What can we say come Christmas Eve?

   Christmas Eve!!  Preaching is a challenge, and a joy (I think). There's still usable Advent material in my previous blog, "Preaching Advent" - but beyond that, here are some key questions and thoughts I’ve assembled over the years of preaching Christmas Eve.

     (a) What do they come for? I try to remember what people came for – and precious few would say We come on Christmas Eve to hear Rev. Howell’s sermon.  They come for the music, and at our place for that magical moment when we sing Silent Night, lower the lights, and raise our candles.  It’s hokey – and I love it.  I’ve tried to name the wonder so it isn’t just “pretty.”  If it’s beautiful, it’s because it happens in the dark.  Lots of darkness in the world, and in our lives; so the little candle is a promise, a pledge, a defiance.  It’s a parable of a faithful life of resistance to evil. 

Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) said it well: “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”  Or this, from the medieval Franciscan, Giovanni Giacondo: “The gloom of the world is but a shadow / Behind it, yet within reach, is joy / There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see / And to see, we have only to look / I beseech you to look.”

     It’s also helpful to help them hear their own music.  We have a soprano sing “O Holy Night,” and there’s much in there (“chains shall he break…”); last year I drew their attention to “Then he appeared, and the soul felt its worth” – suggesting that the order matters:  it is the appearing of Jesus that defines our worth.  We sing “Away in a Manger,” and I’ve invited them to pray the last stanza (“Be near me Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me forever, and love me I pray; bless all the dear children in thy tender care, and fit us for heaven to live with thee there”). When I wrote a book about Christmas music (Why This Jubilee?) a couple of years ago, I found myself surprised, delighted and moved over and over by the depth of theology and psychology and geography and history in our simple carols; I now try to help people really hear what they've sung by heart forever.

     (b) Who comes?  It’s a cheap shot to ding the C&Es.  We aren’t crowded on Dec. 24 because of them.  Rather, everybody comes – and they bring visiting parents, aunts, grandchildren, etc.  But you do have the very occasional attender – and how to speak to them invitingly?  I’m fond of what the novelist Julian Barnes said:  “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”  I believe the most adamant atheist, and the most casual spiritual person have a deep-seated longing for home – for Christ.  Name the hollow place for what it is.

     (c) What do they need to hear?  I’ve chided the sporadic attenders and pleaded with them to continue coming.  Not helpful.  I do suspect Christmas Eve isn’t a bad time to quite gently take on popular atheism.  Among the many anti-Christian bestsellers was God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens (may God rest his soul…).  I’d play on that and say, Correct, God is not great.  God, rather, is quite small, vulnerable, a God who doesn’t conquer everything but gets defeated in the most profound embodiment of suffering love ever.  Jesus did not rise up miraculously in the manger and denounce his foes.  Jesus has a tender place in his heart for Christopher Hitchens.

     And Bart Ehrman.  Amazingly, and weirdly, a few years ago I received an email from him – on Christmas Eve.  I had been trying to connect with him on something – and he finally responded around suppertime on 12/24.  I had reviewed his book, God’s Problem, which is an embarrassingly vapid regurgitation of the most simplistic, easily answered critiques of Christianity – and his email to me said he didn’t like worshipping with his Episcopalian wife on Christmas Eve, because they raise all those candles.  “If good Christians would do something for the poor instead of raising those candles, I would think more highly of Christianity.”  I replied to him that, yes, a few thousand would raise candles at my place on this evening – but we also would raise over $100,000 for the poor.

     (d) What mood are they in?  Some are sentimental, some are giddy, some are edgy – facing family dysfunction.  Some have already been drinking.  I think almost all are in a bit of a “What really matters” mood.  If you’ve never read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, you should.  He says this: “One Christmas was so much like another… I can never remember if it snowed for 6 days and 6 nights when I was 12 or 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6… All the Christmases roll down to the sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street.”  I’ve used this tactic: I’ll ask, What did you get for Christmas in 1998? Or in 2004?  No one can remember, of course.  Then I ask, Whom did you love in 1998?  Who was with you in 2004?  “Through the years we all will be together.”  It’s not the stuff.  I giggle when I recall my girls getting bikes on Christmas Eve.  But what year was it?  And where on earth are those bikes now?  It’s the people, the love, the relationship.  That’s all we have to give, all we really want to receive.  And that’s what God gives.  Not this thing or that answer to prayer.  God gives God’s own self at Christmas.

     (e) What is my tone?  Of all preaching moments, my tone on 12/24 had best be gentle, slower than usual, resonant with wisdom, patience, kindness and wonder.  Sighing is in order.  If you have a smart-alecky voice like mine, you have to practice.

     (f) Where do I go first?  Since homilies on Christmas Eve should be short, you have to take people somewhere quickly.  Not a lot of reiterating the text, or ramping in with chit-chat.  And you have to take them to a very different place quickly.  Could be your grandparents’ Christmas tree.  I like a couple of historical moments.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife died in 1835, he remarried in 1843, then she died in a house fire in 1861; shortly thereafter his son was wounded in the Civil War.  With war raging, and bearing so much loss, he woke up on Christmas day and wrote, “I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, good will to men.  And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom Had rolled along the unbroken song of peace on earth, good will to men.  A voice, a chime, a chant sublime of peace on earth, good will to men. The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound the carols drowned of peace on earth, good will to men. And in despair I bowed my head ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.’

     This sequence moves me every time.  There is sorrow and good cause to feel forlorn at Christmas – but Longfellow continued: “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: ‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail With peace on earth, good will to men.’”  That was my sermon one year.

     Or you have Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s amazing letter from a Nazi concentration camp:  “I think we’re going to have an exceptionally good Christmas.  Since outward circumstance precludes our making provision for it will show whether we can be content with what is truly essential.  I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents, but now that we have nothing to give, the gift God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem all the more glorious; the emptier our hands, the better we understand what Luther meant: We are beggars, it’s true.  The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ’s home on earth.”  The image of no presents, empty hands, in poor quarters, even being apart.  Christ comes to humble hearts.

     (g) What about the text?  If you follow my blog, you know I’m big on attention to exegetical detail.  I think I am less so on Christmas Eve – although there are little details in the texts that intrigue and could be lingered on to make a whole homily.  The name Augustus – who promised everything Christ came to deliver: peace, salvation, good news, unity.  You could cite historians regarding the situation when Jesus was born – but it would be hard to top Madeleine L’Engle: “That was no time for a child to be born / With the earth betrayed by war and hate / In a land in the crushing grip of Rome; / Honor and truth were trampled by scorn / Yet here did the Saviour make his home. / When is the time for love to be born? / The inn is full on the planet earth, / Yet love still takes the risk of birth.” The phrase, “No room in the inn”: easy to spiritualize, and I’d commend Frederick Buechner’s eloquent lament over the fate of the innkeeper.  Mary “pondering” in her heart.  So much in Luke 2, much less John 1…

     (h) Anything you might report on?  I think of the prophets and their symbolic actions: is there something you can do and then just tell about it?  A couple of years ago, in the gap between Christmas Eve services, I drove to inner city Charlotte just to see what if anything might happen, if I might notice something.  I parked, and immediately (as if God set it up) a city bus stopped where I was standing.  An older woman, looking utterly exhausted, got off with a battered, rolling suitcase.  She sighed and looked at me.  I innocuously said “Merry Christmas!”  She moaned a little, and said, “Not for me.”  I said, “Tell me about it.”  She squinted, looked me over, dressed as I was in dress shirt, wool slacks, and with my very Caucasian complexion, and said, “You don’t look like the kind of fellow who would understand.”  I hung in there and said, “Try me anyway.”

     I reported this in my homily that evening – and tried gently and briefly to explore who’s hurting out there, would we understand, and how Jesus came not so much for us but for her and her kin, looking very much like someone who would understand.

     (i) The main thing, the only thing.  It’s the Incarnation.  God became flesh; God came down; God is as close as my own heartbeat and the breath I just took.  God understands us, and redeems us from the inside out.  This is why God’s revealing of God’s heart and mind came through an infant – something we all once were, something that elicits tenderness from even the hardest among us.  This is the only real unique thing about our faith.  Hans Urs von Balthasar: “Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”

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   ** Check out two of my books, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, and Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us About Powerful Leadership, are available.

What can we say December 28? 1st after Christmas

   Low attendance warning!!   There is so much preaching fodder around the turn of the year – although I’d sure avoid urging people to make new year’s resolutions that would make your church, or even their lives run more smoothly. I think of course of Wesley’s Covenant Prayer, a great New Year’s compact to make with God (although I always suspect that it means more to me having studied it on a page than it can to people out there trying to listen to me read it).

   There is a fascinating week of Kwanzaa, whose traditions of long leisurely meals where you talk about tradition, ancestors, culture, and dreams, seems about as Christian a way to end one year and bring in the next as anything I could concoct.  And then I ponder the way New Year’s is a huge deal in largely African-American churches – all because of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom – not American-style freedom so much as that Gospel freedom Paul envisions in Galatians: that’ll preach.

  December 28 follows December 26, Boxing Day, not a day for fighting, but a day to box up gifts to give to the unnoticed people in your world: the mailman, the grocery clerk, the garbage pickup guys. A lovely custom, preachable (if we avoid trivializing the rare, seasonal spurt of kindness which should go on all year). It's also St. Stephen's day - if you think folks are in the mood to hear about the first Christian martyr!! Of course, if you're still doing Christmas in the pulpit, I refer you to my blog, "Preaching Christmas," with loads of illustrative material.

    Isaiah 63:7-9. Fascinating, and important: “I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord” – not just for me personally though! “Because of all that the Lord has done for” not “me” but “us.” An uphill, constant battle for the preacher: to persuade people to think of themselves as part of a community, a member of the Body, before thinking of themselves as individuals! And I love Isaiah’s subtle wording: “Surely” they are my people – the “surely” implying some doubt, some iffiness resolved.

   Psalm 148. What an elegant appeal to even the animals and all of nature to praise God – which, we realize, creatures are already doing simply by being. Thomas Merton: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” All of nature, if we see it from this perspective, is constantly in praise of its Maker. What a way to begin the year – the way we being every worship service: praise.

   We think, of course, of St. Francis of Assisi and his “Canticle of the Creatures,” inviting sun, moon, stars, all living things, to join in a mighty chorus of praise of God. I wonder how many sermons actually invite people into praise, or settle for being words of praise – instead of lurching toward some takeaway, some moral?

   Psalm 148: did Mary and Joseph sing this one during Jesus’ early days? “Praise him in the heights, all his host” (a la the angels on Christmas night?). Echoes of Job in this stirring tour of creation, including not just the pretty and photogenic, but also monsters, frost, stormy wind, wild, dangerous animals. All praise the Lord, even unwittingly, simply by being. Annie Dillard (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) muses over the mind-boggling diversity and experimental dazzle that is creation, saying “There’s nothing God won’t try.”

   Hebrews 2:10-18. Christ as the “pioneer” of salvation. The Greek archegos is used for the founder of a city, the leader of a large army, the author, the instigator of things. How shocking, how subversive though: this archegos leads/wins “through sufferings.” Notice the plural. Jesus’ suffering was lifelong, not just the crucifixion, which was plural sufferings enough!

   The family language is moving. He was God the Father’s Son – and so we too are God’s children and hence his siblings. The sibling image is powerful, largely (to me) because siblings have this rivalry and difficulty in getting along! So it is in this new family of Jesus. Why would we expect otherwise?

   Matthew 2:13-23. Joseph had some fantastic, significant dreams while he slept. They must flee – now! – to Egypt, replicating Israel’s sojourn and return to the land. From my book Birth: the Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series), I wrote (or skip past this italicized section to get the Epiphany texts!), Immediately upon the birth of this child, history’s ongoing struggle of good versus evil got ratcheted up quite a few notches. A thin view of Christmas might elicit giggles over the image of parents with their sweet child. But a cosmic battle just got touched off. “Why do the nations rage?” (Ps. 2:1). The idolatrous, unholy powers, immediately upon Jesus’ birth, seemed to realize that their domain had been invaded.

   And so they recoiled – like that haunting moment in Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Lord of the Rings.” The wicked “eye of Sauron,” atop a high tower, casts its evil beam over the land, probing, ruling, intimidating, always watching for signs of good to be dealt with; “its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom.” When Frodo put on the ring of power, the eye was seized with some paroxysm of envy and terror, jerking suddenly in Frodo’s direction, far away. Jesus was born quietly at a distance of many miles from Herod or Caesar Augustus. But in that moment, there was a recoil, a leap to secure the borders, and police the people so the powers that be will remain unchecked. How astonishing, that this birth struck anxiety into the hearts of those dwelling arrogantly and securely in the corridors of power.

   An appalling, gruesome manifestation of this evil recoil was unleashed by King Herod. Notorious for his paranoia, famously feeling threatened by and then killing members of his own family, Herod flew into what for him was a typical rage, ordering the cruel slaughter of all male boys under the age of two in his realm. The arrival of the Christ child was no security blanket to shelter the people from harm. On the contrary, his advent actually brought on intense sorrow, such is the ferocious kneejerk retaliation of evil in our broken world against the good that would bring life – back then, and throughout history.

 

  The laments, the shrieks of the mothers of Judea have echoed through time, captured beautifully in fresco by Giotto. If we listen, we can still hear them, and also all mothers who have flailed and strained and crumpled to the ground in sheer agony as they have witnessed brutal violence against their children. A mother, wrenched from her small son in Auschwitz, was forced to watch with the rest of the horrified crowd as he dangled by a rope around his neck. A man in the crowd asked, “For God’s sake, where is God?” Elie Wiesel, who was there, said he heard a voice answer, “This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”

   Of course, thanks to a good angel who had warned Joseph, by stealth the homily family fled to Egypt. Legend has it that lions and leopards in the wilderness bowed their heads and wagged their tails in homage. Palm trees bent low to provide food for them. Two thieves pounced on them, but then relented when Mary wept – the same robbers who were crucified next to Jesus thirty years later. The symbolism of this flight to Egypt would not have been lost on Jews of Jesus’ day or careful Bible readers today. This child, who had come to be the deliverance of the people, descended to Egypt, as Joseph and his brothers had centuries earlier, only to return in peace to the land of promise.

   Still in his infancy, Jesus was a refugee, joining the ranks of countless throngs of people through history pushed out of their homelands, in desperate flight to survive grisly armies, rulers and thugs. I have known Jews who managed to slip out of Europe and elude the Nazis; a neighbor of mine was hidden in a potato sack and thrown onto the back of a truck by her parents, whom she never saw again. Refugee camps dot the globe. Particularly haunting are those camps in the land of Israel to which Jesus came. In Bethlehem itself, camps like Dheisheh and Aida have been the home for thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes, living in harsh conditions for generations now since the war in 1948.

What can we say January 4 / 2nd Christmas? Epiphany?

    What to do with January 4? There are 2^nd after Christmas lections, and then many churches (like mine) will observe Epiphany. Let me touch on several of the texts in question, all just fascinating. All in some way wrestle with mystery.

   Ellen Davis (in Preaching the Luminous Word) noticed that the Church of All Nations next to the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem has a sign that sternly warns, “No explanations in the church.” That’s directed to the tour guides, of course – but as Ellen muses, “We’d all do well to heed it. We in the church have been baptized into the mystery of Christ; so long as we attend to God, with every heartbeat we are drawn more deeply into a mystery that infinitely exceeds our understanding, a mystery of mercy that goes beyond even our wildest hopes and imaginings. So no explanations in the church; rather, let us speak softly and with wonder, as befits a holy place.” I’m trying more soft speaking, silent pauses, some stammering in 2022.

   Ephesians 1:3-14. There is so much theology and wisdom packed into this 202 word sentence (yes, these 12 verses are one run-on sentence in the Greek) – impossible to diagram! Paul’s zeal for God and the people bursts over the edges, as if he couldn’t stop rambling, could stick a period anywhere.

   Some cool details: God has “made known the mystery of his will.” That’s perfect (and the subject of my book, The Will of God). God’s will isn’t a hunch you feel. It’s been made known – and yet it’s still a mystery, not as in puzzling, you can’t figure it out, but mystery as in beyond the prosaic, something profound, mystical, beyond what we can reckon and just get done easily.

   “Saints” – not superhuman spiritual heroes, or prissy avoiders of earthly pleasures, of champion do-gooders. The saint is one whose thinking and living at least strives to be different, special, not blending into the mobs out there. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says holiness is simply making space and time for God.

   It’s aspirational. We dream of being what Paul calls us: holy. Mary Oliver’s words always move me: “Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. Oh Lord, grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” Isn’t Richard Rohr right? “We don’t have to make ourselves holy. We already are, and we just don’t know it.”

   “Chosen”? Americans think of choice as limiting - as if you choose which cereal among many in the store to buy, or the bachelor choosing which bachelorette pleases him. Ephesians does this over and over: you aren’t on the outside looking in with God. You don’t have to go find God and get God. You can be confused or even uninterested. God chose you. God is in you. Preachers should and can boggle their minds with this: Want to know how amazing you are? God chose you “before the foundation of the world.” That’s right: when God thought, Let’s make a universe with galaxies and nebulae! God also thought of you, God decided you would be you. And for the noblest conceivable purpose: that you would live with God’s Spirit in you. Go outside tonight. Gaze up into the heavens. Billions of years ago, when God imagined the vast cosmos, God was already making plans for you.

   Adoption. I love Kelly Nikondeha’s marvelous theological reflections on this! Adopted people often want to find their birth parents. Why? “We want that dark corner illuminated. We imagine our own transformation at the revelation of our true origin. What goodness might be unlocked, what possibility unleashed?” Isn’t church a quest to discover our true origin? Nikondeha offers a picturesque retrospective on what being adopted was about: “A woman scooped me out of the white-wicker bassinet in the viewing room of the adoption agency and claimed me as her own. Her physical emptiness prepared the way for my fullness.”

   Does the birth mother “abandon” her child? Or is it a “relinquishment”? So different. Abandonment is unfeeling and cruel. Relinquishment may be the highest form of love – as Jesus, certainly feeling abandoned by God, relinquished his divine power and his life.

   Isaiah 60:1-6 is way more than “Rise and shine and give God the glory glory…” The vision is way higher, cosmic in vastness. God’s project isn’t me feeling better or getting saved. It’s the redemption of the created order – and it is God’s act, illustrated well by the common distinction (Christopher Lasch, Martin Luther King, Jr.) between optimism and hope. Optimism is the sunny dream that tomorrow will be better, and it’s up to us to make it so. Hope can hold it together even if tomorrow is worse; hope trusts in the larger, longer future – and it’s up to God, not us. Ours is, as our text puts it, to “stand.” I saw a doctor ask a woman to stand as he told her her husband had just died. We stand (and argue about it!) for the National Anthem. We stand at the end of worship. This standing in the soul is all about dignity, readiness, an eagerness to see and be ready to move.

   I think of Oscar Romero’s words, which I might use as my benediction: “When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt. Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong, to face the world’s difficulties.” Isaiah envisions a great gathering of the nations (not just our neighborhood!) – and in my blog 2 years ago I suggested the feel might be (corny as it seems) kin to the dramatic ending to “Field of Dreams” – 

or visually, John August Swanson’s “Festival of Lights.”

   Ephesians 3:1-12. Paul doesn’t write from the comforts of a library or his home. He’s a prisoner – literally! And figuratively: he’s a prisoner to Christ’s will. We can think of so many in history who’ve wound up in prison, like Paul, because of their commitments to do good for others: St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas More, Jean Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela… too many to name or number. Playing it safe, being a law-abiding citizen? God called Paul, and God calls us to something higher, riskier, more courageous.

   It’s probably worth recalling, every now and then as we read anything from Paul, that he was the perhaps the greatest but surely the unlikeliest of early Church leaders. He wasn’t a slacker or an impious, blatantly sinful guy. He was quite pious – and an implacable, aggressive, angry foe of the early Christian movement. “Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace which was given me by the working of his power.” What a mystery! – such a radical about-face. That’s what grace does. That’s how powerful God’s work is, and can be even in us today. Any of that in your calling? You became a minister – by choice? Or by the gift of God’s grace?

   Paul’s mission, and the Church’s, is “to make all people see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God.” The mystery, the secret that is now out in the open, is God’s plan for the unity of all, for dividing walls to be broken down, for all hostility to cease. The Church witnesses, not by chatting about such things, but by simply living out the mystery of a people unified in Christ. 

Stephen Fowl points out that “the very existence of the gathered body of Jews and Gentiles reconciled to God and each other in Christ makes known the manifold wisdom of God.” As we sing, “They will know we are Christians by our love,” not for the people who are like us, but for the people the world can’t believe we can love. We show the world a better way.

   We’re not good at this. But it’s God’s work, and if we let God’s Spirit achieve this in and through us, the world will be in awe, and eager to join us. Fowl wrote that “the attractiveness that first drew Gentiles to God should be even more attractive in the light of this reconciliation.” That is, unlikely people were drawn to Christ, and that religion looks even more alluring when the unlikely enjoy unity with the others…

   …which makes me wonder about racial reconciliation. The biggest shock of religious history might just be that black Americans actually believed in the slaveowners’ God! That says a lot about the marvel, the attractiveness of Christianity. So then, what if we white and black Christians genuinely became close to one another and pulled off reconciliation in our country. Who then could argue for a second that Christianity is a lame religion? Everyone would know This really is flat out amazing, compelling, a difference maker, a blessing to all

   Matthew 2:1-12. The magi arrive. Not as in “wise men still follow him,” but astrologers! – an art, an alchemy condemned in Judaism and Christianity! Yet, so eager is the Christchild to be found, and by everybody, that these deluded ones find their way to Bethlehem, and the Scripture, Bible-is-Clear! people miss out. He’s a Capricorn? 

   It’s a tad irreverent, but the bawdy scene in “Life of Brian” when the magi show up at the wrong house might help us see that there’s some sarcastic humor tucked inside this text. Or maybe Owen Meany’s remark while singing the gory 4^th stanza of “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying? Doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.”

   We also have that great line in The Shack: Mack asks Jesus, “Do all roads lead to you?” He replies, “Not at all. Most roads don’t lead anywhere” – and then adds “I will travel any road to find you.” The road our people have just taken may veer them away from the Christ child: the frenzy of gift giving, decorating, entertaining – as if when Jesus was born the angel said “Thou shalt shop and travel and party in his honor!” Mike Slaughter put it well: “Christmas is not your birthday.” How do we delicately remind people that Jesus’ way is one of truth, simplicity, welcoming strangers – and even suffering? Just as The Shack begins with the murder of a child, so Jesus’ story features the slaughter of children. Jesus enters a world where paranoid powers harm children. Explore a few of the ways in your sermon.

   The notion of God going to any and all lengths to find us: Peter Shaffer’s great play, “Amadeus,” notes how the official court composer Salieri is devoured by jealousy when he hears Mozart. Overhearing the Adagio in E flat, played from Mozart’s first and only draft, completed entirely in Mozart’s head, Salieri was staggered: “It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God,” or rather, that Mozart heard his rapturous music from heaven, and merely wrote it down, as if by dictation. Offended by Mozart’s sophomoric, immoral behavior, yet awestruck by his talent, he later said “God needed Mozart to let Himself into the world.” God surprises us by showing up in church, but out there also, in holy people but also the questionable characters, in what seems obviously religious but in countless other manifestations.

   Ray Barfield muses on the way Aristotle believed stars left a trail of music as they travelled through the heavens. Science has said No they don’t – and yet now we’ve lost the joy in delighting in the stars and their movements. “Children look at the night sky and say, ‘I want to go there.’ If we ask, ‘Why?” the only answer that makes sense is, ‘I just do.’ They are not merely interested in seeing variations on the rocks that they find in their back yards.”

   What astral phenomenon did the magi see? Halley’s comet? A supernova? Check out the great scene (view here! – trust me, 3 minutes well-spent!) in Pasolini’s Italian film, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” where the magi show up in the daytime, and have silent, tender interactions with Mary and her baby.

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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 11? The Baptism of the Lord

    We could preach from Isaiah 42:1-9, and I’d have fun exploring the angle of asking: Did John, or Jesus, or onlookers ruminate on this text in their minds? “Here is my servant, my chosen in whom my soul delights? I have put my spirit upon him”? Is this at last the “new thing” God pledged to be about? A “bruised reed”? Were some protruding out of the water in the shallow Jordan?

    Of course, Matthew 3:13-17 gets rightful pride of place this day. I love (understatement) our annual renewal of Baptism on this Sunday. Standing by the font, watching people come, joyfully, sadly, hopefully, broken, eager, every mood conceivable. I always re-read what Martin Sheen, the great actor and devout Catholic, told Krista Tippett (in his fabulous interview with her on On Being) about standing in line in worship: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.” 

    Or as Dom Jeremy Driscoll put it, “Monks are always processing. When we go from one place to another, we don’t just do it helter-skelter. I am reminded again and again that I am not just vaguely moving through life. I am inserted into the definitive procession of Christ. I am part of a huge movement, a definitive exodus. I am going somewhere.” I love that. Wonder if my choir will sing “Down in the River to Pray” from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

   Matthew 3:13-17, so simple, so provocative, needing so little (if any!) explanation. I wonder if in my sermon I can somehow usher people into the scene by the river, and then get out of the way? I’m impressed by what Karl Barth (in the skinny volume of Church Dogmatics, IV.4, published not long before he died) shrewdly suggested: “Jesus was not being theatrical. When Jesus was baptized, he needed to be washed of sin -- not his sin, but our sin. When faced by the sins of all others, he did not let these sins be theirs, but as the Son of His Father, ordained form all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He.”

   If you have a good Baptism story, now’s the time. I once baptized a 45 year old man dying of pancreatic cancer. As I splashed water onto his forehead, he began to shake, then to cry – and then as he became supremely calm and at peace he said to me, “I feel younger. I feel lighter.” I’ve renewed Baptism in the muddy creek called the Jordan – and describing what it looks like invites people into the moment.

    Have you ever read Flannery O’Connor’s story “The River”? A young boy, Harry, hears a preacher, named Bevel, who’s baptizing people in a stream, say “Leave your pain in the river.” The boy has much pain indeed, and the story ends tragically. Well worth the preacher’s time to ponder – even if it’s not used in the sermon! We need to experience, know and feel more than we tell.

   The moment is more ominous than we realize. Jesus’ next challenge is in the wilderness, engaging in mortal combat against the devil. Justin Martyr wrote that just as Jesus was baptized, a miraculous fire was ignited right in the middle of the river! Davies & Allison say this: “Jesus interpreted his prospective dark fate in eschatological terms… so, Jesus could have gone to the Baptist not in order to obtain forgiveness but rather to receive a pledge of ultimate deliverance, a seal of divine protection.”

   Can I imagine and help our people imagine Jesus, dripping wet, climbing the bank, an echo of creation as emerging from the watery chaos, or the people coming up out of the muddy Red Sea – or even an infant plopping out all wet from the mother’s womb. And the dove, maybe a descendant of the one Noah sent out from the ark? The text is about Jesus, not us – so while resisting this perennial temptation to think the text is about me (reminding us of Barth who reminds us that to speak of God is not to speak about us in a loud voice!), we might touch on the way Jesus becomes one with us, and so when he is declared “Beloved,” we are as well. Never forget that your people just don’t feel all that beloved. They are Americans, earning their way, feeling entitled, or lonely or just plain hardened to life. Judging others as a reflex of their own insecurity. Clergy, maybe you included, are a bit numb and weary, not sensing your belovedness. With Jesus, you are beloved. Like a newborn infant.

   Do you know 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 draws our minds back to Noah’s 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. 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.”

*****

  A couple of years ago, I published a new Lenten study, Unrevealed Until Its Season - which proved to be pretty popular for laity (and many clergy I know!). Give it a look!

What can we say January 18? 2nd after Epiphany

    Isaiah 49:1-7. “Before you were born I called you.” How about you, preacher? How do we invite our people to realize such a thing? The suggestion is that your call isn’t something you figure out, or choose, but it’s just there, larger than your entire existence, enveloping you always.

   “You made my mouth a sharp sword.” I was chatting the other day with a clergy friend about another clergy friend who, we agreed, craves and creates controversy and trouble. Is his mouth a sharp sword? Or it what John Lewis called “good trouble” or really just “dumb trouble”? How do we discern the difference? Just because my people are annoyed doesn’t mean I’m speaking truth. St. Ephrem: “Truth and love are wings. Without both, you tumble.” Can a “sharp sword” fulfill love? Is it like a scalpel, the surgeon’s painful but merciful excision of something lethal? Is it like a sharpening blade, creating friction that leads not to harsh sparks but to a beautiful finish, like a mirror?

   “You are my servant, in whom I will be glorified.” God, that is, not you the servant! Not too many clergy are all that tempted to vainglory. More likely it’s what 2^nd Isaiah confesses next: “I have labored in vain, and spent my strength for nothing.” Burnout. Exasperation. The perils of ministry. Notice this burned out one’s words made it into Scripture… So there is some hope – perhaps best conveyed in the question of verse 6: “Is it too light a thing that you should be my servant?” This may mean many things – but for me, today, I hope it can mean that I am okay with simply being God’s servant, whether what I do works, or satisfies me or anybody else, or even if I am worn flat out.

   1 Corinthians 1:1-9. Lucky Sosthenes! Sticking close to Paul, he is remembered forever. This letter is, interestingly “to the sanctified.” Really? Not yet? In anticipation? “Saints”? It’s aspirational, more for Paul than for the Corinthians themselves! By naming them as such, he raises the expectation, dreams the dream.

   Paul opens with what we might call flattery. In the balance of the letter, we find Paul fuming that they aren’t actually living up to the flattering intro. Again, aspirational? Maybe we spoke nobly and optimistically to our people when we preach – dreaming they might actually rise up to our vision, God’s vision. Jewel’s great song echoes the idea: “Maybe if we are surrounded in beauty, one day we will become what we see.”

   John 1:29-42. Fairly standard Johannine verbiage until verse 35 (and I don’t mean that dismissively!). It’s a scene the preacher can depict so people can picture it: over there, guys under a tree in the shade, and it’s 4pm, so it’s getting late, weariness may be setting in.

   John says “Behold” him. I’d want to ponder that “Behold.” It’s more than just looking. At Christmas we sang “Come and behold him.” There’s a taking him in, a reflective meditation on him, a gazing, an amazed gawking, an embrace of the eyes and the soul. 

   John says “I did not know him,” but they were kin! Maybe they didn’t see each other much – or maybe he’s saying I knew him but I didn’t really behold or recognize him until the revealing of the Spirit… Now I see him, know him, understand him, behold him for who he really is. And then you have to love the pace, and spatial imagery of John.  Two guys hear, traipse off after him, he spots them behind him – and he doesn’t tell them to be good or do good, but simply “Stay with me.” And they stayed. That’s enough of a sermon, right? Jesus says Be near me. And it is our life just to be near him.

   He “takes away the sin of the world,” not of each individual but the whole fallen world? He takes it away: I can envision hauling garbage away! So it’s not just, okay, this sin of yours and of the world – and you’re still holding the trash or it’s all lying around. Can we hope for such from Jesus?

   John “saw the Spirit come down.” Was it a dove again? What would it look like today if the Spirit came down? Concoct a vision, and share!

   I might fiddle around with “the first thing Andrew did was to find his brother.” So it’s sort of Go, find others, and tell – but there’s also a little nuance of Because Jesus found you, you find yourself with a new family. He found a brother.

*****

  A couple of years ago, I published a new Lenten study, Unrevealed Until Its Season - which proved to be pretty popular for laity (and many clergy I know!). Give it a look!

What can we say January 25? 3rd after Epiphany

    Isaiah 9:1-4 pulls my heart back toward Advent. Walking in darkness, seeing a great light: we ponder the magi, Jesus’ birth, the Gospel of John’s vivid imagery of light shining in the darkness. Isaiah, back in the 8th century, was not foretelling the future. But how intriguing is it that he names the historic degradation of Zebulun and Naphtali – the very tribal areas where Jesus grew up and ministered as an adult! The “way of the sea,” the Via Maris, was the great road connecting Egypt to Mesopotamia – running right past Galilee and the epicenter of his ministry. I’m not sure the heavy trade that made it a profitable route was what Isaiah had in mind; but Jesus did take up residence along this road, where moneymakers and tax collectors stayed busy.

   Notice in your heart and maybe in the sermon the poetic couplings in this text, as if to reiterate, to remind, to drive home the hope! “There shall be no gloom” surely implies there is gloom now, and I fixate on the great poem from Fra Giovanni: “The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see – and to see, we have only to look.” Hope maybe isn’t so much about better, changed circumstances, but learning to see – in the dark.

   Before touching on our Epistle, let’s linger over the Psalter and Gospel for a few moments.

   Psalm 27 is one of my great loves, which I spend a whole chapter on in my new book, The Heart of the Psalms: God's Word to the World. Hard not to preach on it when the chance comes. The lectionary picks out verses 1, and 4-9 – all lovely, but so is the entire Psalm which, like Isaiah, fixates on the light. Because “the Lord is my light and my salvation,” then “I will not fear” – an echo of Psalm 23. You can almost picture someone with good cause to fear repeating to himself, “I will not fear, I will not fear.” Don’t the words, when coupled to trust in the Lord as light and salvation, actually scuttle some of the fear?

   Mark Smith, in his lovely book Psalms: The Divine Journey, demonstrates that this Psalm emerged from the Israelites’ experience of worship in the temple. It was oriented toward the east; so as the sun rose over the Mt. of Olives, the blazing light would strike the eastern wall of the temple, creating a brilliant glow on the outside. But the inside: high windows were designed to let that rising light in (after a night of watching and praying), and the bright light would then glisten off the golden interior creating a nearly blinding display of radiance. Other nations worshipped sun gods. In Israel, the sun was a vivid illustration of God’s bedazzling nature – and they knew as well as we that the sun is God’s instrument of life, light and warmth. This light symbolized God’s immanence and God’s transcendence all at once! As Smith puts it, “In the temple experience, internal and external perceptions merged, and thus there was experienced the God of superhuman size and brilliant light giving joy and perhaps even healing to those who trust in his name.”

   Ellen Charry (in her Brazos commentary), as always, has rich insights. She notices that Psalm 25 pleads for forgiveness; Psalm 26 proclaims that the speaker has relocated himself to a cleaner place; then Psalm 27 "takes the protagonist's reconstruction of his life a step further. These 3 Psalms provide snapshots of progress in the spiritual renewal of life." Wow. Then this: if you're attentive to Psalm 27 you'll notice "the speaker moves rapidly back and forth between his local hearers" (fellow worshippers) "and God.. One can almost see his human audience watching expectantly as he turns his body now toward them, now away from them, toward God, and back to them again." Prayer, witness, community. Just lovely.

   “One thing have I asked of the Lord.” Me? I’ve asked for dozens of things! When Jesus visited Mary and Martha, just across the valley from the temple, Jesus dissed Martha a little for being obsessed and “distracted” by “many things.” “One thing is needful” (Luke 10:38-42). That one thing was sitting at Jesus’ feet. In Psalm 27, it is simply being present in the house of God. We can resonate to the Psalmist and reflect on the privilege and joy it is today to be in a sanctuary. It is the house of God, God our salvation is there.

   The Psalmist asks “to behold the beauty of the Lord.” Dostoevsky said “The world will be saved by beauty.” We do not think of beauty nearly enough, and simply to ponder the beauty of Jesus, the beauty of the story, the beauty of the Church, the beauty of holy lives: isn’t this the antidote to fear?

   I spoke at a Pentecostal conference years ago. During the opening song (which took at least 20 minutes!), the guy next to me stopped singing the song, raised his hands toward the ceiling (or toward heaven?) and muttered, over and over and over, “Oh Jesus, you are so beautiful.” I want to grow up to be like him. We sing “Fairest Lord Jesus… Beautiful Savior.” Didn’t Jesus say his body was the real temple? The ultimate dwelling of God on earth? Didn’t Jesus have to be beautiful, or maybe magnetic or charismatic or beguiling, as total strangers dropped everything to traipse off after him, with no idea where they were heading?

   If we think expansively, we behold the beauty of the Lord all day long, every day – any time we are awake and looking around… and since Lent is coming: Lauren Winner once offered the shrewd suggestion to give up anxiety for Lent. Of course, worries flutter into the soul… so when they do, you recite a verse, from memory, from a card you carry around, whatever: “Set me on a rock that is higher than I” (Psalm 27:5). Isaiah’s geographical notices, and the Psalm’s seeking of the Lord’s face lead wonderfully into our Gospel reading:

   Matthew 4:12-23. Jesus, walking out of those Isaianic places, Zebulun and Naphtali, on the Via Maris (did he look around and think, Wow, Isaiah is resonating in my soul right now?). He saw fishermen. Not Andy and Opie fishing as a hobby, but a business (was it called Zebedee and Sons?). Little details have figurative import here. Jesus did not wait in the synagogue for them to come. He went to them, to their place of business (a very John Wesley-ish thing to do). They did not interview several rabbis and choose their favorite; he chose them. Jesus didn’t have a nice visit, and say “See you when I’m back” as he waved goodbye. They had to leave plenty behind to follow: business, family, home. We sometimes diss the disciples for their slowness – but geez, they left everything.

   Hard for me to ponder this text without thinking of the “Jesus boat” archaeologists found – dating to the time of Jesus! I wish it said “S.S. Simon Peter” on the prow! But this is a boat Jesus surely saw, maybe stepped into or floated in. We forget the realities of Bible stories – so this salient reminder of the tangibility of the life of fishermen is astounding. I wonder if, just maybe, when they saw the face of Jesus, they ventured in their minds to the 27th Psalm and this seeking the light, the face of God.

   1 Corinthians 1:10-18. When Jesus started calling fishermen, could he even (with his fantastic imagination and brilliant understanding) have fathomed how his followers would quickly divide themselves into warring factions? Yet another “unintended consequence of the resurrection,” the mess our churches have always been in. 

   “Be in agreement,” and we agree that those other guys should agree with us. “Be in unity,” which we all favor – as long as it’s my unity. You have to love Paul’s daring: it’s not just those who say they belong to Paul or Apollos or Cephas – but even those who declare “I belong to Christ.” Aren’t there always those who trump in, cockily vaunting themselves as the one true Bible party?

   They suffer from “rivalries.” The Greek is eris: Paul and his Greek readers would have known the mythological tale of Eris, goddess of strife, causing the Trojan War by dropping a golden ball into a party, and stirring up debate over who was the fairest. The carnage was legendary.

   We cannot know, but I wonder if in this context when Paul refers to the foolishness of the Gospel, he’s exposing the high self-regarding Corinthians for their masked foolishness – and, that if the Gospel itself is foolishness, then we should be well-prepared to bear some foolishness from others in his church?

*****

  A couple of years ago, I published a new Lenten study, Unrevealed Until Its Season - which proved to be pretty popular for laity (and many clergy I know!). Give it a look!