What can we say March 30? Lent 4

       Joshua 5:9-12. A little obscure, but fascinating. Could title a sermon “Rolling Stone,” as the story intimate there were large round stones to mark where Israel crossed the Jordan (“Gilgal” is translated “rolled”). The notice that “the manna ceased”: is this good news? Thank goodness, we’re so tired of that crusty, tasteless food, every day for decades? Or is there some nostalgia? We miss the good old days when we were so close to God, so dependent upon God’s daily gift? Now we have to be responsible, to labor hard for it all?

   2 Corinthians 5:16-21. Reconciliation: if any word sums up what the life of faith is about, here it is. We are reconciled to God, and we go about the business of reconciliation with others. What could be more needed in our fractured world? And more arduous, well-nigh impossible?

   Before the pandemic, my church had a significant series on Reconciliation; check it out! A seasonal emphasis drills in to our folks that this is serious, hard, marvelous. It’s weirdly beyond forgiveness. A restored relationship – although care must be taken not to make the abused feel they need to feel good about their abusers, and so on.

    Paul’s counsel, “Regard no one from human point of view,” is the baseline for Christians functioning in the world – but do we even try? Culture wages aggressive war against this ministry – and thus against our own personal sense of being reconciled to God! Christena Cleveland (in Disunity in Christ) is especially sharp on the nature of the work of reconciliation. We can meet God in our cultural context, but then to follow God we must cross over into other contexts. She explains how “group polarization” works – we experience confirmation of our views because of our narrow social circle or social media tricks. Church makes it worse! God calls us to “cognitive generosity,” as we expand our “we,” and discover the fruit and joy of the hard labor of reconciliation.

    What can preachers do, but to name it, to embody it, to lift up the beauty of reconciliation by telling stories (if they can be found)? And clarifying, gently, that reconciliation isn’t an optional add-on for some churches. This is the church’s work, always, everywhere. Not splitting up, or even being “right.” Sam Wells (in God’s Companions) reminds us that, for us, ethics isn’t so much about what’s right and wrong, but what builds up the Church. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out how our “goodness” can actually get in the way of us doing God’s will; God doesn’t ask for goodness, keeping our hands clean, but prefers we do whatever God asks, which will likely involve getting our hands dirty.

   Notice Paul begins with “from now on” – assuming the saving work of Christ and consequent community engagement and commitment to holiness he’s just talked about. This is totally new – a “new creation.” The Christian isn’t 14% nicer or 11% more generous. We are all new. And we see others through new eyes. Echoing the haunting truth that “God does not see as we see” (1 Sam. 16:7 – when David was the one chosen, not the taller, more muscular sons of Jesse).

   And why do we see differently? Not just because God said Look at them this way! For Paul, it is that Jesus was once viewed as merely a guy. But now he’s the risen Son, the Messiah, our Savior. We, too, used to be mere people; but now we are “ambassadors” for God!  Then, as if to be sure we don’t miss it (since we might), Paul pleads, urges: “See?!?!” And our transformation looks like this, well-described by John Barclay (in Paul and the Power of Grace): “Christ takes on the human condition and participates in the limitations and vulnerabilities of human nature… But this has a purpose and a result: Christ’s self is given into the human condition but not ultimately given away, because in the resurrection and exaltation of Christ a new era is begun and a new life released, in which we may participate. Christ participates in the human condition in order that we may participate in his condition.” Susan Eastman calls this “mutual assimilation.”

  Thomas Merton, ever helpful: "For the 'old man,' everything is old: he has seen everything or thinks he has. He has lost hope in anything new. What pleases him is the 'old' he clings to, fearing to lose it, but he is certainly not happy with it. For the 'new man' everything is new. Even the old is transfigured. There is nothing to cling to. The new man lives in a world that is always being created, and renewed. He lives in life."

  Luke 15:1-13, 11b-32. Oh, so much to say. Amy-Jill Levine has taught us not to read such texts anti-semitically, as if Jewish dads were legalistic judgers as opposed to the Christian vision of the running, welcoming dad. Grace dominates both religions. George Balanchine’s ballet has the son whirling and writhing in a long dance of remorse: lovely choreography but bad theology. Amy-Jill also points out that riotous living and the party life aren’t inherently sinful – and Jesus nowhere in this parable mentions anything about anybody’s sin! It’s foolishness, for sure – but the story isn’t about sin and the son doesn’t really repent, does he? Is he really sorry? Or just cynical or desperate? He’s just hungry and journeys to the only place he bets he can get a square meal. It's all about home with God, God's yearning for us to be home with God, and mostly the joy of being there - which is precisely what the elder son, who never left, missed, as he was never really home, failing to comprehend what home and life and joy were all about.

   And who could forget the mesmerizing, emotionally riveting way the TV miniseries from the 70’s, Jesus of Nazareth, handled this! Peter is indignant Jesus has gone to the home of a tax collector. At dinner there, Jesus tells this story – as Peter peeks in through the tent opening. Everyone is transfixed – and then Peter and Matthew… oh, you have to watch it for yourself!

   Isn’t there a curious kind of judgment in this father’s lack of judgment? Want to feel really sorry for how you mucked things up? Receive total mercy with no requirement for an accounting or an apology! Indeed, Robert Farrar Capon is always eloquent, noting how real confession only comes after forgiveness: “Only when, like the prodigal, we are finally confronted with the unqualified gift of someone who died to forgive us no matter what, can we see that confession has nothing to do with getting ourselves forgiven…. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have.”

   I’ll thumb through my favorite Henri Nouwen book, at least one-third of which is underlined. Such marvelous stuff. Nouwen, feeling for the steely, distant brother in Rembrandt’s painting of the moment the younger son returns, asks about his own soul: “Had I really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God, instead of choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in? There are so many other voices, voices that are loud, full of promises and very seductive. These voices say, ‘Go out and prove that you are worth something.’ Do you know these voices like I do? They cut deep inside into those vulnerable recesses where we doubt our worth, where we know we can never achieve enough; they wrap ‘what I do’ around ‘who I am’ and cruelly lie to us. They suggest that I am not going to be loved without my having earned it. They want me to prove to myself and others that I am worth being loved. They deny loudly that love is a totally free gift.”

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   Check out my latest book, Everywhere is Jerusalem: The Holy Then & Now - which has a study guide and video - and now it's on Audiobook!

What can we say April 6? Lent 5

   Isaiah 43:16-21. Coming out of the pandemic, we kept reminding our folks, It's not about going back! God calls us forward. The preacher could fiddle with this text in so many ways. God will make “a way in the sea” – so do we name the tragedies of panicked immigrants washing up on various shorelines? How lovely that Pope Francis’s first trip outside Rome was to the posh resort island of Lampedusa – where (rather incongruously) hundreds of drowned immigrants were found on the beaches reserved for the rich. His presence there asked us if we care.

   “The wild animals will honor me.” They already do, simply by being. How delightful that the prophet doesn’t name the loveliest creatures, like the eagle or lion or dolphin. It’s the jackal (yes, think Lion King!), and the ostrich (gangly, comical, and named also by God in the whirlwind with Job!). The preacher needn’t explain or make a point. Just let it lie, linger over the ostrich. God did.

   Sermons are wise to dwell on Why do we exist? Our text phrases it like this: “The people whom I formed for myself.” We aren’t here for ourselves, but for God. It’s not a crushing possessiveness either. God’s dream for us is “so that they might declare my praise.” Our true vocation, a life of praise? If heaven is a thing, this is what will occupy us not for a few decades but for… ever.

   Psalm 126 paints a marvelous, hopeful vision. The tenses confound the translator – and so it is with God’s time, or our meshing with God’s time. It’s now, it’s coming, it’s already happened. 2 things: “those who dream,” in Scripture, aren’t sleepers working out anxieties, or even prophetic visionaries like Martin Luther King. Both Josephs had dreams in which God disclosed the future. Ahh… and then a great individual exercise, and even a solid church activity, might be to reflect on “The Lord has done great things for us.” Make a list. Review. Rejoice. Notice stuff you’d left out. Rejoice some more.

   Philippians 3:4b-14. This passage tickles me. Paul indulges in serious braggadocio, then scolds anyone who would brag. It is remarkable that this vicious foe of Christianity became its greatest ambassador. We needn’t read any of this as anti-semitic. Paul is not tortured by the throes of guilt or a sense of inadequacy – the kind of agony that plagued Martin Luther. The bright shining of God’s grace puts all our achievements, all our good-deed-doing in the shade. To those who have been moved in their hearts by the immense love of Christ, we boast not in any good we have done, but ironically enough in our weakness.

   Paul does not encourage us to build on our strengths – because it is God’s strength that matters! Amazing grace saves – not the nice or above average person but “a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” So it is my lostness, my blindness, that is my hope. My wounds, my mindless foibles, my past littered with mistakes and confusion, are the arenas of God’s glory. Only the sinner deeply grieved by his waywardness understands the grace of God.

   Paul talks like an accountant with a ledger here – until you read between the lines and feel the harrowing heartbreak. Paul lost “his Jewish friends, his high status, and perhaps his wife” (Ben Witherington). Most of the early Christians suffered financially, because they refused to strike deals at pagan temples, and no longer curtsied to the emperor’s claim to total devotion. Families were ripped apart: husbands dispensed with wives who converted, Christian children were disinherited by parents. Nero burned Christians as torches in his garden.

   So is Christianity a good investment? Hardly. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote eloquently of The Cost of Discipleship. A choice must be made – and we’re blessed with a great hymn that echoes Paul’s words here: “When I survey the wondrous cross… my richest gain I count but loss… Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast.” What do people think when they sing or hear these words? Best I can do is, in the sermon, to slow them down and invite them to ponder.

   To our high control people (and selves) we blush to notice the passive verbs: I am “found” in him. I do not “find” God. What I do is I flee from God, I mosey about as if there were no God. But God is what the poet Francis Thompson called “the Hound of Heaven”: “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days… I hid from Him.” But “with deliberate speed, majestic instancy, came on the following Feet” of God who never stops finding us.

   Paul wants to “know Christ and the power of his resurrection,” – but the way is to “share his sufferings,” not be spared suffering because of Christ, but actually to suffer not for but with Christ! St. Francis prayed before a cross, “My Lord Jesus Christ, Two graces I ask of you before I die: the first is that in my life I may feel, in my soul and body, as far as possible, that sorrow which you, tender Jesus, underwent in the hour of your most bitter passion; the second is that I may feel in my heart, as far as possible, the abundance of love with which you, son of God, were inflamed, so as willingly to undergo such a great passion for us sinners.”

   Paul had witnessed athletic games, and points to the “goal” (skopos), the marker at the finish line: the best runners focused on that mark. As any good coach will tell you, leave the past behind and keep your vision rapt on the climax, the victory. This isn’t bland optimism, but hope, rooted in God’s past habits, trusting in God’s future.

   Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” not “Blessed are those who are righteous” (Matthew 5:6). The beauty is in the hungering, in the yearning. The nagging hankering we feel inside is God’s voice, calling us home, keeping us a bit “restless until we find rest in God” (St. Augustine).

   Gregory of Nyssa (4th century) wrote eloquently of the way God gives us just a tantalizing taste of God’s presence, a hazy glimpse of God’s utter beauty, only to draw us forward as if we were still straining to see for the first time. For Gregory, true satisfaction “consists in constantly going on in the quest, seeing that every fulfillment continually generates a further desire… Far from making the soul despair, this is actually an experience of God’s fuller presence. Yearning fills the soul more fully than actual possession.”

   John 12:1-8. How blasé are we in taking for granted the shocking, miraculous surprise that was the Christian story? Jesus arrives in Bethany – hard to do nowadays with the massive wall separating Israelis and Palestinians! – at “the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” Hardly just an address. Pause. Wonder of all wonders – and he’s at home, welcoming Jesus to dinner.

   “Martha served.” Of course she did, right in character. Surely John knew and expects us to recall Luke 10:38-42! Mary – but which Mary is it now?? – pours exotic, pure nard all over his feet. And we can envision it running all over the floor, down in the cracks, soaked up into the ground. No wonder onlookers gasped. Too late to scoop it up.

   Judas smugly complains. Aren’t there always church people, and certainly skeptics outside the church, cockily pronouncing upon what others should be doing for the poor?! Which poor is Judas intending? Or which poor do critics of Christianity, or even the devout, imagine here? Doug Meeks’s brilliant God the Economist surprises us by explaining who’s the “preeminent American theologian” when it comes to stewardship: Andrew Carnegie! The production of wealth “is determined by inexorable natural laws, such as the survival of the fittest.” So discrepancies in wealth between rich and poor are fully justified, and deserved. Christianity enters the capitalist picture “only after the production process has run its course and money has been made and reinvested.” Faith helps producers to disperse their “surplus charitably.” The rules for how to do this? Leftover money should be given only to the “deserving poor,” not those who deserve to be poor, but who are deserving because they are pulling themselves up and stand a good chance of joining the producers.

   Sounds crass to hear it this way. But let’s be clear: this is the theology of stewardship in America. How does the preacher counter that it’s all God’s, how we earn matters, the calculation of what’s leftover is horrifically awry. John reports Judas was a “thief.” John Wesley wasn’t the only great church leader to point out that when we keep what we should be giving to the poor, it’s theft!

   The text quotes another text: “The poor you always have with you.” I recall my dad muttering this to me, a little cynically, as if it’s not worth bothering, since the poor will just always be poor. The cited text, Deuteronomy 15, of course is making the opposite point: our work in lifting up the poor is never done.

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    Check out my book, really a theology of place, on Bethany and other Bible places and also other places where the world changed: Everywhere is Jerusalem: Experiencing the Holy Then & Now (and the publisher offers video, and a study guide!).

What can we say April 13? Palm/Passion Sunday

    For years in worship planning, my musicians and clergy ask, annually, “Are we doing Palm Sunday? Or Passion Sunday?” I get it – but is there really a choice? There’s a tragic dimension to the Palms entry, no matter how cute or fun we try to make it. Jesus comes surrounded by great joy but into the teeth of mortal danger; he comes to tackle the powers, and to be killed by them. And there’s a joyful dimension, paradoxically enough, to the Passion. Gruesome, horrific, unjust suffering, transformed by the miraculous way of God into immense life, light, joy.

   Psalm 118 could be preached upon; but even if you don't, its cadences are well worth mentioning, or even deploying as a call to worship. It’s about a royal victory in ancient times. “This is the day the Lord has made” doesn’t mean Oh, God made a pretty day for me to enjoy, but “This is the day the Lord has acted,” brought deliverance, re-established his people once peril was eluded. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Did Jesus or any of his friends ponder this as he rode right by the huge ashlars of Herod’s temple mount?

   And Philippians 2:5-11 fits the day marvelously as well. I love the little translation quandary that needn’t be resolved but simply pondered: is it “although he was in the form of God, he humbled himself to death on a cross”? or should it be “because he was in the form of God, he…” I lean “because.” Jesus wasn’t pretending to be what he wasn’t, or what God isn’t. Precisely in his humility, in his shattered heart and body do we see the truth about God.

   So, Luke 19:28-40. Donald Senior wrote a thoughtful book about the peculiar angle Luke takes in his entire Passion narrative, including the triumphal entry. Luke’s whole Gospel has emphasized (more than the other 3) the hysterical, mounting opposition to Jesus among the powers. And Luke makes no secret of Jesus’ royal identity. The conflict is at fever pitch by the time Jesus enters Jerusalem. Why did Jesus die? For our sins? Why did they kill him? Security. Fear of a tumult. A greedy, steely, violent decision not to share a shred of power.

   Luke’s contrasts are brilliant. When Passover came, Pilate and his legions marched into Jerusalem from Caesarea – to the west! – just as Jesus entered with his “fans” from the east. Roman arms clattering, swords glinting in the sun, the thunder of hooves and chariots meant to intimidate, vs. Jesus, not on a war stallion (like Alexander’s fabled Bucephalus or Robert E. Lee’s Traveller) but on a donkey, unarmed, not meant to intimidate anybody, but to unmask the powers, to conquer evil and hate with mercy and love.

   Notice – although you needn’t alarm anybody by mentioning it in the sermon! – there are no palms in Luke, and no Hosannas! There are also no homiletical takeaways. What’s the moral here? There isn’t one. We are simply transfixed by Jesus’ courage, his peaceful witness, his rock solid determination to fulfill whatever God was asking of him. The moment is politically loaded. Jesus doesn’t shirk, or say Oh, you’re mistaken, I’m nothing to worry about!

   David Lyle Jeffrey reminds us that this colt is untrained, undomesticated, never ridden – and so we’d expect such a creature to be difficult to mount or to stay on task. Instead, he’s docile, cooperative – even amid all the clamor, racket, flapping cloaks and branches. He doesn’t buck, but carried his load beautifully. Luke does linger over the disciples securing this creature. “The Lord has need of it.” It’s thin, and a tad corny, but the preacher isn’t off target to ask “What do we have tied up that the Lord has need of, and could put to lovely use? Does the Lord have need of me?"

   The cloaks laid along the path: do we think of Sir Walter Raleigh doffing his coat for Queen Elizabeth to walk across a muddy path? What about Francis of Assisi – whose conversion was hastened by a peasant who laid down a cloak for Francis to walk upon in front of Assisi’s equivalent of Herod’s temple? Francis wasn’t St. Francis at all – not yet. The peasant foresaw what would unfold. Were Jesus’ fans unwitting foreseers of the Lord Jesus would later become?

   Who was in the crowd? Had formerly blind Bartimaeus followed him from Jericho? Mary Magdalene surely was there. Lazarus? What about James, Jesus’ brother – who could well have accompanied Jesus’ mother to the triumphant but hauntingly ominous scene. Howard Thurman thoughtfully includes Mary in his pondering on Palm Sunday:

   “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.”

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   Check out my book on, not how to preach, but how to continue preaching, The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.

What can we say Maundy Thursday?

    Maundy Thursday, one of our holiest 4 nights all year. I can’t preach long at all, for they come, not for a sermon, but for a tangible experience, a real bodily encounter. A little bread. A little wine.

   The footwashing in John 13 is so easy to flatten: Jesus served humbly, so go and serve others humbly (like Pope Francis washing the feet of women, and Muslims!). Since we talk service all year long anyhow, I wonder how on this night to fixate more on Jesus, his remarkable encounter with confused people – and thus with us.

   I love Jean Vanier’s thoughts here (even after learning of his abusive relationships, albeit now with an asterisk…): "Jesus loves us so much that he kneels in front of us so that we may begin to trust ourselves. As Jesus washes our feet, he is saying 'I trust you and I love you. You are important to me. I want you to trust yourself because you can do beautiful things for the kingdom. You can give life; you can bring peace. I want you to discover how important you are. All I am asking is that you believe in yourself because you are a beloved child of God.'"

   I think I may tell about the opening worship service of my Divinity School career - a footwashing. Unpleasant, just awful for me. I'd just moved, had smelly socks, knew I'd not trimmed my nails... Washing other people's feet was weird, but okay - but a stranger washing mine? Thinking of "putting my best foot forward..." 

 I think of Walter Wangerin's lovely narration of his courtship with Thanne (in his marvelous As For Me and My House): “Love lies a little.  Love edits the facts in order to continue to feel good. Love allows me an innocent misperception of my fiancée, while it encourages in her a favorable misperception of myself. If it isn’t blind, it does squint a bit…  While courting Thanne, I shaved.  I wore clean clothes, not my usual habit. I was gentle, temperate, I wrote poetry, I sprayed the carpet with deodorizer, washed dishes.  I laughed heartily when we were together. I put my best foot forward. ... Was I deceiving her? Of course not. I was showing her what I truly believed myself to be in the generous light of her love – and what I knew I could become, if only for the prize of her hand in marriage." There's something in there about who we could become if only for the prize of a relationship with Jesus.

    I don't usually re-narrate biblical scenes at length, but on Maundy Thursday I invite my people to imagine that first Holy Thursday night. Maybe like Palm Sunday, the disciples were in a buoyant, expectant mood (it was Passover, after all, an evening of jubilation!), while Jesus was mired in a more somber apprehension of what was to come. They sang Psalms - any or all of 113-118. What did their voices sound like? Did Jesus or one of the others lead? Did they harmonize? How did "Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints” (in Psalm 116, our lection for the day!) or “This is the day the Lord has made” (from 118) resonate with Jesus and the rest of them? This is the preaching angle I often suggest: instead of asking about takeaways or relevance to me today, I just ask people to marvel over what happened then.

   Beyond any doubt, Jesus stared at that bread and caught a vision of what would happen to his own flesh the next day. And then he peered into the wine and glimpsed an image of the blood he would shed. How haunting, lovely, gripping, poignant.

   When they ate, what did they think?  We quiz candidates for ordination about their theology of the Eucharist; just to be clear, a struggling seminarian and even the frankly less than average churchgoer today understands more of what was going on that the disciples did. Austin Farrer (in his unfortunately out of print Crown of the Year) put it beautifully:

   “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.” I like that. We are mystified – but we know we receive Jesus himself, and we are thereby committed to him, come what may. 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.”

   What do our people think as they amble slowly forward? I invite them into what Martin Sheen said to Krista Tippett in an On Being episode: “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.”

   Inclusivity is debated – but how inclusive was Jesus? Jürgen Moltmann (in The Church in the Power of the Spirit): “The Lord’s supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is as open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of ‘the world,’ the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper.”

   In my book Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, I quote these words and then turn to the lovely interview Krista Tippett had a while back with Father Greg Boyle, whose ministry with gang members in California is impressive and moving:  “We’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’ hand and we’ve replaced it with a chalice because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice?”  Then he told how he asked an abused orphan and former gang member in his program, “What did you do for Christmas?” The young man said he cooked a turkey “ghetto-style,” and invited six other guys to join him. When he named them, Boyle recognized them as members of warring gangs. As he pondered them cooking together on Christmas day, he wondered, “So what could be more sacred than seven orphans, enemies, rivals, sitting in a kitchen waiting for a turkey to be done? Jesus doesn't lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends.”

   A few years ago, it occurred to me that my reflections on something as stupendous and tender as Maundy Thursday were growing stale. How to find a new wrinkle? I tend to forget that Maundy Thursday includes Jesus bolting out into the dark to pray in Gethsemane – and being arrested. On that prayer of agony, I am always moved by Jesus Christ Superstar’s “I Only Want to Say.” I’ve made a point over the years of correcting a popular image of Gethsemane – that of Heinrich Hoffman’s “Christ in Gethsemane” (hanging in the Riverside Church, NY) – Jesus praying placidly, well-coiffed, almost as if saying his bedtime prayers. Willem Dafoe captured that searing agony in Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ.

   And then, of course, the poignancy of Judas’s kiss, and the arrest – and I am continually mentioning the detail that I can’t and don’t even want to explain: in John 18:6 Jesus says, “I am he.” What happened next? “The soldiers drew back and fell to the ground.” Wow.

What can we say Good Friday?

    I love Good Friday, or I’m humbled by it, privileged to be in the relatively shadowy room. It’s such a quiet service, no long silences so much as the tone and mood of whatever sounds the choir, readers and preacher make. “Preach” or “homily”: too strong, too grandiose to describe what I try to do. I meditate, and feel the shudder, the sorrow, the beauty and majesty. I prepare not by exegesis but by gazing at and pondering art, whether it’s Rouault or Grünewald or one among so many that avoid being corny or sappy.

   At our church, we always read the Isaiah 52:13-53:12 early. Haunting. Good Friday isn't the time to explicate this complex text and its background. We trust the words to do their thing. And Psalm 22: Jesus' heart-wrenching cry, himself forsaken, and joining his God-forsakenness forever to ours. I try to ponder the horror, the sorrow Mary felt as she watched her son cry out these words she had taught him as a little boy.

   Then we do the Gospel reading in stages, gradually extinguishing lights and then candles until we are immersed in total darkness. On Good Friday, more than any other day, we are humbled by our inability to say anything – just as Jesus was all but silent as he hung for hours. On this day, more than any other, we realize we do not need to make the Bible relevant, or to illustrate it.  We can and must simply trust the reading to do the work it has done for 2000 years.

   Just as the art is better than a chatty sermon, our hymns articulate all this so provocatively. “When I survey the wondrous cross.” I don’t glance at it. I study it, measure it, measure myself by it. “Sorrow and love flow mingled down… Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?” All the paradoxes sung pensively. “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” Yes, his hands, feet and side were gored and gruesome. But the head: the brow, with that poisonously pointed crown, the eyes, looking at the soldiers and his mother, the mouth, thirsting, and speaking words of mercy for the soldiers and provision for his mother. You can fashion a whole meditation / homily just looking at and reflecting on that head – knowing he is our Head.

   We part in silence at the service’s end. I’m not in a chatty mood myself, and I don’t want to let them off the hook by exchanging premature Easter greetings. There’s no moral, no takeaway. Just be in awe. Feel the pain, if you can – as Francis of Assisi prayed constantly before a crucifix: “Lord, 2 graces I ask of you before I die: first, that I might feel, in my body and soul, as far as possible, the pain you underwent in your most bitter passion; and then, that I might feel, in my body and soul, as far as possible, the love that so enflamed you to undergo such passion for us sinners.”

   Talk about answered prayer. Francis prayed to feel the pain. And God gave him the stigmata, wounds in his hands, feet and side that bled intermittently the final 2 years of his life.

What can we say Easter Sunday?

    I can never decide if preaching Easter is one fabulous moment, or a vaguely monotonous drudgery. I mean, it’s Easter. No greater day could be to preach. And yet, they come  - in droves! – yet inoculated against the radical truth of the day, thinking it’s that All Dogs Go To Heaven, that it’s all about flowers and pretty dresses, the flowers blooming in Spring. We’re fortunate – maybe – this year in that Easter is early enough that all may not yet be in bloom.

   I can only point you to two earlier posts on prior Easter Sundays, this one focused on Kavin Rowe’s Christianity’s Surprise – and then this one, that attends to the fact that Easter was “after the Sabbath.”

   Friends, preach well – which is only fitting – on Easter. But don’t be exasperated if, afterwards, the response is a bit tepid. So it was for the first proclaimers of the astonishingly good news.

   I would add, to what I link you to above, this. St. Augustine tantalizingly wrote, "The more you love to be, the more you will desire eternal life." We love to be - even the unhappy, or those bearing chronic pain. We know we are made for eternity - for God would not have made us with this love for be-ing for any other reason.

    How do we appeal to that to draw people toward eternity? And why then does our living matter? Last year, I saw the best movie I've seen in years: One Life - the story of Nicky Winton (played masterfully by the aged Anthony Hopkins!), a businessman in Prague who figured out how to save not just a few, but 669 Jewish children on the brink of the Holocaust. No spoiler alerts - but oh my gosh, how moving, one life, courageously and creatively saving life. At the climax, the credits say 6,000 people owed their lives to Winton. How many owe our lives to Christ? What do we then do?

   We can ask why God bothered to get involved in our dying... In Kristin Hannah's lovely novel, The Women, she repeatedly pictures combat nurses in Vietnam sitting with soldiers dying far from home. They hold his hand, and soothingly say "You're not alone." So crucial - and so Jesus-like. The Gospel is less Oh, you get to go straight to heaven! and more You are not alone.

   Recently I attended the funeral of my friend, Jean Ford, Billy Graham's little sister. Her grandchildren sang "Heaven came down..." which was sung and quoted at her brother's funeral. Notice it's not We go to heaven - but heaven came down, to us, and claimed us, assumed us, collected us. Review this song - an oldie I'd not pondered for many years. Isn't Easter Heaven coming down to us?

What can we say April 27? Easter 2

    Acts 5:27-32 portrays in a scene of social, political and religious conflict what the resurrected life looks like. Willie Jennings (in his terrific Acts commentary) eloquently portrays Gamaliel as “the quintessential compromised intellectual who reads history from the wrong side and politics from the sidelines.” He goes on to say he is an “exceptional,” an excellent man – so he’s looking for the divine in what is exceptional. No wonder he missed God showing up in the common, in the flesh.

   What determination could be more pertinent today than “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” With political ideology as our idol, our people do this all the time!

   Notice also that God exalted Jesus – but why? So we can get into heaven? No: “So he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins.” In our Gospel reading we stumble on this same dynamic: Jesus is risen, the Spirit is given – so forgiveness can start happening! We are forgiven, we forgive, forgiveness becomes the very air that we breathe. Correcting confusions about forgiveness matters in preaching. It’s not kiss and make up, it’s not letting bygone be bygones, it’s not saying Oh, it doesn’t really matter. It’s costly, daunting labor. Check out this talk I gave to my church trying to open up why and how forgiveness is a huge thing for us. The turnout was massive – indicating there is a real hunger to explore not just the idea but the real happening of forgiveness.

   Like the Gospel lection to come, where the disciples are locked up by choice but locked up all the same, here in Acts the apostles are locked up – setting God up to prove how “the power to incarcerate will be trumped by the power to free” (Jennings). God indeed is “accustomed to moving through locked doors.”

   Psalm 118:14-29. Such a great text. Feels so Jesus-y, so Christian-ish that it’s crucial to try to hear it in its original context before rushing centuries forward to Holy Week! Mitchell Dahood, in his quirky Psalms commentary linking everything to Ugaritic poetry, rightly points out the tenses in verse 17 should be past. It’s not “I shall not die, but live,” but “I didn’t die, I survived.” Preachers might invite our folks to ponder the mere surprise and gift of having made it thus far. ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far… This simply surviving as a cause of gratitude is at the heart of Frederick Buechner’s eloquent wisdom – which I’ll cite below after we look at Epistle and Gospel.

    The rejected stone becoming the corner can be read as who we are to be as the Body of Christ. 1 Peter 2 speaks of the church as “living stones.” And Paul clarifies that in the Body, it is the weakest member who is the most valuable. Do you have stories of a church, or your church, where some unlikely person becomes the most valuable to growth in compassion and joy? I think of a young girl with various disabilities, or a homeless guy who joined and then took on leadership in my very highly-educated and well-heeled church.

   Revelation 1:4-8. I preached on this for Christ the King back in November! Check out my sermon. We probed how Zeus frequently was spoke of similarly: Zeus was, is and will be. With Jesus it’s is (current reality first!), was, and is to come. It’s the coming that’s peculiar, unique, and saving. God, unlike Zeus, doesn’t remain aloof in the penthouse of some Olympian heaven, tossing down an occasional thunderbolt, but he came down. – my sermon from X the King?

   I also took a fresh approach to the Alpha & Omega. It’s the first and last, so comprehensive – but it’s also a different language. Jesus introduces a fresh way of thinking, talking, listening, requiring some re-training, practice, quite a few stumbles but then some startling new mode of communication and living.

   {I'd mention that this year's lectionary is a long read through Luke - so I'll take this Sunday or the next to cover one of the highlights of all of Scripture: Luke 24:13-35, the marvelous Road to Emmaus story. Check out my blog from an earlier year on it.}

   John 20:19-31 is always a fruitful Easter 2 text, and maybe especially in the pandemic setting, people locked indoors – and then Jesus breathes on them! My earlier blog on this text has lots of illustrative stuff, with Rachel Hollis, Graham Greene, Elie Wiesel, Walter Brueggemann, Simone Weil and Caravaggio!

   We can always ponder what we sing: “Crown him the Lord of love; behold his hands and side, those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” How striking that the scars remain – eternally. Jesus breathed on them! Notice afterward they don’t feel emotionally jazzed up! The gift of the Spirit (as we’d divine that) isn’t about how we feel. No: he breathes on them and seems clearly to be granting to them the power to forgive. The historic “power of the keys.” Don’t think this is a fossil from some guilt-ridden religious past. Our power, our opening to forgive, to invite forgiveness, is huge, and always will be.

   Doubts interest us with Thomas. We cherish them, and lionize him! But it’s a clinging to control, insisting I am the arbiter of truth! Of course, we can urge people to doubt their doubts. Thomas’s doubting wasn’t generalized intellectual questions about God, but simply if the risen, quite physical Jesus really is out and about.

   I’ve never tried it in a sermon, but reflecting on “Much more happened that didn’t make it into this Gospel” could be amazing. If you want your first “for example,” read chapter 21! Isn’t the whole history of the church itself the ongoing account of the other things Jesus did, does and even will be doing?

   OK, here’s the Buechner quote: “In one sense the past is dead and gone, but in another sense, it is not done with at all, or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere. A scrap of some song, a book we read as a child, a stretch of road we used to travel, an old photograph. Suddenly there it all is. Old failures, old hurts. Times too beautiful to tell. 

     We are all such escape artists. We are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except what really matters, except for what is going on inside our own skin. We chatter. We hold each other at bay. It is the same when we are alone. We turn on television, or find some chore that could easily wait. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface. We get tired.

   But there is a deeper need, to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive to ourselves, to the long journeys of our lives. So much has happened. Remembering means a deeper, slow kind of remembering, a searching and finding. ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ goes the old spiritual – but we know it. We are to remember it. And the happiness we have seen, too – precious times, precious people, moments when we were better than we know how to be. 

     And then, we will find beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well. We have survived. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. Many times I have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason. Many times I have loved people too much for their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I remember times I might have given up, but I didn’t. Weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far. A love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. We are never really alone.”

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   Check out my book on, not how to preach, but how to continue preaching, The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.