What can we say come April 29? Easter 5

     The Old Testament – Acts 8:26-40?? – is actually about the impact of reading the Old Testament on one of Christianity’s first converts.  So in a way, the Old Testament reading is Isaiah 52-53, the elusive, profound poem about the suffering servant.  I preached on this three years ago (video here).

    The preacher can portray the dual identity of this Ethiopian. There is something exotic about him and his native land, home of the Queen of Sheba, the mysterious source of the Nile, perhaps the place where the ark of the covenant has rested all these centuries… But then he’s black, he’s African, and he has an alternative sexual identity.

    He’s been to Jerusalem – and we know that because of his identity, he wasn’t admitted.  Stunning: he still went, still was obsessed with the Scriptures even though he was excluded!  I’ve noted this in United Methodism: people we exclude, whom we don’t “condone,” who can’t receive the church’s blessings, keep showing up, keep coming back, keep seeking to be a part of the community that ostracizes them.  Some miracle in that…  reminding me that this text appeared in the lectionary the Sunday after our 2012 General Conference, and I could not help but comment on the parallels (video here).

    The text’s question, Do you understand? intrigues – as this Suffering servant text (Isa 52-53) still is a puzzle.  But for all of Scripture, we need guidance – we the clergy, and we the people to whom clergy preach.  There is a study/intellectual level at which we need guidance; but more importantly, we need real life practical guidance.  St. Francis was the master interpreter of Scripture – not because of any clever insights he had, but because he read the Bible, and it became his to-do list for the day.

    The text’s next question, Does he speak of himself, or another? is still batted around. The answer, certainly, is Yes.  The prophet has been afflicted in his ministry to the exiles; yet his servant role is theirs, unfulfilled, or perhaps one they are being summoned to fulfill.  We can read Jesus in, as Phillip and the Ethiopian did – but the original text stands well enough on its own; I’d commend John Goldingay’s lovely exposition (in The Theology of the Book of Isaiah) of how a prophet suffered for his message, and that suffering came to be understood as redemptive – and this does give us some clues about how God chooses to be God, and hence what God was doing in Jesus.

    And the text’s third question, What is to prevent me being baptized? quite tragically gets answered. There’s a class, you have to be a member, you have to believe and repent, you can’t be this identity unless you repent, you have to be touched by a duly ordained person, etc.  What a rich text, teeming with homiletical possibility.

     Psalm 22:25-31 is certainly fascinating – if we reckon with the notion that Jesus, in utter agony on the cross, called to mind a Psalm he had learned as a boy from his mother, beginning “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Did he, as many did, hold in mind not just that phrase, but the entire Psalm – which as we see here winds up with dramatic words of steadfast hope in the face of severe adversity?

     1 John 4:7-21 goes on a bit of a ramble – but his points are well-taken and entirely preachable.  I shiver a little when people say something like God’s love is the love people share – but 1 John surely underlines that when we love, we do partake of God’s love.  But for him it’s not only that God’s love = human love – which is a dicey proposition.  It all begins, continues and ends in God’s love for us – and not a mood in the heart of God, but a specific, concrete action in the crucifixion of Jesus. 

    “Perfect love casts out fear” is the text’s best line – although discerning what “perfect” love is can be elusive.  I admire Scott Bader-Saye’s great book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear.  His wise reflections on good and necessary fear versus irrational, overstated fear – and then how the desire for security, especially in our post-9/11 world, crowds out faith, courage, boldness, discipleship. “We fear excessively when we allow the avoidance of evil to trump the pursuit of the good. When we fear excessively we live in a mode of reacting to and plotting against evil rather than actively seeking and doing what is good. Fear causes our vision to narrow, when what is needed is for it to be enlarged… Our overwhelming fears need to be overwhelmed by bigger and better things, by a sense of adventure and fullness of life.”  Or we may well say, by the love of God in Christ Jesus.

     John 15:1-8 exhibits yet one more of Jesus’ riveting “I am” statements.  His identity, and thus the revealed identity of the very God Moses inquired into, is declared – but in images, like living water, the good shepherd, and here, a vine.  If you can, interview somebody who knows about growing things, how vines work or don’t, how they bear fruit or don’t. 

     Gisela Kreglinger has written a fascinating book called The Spirituality of Wine. She grew up in a wine-producing family, and teaches us much about how alienated urban people are from the land and what unfolds there.  As archaeologists have found thousands of winepresses all over Israel of Jesus’ day, we realize he spoke to people who knew vines, vineyards, winepresses, and so his very vivid image of life with him would have been utterly memorable – and as listeners found themselves back at work, pruning, pressing, keeping the bugs away and such, would have seen, felt, and smelled quite tangible images of their relationship to Jesus.

    Acknowledging the woes of alcohol mis-use, Kreglinger shows how flowing wine is a constant image of the dawn of God’s kingdom. Then, her details drawn from viticulture are intriguing – and preachable. Sap from the rootstock journeys through the vine and gives life to the grapes. There’s this: “When a vine lacks water and is under stress, it is forced to develop deeper roots… The deeper the roots, the more the roots interact with and drawn from different layers of soil, and the more complex (and desirable) the wine becomes.”  Vintners can’t just grow the maximum amount; sustainability requires some restraint, a long-terms care for the soil.

     And then there’s this: “Left to themselves, vines grow like weeds… Part of cultivating the vines is to prune their branches and tie them onto wires….” Pruning has its homiletical possibilities – and Kreglinger suggests that the wires onto which vines are tied “are like the structures and rules in a religious community; we need them… they give us support and stability.”  I find all this to be wonderfully suggestive, and may well preach a sermon in which I reflect in a leisurely way over vines, roots, being stressed, pruning, trellising (especially if I can track down a vineyard worker for an interview!).  After all, monks back in the Middle Ages became the great wine producers, and tended their vines as a spiritual practice accompanied by prayer. Even we grape-juice Methodists, with our peculiar and unhappy relationship with fermented grape juice, can ponder with profit the image of Jesus as the vine.

    This business of fruitfulness is always ripe for preaching.  (Pun intended).  Bearing fruit, from the vine’s perspective, is different from the way we think about being good.  Ripening fruit doesn’t grit its teeth and strive really hard to get bigger and change color.  It’s a passive thing, nutrients being pumped into the fruit, entirely dependent on uncontrollable rainfall and sunshine, and processes that are hidden underground where no one can see.  Holiness is like this; do you remember how the doctrine of Sanctification actually works?

    And then I recall when I was in the thick of writing on The Will of God.  I asked a bunch of theologians about the subject – and one replied quite simply by saying “If you want to do God’s will, start with the Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5.  That can keep you plenty busy for the rest of your life.”

    Prepositions matter in theology. A lovely hymn prays, “Abide with me.” But Jesus doesn’t speak of being beside us, but actually in us, and we in him. Mind you, Jesus isn’t going for any bland “I feel God in me” or “God is in each one of us.”  It’s way more serious, and downright fleshy than all that.  Jean Vanier rephrased it, “To abide in Jesus is to make our home in him and to let Jesus make his home in us.”

   Raymond Brown rightly says this vine language has “eucharistic overtones.”  To think of the Lord’s Supper – in my book, Worshipful, I quoted Austin Farrer and then explored this thought and its inversion: “Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples in bread and wine. Amazed at such a token, and little understanding what they did, Peter, John and the rest reached out their hands and took their master and their God. Whatever else they knew or did not know, they knew they were committed to him… and that they, somehow, should live it out.” When a disciple is filled with Jesus, he remembers what his physical body is to be: a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)… As N.T. Wright rightly suggested, when we eat and drink at the Lord’s table, “we become walking shrines, living temples in whom the living triune God truly dwells.”…To ingest Jesus is intriguing: we take Christ into ourselves, and he is then within us. This goes beyond even the closest human relationship, even sexual intimacy. If Jesus is in us, there is zero distance between us. Over time, creative theologians would reverse the image: we are consumed by Jesus. We enter into his body; we get inside Jesus himself. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke imaginatively about this: “My penitence, my salvation, are His food. I myself am His food. I am chewed as I am reproved by Him; I am swallowed as I am taught; I am digested as I am changed; I am assimilated as I am transformed; I am made one as I am conformed.”

   He lives in us, and acts through us – and so as not to thwart this, we need to be cleansed or pruned. Jean Vanier speaks of asking to be pruned of our fear, compulsions, our frenetic pace in life, sense of failure, spending ourselves on success and power.  “Choice implies loss Fidelity in love can cost a lot. To grow in love we have to pass through pain and anguish. It is the same in our relationship with God. In order to be more present to God, we have to be less present to other things.

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 My book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, now has a study guide with videos, making it more useful for small groups!  

What can we say come April 22? Easter 4

   1 John 3:16-24 is a promising passage, which has the fertile thought that “God is greater than our hearts” (important to explicate, as most people reduce God to what they feel in their hearts, or to the One who should give us what our hearts want – and I also think of Bonhoeffer’s admonition that we not only pray what is in our heart, but we pray what is in God’s Word, which might lead us to pray what is contrary even to our own heart!). This text also carries that glaring question, “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need yet closes his heart, how does God’s love abide in him?”

     But I will focus on Psalm 23, or John 10:11-18 – or both. Psalm 23 can be risky preaching, as so much sugary sentimentality has attached itself to this overly familiar text. No need to ding people or jolt them out of their warm fuzzy mood on hearing it; hey, I get warm fuzzy feelings from hearing it – especially when we read it aloud, together as a Body, at funeral services. It’s just a matter of the preacher taking them further into what they were sure they already comprehended well.

     A few points of interest. To speak of the Lord as shepherd isn’t flattering to us – although much like sheep, we are foolish creatures, driven entirely by appetite, easily lost and in peril. I heard a preacher years ago say “Sheep nibble themselves lost.”

     And then, the shepherd. We romanticize them as rural simpletons. But rulers throughout the Ancient Near East were called shepherds. As a business, flocks could number in the tens of thousands, so shepherding required considerable administrative savvy. Travellers to the Holy Land have observed that shepherds are a bit rough in appearance, and are quite rough with their sheep. First shepherd I ever saw was wearing an Elvis t-shirt, big green golashes, swatting sheep on the rear end with his stick, and hollering expletives. The Lord is my shepherd.

     The shepherd’s care can be tender and personal. It was common for shepherds to give sheep names. I was never sure, as a child, by that TV program in which Shari Lewis spoke to her little sheep puppet she called “Lamb Chop” – a name that sounds more like a meal than a pet. If you want to ponder the shepherd’s personal care for the sheep, flit over to Jesus’ great story about the shepherd who had hung onto 99 out of 100 – a super high percentage – but was restless until he found that one. Jealous, protective, resilient, doggedly loyal: shepherds. No wonder the angels chose them for their audience when Jesus was born.

     Most pastors are cognizant that “I shall not want” might be better rendered as “I will lack no good thing.” This opens up some reflection on our wanting, what is genuinely good, etc. The “paths of righteousness” – good roads to take, but what kind of righteous, holy, Torah-filled, disciple living is required of those who can truly claim to walk there?

 

    Someone counted all the Hebrew words in Psalm 23, and it turns out that the word smack dab in the middle is “with.” The center of the Psalm, the center of the life of faith, is “thou art with me.” This bears homiletical reflection. Sam Wells gifted us with his marvelous A Nazareth Manifesto, in which he explains that God isn’t primarily a fixer or protector or guarantor of this or that we think we must have. God’s identity and purpose: simply to be with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, not God fixing us or doing favors for us. This then redefines our mission. We don’t do for others or fix others; we are called to be with them – as explicated now in Sam’s companion volume on the nature and mission of the church, Incarnational Ministry.

    “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies” bears some thought. It’s not a taunt (as a scholar I’ll leave unnamed has insisted). From a Christian theological perspective, the Lord’s table is the place where reconciliation begins and ends. When you have a dinner party, do not invite those who can invite you in return (Luke 14). We are to make peace, at table, not with our pals but with those where relationships are broken or nonexistent.

   

I had a strange compulsion a while back when preaching on Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd – but what is the antecedent of “my”? Sheep, surely? I tried my hand at putting these words into the mouth of another creature in the pastoral scene: the sheepdog (catch it on YouTube). It’s his shepherd too. I latched onto this because of a lovely quotation from Evelyn Underhill I’ve long treasured: “You want to be one among the sheepdogs employed by the Good Shepherd.  Now have you ever watched a good sheepdog at his work?  He is not at all an emotional animal.  He just goes on with his job quite steadily, takes no notice of bad weather, rough ground, or his own comfort.  He seldom or never comes back to be stroked.  Yet his faithfulness, his intimate understanding with his master, is one of the loveliest things in the world.  Now and then he just looks at the shepherd.  When the time comes for rest they can generally be found together.”  

     I love Evelyn Underhill.  Always spot on, always wise, always full of clarity and insight.

     The Lord is the shepherd of us, the Body of Christ. This is more evident in John 10:11-18 – where the emphasis is on the courage, the stick-to-it-iveness of the shepherd. Wolves go on the prowl, but this shepherd doesn’t duck behind a rock. He “gives his life for the sheep.”

     I am increasingly drawn toward preaching to the Body as the Body, not to each individual sitting there individually. If we are Christ now, if we are his body, then we have shepherding to do.

 

Raymond Brown even translates kalos in “I am the good Shepherd” as “I am the model Shepherd.” Not good as in good to the sheep, but good as in good at it. He shows us how to shepherd – and it’s laying our lives down for the sheep.

    Jean Vanier explores this shepherding, pointing out how false shepherds “are more concerned about their salary, their reputation, structures, administration and the success of the group. They use people… They are closed up in their own needs.”

 By contrast, “To become a good shepherd is to come out of the shell of selfishness to be attentive to those for whom we are responsible, to reveal to them their fundamental beauty and value and help them grow and become fully alive. It is not easy really to listen. It is not easy to touch our own fears. It is a challenge to help others gradually accept responsibility, to trust themselves. When people are weak or lost, they need a shepherd close to them. Little by little, however, as they discover who they are, the shepherd becomes more of a friend and companion.”

     And how do we give our lives for the sheep? Vanier again: “It can mean communicating what is precious… It can mean giving yourself in trust and love… It can mean risking my life by throwing myself into the raging waters to save someone who is drowning.”

     Of course, John gives us that mysterious “I have other sheep not of this fold.” Does he mean other religions? Or as one friend of mine believes, Jesus has people on other planets in other galaxies! Jesus is thinking Gentiles of course – but here we see his abiding, deep desire for unity among God’s people, which is the reality in God’s heart, even if our hearts are divided from one another.

What can we say come April 15? Easter 3

     I always moan a little when I see the book of Acts under “Old Testament Reading.”  39 of the Bible's 66 books actually are Old Testament, with so much rich material never touched in the lectionary – and they go to Acts?  Psalm 4 is a typically eloquent prayer… but I’ll focus this week on 1 John 3:1-17 (admitting that I find the tail end of Luke 24 the least charming, unique or profound of all the resurrection periscopes, although the prospect of baking a little fish for Jesus, and, according to a few old manuscripts, him eating some honeycomb, is alluring!).

   When I was young, I liked 1 John a bit – but when you’re young, you’re looking for information, applicables, something ready and quick.  As I get older, I treasure, savor, and linger over 1 John more and more – and I suspect preaching should way more often adopt as its goal making space for our people to treasure, savor and linger over a text more eloquent than any sermon could be.  With 1 John, it’s the love, the wisdom, the perspective, the tenderness, the immense sense of belonging.  You feel you’re in a small group in a small home, huddled around candlelight, pondering again the reality of Jesus, an overflow of love filling and warming the place.  No wonder scholars guess the author was one long steeped in the experience of Jesus and living it in a treacherous, rapidly changing world.

   Our 7 verses open up a window into, not just the whole letter but the whole world of this beloved community (and the preacher would do well to read the whole thing as personal preparation, and not in a rush!).  It’s a marvel. Don’t overexplain.  Trust the text.  Let your people see/hear you marveling over it.

 

 

    In his classic Anchor Bible commentary, Raymond Brown suggests that the author, mid-argument, inserts 3:1-3 as "a type of exclamatory interruption... an emotional aside." Quite personally, he is amazed over what God has already given, more moved by what is to come.  There's a psychological point here: if we can look back in gratitude, we will look forward with hope, whereas if we look back with regret, or guilt, or if we just never look back, then we look forward with anxiety or hollowness. 

   But Brown's odd notion piques my interest: I wonder if a sermon can capture this interruption and the preacher might offer some personal emotion.  OK, I was working on this sermon - and then I just felt entirely moved, downright flummoxed, by how unspeakably amazing God's love, all God has done for us, for me, really is.  And I just couldn't write for a few minutes.  Shake your head, nod - and then move back into the sermon.  Too manipulative??

 

   The opening verb, “See,” is strong, more like “Look!” or “Behold!” (ίδετε).  Also, visibility must matter:  the Father’s love must be tangible, viewable – in Christ, and in the life of the Body.  I suspect preachers need to underline this visibility often.  Spirituality does not = invisible!  Spiritual things aren't unreal things; spiritual things are utterly real, visible things driven by God's spirit.

 

     Reading slowly (always recommended), the second word, “what,” is ποταπήν, which, according again to Raymond Brown, expresses “both quality and quantity, thus, how much love, and what amazing love.”  Volume (overwhelmingly endless) and quantity (the likes of which we only dream of): God’s love makes us God’s children.  Jesus spoke of becoming like children – and I think of the beautiful moment in 2 Kings 5 when the leprosy-stricken Naaman finally washed in the Jordan, and his flesh was restored “like that of a young child.”

 

    A child.  Brown, once again, offers a keen, preachable insight: "John has rephrased the covenant saying, ‘I will be your God and you shall be my people’ into ‘I will be your God, and you shall be my children.’"  The Bible insists that this regression, this spiritual reversal of the arrow of time, becoming children, is the way to life.

 

   “When he appears, we shall be like him.”  Wow.  Jesus doesn’t save me so I can keep being like me; our portrayals of heaven (playing golf, lavish meals, sunshine) are so vapid.  We will be like him (and we can’t be sure, but most likely the writer means God, not just Jesus).   St. Athanasius and a holy host of theologians unblushingly spoke of deification: we will become glorious – 

or as C.S. Lewis put it in his astonishing sermon “The Weight of Glory,” “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which you would be strongly tempted to worship… There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
 

The Church fathers did not hesitate to speak of our deification!  “We will be like him.”  Maybe American churchgoers won’t fancy even deification, for they are rather attached to their own, independent selves. Surely God will help me be… me.  I gotta be me…  I did it my way… But no, we will be like him. 

     This likeness is not a moral imperative. Our text doesn’t envision “the imitation of Christ” or “What would Jesus do?” as an ethic. It is more transformational, ontological, and eschatological. Be patient now, even if you’re trying hard to be like Jesus.  You get it right once in a blue moon, but you have light years to go.  But it will come.  We will be like him.

     For now, ours isn’t to behave better, but to see clearly.  Brown again: “Our seeing God as He is is the basis for our being like Him.” The preacher might rehearse the ways we recreate God in our own image; we see the deity we have a hankering for. The secret of the spiritual life is coming to see God as God truly is, which must require a lifetime of study, contemplation, direction, worship, discipline, unlearning so much, relearning what you thought you knew, looking long and carefully once more.

     Our text does bear an unavoidable complication – as if you walk into a lovely foyer, which is well-decorated and full of those welcoming people. But then they lead you into a noisy, smelly back room where a gang of sweaty guys are making sausage.  To his beautiful verbiage, 1 John adds that “sinners are lawless,” and that crushingly discouraging thought that “No one who abides in him sins, no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” Mind you, we’ve all known ultra-pious people who smugly nod and peer in judgment at others when they read such words.  You may preach to a few of them… but the Word this Sunday is first for the others, and then you hope to vainly self-justifying might overhear and be saved.

    I am unsure what to do, except to ask: What if verses 4-7 were all we had?  Most Christians, with the exception of the doggedly naïve and most hardened pharisaical, would give up the ghost and quite church as absurdly impossible and maybe irrelevant. In short, 4-7 is a counsel of despair. But then, what if verses 1-3 were all we had? All peace, love and light – but after a while, an unchanged life wouldn’t be worth living either.

    The order is divinely inspired.  You don’t end your sinning and then get the love.  God’s love overwhelms, and then the sanctification begins and continues. Remember sanctification? Not gritting your teeth and doing better, but what the powerful mercy of God does in you. I suspect this isn’t preached much…  Thinking of 1 John's remark about purity, C. Clifton Black (New Interpreter’s Bible) calls this purity one of the “family traits” of God’s children.  Purity isn't an alien behavior we can't get the hang of, or something only special people DNA enables.  It's a family trait - and in our family, God's family.

 

   And it isn’t just that after the abundance of mercy we then fix the sin.  In a way, we aren’t really sinners, or we at least don’t get it, until we get the mercy.  Weird, God’s way.  The world has no comprehension of sin.  President Trump, during his campaign, said he’d never asked God for forgiveness.  That’s how it is in an unredeemed world.  You don’t know sin until you’ve seen the grace.  When we see God as God is, only then is our wobbly, flawed, even wretched state realized – and what perfect timing! 

The gut reaction might be Oh no, gee, I’ve made a mess of things, I’d best start doing better.  But then Jesus gently coaxes us into what for me what a transfixing moment during seminary when my theology professor, Dean Robert Cushman, brilliant to excess, explained that we often strive to make Jesus our exemplar – and then, when that project fails so miserably, it dawns on us that he is our savior.

What can we say come April 8? Easter 2

    I recall being semi-impressed with myself as an undergrad for taking a challenging course on Existentialism, expecting to have my intellectual horizons expanded.  Plunging into Kierkegaard, though, I had my life challenged.  His pointed, barbed critiques of a thin, superficial, even faked faith blew me away - including his report of walking around Copenhagen, asking people if they believed Jesus was raised from the dead.  Almost unanimously, his fellow citizens said Yeah, sure.  But what difference did it make?  No one could answer; no one had much to show for their belief.

     Easter 2's texts astonish us with the difference resurrection makes. Acts 4:32-35 describes a vital church not much like ours at all. What was the greater miracle for those first Christians? That they coughed up all their possessions to insure no one went without? or that they were of one heart and soul?  Psalm 133 is a fitting Easter text: How lovely when brothers dwell together in unity. Or we might today say, How rare. Or How miraculous. How resurrection-like.  There is an inextricable link between "No one said any of the things he possessed was his own but they had everything in common" and "And with great power they gave testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" and "There was not a needy person among them."  We can talk evangelistic tools or church growth strategies all we'd like; but the early Christians expanded exponentially because their witness was what they did with their possessions.  We are so enmeshed, we prefer to keep our own stuff and blame others who don't have enough, or we feel noble if we toss some loose change or some leftover canned goods into a basket.

     Speaking of testimony: in my circles, we do not attend sufficiently to the remarkable epistle text for Easter 2, 1 John 1:1-2:2.  The writer speaks urgently about what they had seen "with our own eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands... We saw it!" Richard Bauckham wrote a fantastic, definitive-feeling book (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) about how the Gospels came to be, and it's all about the piling up of eyewitness accounts.  The earliest Christian preachers could say We saw him, we touched him, if anybody could debunk the resurrection or his lordship, it would be us. 

     I continue to speculate over the role of testimony in preaching. I suspect that while I engage in it, I don't go far enough.  I think people want to hear that Yes, I believe this - as opposed to I've gotten up a sermon for you today. 

And notice in 1 John the purpose of them sharing what they saw and touched: so we can have fellowship with each other and with God, and so that "our joy may be complete."  Love it: not You better be joyful, but We are joyful.  Joy isn't happiness jacked up a notch or two.  It's so very different - and I would commend to you Christian Wiman's lovely collection of poetry about joy, with his startlingly wise commentary. And, as I've said in this blog repeatedly, the point of Easter is forgiveness, not I get eternal life now.  How much clearer could it be?  1 John goes from fellowship with God via the resurrection to being forgiven and forgiving.

     Same for the Gospel lesson, John 20:19-31.  The preacher can set a mood people can understand easily: doors are locked, fear dominates.  And they can't seem to recognize Jesus (Mary Magdalene or the twelve!).  "I think they are blinded by their unfulfilled expectations and their feelings of loss and despair" (Jean Vanier).  To such people Jesus utters a word, with the power of the one who commanded stars, sky and earth to come into being, and it's the one who stilled the storm: "Peace."  As Jesus clarified earlier in John, this peace isn't the one the world gives! (John 14:27).  Jesus doesn't give you some peace of mind or serenity you think you want.  Jesus' Peace is his personal presence.

     In Jesus' presence there is no fear.  Or maybe the way Jesus banishes fear might get us a bit agitated and in rapid motion.  Elie Wiesel famously said “If an angel ever says, ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out:  a big assignment is on the way.”  Jesus comforts with one hand and then shoves them out into hard labor and danger with the other.

     His hands matter here.  Jesus still has wounds in his hands and side (his feet are unmentioned).  We’ll say more about the nature of this “resurrected body” in a moment. 

I love Vanier's remark: “These wounds are there for all ages and all time, to reveal the humble and forgiving love of Jesus who accepted to go to the utter end of love. The risen Jesus does not appear as the powerful one, but as the wounded and forgiving one. These wounds become his glory.”  And what do we sing in "Crown Him with Many Crowns"?  Behold his hands and side. Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified. I've sung that a thousand time, and have never given it the briefest thought.  How profound...
 

For now, the scars are worth pondering.  I’m reminded of a lovely scene in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.  A woman notices what used to be a wound on her lover’s shoulder, and contemplates the advancing wrinkles in his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of a scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man from a falling wall.  The scar was part of his character, and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.”  Thankfully, Jesus scars remain; they tell us all we need to know about his character.  And what are the implications for us and our life in heaven?  What wounds will we continue to bear – joyfully, but still.

     One of my favorite details in all the resurrection narratives is in verse 22: “He breathed on them.”  I’ll acknowledge there is powerful symbolism here – like God breathing the breath of life into people, the winds of Pentecost to come.  But what if he actually breathed on them?  What was that like?  You have to be very close, physically, to someone before they can successfully breathe on you.  Proximity to Jesus allows the sensation of his breath. 

     And lest we forget:  the note of forgiveness, once again, is sounded in a resurrection story.  Jesus is risen, therefore you get eternal life?  No: in the Scriptures, Jesus is risen, therefore you are forgiven – and you’d best get out there now and forgive others.

     We’ve all heard sermons about “doubting Thomas.”  Doubt is hardly praised in this story.  If anything Jesus dings him, contrasting him with those who haven’t seen and yet believe.  He is loved and treated with immense compassion; Jesus invites him to touch the wounds.  The Greek is graphic, with Jesus saying “thrust” or “press” or “cast” your finger into (like down in there) my side.  Caravaggio captured this in a stunning way…

     This whole business of Jesus appearing suddenly behind closed doors, then vanishing just as suddenly, and yet you can poke a finger into his side and not just see but feel him raises questions about the resurrection.  Long books have probed this – but my shorthand answer is that Jesus is the first of what we shall be, and that is: we will be raised with (or in, or as) what Paul called “spiritual bodies” (1 Cor. 15).  No simplistic resuscitation here.  Your old body doesn’t revive and live on.  You are transformed, metamorphosized maybe.  Jesus was not recognizable, but then he was recognized; the mortal and spiritual bodies are kin, similar, but hardly identical.  It’s still a body though, not a ghost or a floating spirit.  It can cook and eat, but it might vanish too.  Paul uttered the understatement of the Bible: “Behold, I tell you a mystery” (1 Cor. 15:51).

What can we say come Easter morning?

Easter - on April Fools' Day!  I'll have to say something, but not overdo it...  There is a foolishness at the heart of Easter.  It's not flowers blooming in the Spring (which only works on one hemisphere!), and it's not any natural and inevitable continuance of some immortal soul within.  It's the miracle, the shock of new life.  Or really, Easter isn't about you and me.  It's about God, and Jesus, how amazing they are - as we will see.  You can view the sermon I did four years ago (featuring some Winston Churchill humor, reflections on the deaths of a two year old and a teenager in our church family just before Easter, and some wisdom from Julian of Norwich).

Easter preaching, to me, is so hard – in two ways.  There’s such a “prettiness” to the day, with lots of sightseers, the Christmas and Easter peeps, flowers – and at least for us, more people than we can fit in the room, a problem that prompted me to write a blog last year about how we come to church on Easter and Christmas, hospitality, kindness, etc.

   My focus this year will be this: the plot of the Easter accounts in the Bible seems to be, not Jesus rose so you get eternal life, but Jesus rose, so you are forgiven.  And Jesus rose, so he’s vindicated, he’s amazing, he’s the One.  If you’ve followed my blog, you know I advocate preaching sermons that aren’t Here’s the text, so go do such and such, but are rather just reflections on how amazing Jesus was/is.  I think the Gospels do this.  It’s just Wow, he really is the Messiah, the crazy things he said and did now most clearly are wonderfully the way.

   I'm also, as of this morning, interested in John Dominic Crossan's interesting Christian Century piece about the Greek word for resurrection - anastasis - and how it means "rising up" or "uprising." He points out how in Christian art, Jesus regularly doesn't rise alone, but leading a crowd, beginning with Adam and Eve. He's raising up a community, he has maybe descended into hell to free the captives.  This angle fits wonderfully with N.T. Wright's book on the crucifixion - The Day the Revolution Began - not to mention the lovely and quotable thought from Karl Barth: "Prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."

Mark 16 interestingly begins “After the Sabbath” – meaning this kind of thing unfolds during the day of rest, when we aren’t laboring but are only trusting God’s hand to be on what we aren’t managing or producing right now… reminding me to encourage all clergy to watch the best sermon for clergy I’ve ever heard  - and it’s on this business of the women, the tomb, and the Sabbath – by my friend Claude Alexander; a must watch – and don’t miss the song right after the sermon.

The Forgiveness part is huge.  We don’t know sin, and thus we don’t know forgiveness – and if I ask people about the need for forgiveness, they tell me about somebody who hurt them they just can’t forgive.  Is there a sermon for Easter about the healing of fractured relationships – beginning with ours with God?  Can we find any vivid imagery or stories to help people see Easter?  Can you come up with a profound story of forgiveness?  Or would you use this incredible, moving story from Corrie Ten Boom that Ben Witherington told in my sanctuary recently (video – at the 49 minute mark)?

Resurrection isn’t the reward for a well-lived life, or the natural outcome of mortal existence.  You always have that famous Buechner quote about If Easter is nothing more than the flowers blooming in the Spring, the natural outflow of how things unfold, then I should turn in my credentials.  I think he’s right.

I wonder about the role of personal testimony at Easter.  I did this after the DaVinci Code came out, along with the other anti-Christian books that sell so well.  I clarified that for me, as a guy, not as pastor, not under instruction from the bishop, but just me, a naturally cynical guy: I really believe Jesus didn’t stay dead, but he rose, he appeared.  I can clarify various things, like It’s not a resuscitation, etc.  But I really believe this amazement happened.

If I were asked for proof, I’d go for the one several others have advanced:  in those days, lots of great, heroic leaders died; some were even believed to be messianic.  After their deaths, their followers trudged home and gave up or looked for the next great thing to come along.  Jesus’ followers never went home, but launched out into the world, risking everything, and often winding up dead or hurt, because of one thing only: they had seen the risen Lord.  As Rowan Williams said in The Sign and the Sacrifice, “It’s hard to see how this new age faith could come into being without an event to point to.  The language of resurrection is historical, not speculative: it’s about earth before it’s about heaven.  The very untidiness of the resurrection stories is one of the main reasons for taking them seriously.  What’s going on is clearly people struggling to find words for something they had not expected.”

Or I am fond of what J. Christiaan Beker wrote in Paul the Apostle: “Paul’s church is not an aggregate of justified sinners or a sacramental institute or a means for private self-sanctification, but the avant-garde of the new creation in a hostile world, creating beachheads in this world of God’s dawning new world and yearning for the day of God’s visible lordship over his creation.”  N.T. Wright mirrors this approach in lots of his books, especially Surprised by Hope.  Does the D-Day analogy fit? Or is the carnage of war counter-intuitive for Easter?

Preaching hinges on how we grow and are enriched personally, whether we ‘use’ the stuff involved or not.  Let me summarize what Rowan Williams has said in his lovely new book: “Believing in the resurrection is believing that the new age has been inaugurated… The decisive difference has been made.  The destinies of all human beings are now bound up with Jesus.  They will find who they are, who they may be, and where they will be, in relation to Jesus.  The future is in his hands.  Christianity is not the Jesus of Nazareth Society – rather like the Alfred Lord Tennyson Society, looking back to a great dead genius. If Jesus is risen, there is a human destiny.  We were made with dignity and liberty so that, one day, we would be companions for Jesus Christ.  Human nature was endowed with all its gifts so it would one day be a proper vehicle for the transforming work of God the Father.”

What a high view of humanity!  And then he invites us who preach to trust the message:  “Wherever we go, with the biblical story in our hands and the vision of Jesus in our eyes, there is an expectation that human beings will resonate with what’s being spoken of.  They may not quite know how they do it or why…  We go on in mission, because of that conviction that there is such a thing as the human heart and human destiny, and thus that these words will find an echo.”

Preaching Palm Sunday - March 25

     When we sit down to plan worship, we always entertain the question: are we doing Palm Sunday or Palm/Passion Sunday? I acknowledge we have to decide what texts to read, and to read the full passion narrative out loud requires a total restructure of the service – which can be lovely and moving. We’ve interspersed reading a section and then music/hymn, sort of Lessons & Carols-like.

     But the dichotomy is less clear to me than it once was. There is no Palm Sunday without an eye to the Passion, no festive entry that is simply party time. His entry is ominous, dripping with irony. He enters to die – and the forces of evil are already arrayed against him. Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan, in their stellar The Last Week, explain how, with Passover due, Pilate with his Roman legion is marching into Jerusalem from Caesarea to the west, arms clattering, swords glinting in the sun, the thunder of hooves and chariots meant to intimidate, to quell any thought of an uprising with the huge crowds visiting the Holy City.  Simultaneously, from the east, as clear a counterpoint as you could imagine, Jesus enters, not on a war stallion, unarmed, not to intimidate but to unmask the powers, to conquer evil and hate with mercy and love.

 “Hosanna, heysanna!” from Jesus Christ Superstar captures the mood dramatically. And for me, I love the fact that "Hosanna!" isn't a cheer. It's a prayer, meaning something like "Lord, help, please," or "Help us now."  What was the tone of the Hosannas on Palm Sunday - as habituated as the people were by the Romans to stay quiet?

   I am pondering doing something ultra-creative (which frightens me a bit) - building a sermon around What did Jesus see in trees? I started with the idea that when he saw palm fronds, those branches they waved at Palm Sunday, he liked them - 

but shuddered a few days later when what he'd seen in other trees were those strands of thorns (the dreaded zizyphus spina christi, with a bit of itchy, burning poison which would grace his brow on the cross). Then I thought of Jesus and trees period. He'd worked in wood with his father; The Last Temptation of Christ envisions Jesus making crosses for the Romans. Did he see building material? Did he see birds in the trees (which he spoke of so eloquently in the Sermon on the Mount)? I thought of Mary Chapin Carpenter's lovely "Only a Dream," recalling a childhood of looking up into elm trees with her sister; did Jesus recall his childhood? Shel Silverstein (The Giving Tree) might help... At Passover, did Jesus notice wood having been recently cut down - for the fires of the temple altar, or for the fires for the Roman soldiers in the city to keep the peace? Jesus wound up dying on a tree - and I may delve back into that lovely medieval "Dream of the Rood," which tells the story of the tree that became the cross.  Will I do this to break my own boredom of preaching now on my 37th Palm Sunday? or stick to my usual?

     David Bentley Hart eloquently articulated the humility that is God in The Beauty of the Infinite – how God “apparels himself in common human nature… brings good news to those who suffer and victory to those who are as nothing; who dies like a slave and outcast without resistance; who penetrates the very depths of hell in pursuit of those he loves; and who persists even after death not as a hero lifted up to Olympian glories, but in the company of peasants, breaking bread with them and offering them the solace of his wounds.”

 Even the whitest most prosaic preacher can indulge in a bit of a cadence this week. Something like Instead of a war stallion, he rode a donkey; instead of a palace he was born in a manger; instead of wielding spears and swords he was armed with nothing but love – and so forth. People love this, and it can capture the counter-cultural-ness that is the Gospel. Last year, with the election looming, I observed how Jesus is humble, courageous but not angry; but we fawn over leaders who are arrogant, and angry – and we are driven by fear. I might revisit that this year.

     The confusion that reigned on the first Palm Sunday is worth exploring. People were wrapped up in their fantasies about Jesus, about God, and about what deliverance would look like. The Epistle reading, Philippians 2:5-11 (a perfect Palm or Palm/Passion text, toward which I leaned in my sermon 3 years ago) clarifies what Jesus was demonstrating by entering the city on a donkey. The translation is fascinating: we typically hear “Although he was in the form of God, he emptied himself…” but the Greek will allow for an even more insightful rendering – “Because he was in the form of God, he emptied himself…” Jesus’ humility, his lowness, his vulnerability – this is not temporary charade, no play acting whereas God’s real nature is sheer, unadulterated power and might.  This is God, the humble one, the infant in a cow stall, the abject, beaten, silent one, the nailed one.

     If you do the full Markan passion account, I’d commend Donald Senior’s brief and wise The Passion of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark – a close reading of the text in context, beginning with this, “The hostility against Jesus was a result of Jesus’ own mission” (which he then unfolds for us), and ends with this, “The true identity of Jesus as God’s son is manifested not in acts of marvelous power but in an event seemingly devoid of any power, his passion and death,” with lots also on what we do as a consequence, like “The cross is both what we have to endure and what we actively and deliberately take up.” 

And then I will never again ponder the passion narrative with recalling Robert Jenson’s wise conclusion to his exploration of various theories of the atonement: “The Gospels tell a powerful and biblically integrated story of the Crucifixion; this story is just so the story of God’s act to bring us back to himself at his own cost, and of our being brought back.  There is no other story behind or beyond it that is the real story of what God does to reconcile us, no story of mythic battles or of a deal between God and his Son or of our being moved to live reconciled lives.  The Gospel’s passion narrative is the authentic and entire account of God’s reconciling actions and our reconciliation, as events in his life and ours.  Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves.”  The question for the preacher is: can I trust the story? Or do I feel some compulsion to dress it up and improve upon it?

     Some more fodder for preaching Palm Sunday. Here is what I did on Palm Sunday, 2014 – with a little humorous use of Donkey in Shrek: “Are we there yet” (over and over) but then redeeming himself with a spiritually suggestive “Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer.”  At the culmination of Jesus’ long journey, involving a donkey, we finally see his true face – and believe.

     Many people will have seen the movie “The Shack” (or read the book) – almost a handy substitute for the Bible for many!  Its best line, I think, is when Mack asks Jesus, “Do all roads lead to you?”  He answers, “No, not at all – most roads don’t lead anywhere.  What I do mean to say is I will travel any road to find you.”  That’ll preach…

     I love Howard Thurman’s pensive reflection:

 “I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey. Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes in his father’s shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him this Great Necessity that sent him out on to the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from Isaiah, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.’ I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey.”

     Or maybe you know the music of David Wilcox. His moving “Show the Way” I think fits Palm Sunday to a tee: “You say you see no hope, you say you see no reason We should dream that the world would ever change. You're saying love is foolish to believe 'Cause there'll always be some crazy with an Army or a Knife To wake you from your day dream, put the fear back in your life... Look, if someone wrote a play to glorify What's stronger than hate, would they not arrange the stage To look as if the hero came too late he's almost in defeat It's looking like the Evil side will win, so on the Edge Of every seat, from the moment that the whole thing begins.  It looks like we’re alone in this scene set in shadows, evil is cast around us.  But it’s love who stacked the stones, it’s love that made the stage it’s love that wrote the play; For in this darkness love can show the way.”