What can we say February 23? 7th after Epiphany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say March 2? Transfiguration

     Not one or two but three great texts to mark the Transfiguration of our Lord! Exodus 34:29-35 – the day Moses’ face began shining. Today we speak of someone’s face “beaming” or “glowing.” But it’s not that Moses had a chipper disposition or a cheerful countenance. He had seen God, and the shining of God lingered, impressed itself upon him. I’m not sure there’s a “Go thou and do likewise” here (or in our Gospel text!). Maybe the writer simply wants us to be awed by Moses, a theological hero if there ever was one. Or if there’s a “go thou and do,” it’s captured in something the newly sainted Oscar Romero said: “When we leave worship, 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.”

   I just love Zora Neale Hurston's vivid portrayal (in Moses, Man of the Mountain): "Moses lifted the freshly chiseled tablets of stone in his hands and gazed down the mountain to where Israel waited. He knew a great exultation. Now men could be free. They had something of the essence of divinity expressed. They had the chart and compass of behavior. They need not stumble into blind ways and injure themselves. This was bigger than Israel. It comprehended the world.  Israel could be a heaven for all men forever, by these sacred stones. With flakes of light still clinging to his face, Moses turned to where Joshua waited for him. 'Joshua, I have laws. Israel is going to know peace and justice.'”

    Context matters. Moses has just, in a holy rage, broken the tablets of the law. As the Jewish commentator Gunther Plaut put it, “The newly liberated people struggle to understand their God and God struggles to understand His people.” At least God and Moses ‘get’ one another. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, priests often wore a mask or veil when engaging in their sacred rituals. With Moses, it’s reversed: he wears the veil when he’s a civilian, with the people, and it comes off when he’s up close with God! It’s a kind of humility – maybe the way St. Francis hid his stigmata. Or he wants to shield the people from his excess of holiness; we pastors suffer the opposite in every church, those who are so very pious and flout it in your face!

    And Moses’ glowing isn’t a private experience for him to enjoy. He shines as the one God has chosen to lead, the one who is God’s earthly connection to the people. There’s also the peculiar way this shining entered into Western art. The Hebrew translated “shone” or “radiance,” qaran, is an inch away from qeren, meaning horn – and so it became, in the Vulgate, that Moses was “horned.” We see his horns all over, most famously in Michelangelo’s statue in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. In Bible times, horns symbolized power – but by the Middle Ages, horns represented the demonic. Moses became the epitome of anti-Semitic hostility… and much of the fault lies with our dear friend, Paul, as we'll see in a moment.

   For now, on Michelangelo’s striking sculpture of Moses: it’s massive: he’s eight feet tall—seated! There’s so much energy captured in his face, hands, and posture; his foot looks poised to spring up. His piercing gaze is a bit intimidating, but wise, visionary.

   Pope Julius hired Michelangelo to build his tomb, with Moses, but it took him more than three decades to finish it, always perfecting it, and distracted by other work (like the Sistine Chapel!). He chipped away at the marble in his workshop near St. Peter’s—which was his home, where he lived. Art historian William Wallace explains that “Michelangelo lived with Moses; the two grew old together. Every morning the artist woke up with Moses. Every time he returned home, he was welcomed by the same imposing figure. To live with Moses could be unnerving.”

   What would it be for us to “live with Moses,” and to “grow old together.” Moses: a man of immense courage and resilience, a dogged determination to do God’s will in the face of peril and frustration. Moses: the custodian of God’s law, showing us how to live with God and others. Moses: the mystic, withdrawing from the crowd to be alone with God on a mountain. I am pondering spending more time with Moses as I grow older, his life and experiences, and the words he shared, so challenging, and so hopeful. Jesus pondered Moses every day. All of Scripture, Moses and the rest, might just sustain in me a keen attentiveness to God’s ongoing call. Even the grisly sacrifices of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers: being chained to Jesus requires sacrifice. It’s not doing enjoyable, rewarding things for God, but what is hard, as we bear the cost to discipleship.

   Wallace humorously envisions the day they moved that massive statue three miles from Michelangelo’s home to San Pietro in Vincoli: “A few astonished persons stood gaping as Moses, peering over the side of a rude cart, slowly rolled through the streets of Rome.” Moses, watching us on the street: oh my.

   Our Epistle, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, exegetes why Moses hid his face, suspecting it was not humility but embarrassment, because the glory was fading (a notion unmentioned in our text)! The veil now cloaks them, the Jews, from seeing the truth. I can sympathize with Paul’s profound grief that his fellow-Jews, certainly including close friends and family, just didn’t see Jesus as the Messiah or Christianity as the way. It would be hard to preach this text now without lifting it up as one of the way we fail to ‘get’ others who believe in our God in a different way? Can we revel in the transformation, even the transfiguration, that is life with God without being dismissive of other faiths?

    There is a fading of the glory. Is it the gradual demise of the church? Is it our heightening secularism? Is it our fallen inability to see God? We at best know what we know with veiled faces; “now we see through a glass darkly,” and only “then face to face.” Maybe the preacher doesn’t reach for a “Go thou and do likewise,” but simply notices and points, like a docent in a museum, to the greatness that was Moses, and the competitive zeal that was Paul – and then primarily, on Transfiguration Sunday, to the amazement that is Jesus.

     Luke 9:28-36. What a text! and how easy it is to preach it poorly. The Transfiguration texts are, for me, exemplary of what goes wrong in much preaching. We make texts about us, our faith, our doubts, our serving, etc., when many texts are quite simply about God, or about how amazing Jesus is. The Transfiguration texts are my prime example in The Beauty of the Word: clearly these passages seek to make us amazed at Jesus. He dazzled them, he was in the company of Moses and Elijah. The lunge to build booths is what we always do: what’s the takeaway? I’ve heard “After the mountaintop experience, you go back down into the valley and get to work.” But this text isn’t about us! It’s about God. We are to be awestruck. The takeaways is the disciples were awed, amazed, stunned, moved. Can you preach a sermon that simply says Wow! Jesus is amazing! How do I love Jesus? What is lovable about him? Let us count the ways.

   Luke’s Transfiguration episode is peculiar in that “They were speaking of his departure.” The Greek for “departure” is exodon, reminding us of the Exodus! ” Amazingly (to me), Luke reports that those with him are “sleepy” (as in Gethsemane!). Verse 33: “Master, it is good that we are here” must be the great understatement in all of Scripture! As in the Baptism texts, God says “Listen to him!” (as if God knows we won’t listen to Jesus!).

   At best, the takeaway is that we who are awed by Jesus listen to him. Or maybe we just adore and worship him. “Jesus, I adore you, lay my life before you, how I love you.” Or maybe Dorothy Day got it right: Robert Coles was interviewing her late in her life and asked her to jot down some autobiographical remembrances. She responded with this: “I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me. The other day I wrote down the words ‘a life remembered,’ and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most – but I couldn’t do it. I just sat that there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”

What can we say on Ash Wednesday?

  Ash Wednesday. I always tell myself and fellow clergy that they don’t come for the homily. They come for the ashes. I still love the great reflection Martin Sheen offered when interviewed by Krista Tippett: “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 just overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

   I continue to commend some sort of Lenten fast, although it gets watered down into dieting or substituting beer for wine or whatever you gave up. Jesus fasted for his 40 days, and the saints we adore did the same. The location of his fasting: simply harrowing. Lisa and I visited the St. George's monastery that hangs perilously from a cliff overlooking the Wadi Qelt. It's hot, it's steep, and even today they warn you of brigands and carnivorous creatures in the area. 2 hours almost wore us out. Jesus did 2 hours 12 times daily for 40 days.

   I am enjoying and admiring Chris Green's new Being Transfigured. He confesses, as we all can, that "my sense of sin is warped / There is nothing more sinful than what we’ve said about sin, and what we’ve done in the name of our hatred of sin." How very "Self-absorbed – and self-negating" our sense of sin can be. "We’re nice but not kind, indulgent not compassionate, permissive not forgiving." Our need isn't to try harder, but a miracle; we need to be released by a divine intervention. 

   I think of my first adult life dog, Abigail, who loved to run in the woods of my rural parish. After she didn't come home one day, I finally found her - enmeshed in some old barbed wire somebody had used as a fence back in the day. The harder she struggled to get out, the more the barbs gashed her skin. I had to urge her to be very, very still, to trust me, so I could extricate her  - and then her wounds required some healing. That's what Lent, and the whole Christian life is like.

  William Placher's terrific Mark commentary cites Alexander Schmemann ("Fasting makes us light, concentrated, sober, joyful, pure"), Macrina Wiederkehr ("Fasting is cleansing. It lays bare our souls. In the Divine Arms we become less demanding and more like the One who holds us. We hunger and thirst for justice, and holiness. We hunger for what is right. What hunger to be saints"), and St. Basil ("Fasting is to refrain from vice"). I'll ponder those for me, whether they worm their way into a sermon or not.

   Our Psalm, the 51st, one of the church's historic "penitential Psalms," bears the weight of this day and season - although we might quibble with the unforeseen implication that David, having seized Bathsheba (the patron saint of #MeToo?), simply repents and expects cleansing - and we conclude all is well. What's the lesson in the ripple effects and lingering impact of our sin - even forgiven (by God) sin?

   Matthew 6 is perfect yet terribly odd for Ash Wednesday. Jesus tells us not to practice our piety visibly (v. 1), and not to disfigure our faces but to wash them (v. 16) – on the very day we disfigure our faces publicly. Nobody at my place though is showing off, sporting ashes for the rest of the day. If anything, they’ll get some strange stares at the store on the way home.

  When I get home, I try to take some time to linger before a mirror – to ponder that I have just been marked with the horror and hope of Jesus’ cross. No hymn captures so thrillingly the paradox of this horror and hope as Isaac Watts’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” We “survey” the cross. We don’t just glance at it. The soldiers didn’t survey this one. They’d seen plenty of crosses, and had no reason to think this was God. All they saw was a dying, despised person – which was precisely what God was hoping to achieve. More lines in that hymn bear reflection: “Sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Onlookers saw tragedy, maybe justice mingled.

   “Did e’er… thorns compose so rich a crown?” At Elizabeth II’s coronation so long ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed St. Edward’s Crown on her head. It was heavy, forged of 22 karat gold, with 444 precious stones, aquamarines, topazes, rubies, amethysts, sapphires. She then knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord. Did she ponder Jesus’ very different crown, its only ornaments those harsh thorns gashing his forehead, scalp and temples?

   “My richest gain I count but loss.” Lent is the season to reassess what has value, what doesn’t, how much we offer up to God. Do we urge our people to embark on a fast? It’s not dieting. It’s not being glum and feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s solidarity with those who aren’t choosing to fast. It’s weaning ourselves from dependencies on things. It’s an awakening to where our treasure is.

   Where are the “Take the Bible literally!” people when it comes to “Do not lay up treasure on earth”? We prudently save, we check our retirement portfolios, we pay off the house. No use castigating the people, or ourselves. It’s a mark of our brokenness, our desperate need for the true God. The ashes are lie that mark on Cain’s forehead. It’s guilt, and grace.

  And so we invite people into (hopefully) a growing devotion, a loosening of our grip on our treasures, an expansion of God and grace into daily life. Here’s something we did a few years back. At the Baptism of the Lord, we handed out shower tags (we got the idea, and even purchased the tags from Adam Hamilton!), which you hang in the bath: “Lord, as I enter the water to bathe, I remember my Baptism. Wash me by your grace, fill me with your Spirit, renew my soul. I pray that I might live as your child today, and honor you in all that I do.”

   On Ash Wednesday, we picked up on Matthew 6 and handed out closet tags. Jesus said “Go into your closet to pray.” The Greek tameion is an inner room of the house, a storeroom, small, private – reminding us of the need for a dedicated holy space at home. I love this – that if you go into your closet and pray, you are doing God’s will! Picking up on other clothing images in Scripture, here’s how that tag reads: “Jesus said, ‘Go into your closet and pray in secret; and your Father will reward you.’ So pray. Prepare for your day with God. As you dress, remember Romans 14:8, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and Colossians 3:12, ‘Put on compassion, patience, forgiveness, love – and be thankful. Whatever you do, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus.’”

   Two more items while we’re on Matthew 6. Jesus says “When you pray,” not “If you pray” – and he was assuming 3 set times of prayer as was common Jewish practice then and now. When Will Willimon was Dean of Duke Chapel, he told about a Muslim student who asked him, “Why don’t the Christian students ever pray?” He obviously observed the 5 set daily times for prayer in Islam, and was puzzled that he never ever saw Christians stopping to pray. It’s a judgment call whether you can mention this to your people. I think it’s compelling, and inviting – but some folks have such potent, irrational anti-Muslim feelings that they’ll shut down on you.

   And then Jesus talks about “reward,” shunning earthly reward, but implying quite clearly there are rewards, ultimate rewards to the life of faith. I for one downplay this, remembering a very smart college student who asked me if he could become a Christian if he didn’t believe in eternal life. His angle was he wanted to follow Jesus just because it was good, right, noble and true, not to secure any prize for himself. I admire that – but quite clearly the Gospels and Epistles lay out for us fabulous, unspeakably fantastic rewards, or ultimate realities, for those who believe.

 ** Check out my new podcast, Maybe I'm Amazed - amazing conversations with amazing people who've done amazing things! Recent guests: Kate Bowler, David Wilkinson, Lillian Daniel, Chris Green - and earlier in the series, Civil Rights hero Dorothy Counts Scoggins, UNC basketball coach Roy Williams, 7 time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson, Walter Brueggemann, Amy-Jill Levine, and more!

What can we say March 9? Lent 1

   Deuteronomy 26:1-11, a text Gerhard von Rad dubbed a “creed” for the ancient Israelites, would work well to kick off Lent: we offer our first fruits, we give up what is precious, in recollection of God’s deliverance. Similarly, in Romans 10:8b-13, we’re invited to confess – but not your sins! Rather, confess that Jesus is Lord. Everything is different because of what God has done in Jesus – beautifully articulated by Fritz Bauerschmidt (in his marvelous The Love That Is God): “The words and actions of Jesus do not so much seek to tear down the walls of earthly kingdoms as to undermine their foundations so they will collapse under their own weight.”

   And so, in Romans, or in any Lenten text, we reimagine our relationship to everything. Bauerschmidt again: “When we expect the passing things of this world to bear the full weight of our love, they collapse under that weight, their own structural flaws revealed in their inability to bear that weight.” Jesus, therefore, was not much troubled by the contagion of sin, and so he easily and naturally befriended outcasts and sinners. His lordship can be vividly envision as (to cite Bauerschmidt one more time!) “love running forth in joy to embrace the wayward human race, journeying even as far as the place of death, and bringing humanity into the interpersonal, generative and joyful love that is the Holy Trinity.” The first place he ran was into the wilderness:

   Luke 4:1-13 is in a way an astonishing text to open Lent. It’s not about our sin, it’s not really about our being tempted (as in the thin, vapid sermon that might say We’re tempted like Jesus, so let’s resist the way he did!). It’s a story about how great Jesus is, how he became that Lord named in Romans 10. Luke 4 is my parade example (discussed in my The Beauty of the Word) of the way we mis-read texts in preaching. We make texts about us: my faith, my struggle, my serving, my doubts, my discipleship. But most texts aren’t actually about us. They are about God. Jesus did what you and I could never do, and that we (what a relief!) don’t have to do. Jesus isn’t our moral example, showing us how to combat Satan. Jesus is our Savior, for all the times, for all of life, when we succumb, when we drink the koolaid and fall for the devil’s wiles. This story should make us fall on our knees in awe. Jesus. Wow. What a Savior.

   In his wonderful The Whole Language, Father Gregory Boyle narrates his mother's final days, way past ready to go. She'd awaken in the morning, and after an exasperated "Oh for crying out loud," she'd fix her gaze on one or 2 or 4 family hovering nearby and say "You're here, you're here. Boyle wonders if the temptation narrative was really God saying tenderly to Jesus "You're here!" and Jesus not really knowing what to say in response but "YOU'RE here." "God meets our intensity of longing with intensity of longing. The Tender One whom we long for, longs for us. Maybe the desert is really a time to notice the notice of God."

   Luke sets Jesus’ ministry in the context of the political powers of his day: Tiberius, Pilate, Herod. Does Luke imply in chapter 4 that Satan is the source of their power? Luke’s genealogy of Jesus traces his lineage back to Adam. Luke 4 shows Jesus succeeding where Adam failed; with Paul in Romans 5:12-21, we see Jesus correcting and healing the Fall.

    Jesus, Luke alone mentions, is “full of the Holy Spirit.” He’s not beaming or having a titillating emotional experience. The Spirit, for him, stiffens his resolve to be at one with God the Father in the most arduous circumstances imagineable. And he’s not alone out there! The preacher might contrast solitude with loneliness. Jesus seems never to be lonely, although he’s often alone. Luke makes his solitude-ness explicit: the Spirit is with him, in him. When we are alone, we get lonely because we hear voices in our heads, negative messages… Preaching should make some attempt at comfort – while still fixed on the fact that this story is about Jesus, not us.

   It’s helpful for the preacher to describe the locale. Not a “desert,” like a stretch of sand with cacti. The Judean wilderness was a rocky zone full of cliffs and caves, with dangerous predators lurking behind every rock. A gravity-defying monastery clings to a cliff there, marking the traditional spot of Jesus’ testing. It’s a wilderness, again reminding us where Israel was tested (and failed). Again, Adam failed, Israel failed, we all fail. Jesus alone is our Savior.

   I love Nikos Kazantzakis’s image of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ: every time young Jesus reaches out for pleasure, “ten claws nailed themselves into his head and two frenzied wings beat above him, tightly covering his temples.  He shrieked and fell down on his face.”  His mother pleaded with a rabbi (who knew how to drive out demons) to help.  The rabbi shook his head.  “Mary, your boy isn’t being tormented by a devil; it’s not a devil, it’s God – so what can I do?”  “Is there no cure?” the wretched mother asked.  “It’s God, I tell you.  No, there is no cure.”  “Why does he torment him?”  The old exorcist sighed but did not answer.  “Why does he torment him?” the mother asked again.  “Because he loves him,” the old rabbi finally replied.

   This devil is more sinister and sneaky than a red guy with a pitch fork. The devil’s greatest wile? To persuade us he doesn’t exist, or to dupe us into seeing the devil behind every rock. Thomas Merton spoke of “the theology of the devil,” suggesting that what the devil wants most of all is attention. Clearly, if evil is alluring, we should look to things that are beautiful, attractive, even appearing to be holy – and that’s where evil sets its trap for us, as it did for Jesus.

   After teasing Jesus to turn rocks into bread (after all, he’d been born in Bethlehem, the “house of bread,” and he was on his way to becoming “the bread of life”!), the devil fights 2 more rounds. Luke reverses temptations #2 and #3 from Matthew’s version. The offer of the kingdoms: I can’t talk about this without lifting up Tolkien’s marvelous Lord of the Rings, in which he quite wisely showed that the ring of power shouldn’t fall to those who believe they’ll wear it well; it must be destroyed for there to be peace and goodness.

   Jesus is taken (spiritually? in the imagination? or literally?) to the “pinnacle” of the Temple. Does Luke mean the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, looming 400+ feet over the Kidron Valley? How many televangelists, or even parish pastors, would indulge in a bit of razzle-dazzle? Henri Nouwen (in In the Name of Jesus) reminds us that we clergy fantasize about doing something impressive for God. Sometimes, I worry if I see in others (and in myself!) a kind of ambition to be somebody, to matter, to stride forward to validate self - in a religious cause, of course! But this is not God’s way.

  The devil quotes Scripture! And from this Sunday’s Psalm (91) – that the angels won’t let us fall. I’ve called this the devil’s favorite passage, since it speaks of God protecting us from harm. People experience harm, pain, loss – and believing thinly that the Bible promises God won’t let that happen, people just give up on God and don’t believe any more. Every time this happens, the devil smiles, thinking My favorite Bible passage brought down another one!

   The angels adored and worshipped Jesus – but clearly, in the end, they not only let his foot be dashed against those stones near the Temple. They let Jesus’ blood be shed, his body be pierced. This story points toward that day – as Luke adds the tantalizing, haunting footnote that once Jesus won round 1, Satan “departed from him until an opportune time.”

***

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What can we say March 16? Lent 2

  We have great readings for Lent 2. Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 is the most quoted, theologically pregnant and productive text in all of the Old Testament, with its “the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” But did Genesis mean what Paul had in mind in Romans?

   Genesis 15 begins with “After these things” – meaning chapters 14! First, Abraham led 318 (an astonishingly exact number) men from his home far in the south to the far north to Dan. When I take folks to Israel, I love to show them the Bronze Age gate in Dan – as a place where Abraham came! Not many places in Israel do this. And then we have the curious Melchizedek passage – much beloved in the New Testament and early Christianity, and entirely mystifying to us.

   God reiterates the promise God made in Genesis 12 – and Abraham asks, like Mary centuries later, “How?” God here is a promiser. Americans love God-as-promiser – but they are thinking what God will do for me this week. God’s promise in the Scriptures is centuries – centuries! in the fulfillment.

   Abraham is asked to look up at the stars and count them. We can actually do this today, pervaded as our night skies are with so much ambient light. But Psalm 8, Job 38ff and Genesis 15 know of a darker – or brighter – sky, with countless stars, maybe like the sky I saw as a child, or the sky you can see if you go out West someplace.

   I'm haunted, when I think of Abraham looking up and counting the stars, by the Children's wing of Jerusalem's holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. A dark room with mirrors, reflecting the light of just 2 candles in an array like the night sky. Day and night, the names of children who died at the hands of the Nazis are read aloud. It takes 3 months to cycle through all of them.  God's promise to Abraham, fulfilled, and then tragically annihilated.

   That key verse 6, quoted as manifest proof of the life of faith vs. works in Paul: Abraham believed. His “belief” was trust, consent to God’s future, a commitment to stick things out, fixing his life on God’s direction. Ellen Davis reminds us (thinking on chapter 22) that with Abraham the question really is never "obedience," but "trust" - and it's his trust in God's presence, and God's promise, not merely to get the desired outcome, but to stick with God whatever unfolds. This was “reckoned” (imputed?) to him as “righteousness.” Certainly for Paul, and even in the Old Testament, righteousness is relational. Even when you live out the regulations of the Torah, it is because of a trusting, grateful, intimate relationship with God.

    You have to admire Abraham for taking God’s promise into his own hands, for making it happen – by adopting Eliezer. Rational, practical – but not God’s plan!  The promise of the land has been hugely problematical through history.  We might wish God had promised a great people, and a blessing – but the land pledge has precipitated so much conflict. Walter Brueggemann’s new, short, and incisive book, Chosen? Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is so very helpful in sorting out the issues.

   The vision here of birds swooping down on bloody carcasses might make you shudder; the gauntlet of fire between the slaughtered heifer, goat, ram, turtledove and pigeon feels like an ancient agrarian hazing… but it was an ancient covenant ceremony of immense purpose.

    Psalm 27. So eloquent, the shining gem of all the Psalms, I would say. What do we desire? God’s presence? The “Beauty of the Lord” is undertreated in preaching – and I wrote a whole book on preaching called The Beauty of the Word to try to capture why the beauty that is God figures so prominently in preaching.

    Our Epistle, Philippians 3:17-4:1, is rich in theological implications. Paul, not bashful at all, invites imitation! I don’t do this so often, out of humility, and a frank realization that my people should not imitate me. I wonder if we clergy should dare to hold ourselves up, in some humble, self-effacing way, as exemplary of a life with Christ.

    How odd for Paul to speak of religious, spiritual people who claim to follow Christ as “enemies of the cross”! Back then, Paul saw grave danger in those who believed Christianity was all about the mustering of good deeds. Today it’s more about feeling and emotion – or maybe what Paul says: “Their god is their belly, their glory is shame.” We are first and foremost consumers: we buy, we eat, we collect, we shop more, we drink more, and it’s all about me, how I feel, my sense of fulfillment. We even enlist God to help us consume, to feel full – but can’t we see how our minds are really stuck on “earthly things”?

     What once was shameful we now glorify: the “seven deadly sins” (greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, anger, envy and pride) now describe the good life in America! We fantasize about and are intrigued by what is shameful – because we’re after a rush of feeling, a higher high. But God isn’t a feeling more titillating than any other: God is a stable rock enduring every oscillation of feeling. God you cannot buy or consume. God calls me out of self-indulgence, away from it being all about me, and into the adventure of God, far grander than me and my small satisfactions. Preachers have to help people with this…..

    Citizens of Philippi took great pride, as settled military veterans, in their membership in the commonwealth that was the Roman empire; their citizenship (politeuma) wasn’t Greece where they were located but Rome! Paul plays on this: for Christians, our true citizenship is in heaven: it was to God’s kingdom we belong. And try as they might to straddle both worlds, you have to make a choice, a big choice but also a lot of little choices – just as we do as Christians who belong to heaven but are pressed to get too enmeshed in the habits and ideals of our culture. 

    “We await.” We live in anticipation of something that has peeked out from behind the veil but is not fully revealed: our mood is Advent-ish, waiting, longing – and not for just any Savior! The emperor claimed to be soter, savior – but of the upper echelons, keeping a heavy boot on the lower classes. Ben Witherington: “Paul was offering a very different sort of savior, one who was for everyone, even those in the lowest status in society, even slaves.” 

     We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself (Philippians 3:21). In my book, The Life We Claim: The Apostles’ Creed, I tried to clarify what this “glorious body” is about: “When we speak of the resurrection, we do not mean that Jesus’ soul survived the death of his body, and yet we do not mean the mere resuscitation of a corpse. The risen Jesus is not recognized, but then is recognizable. He can be touched, but then he pulls back. He materializes, and then he vanishes. Paul spoke of the resurrection as involving a ‘spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15). A body, yes, but spiritual, not merely a spirit, but a body, totally transformed, animated entirely by the Spirit, not liable to disease or death. So for those whose understanding of anatomy makes a resuscitation seem ridiculous, the Bible narrates something different, and far better – better even than the immortality of the soul. The Bible promises the resurrection of spiritual bodies.”

     It’s a “lowly body” though now, not yet glorified, and something of a struggle, like a burden – and yet the Body is God’s temple (1 Cor. 6). Paul’s tone in all this is never castigating or harsh. How tender is he? How tender must the preacher be? Where else but in the Church do you get called “beloved”? Henri Nouwen’s book, Life of the Beloved, articulates God’s hopeful message for each of us who live a world where “beloved” doesn’t compute.

    Paul and the Philippians share love (review the origin of the church in Acts 16!) – but their love isn’t spontaneous affection, or the fact that they think alike or enjoy leisure activities together. It is Christ who is their friendship, who cements their relationship; it is Christ they share, and their zeal for the present work and future hope of the kingdom of God. Love? “My joy”? “My crown”? Hard of me not to think of the consummation of Tolkien’s The Return of the King. The crown falls to the new king, Aragorn, but he yields to the wonder of the small people, the hobbits. They are friends. As Merry famously said to Frodo: “You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. You can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.” This is the life of the Body of Christ.

   Luke 13:31-35. Finally we come to the Gospel. Jesus has Paul’s tender love – for Jerusalem. Its people, of course, but the larger dream and destiny of God’s chosen place. Warned by the Pharisees (was this a friendly warning? or are they trying to goad him into shutting up?) to flee, Jesus has a snarky response, calling Herod a “fox.” His poetic declaration about his as-yet incomplete work (today, tomorrow, third day) is haunting, beautiful, courageous. 

   His lament is moving, and picturesque. If you get to travel to Jerusalem, you often get your first glimpse of the old city as you round the crest of Mt. Scopus. Tourists get giddy, or play that old song “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” on the bus’s loudspeakers. Jesus at this point fell on his knees and wept – just as he’d wept for his friend Lazarus on arriving at his tomb. He would have seen, in the Kidron valley, the “tombs of the prophets.” So he wasn’t just recalling history. He sees and points to their tombs! – a haunting glimpse of his fate to come. I even wonder if “stoning those sent” might look forward to Stephen, the first martyr, which Luke of course knew about.

My friend Jeremy Troxler, on the last night of our awful General Conference in February, suggested that if you look at a religious institution you love and it is a travesty, profoundly disappointing - or if you know things you know, try to explain them to other people, and they just don't get it, then in that terrible, painful, frustrating place, you are very close to the heart of Jesus.

   And then the lovely image of a hen gathering her brood. It’s lovely – and not just because it’s a feminine image. In the traditional “Upper Room” in Jerusalem, the site where pilgrims have believed (wrongly, but still…) the Last Supper transpired, there is a carving on one of the columns of a pelican and her chicks. Evidently (is this true?) a mama pelican goes out in search for food for her chicks. But if everything is dried up and she finds none, she returns to the nest, pokes holes in her own flesh with her beak, and the chicks feed on her. Eucharistic. Cruciform. Sacrificial gathering. Grisly, and lovely.