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.

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  Check out my newest book, The Heart of the Psalms: God's Word to the World - one I've been wanting to write for decades now! Abingdon provides a study guide and video series with it. Enjoy - for you, for others and for groups too.

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.”

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  Check out my newest book, The Heart of the Psalms: God's Word to the World - one I've been wanting to write for decades now! Abingdon provides a study guide and video series with it. Enjoy - for you, for others and for groups too.

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 newest book, The Heart of the Psalms: God's Word to the World - one I've been wanting to write for decades now! Abingdon provides a study guide and video series with it. Enjoy - for you, for others and for groups too.