What can we say January 12? The Baptism of the Lord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say January 19? 2nd after Epiphany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say 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 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 16? 6th after the Epiphany

    Three great texts present themselves to us in this Epiphany season! Hard to choose. And daunting to figure out how best to allude to/play on Black History month. Some congregations are open/eager, others stiffen at the mere mention. Best not to castigate people for being racist or something they can't quite comprehend. How to use stories from Black history to illuminate the Gospel? I'm grateful for this conversation I had with Yale's Willie Jennings on "Jesus and... Race" (and here it is in podcast form!). And our church's Book of the Month is Clint Smith's amazing How the Word is Passed - a fresh perspective on these issues (and Clint gave me a great podcast as well!).

   Jeremiah 17:5-10. In our culture, where choices are matters of taste, personal preference, of little import, Jeremiah poses a deadly serious choice with all-encompassing consequences. Oddly, our people make such a choice, day after day, but never realizing the scope of what seem like little decisions over what to buy, watch, say, think or do. Preachers are to unveil how in a thousand little ways we are choosing for God, for wisdom, for holiness – or not.

   The images are profound, echoing this Sunday’s Psalm, the 1^st. Those who trust in mere mortals – those out there, whether politicians, bosses, salespeople, or lovers, or the more relied upon but least trustworthy mortals of all, ourselves! – are like a desert shrub in a parched place. Shriveled, lifeless, gasping for life. But those who trust in the Lord? Like a tree planted by the water. “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree” (Thomas Merton). The glory is hidden. What makes a tree thrive is in the dark, underground, unseen, even if you know it’s the river that provides the life up and through the trunk, branches, and leaves.

   Jeremiah’s warning is stupendous, and harrowing: “The heart is devious above all else… who can understand it?” The preacher’s task is to reveal to folks how duplicitous, how gullible, how easily duped the human heart is – theirs, of course, but mine too, even the hearts of the holiest. You talk yourself into… consumption, self-doubt, recrimination of others, political ideology: you name it. You’d think our hearts would be wiser, smarter, more potent somehow. God made the heart! But it’s malleable, easily tugged toward foolishness. We need mercy. We need healing. We need power we don’t have.

   1 Corinthians 15:12-20. When I was growing up, I pondered the strangely popular Peggy Lee hit, “Is That All There Is?” Not as profound as Paul, but reflecting on what’s left to do if this life is all there is: “Let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze, and have a ball.” Paul, having pointed out there are hundreds of people who saw Jesus after Easter morning, rhetorically quizzes his readers on the implications. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain… your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Two items matter especially: notice the resurrection is about liberation from sin! We think “Christ is risen; I get eternal life!” But in the Gospels and Epistles, it’s “Christ is risen; forgiveness is real.”

   And then how the reality of the tangible resurrection matters? vs possible spiritual spins on new life? Frederick Buechner put it best, in his longish quote from The Alphabet of Grace: “We can say that the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than the literal… Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity. Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points. But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this "miracle" of truth that never dies, the "miracle" of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the "miracle" of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.”

   Indeed. Listen to Sartre, Nietzsche, all the hollow existentialists and brilliant doubters of the supernatural, and you land where Paul did: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” No wonder people are cynical, jaded, anxious, depressed. Ours is to offer the radical alternative. If the preacher does slightly less, he/she is to be pitied, or maybe censured, if we had a mechanism to do such a thing.

   Luke 6:17-26. Jesus’ familiar “sermon on the mount” in Luke takes place “at a level place.” Jesus taught this stuff all over the place! Surely he spoke words like Luke 6 and the more familiar Matthew 5 many times and in many places. We might ask ourselves why Matthew 5 is in fact way more familiar. In The Beatitudes for Today, I concluded it is because Jesus, rather unpleasantly we might suppose, didn’t stop with his “blessed” sequence, but tacked on a “Woe” series. I tend to overhear Jesus’ tone as harsh, berating, judgmental: “Woe!” But maybe he was more plaintive, almost in tears, so deep was his love for those bearing such woes.

   And Jesus blesses, in Luke, not the poor in spirit – for that can be me, even while I live an indulgent, pampered life! It’s more simply “the poor.” Notice Jesus doesn’t say Glamorous are those poor! No idealization of poverty. But in Jesus’ heart they are blessed because of his regard for them. And it’s in the second person! Not blessed are those guys who are poor. No, it’s Blessed are you who are poor. He’s speaking with them – and has listened to them, understanding them and their plight and challenges, and virtues.

   The beatitudes, here or in Matthew, aren’t commands. They are blessings – or as Rebekah Eklund puts it in her fabulous new book, The Beatitudes Through the Ages (which I reviewed in Christian Century – and catch this great conversation she had with me on this text!), they express value judgments, a field of what matters in the heart of God, in the Gospel’s upside-down vision of worth.

   When I think of preaching on these or really any texts, I try to remember what Luke says here about Jesus’ first listeners. They “came to hear,” yes, but they also came “to be healed.” Both – although as they trudged through the discomforts of ancient travel, I’d bet their deepest fantasy was that they would be healed. People come broken. They need, and seek healing, something beyond what they can muster. Ours is to be sure the hear – not a clever homiletical tirade, but a life-giving word of hope, the word that itself creates what only God can do.

 ***

   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.