we suffer. Rather, we become his children, close to him, if we suffer as Christ did, or at least some approximation. Not a cross-stitchable passage! – although it was for St. Francis who actually prayed to suffer so he could feel in his soul and body what Christ felt for and with us.

   John 14:8-17, 25-27. I want to linger, always, over the simple request, “Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” No other satisfaction (Mick Jagger, anyone?) – and the request, “Show us the Father” elicits from Jesus a bit of “This is it, you’ve been seeing it right in front of you all this time.” So lovely, surprising, earthy, simple.

   Jesus makes two confusing, questionable comments next. You guys “will do even greater works” – than Jesus did? The only parsing of this is to realize the bar is set high – so there isn’t some honeymoon period of amazing things past and gone once Jesus ascends. And we may well reflect on what the Body of Christ, Jesus on earth, has done worldwide and through centuries. Greater, indeed. More embarrassing in many moments too. Yet that’s God’s way, risking it all, placing the future of Jesus in the hands of confused fools like us! As we saw at Pentecost, it’s God’s surprising irruption into things that wins the day anyhow.

   And Jesus also say “Ask anything in my name, I will do it.” When I was fairly new to Christianity, I had friends who insisted you pray in Jesus name, and they “claimed” the answers if they did so. This is blatant nonsense. It’s not that God is waiting for us to stick “in Jesus’ name” on the end of a prayer before doing something. The question is back at us: are you praying “in Jesus’ name,” that is, are your prayers what Jesus would pray, in sync with his mission, your heart so close to his as for you to be almost him praying? It’s not about control, but the yielding of control. It’s not about prayer working, but us dreaming God’s dreams. As Jennings said about the Day of Pentecost, they may have asked for the Spirit, but they certainly did not ask for our “claim” what they actually received!

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  Check out my Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week on all these matters and living spiritually in ways connecting Sunday worship with the rest of life.