What can we say March 1? Lent 2

    Genesis 12:1-4a blew my mind week #1 in seminary. Prof. Lloyd Bailey explained how this wasn’t just a thing that happened to Abraham, but was the key to unlock the entire calling of God’s people – to be blessed, to multiply, to be given land (a huge problem historically!), and to be a blessing to everybody else. That’ll preach.

   God calls Abraham to go – but where? How will it work out? I’m reminded of those fishermen who drop their nets to follow Jesus – but where? How will it work out? Walter Brueggemann calls this “a call for a dangerous departure from the presumed world of norms and security.” Risky? Isn’t that what we need? Russ Reno, in his great Brazos commentary, phrases it like this: “The divine plan injects a new possibility into the flow of history rather than acting over or upon humanity from the outside.”

   Reno sees this text as an answer, an antidote to the Babel story in Genesis 11, how the fallen world of grasping is what Abraham is taken from – and that “now God promises to give Abraham-in-particular what humanity-in-general sought to achieve by its own hands whether it gathered to build a tower to heaven: a place, a nation, a name remembered.”

   It’s a journey, a pilgrimage. Abraham never quite arrives, does he? Odd, as part of God’s pledge to him is that he’ll have land – the most problematical item, if you weigh what’s unfolded through history, maybe in the whole Old Testament. This pledge of land has caused wars and irresolvable tensions. 

Brueggemann (in his great book on the promise of the land, Chosen), asks “to what extent that theological claim has come to be or has morphed into an ideological claim that functions as self-justification.” Indeed.

   The other promise is that these chosen ones will be the way God will bless everybody else. It’s not being chosen to be protected, or to be granted special blessings, and certainly not to pass judgment on others. Israel’s will not be a doing for the others, “but that the life of Israel under the promise will energize and model a way for the other nations also to receive a blessings from this God” (Brueggemann). Isn’t this the church’s mission?

   Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, a text I won’t linger on now or in my sermon, takes the call of Abraham and morphs it into something about faith and being reckoned righteous. I love to dissect Paul’s midrashic read of Abraham and why he matters in a Bible study, but am not so good at preaching it. Psalm 121, which we read at gravesides, is also rich in wisdom; for his long journey, Abraham lifted his eyes to uncertain hills; and Jesus and his family, along with all pilgrims in Bible times, sang this as they made their way to Jerusalem for Passover – including Jesus’ last. 

   John 3:1-17. Utterly familiar – and yet I’ve had good cause to rethink it over the years. I was invited to write a book about Birth (in the series, Pastoring for Life: Theological Wisdom for Ministering Well). Listening to moms, doctors, and midwives, and in much research, I have tried to connect what I learned to what it might mean to be born again. I kept wondering why it is that preachers (George Whitefield, Billy Graham, etc.), who’ve talked constantly about being born again, virtually ignore birth itself when theologizing about being born again. They’re men? Never witnessed a birth? Is “born again” really a revivalist mood, a surge of spiritual emotion, or even a zealous commitment to be different?

   Think about it: Nicodemus comes in the dark – like life in the womb, about to be born. When you were born, the first time, wasn’t it true that “God called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Pet. 2:9). 

   Isn’t it curious that, in explaining this new birth to Nicodemus, Jesus speaks of being born of water and the spirit. Recall your first birth. You were in water. Then you emerged, gasping for air, for a breath – or we can say “spirit,” as the Hebrew ruah, and the Greek pneuma both mean air, and then by extension, spirit. It’s always water, and then the spirit when getting born.

    That you “must” be reborn intrigues. The Greek, deî, isn’t must as in You must do your homework, or You must report for jury duty. It’s more like You must come to my birthday party! or You must come with me to the hospital to see Fred before he dies. It’s love, it’s a deeply personal, can’t-miss-it necessity – like birth.

   The heart of Jesus’ surprising notion of being born again is this: you can’t grit your teeth and get born the first time, and you can’t when you’re born again either. Back in October of 1955, I didn’t think, Hmm, nice day to get born, let’s do it. An entirely passive, unchosen event. Even the mother has zero ability to turn a microscopic zygote into a breathing, squawling person. Birth happens to you, and in you. Rudolf Bultmann, reflecting on Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus’s search for salvation, clarifies that “the condition can only be satisfied by a miracle… It suggests to Nicodemus, and indeed to anyone who is prepared to entertain the possibility of the occurrence of a miraculous event, that such a miracle can come to pass.”

   Given the ways preachers like Whitefield and Graham conducted revivals seeking new births that were marked by a swooning of emotion, it’s important to realize that Jesus didn’t ask Nicodemus to feel anything. There are, of course, intense feelings at birth. The mother giving birth may be overwhelmed with an intensity of joy, or anything else along a broad spectrum of emotion. The one being born though: is birth an emotional high for the baby?

   Of course, the feelings mother and child share in childbirth are the pains, the excruciating squeezes, the tearing of flesh and sometimes the breaking of bones. Could Jesus have imagined such agony when pressing us toward a new birth? Jesus courageously embraced pain, and invited us to follow. Paul, imprisoned and beaten multiple times within an inch of his life for following Jesus, wrote that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God… provided we suffer with him” (Rom. 8:15-16). No wonder we prefer a happy emotional kind of rebirth at a revival, over against the costly discipleship that is the new life Jesus has in mind for us. It isn’t the feeling, but the fact of the new birth, and the hard facts of union with Jesus in a world puzzled or hostile to his ways.

   By now, of course, we see that Jesus wasn’t asking Nicodemus to behave a little better. It’s radical, a total shift of focus, priorities, behaviors and habits. Bultmann explains it perfectly: “Rebirth means… something more than an improvement in man; it means that man receives a new origin, and this is manifestly something which he cannot give himself.” My first birth defined my origin as a Howell. I have the DNA, I favor my dad, I am who I am. How could I come by a new and different origin? Let’s look to St. Francis of Assisi.

   After fitting in and even excelling as a child and youth, enviably popular, chic and cool, Francis heard the call of Jesus. Taking the Bible quite literally, picking up whatever Jesus said or did and putting it on his to-do list for the day, Francis divested himself of his advantages, including his exquisite, fashionable clothing, which he gave away to the poor. His father, Pietro, a churchgoing, upstanding citizen, took exception, locked his son up for a time, and then sued him in the city square. Giotto’s fresco in the basilica where Francis is buried shows a stark naked Francis, handing the only thing he has left, the clothes off his back, to his father. But his eyes are fixed upward, where we see a hand appearing to bless him from up in the clouds. At this moment, Francis declared, “Until now I have called Pietro Bernardone my father. But, because I have proposed to serve God, I return to him the money on account of which he was so upset, and also all the clothing which is his, wanting to say from now on: ‘Our Father who are in heaven,’ and not ‘My father, Pietro di Bernardone.’” A biblical moment, if we have regard for “You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 2:23), or “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother” (Matt. 10:35).

   What is we ponder “born again” from the mother’s side? Anne Enright, who shows no evident interest in religion: “A child came out of me. I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing.” Isn’t this what being with Jesus, a child who came out of his mother, is like? The past is laughably past. Every small thing, devoted to this Jesus, matters. 

 Perhaps being born again is like the discovery so many new moms make, articulated beautifully in John O’Donohue’s words:

     Once it began, you were no longer your own.

     A new, more courageous you, offering itself

     In a new way to a presence you can sense

     But you have not seen or known.

   I'd be remiss, if we're trying to parse John 3:16 in light of all this Birth stuff (and oh my gosh, if you're having Holy Communion!), if I didn't share Rachel Marie Stone's marvelous envisioning of Mary's great gift to us: "A girl was in labor with God. She groaned and sweated and arched her back, crying out for her deliverance and finally delivering God, God’s head pressing on her cervix, emerging from her vagina, perhaps tearing her flesh a little; God the Son, her Son, covered in vernix and blood, the infant God’s first breath the close air of crowded quarters… God the Son, her Son, pressed to her bare breast… God the Son, her Son, drank deeply from his mother. Drink, my beloved. This is my body, broken for you." 

What can we say March 8? Lent 3

    Exodus 17:1-7. What a roomy text for Lent! A test in the wilderness, the hard-to-beat question, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Wryly I may take note that it’s the wilderness of Sin, not sin – observing though the sin in Sin. Notice the verbs: they camped, quarreled, thirsted, complained. God’s reply? Not judgment, but mercy. Is the Lord among the quarrellers and complainers? Yes, of course. So the presence is a matter of realization, or embodying, or not deflecting, shoving away?

   This business of demanding proof should draw many people in. Anselm, Aquinas and a host of brilliant people have devised proofs for God’s existence. Logic can’t bend the will, or the heart though. As we’ll see in Philippians 2, Jesus ‘proved’ God by utterly ungodlike actions:  humbling, debased, being abused and killed. There. That’s the only proof you get. 

   As in our Gospel reading’s woman at the well, the people are thirsty – and then they also are thirsty. This story figured prominently in the rest of the Bible. Psalms 81 and 95 remember and issue dire warnings based on it. “O that you would listen to me, Israel!  Do not be stubborn as you were at Meribah.” As C.H. Spurgeon put it, “Let the example of that unhappy generation serve as a beacon to you; do not repeat the offenses which have already more than enough provoked the Lord.”

   Romans 5:1-11 is a rich text, but I’ll veer from preaching on it, given the two dramatic narratives in this week’s readings. I would note that Paul, taking a deep breath after chapters 1 thru 4, exclaims “Therefore we have peace.” Our people will breathe relief – until we read on to be informed that this peculiar peace leads to suffering (verse 3). 

 I think of Mother Maria of Paris, St. Maria now, the Latvian woman killed by the Nazis for her labors in the French resistance, who said “It would be a great lie to tell those who are searching: ‘Go to church, because there you will find peace.’ The opposite is true. The Church tells those who are at peace and asleep: ‘Go to church, because there you will feel real anguish for your sin and the world’s sin. There you will feel an insatiable hunger for Christ’s truth. There, instead of becoming lukewarm, you’ll be set on fire; instead of being pacified, you’ll become alarmed; instead of learning the wisdom of this world, you will become fools for Christ.”

   And I shy away from Paul’s confident “Hope does not disappoint.” Sure it does. And I admire Kate Bowler’s interesting musing: “Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present.” Ponder, ponder, ponder this…

   John 4:5-42. Such a vivid scene, so much drama. The little details dig us deeply into an interpersonal encounter. It’s noon. High sun; it’s hot, the shadows are sharp. She’s tired – midday? Did she go on noon so as to avoid the other women who typically went early morning or late afternoon? The well – 135 feet deep, visitable today, and you can drink from it! – was tantalizingly “near the plot of ground Jacob gave Joseph.” Not on, but near… Here’s a sermon I preached shortly after visiting – and drinking from that well!

   The setup verse (4:4) says Jesus “had to pass through Samaria.” Hardly: this is the hilly, rocky, more dangerous route – even today, situated as it is on the West Bank. This Greek word, deî, is pregnant with a sense of divine necessity. He had to, as it his missional focus required him to go there.

   Samaritans were actually Jewish, but attached to Mt. Gerizim instead of Mt. Zion, and to the Torah but not the Prophets (and not liking the prophets makes them like lots of people we preach to!!!). So close to Judaism – and yet so far. What is it in human nature that makes us most hostile toward the people who are just barely different from us? There’s the hilarious (and crass) scene in The Life of Brian (not for the sermon, just for the preacher’s fun) where the People’s Front of Judea explain “the only people we hate more than the Romans are the Judea People’s Front”…

   She’s despised by Mt. Zionish Jewish guys like Jesus. But this woman is despised even within her own despised group! She is pitiably alone, as in lonely, ostracized. Jesus encounters her – and he too is alone. He becomes what she is. He’s alone, and thirsty, like she is.

   I love David Ford's ruminations (in his great new commentary on John): "Does the woman approach the well provocatively or nonchalantly? Does she project shame, modesty, or sexual availability? What tone of voice does she first use to Jesus - polite, ironic, flirtatious? Does she understand Jesus's request for water as a sexual advance? Is her response to Jeus's offer one of genuine astonishment and openness, ironic dismissal, or wistful longing?" He's so on point on her marital history: "There could have been a mixture of divorces and bereavements. Yet, whatever the truth, a life shot through with disappointment, pain, and grief is suggested."

   He doesn’t judge, or teach a lesson, or even give her water. He asks her to do something for him. Jean Vanier explains, “Jesus is showing us how to approach people who are broken and wounded: not as someone superior, from ‘above,’ but humbly, from ‘below,’ like a beggar. Such people who are already ashamed of themselves do not need someone who will make them even more ashamed, but someone who will give them hope and reveal to them that they have value.”

  I love the idea that Jesus was nothing like David, who encountered a woman mid-day and "took" her: Bathsheba. David assumes a woman is his for the taking. Jesus assumes she is a person, with a story, wounds, dreams, and is more than ready simply to listen to her, to care, to be a non-judgmental presence. David judged Bathsheba as less than noble and his for the taking. Jesus judged the Samaritan woman as of priceless worth.

   Once there was a boy born with an acute case of cerebral palsy who was treated terribly as a young child.  He was sent to another home where his mother noticed how he watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  She believed Mister Rogers was keeping her son alive.  Some big foundation worked it out for Mister Rogers to visit this boy, and when he did, Mister Rogers asked, “Would you pray for me?”  The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for anything.  He was the object of prayer, not the one to pray for Mr. Rogers.  But now he prays for Mister Rogers and he doesn’t want to die anymore.  Tom Junod witnessed this and privately he congratulated Mister Rogers for being so smart.  But Mister Rogers didn’t know what he meant.  He really wanted the boy’s prayers, saying, “I think that anyone who’s gone through challenges like that must be very close to God.”

    This Samaritan woman does not seem or feel close to God though. Can we hear this woman’s pain? “I have no husband.” She’s not lying, or covering up; it’s a lament, one we all sense in the gut. How many negative images has she been bombarded with, and how much self-recrimination does she tote around in her head? The Bible doesn’t tell us her name – par for the course. She didn’t matter much to anybody else back then – except Jesus, who surely did learn her name, even if John forgot to tell us.

   I’ll guarantee you Jesus asked for and remembered her name. He knew her entire life story, one she’d prefer to cloak. And yet he’s not repulsed. Don’t we all long for such a friend, who can bear our entire, true story, and not shrink back? This is faith, I think, exploring the truth about our story, and experiencing the presence, the mercy. As Vanier puts it, “Jesus invites her, and each one of us, to revisit our past in truth: not just to analyze it or remain trapped in it, but to be liberated from its hold.”

   Jesus knows all about us, but never with a Gotcha! I am moved by Gerhard Lohfink’s vision of final judgment: “When we encounter God in death, we will for the first time recognize with full clarity who we really are. God will have no need to sit in judgment on us, to harangue us. In our encounter with the holy God our eyes will be opened to behold our own selves. We ourselves will judge and condemn the evil in ourselves…” He adds that those we’ve hurt or not helped may also stand before us and stare – becoming our judges! My knees buckle at such the prospect of such an “encounter with the truth about God, about others, about the world, and about ourselves.” But Lohfink says we should rejoice, because as Jesus said “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Only then will we grasp the depth of God’s mercy – and only then can the healing that will be eternity begin.

  She is exposed, she is loved – and then she is filled, refreshed, washed with this incredible living water that Jesus is. Double entendres everywhere: the well is “deep,” as in the depths of her soul, and where Jesus is taking her. Wink, wink as you preach.  

    In my book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, I explore some medieval notions of being hungry and thirsty for the Eucharist – and then Jesus’ own hunger and thirst.  Julian of Norwich wrote that “Jesus will be thirsty until the last soul is saved and joins him in his bliss; his thirst is to have us drawn into him.”  And Bernard of Clairvaux: “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 to him.”

What can we say March 15? Lent 4

 

    Samuel’s clandestine visit to Bethlehem in 1 Samuel 16 (depicted here from the 3rd/4th century Dura Europos synagogue in modern-day Syria) is a high water mark of Scripture drama. Saul is king, but he’s pretty much done. He was big, strong, tall, powerful – yet when David appears on the stage of history, tall Saul seems small, very small next to this very small one. The Bible’s quirky logic is in play: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zech 4:6). “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many people?” (John 6:9). “It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you – for you were the fewest of all peoples” (Deut 7:7). “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised” (1 Cor 1:27).

    What were Jesse’s feelings when he learned one of his sons would be king? Pride? Shock? A fearful trembling?  The preacher can depict the lineup of sons, tallest on down, the strapping Eliab, the burly Abinadab, the chiseled Shammah, all 7 – but not one of them was the one.  The Lord’s word to Samuel – and us?  “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16:7).

   Even in church, we look to ability, strength, IQ, savvy – but it’s the “heart,” although it’s really God choosing whom God chooses. Puzzled, Samuel shrugs – and only then acknowledges, “Well, yes, there remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” The obvious deduction is that Jesse didn’t even consider the possibility that this little one might be the one. But could it be that Jesse actually feared David might be the one, that he saw unprecedented potential in him – or perhaps he was simply the one he loved the most, the unexpected child of old age, the apple of his eye? The writer does take note that David “was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome” (1 Sam 16:12). Perhaps Jesse wanted to keep this small but handsome one home, to shelter him for himself, and from the perils of kingship.

   Christian history features so many stories of parents blocking their children’s calling to sainthood. Francis of Assisi’s father, Pietro, was so mortified when his son began giving to the poor with total abandon that he took him to court and disowned him. Pope Francis’s mother was crushed when he reported he was headed into the priesthood instead of to medical school, and she would not speak to him or forgive him for some time. How many women and men never became great heroes of the Church because parents restrained them, and wouldn’t let go?

   This story is about a different kind of seeing. The verb “see” occurs six times in the story of David’s anointing; “the Lord does not see as mortals see” (1 Sam 16:7). How does God see? How can we see as God sees? Can we see things as they really are instead of being deceived by what is only superficially visible? As Gandalf wrote in a letter to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, “All that is gold does not glitter.” Or that Native American saying: “We teach our children to see when there is nothing to see, and to listen where there is nothing to hear.”   Preaching is not seeing for others, but showing them how to see.

   This brings us to Psalm 23. The Hebrew word for “see,” ra’ah, is one barely distinguishable sound away from ra‘ah, the word for “shepherd.” We might think of shepherds as lowly and despised, poor laborers of no account. Yet there is always an ambiguity to the image of a “shepherd.” Yes, they spent their days and nights out of doors with smelly animals who tended to nibble themselves lost. Mothers didn’t fantasize that their daughters would marry shepherds one day. And yet in the agrarian, pastoral culture of the world in those days, where sheep were everywhere and they mattered for survival, even the mightiest kings of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria and Egypt were often dubbed the “shepherds” of their people.

   The Lord is my shepherd.  Lest we get sappy about the image, as so much kitschy church art does, I will recall the first shepherd I saw in Israel:  Elvis t-shirt, green rubber golashes, with a stick, swatting sheep, hollering expletives at them.  The Lord is like that? Or we are like such dumb sheep?

   Most of us have heard the Hebrew of verse 1 means “I shall lack no good thing.” I shall not want? Our whole life is about wanting, even in prayer. Maybe we are asked here to learn to want the one good thing: God. Psalm 27 says “One thing have I asked… to behold the beauty of the Lord.” Psalm 73 similarly says “For me, it is good to be near God.” Clearly all this requires a focused re-understanding of what is genuinely good, and what doesn’t really count… 

   In our church, we read Psalm 23 aloud at funerals. “Read” – but really people say it from memory, and are clearly moved. And we use the King James Version, rightly I think…  Regardless, I’m struck by one four letter word in verse four: thou. This is fascinating: in the original Hebrew of Psalm 23, there are exactly 26 words before “Thou art with me,” and exactly 26 words after “Thou art with me.” Could be chance – but perhaps the poet was boldly declaring that God being with us is at the very center of our lives, the apogee of all that transpires, the focal point of the universe? God is with us. We are not alone down here.

   The whole Gospel is that God is with us; Jesus was called “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.” John Wesley’s dying words were “The best of all is, God is with us.” Sam Wells has rightly demonstrated how the most important theological word in the Bible is “with.” God doesn’t shelter us from trouble, God doesn’t magically manipulate everything to suit us. But the glorious With is unassailable, unchangeable, the only fact that matters.

   This marvelous news draws our attention again to the Thou. For the first 3 verses of the Psalm, God is spoken of in the third person: “The Lord is my shepherd… he leads me… he restores my soul.” But with the Thou, the third person shifts to second person: “for Thou art with me, thy rod… thou preparest a table…” Instead of talking about God, the Psalmist begins to talk to God; instead of God in the head, God is a friend in the heart, a conversation happens, a relationship grows. This is faith. This is the only true comfort.

   And the with isn’t just me-with-God. It is me-with-others – and especially those with whom I’ve been estranged. Reconciliation is our burden – and joy. This “table” is set “in the presence of my enemies.” Jesus said Before you come to the altar, make peace with your enemies (Matthew 5:23f) – and When you have dinner, don’t invite your friends, but the outsiders, the outcast (Luke 14). In our day of intense rancor and derision, we are asked, invited and empowered by God not merely to think about others more happily and in light of God’s grace, but actually to break bread with them. How do we urge our people to engage in this difficult but life-giving discipline???

   How interesting is it that Psalm 23 says “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” – the key word being “through.” We don’t move into the valley and camp there; we get through it, not by dint of will, but by God’s mercy. 

   Ephesians 5:8-14. In my book on Birth (in the Pastoring for Life series), I dwell on the rarely noticed but obvious once you see it image that the newborn emerging from the womb “once was in darkness, but now in the light.” And so, to ponder being “a child of the light,” reflect on the moments after birth, where you are entirely vulnerable, yet encircled in tender love, utterly dependent, yet the focus on intense attention and unlimited grace.

  “Fruit of the light” jars a little, as we are familiar with “fruit of the Spirit.” But fruit requires the light of God’s good sun to grow. Frank Thielman interestingly translates v. 10 as “trying to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” Like, try to figure it out. Do some investigating. Study. Ask around! I admire Thielman’s chapter heading for this text: “From Avoidance to Transformation.” Christians aren’t avoiders so much as they are doers, but not just human effort doing; it’s transformed doing, and being.

   How lovely: if you want to know how noble you are, how fantastic humanity actually is, it is that we are capable of “pleasing” the Lord. It’s God, almighty, ineffable, omniscient, eternal, immovable, omnipresent, infinite – and yet God makes the divine heart vulnerable to be buoyed up into joy by us, or conversely to be crushed in disappointed sorrow. Clearly the Christian life isn’t about rules, doing right or wrong, and it isn’t even entirely about grace, as in God’s embraces you no matter what – both of which are true, but missing this dynamic that we can please that omni-God, and that this is precisely what brings us our own pleasure.

   Paul’s expose of what is “secret” could be probed in the sermon. iPhones champion their ‘privacy’ settings; we all wear our masks and hide dark secrets, often even from ourselves. I had a friend years ago, a sociologist, whose specialty was family secrets. Any time she mentioned this, at a party or anywhere, someone would pull her aside and say “You know, our family has this secret” – and then who knows, who doesn’t and why? Tell this in a sermon and people squirm a little over what they hide, or suspect they’ve not figured out just yet. Paul wants us to go right to that place.

   His overriding image is of waking up from sleep. Rip van Winkle slept through the American revolution. The “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” hid in a cave from persecution, fell asleep, and woke up decades later to the shock that the empire was now Christian. Sleepwalking is a thing someone you know does – and it’s such an apt image of the way we drift through life, even our church life. Paul sounds the alarm: it’s time to wake up!

   John 9:1-41 is a really long read in worship. But such a dramatic story! Jesus’ answer to the question about sin exhibits his heart more than anything he ever said: Who sinned, this guy or his parents? Right answer: Neither. Boom, blame game squashed. Odd: religious people had read the book of Job, but still resorted to the tactic of Job’s friends: it’s gotta be something he did wrong. Be sure to underline this nasty habit in your sermon. A teenager uses drugs, and we suspect the parents were duds. A husband leaves his wife for another, and she firmly believes she was inadequate. A homeless man must be a lazy bum. On and on. Name these. Let people fill in the blanks – both in how they feel unjustly judged, and how they do this to others. Jesus says Neither.

   The gross tangibility of Jesus’ healing: spittle “smeared” on his eyes. Jesus gets his hands dirty, and yours too (reminding us of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wisdom that Christians too often like to keep their hands clean, when doing God’s will actually gets your hands dirty). The setting of this healing: the Pool of Siloam has been excavated in recent years. If you look at a city map of ancient Jerusalem, you realize this wasn’t a pool for swimming or beautifying the city. Siloam (like Bethesda, the other pool where Jesus healed) was a gigantic group mikveh – those ritual bath establishments. 

   People coming to the temple, pilgrims having journeyed for many days, stopped off at the huge Siloam mikveh to repent, to cleanse themselves, to prepare to climb the hill to enter the holy place. Jesus knew this place of grief and expectation was a prime spot to find seekers receptive to his message and his healing.

   And John 9 titillates the listener with Jesus’ clever, probing irony about who can see and who can’t. The super-pious assume they see all things clearly – but they are the truly blind ones. A homiletical question is: do we wish to see clearly? Or do we prefer to continue to avert our gaze, keeping the corrective lenses of Scripture safely on the coffee table?

   Jean Vanier (the news about whom broke my heart) shared thoughts on John 9 that acknowledge his own brokenness: “Yet if we seek deeper, we will find underneath our brokenness the beauty in our own hearts and in the heart of each person; our capacity to love, to give life and to take our place in the world.” He notes how bystanders in John 9 talk about the person with a disability instead of entering into a relationship with the person! “People with disabilities are like everybody else. Each person is unique and important. Each one has been created by God and for God Each one of us has a vulnerable heart, and yearns to be loved and valued. Each one has a mission Each of us is born so that God’s work may be accomplished in us.”

   Vanier even ushers us into Jesus’ own head: “Jesus must have been deeply touched by this trusting beggar… Maybe it is precisely because this man had been excluded and pushed aside that he was able to distinguish in Jesus a real person, someone sent by God, profoundly human. People with disabilities are sometimes more realistic than those caught up in a competitive society.”

What can we say March 22? Lent 5

    Jeremiah 31:31-34 seems preachable to me, although I’ve never done it. I try to imagine the small scroll scholars believe chapters 30-31 once were – a small roll indeed, yet full of promise and hope, and for the very people Jeremiah had been castigating for years! That’s something – like a long pamphlet of hope. I am fond of Elizabeth Achtemeier’s wisdom on the need for the law to be written on the heart, for a radically new and different covenant: “It is obvious from this passage why moralistic preaching does no good. It does not and it cannot produce any change in people’s lives, for they have no power in themselves to change. They are like prisoners – slaves of sin – and exhorting prisoners to be good is like telling them to fix up their prison cages a little – maybe to hang a picture on the wall or to put a rug on the floor. But what is needed is someone to come and open the door!” Whichever text you choose, hold that in the back of your mind!

   Psalm 51:1-12. What a great, famous, heavily-used and oft-quoted Psalm – and what could be more fitting for the season of Lent? The seven “Penitential Psalms” in general could draw more attention during Lent. I love this: when St. Augustine was confined to his deathbed, his eyesight failing, he asked that the 7 Penitential Psalms be printed in oversized hand on huge pieces of paper and hung on the walls around his bed.

     In seminary you learn that the headings attached to Psalms aren’t original. It is interesting that whoever pieced the Psalter together to find its way into our canon saw a fit between Psalm 51 and the sordid, telling tale of David and Bathsheba – and the temptation is then to launch into a digression and wind up preaching on 2 Samuel 11-12. A worthy text! 

 On that text, though, I’d urge you to read Robert Barron’s brilliant, probing insights in his fabulous Brazos commentary, which I reviewed in Christian Century; after assessing David’s balcony view as “a parody of God’s providential presidency over creation,” and the way David “seizes the prerogatives of divinity, like Adam did,” he pairs the story to Psalm 51 and shrewdly points out that “David does not need a program of ethical renewal; he needs to be re-created.”

   Wow. And we also have Robert Alter’s clever translation of the Psalm 51 heading, noting the Hebrew wordplay which he dubs “a barbed pun”: “Upon Nathan the prophet’s coming to him when he had come to bed with Bathsheba.”

   And doesn't the plotline - that David sinned, repented, and was forgiven - is way too cheap? Uriah's dead. Does his family forgive David? Even Bathsheba (the patron saint of #MeToo): she was seized, taken by the king. Does she just slide on by while David basks in his forgiveness? Or isn't she permanently wounded?

   Humble, eloquent, heart-rending contrition: Psalm 51 hardly needs explication. As a preacher, it would be too easy and simplistic just to default to an old-timey sermon plot: yes, you sin, and yes, God forgives if you ask. But the Psalm happily complicates things – and we do too. The Psalm is after, as Barron mentioned, not a plan of ethical renewal, or a determination to do better, but a radically new heart, like the one Jeremiah 31 dreamed of – and maybe this is the sort of thing Jesus had in mind when he said we must be born again.

 

   This text isn’t after the mere absolution of guilt. It’s about reconciliation, a healed, renewed relationship with God that only God can achieve. Randy Maddox helped us see how for John Wesley, grace isn’t just God letting bygones be bygones; grace has a medicinal, healing power.

   The Psalm also highlights the image of being wiped clean – very different from the accounting of sin being erased. I love this thought: in his Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis ponders something John Henry Newman wrote in his “Dream of Gerontius.” A saved soul, at the very foot of God’s throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed before continuing in heaven.

   “Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so sir.’”

    Relevant preaching will touch on why sin is an elusive topic nowadays. Yes, the Psalm implies “original sin.” Unsure how much the preacher should delve into that. I love Mark Twain’s quip, that when we sin, there’s nothing very original about it! We fall in line – and then his other thought: “I don’t know why Adam and Eve get so much credit; I could have done just as well as they did.” Or Whitney Brown’s Saturday Night Live humor: “Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It’s very embarrassing.”

   Our bigger challenge isn’t persuading anybody of the doctrine of original sin. It’s getting anyone but the most conservatively-reared, guilt-riddled Christians to understand sin is a real thing. A generation ago the psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote Whatever Became of Sin? – and it’s a better question now than then. But it’s no use hammering on people (as I’ve tried a few times), saying You don’t think much about sin, but you really are a sinner! People can’t conceive of sin as an impudent violation of God’s commands – with which we only have a passing, thin acquaintance anyhow. And if sin is breaking a rule, then we fail to understand what revolutionized Martin Luther’s ministry 500 years ago – that sin isn’t this or that action but our entire nature.

   How do we explore the human condition and then help people realize the trouble they are in? Douglas John Hall (in his wonderful Professing the Faith) rather wonderfully suggested that we don’t feel so much like Prometheus, defiantly scaling the heights to steal fire from the gods, but rather we feel like Sisyphus, valiantly pushing that stone uphill, only to have it roll down again; we are weary, hollow, frustrated people.  We are dogged (and you needn’t persuade anyone) by all kinds of brokenness. Such as these:

    Sin, today, is being enmeshed in a culture that is not of God; the “seven deadly sins” (pride, sloth, greed, lust, gluttony, envy and wrath) are the very definition of the good life in America we mindlessly pursue and accept!

    Sin, today, is our irrational attachment to and ultimate trust in our political ideology, which is today’s idolatry. If your god is what you rely on, what can make your day (or ruin it), what you believe can deliver the fullness of life, what unites you with some other angry people, then political ideology (and perhaps especially for those who vehemently insist politics not be spoken of in church!) is sin.

    Sin, today, may well be our bland niceness, and believe it passes muster as a Christian life. All of these, and even old-timey garden variety rebellion against God, mean-spirited sins, indulging in the more sinister aspects of our culture: all are manifestations of fear, fear of isolation, fear of pointlessness, fear even of God, fear there may be no God, fear I’m insufficient somehow, fear of missing out, fear of death.

   We do know guilt, shame, worrying about being found out, hoping to be good enough – and by “we” I mean not just churchgoing believers but garden variety American people!

   The Psalm urges us toward what Luther figured out. My witty and brilliant professor of Church History, David Steinmetz, explained things this way (in Luther in Context). As a young priest, Luther encountered the common medieval understanding, which sounds hauntingly like the common modern church understanding of religious reality: “Although Christ died for the sins of the world, it is still the responsibility of the sinner to act on behalf of his own soul by rigorous self-examination, by good works and self-denial, by prayer and pious exercises.  God is willing to forgive the sinner, but there are conditions which must be met – and which lie within the power of the sinner to perform.”

   But then, after a deep reading of Paul, and thrashing through his own personal struggles and guided well by his mentor John Staupitz, Luther arrived at a very different, more mature, and theologically on target view of things: “The problem with human righteousness is not merely that it is flawed or insufficient (though it is both).  The problem with human righteousness is that it is irrelevant.  God does not ask for human virtue as a precondition for justification.  God asks for human sin.” I love that. God asks for sin. And we’ve got it.

   A few other details in the Psalm might merit attention. “Cast me not away from your presence”: the very is more like “Hurl” or “Fling me not away…” And this: the craving is to be “whiter than snow,” which got erased from “Have thine own way, Lord,” in the hymnal; but if you rail against this as political correctness, you are exposed as the very sinner in need of being washed. And the opening verb, “Create,” renders the Hebrew bara’, which is used rarely in Scripture, and only with God as its subject – as in Genesis 1!

   Our other texts? Hebrews 5:5-10 has always left me puzzled. This “order of Melchizedek” business meant so much to early Christians, but then for most of us it’s just plain mystifying. How fascinating is Hebrews 5’s narrative – that Jesus prayed “with loud cries and tears.” In Gethsemane? On the cross? And “to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear.” Really? The Gospels imagine Jesus’ prayer not being heard, or being heard but resolved quite differently. Or is Hebrews envisioning the resurrection? I think not, but who knows?

   And then John 12:20-33 is a rich text. In the wake of being anointed, and of Palm Sunday, and then just before the footwashing, we find this public scene where some Greeks approach Philip (the one disciple with a Greek name!) and ask “We wish to see Jesus.” I heard a sermon years ago that used this as a cadence throughout, the whole homily playing on what it means to wish to see Jesus, how to find him, what we see when we find him, or are found by him. This is our request, and I suspect this is even the request of a cynical, unbelieving world – in our Christ-haunted landscape.

    I love the way Philip told Andrew, then and Andrew told Jesus. There’s something hidden in there about the nature of community, but I’m not sure what. Jesus’ “hour to be glorified” is near – and for John, that glorification isn’t on Easter morning but as he breathes his last on the cross. How startling is the way this Johannine text picks up on Paul (“unless a grain falls into the earth”) and the Synoptics (“he who would save his life will lose it,” and the voice from heaven!): it’s as if this text is an overture, a big musical climax, a “greatest hits” explicating Jesus. And then (and I recognize it’s past our reading), what is that in verse 36? “And he hid from them.”

What can we say March 29? 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.

   Matthew 21:1-11. A king on a little donkey, not a war stallion like Bucephalus (Alexander the Great’s mount) – and a  borrowed donkey at that. Or two. Not just as fulfillment of prophecy (Zechariah!), this has a lovely, family feel. Mother and child, father and child, donkey and colt. Martin Luther noticed Jesus road on “an animal of peace fit only for burden and labor. He indicates by this that he comes not to frighten anyone, nor to drive or crush anyone, but to help him and carry his burdens.” Notice "the Lord has need of them." Being needed by our Lord; that's enough, isn't it? Some special donkey. Despite all the clamor, he never gets skittish; he doesn’t bolt or freeze.

Those following weren’t armed or rich or influential. Dreamers, every one. Wouldn’t the recently healed Bartimaeus have been in the crowd? And the recently raised Lazarus? 

   Jesus is so full of courage – that rarest of virtues in our day. The preacher is wise to portray vividly the sights and sounds: Pilate had just marched his legions from Caesarea on the coast to Jerusalem to intimidate, to secure the city overcrowded at Passover. His stomping regiments, with arms clattering and banners waving high, heading east into the city could not have found a greater contrast that Jesus, donkey hooves clomping on the stone, children holding leafy branches in the air, heading west into the city. The perpetual clash of good and evil coming to its climax.

   Stanley Hauerwas is right: "Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem is an unmistakable political act." The crowd does not yet know, and may never understand, that "this king triumphs not through violent revolt, but by being for Israel the one able to show it that its worship of God is its freedom." His action is "a refusal to let Rome determine what counts and doesn't count as politics." Well-said, daunting to explicate in a sermon though, with hearers mired on old-timey Americanish notions about what politics is and what religion (to them, very different) is.

   Hard to beat the wisdom inside Jesus Christ Superstar’s “Hosanna Heysanna...” with the crowd’s escalating appeals to Jesus: “Won’t you smile for me?” “Won’t you fight for me?” “Won’t you die for me?” I lucked into a podcast (my “Maybe I'm Amazed”) conversation with Tim Rice, who wrote these and all the words for that splendid musical! Lots of insight in there for Holy Week! For Palm Sunday, we feel the jubilation, and yet the painful ironies, the dawning realization on them, and us, of impending doom and what’s at stake.

   The shout “Hosanna!” isn’t cheering in church, but a prayer, a cry for help meaning “Save us now!” That’s precisely why he came, although the enthusiastic crowd melted away by Good Friday. Not the saving they had in mind.

   World leaders, including our own, look frightening, and expose themselves as frightened. Jesus wasn’t scared, and he didn’t scare anybody – except the armed and powerful who probably couldn’t admit to themselves that his stark alternative posed a paradoxical threat to their business. Jesus had so much courage! And yet an utter calm, the ultimate non-anxious presence.

   Others have imitated Jesus by striding peacefully into the jaws of danger. Francis of Assisi, having joined the bloodthirsty Crusaders in the battle of Damietta in 1219, walked across No Man’s Land between the heavily armed Christians and the saber-rattling Muslims – unarmed, barefooted. He was so pitiful that, instead of butchering him, the soldiers hauled him to the sultan, Malik al-Kamil. Francis spent three days with him, befriending him, and bought peace in that region. Well, for a brief time.

   What is the homiletical takeaway? Go thou and so likewise? Hardly. We simply find ourselves in the crowd, excited yet with the hunch that a week of agony for this holy one is beginning. Just before Lent we observed the Transfiguration. No takeaway there. The disciples fell on their faces in awe. I dream of the sermon that has no moral, no lesson, but simply causes all of us to say Wow, Jesus is amazing, so courageous, so humble, so loving, so bold, so holy, so divine. That’s really enough, isn’t it?

   I also like to think each year about Howard Thurman's lovely thought (whether it winds up in my sermon or not) - all the more interesting in light of Peter Eisenstadt's new, great biography, Against the Hounds of Hell (also the topic of one of my “Maybe I’m Amazed” podcasts!): “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.”