What can we say June 14? 3rd after Pentecost

    Genesis 18:1-15 (21:1-7). I love the charming and ancient fresco in Ravenna depicting the visit of the three strangers to Abraham and Sarah under the Oaks of Mamre. What a lovely place-name! Trees mark the spot! It’s hard not to interweave chapter 17’s details of the same moment – and (my seminary training notwithstanding!) it isn’t illegitimate to do so either!

   Rabbi Jonathan Sacks sees Abraham (after the foibles of Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah) as “a new human type.” Until now, people viewed God’s command as “a constraint from which they strive to break free.” For Abraham, God’s command is his life. He calls him the “unheroic hero,” as it’s not about him, but about God. He’s flawed, laughable at times. And then the last laugh comes.

   Three strangers. Of course, Christian theologians have lunged toward the Trinity. But why not simply think “strangers.” The Triune God is active any and everywhere, including when strangers materialize. Isn’t mature spirituality seeing strangers, noticing them, and maybe discerning something angelic or even divine in them?

   These three somehow though know of Sarah’s impending pregnancy – and they can even read her silent thoughts just inside the tent. Robert Alter’s rendering is vivid: “Sarah no longer had her woman’s flow. And Sarah laughed inwardly, saying ‘After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure?’” The laugh, yitzak, is cynical, and ironic – since we know the baby is coming, and that his very name Isaac, yitzak, means laughter. The sermon just has to play on this, how we might snicker at the possibility of new life, and then how when it comes we laugh – for the joy, or even at ourselves for our prior snickering.

   How to preach hospitality – in an unsafe world? The question isn’t Do we do hospitality? but How? Children learn "Don't talk to strangers." But isn't it like "Don't cross the road?" Once you're grown, you've learned how to. Can grownups learn to talk to strangers? Isn't hospitality a kind of curiosity? And a kind of humility? Who've we made into strangers who need not be? 

   How to preach impossibility? Easy for the preacher to rattle off jargon about God doing the impossible. But I doubt many people I preach to expect anything extraordinary or beyond human capacity from God – and that’s likely because I as their pastor don’t expect so much either.

   Romans 5:1-11. Paul is finally warming up to his greatest eloquence after his midrashic meanderings about Abraham and faith. Every time I imagine Paul pacing around a room, dictating this letter, I get slackjawed with wonder. There was no New Testament, no theology textbooks – and off the top of his head he came up with this! Inspired, sure. Still amazes me. What was the secretary thinking? Wow, this guy is on fire today. I ruminate on this in sermons sometimes. No takeaway, no go-thou-and-do-likewise...

   I like Michael Gorman’s new commentary on this (and most other Romans texts!). Romans 5 forms a “bridge” between the 1^st 4 chapters and the next 4 – so it’s pivot. Our text forms an “artfully composed chiastic form,” shaped like the Greek letter chi (X):
   A (v 1-2a): Justification as peace thru Christ

     B (v 2b-5): Hope for future glory

        C (v 6-8): Christ’s death as God’s love

     B’ (v 9-10): Hope for future salvation

   A’ ( 11): Reconciliation through Christ

This matters, since Christ’s death is the center, the fulcrum, of God’s justifying, reconciling work. And “reconciliation isn’t something separate from justification”; they are used in the “same breath.”

   Faith: is it ours? (as most would assume) or Christ’s (as theologians think)? Paul stressed that the initiative is always God’s alone, and even its completion. “God’s grace is the means of justification, and faith is the mode of justification.” Hence it is “not mere assent but is robust: a sharing in the faithfulness of Jesus” (Gorman).

   Notice how for Paul “the road to glory is bumpy and has a cruciform shape: it includes, or will include, suffering.” The “will” matters; it’s not “might,” which we would prefer!

   Romans 5, the preacher should note, is entirely in first person plural. It’s not I have peace with God, or you, you individual person out there, have access to God. It’s we: we who are part of the Body. God doesn’t intend for us to do this alone. The logical consequence of all Paul has declared in chapters 1-4? Peace. C.E.B. Cranfield reminds us that eirene isn’t “subjective feelings of peace (though these may indeed result), but the objective state of being at peace instead of being enemies.” It’s a fact. Done. And not by you but by Christ, and at immense cost to himself.

   James K.A. Smith, in his marvelous On the Road with Saint Augustine, paints a homiletically intriguing picture of what our pursuit of peace is: “Like the exhausted refugee, fatigued by vulnerability, what we crave is rest (‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you’)… Joy, for Augustine, is characterized by a quietude that is the opposite of anxiety – the exhale of someone who has been holding her breath out of fear or worry or insecurity. It is the blissful rest of someone who realizes she no longer has to perform; she is loved. We find joy in the grace of God precisely because he is the one we don’t have to prove anything to. "

   "But it is also the exhale of someone who has arrived – who can finally breathe after making it through the anxiety-inducing experience of the border crossing, seeking refuge… The Christian isn’t just a pilgrim but a refugee, a migrant in search of refuge.” He then invites us to imagine Augustine’s City of God “as a tent city, a refugee camp… Think of Dadaab in Kenya, the Sahrawi camps in Maghreb.” Not my usual image of the City of God - but there it is. 

   “Obtained access” in v. 2: F.F. Bruce vividly explains that the Greek, prosagoge, means “the privilege of being introduced into the presence of someone of high station.” Verse 3: “We rejoice in our sufferings” – which is aspirational more than true. 

   There is beauty in suffering; Ray Barfield spoke at our church on just this (check out his little book, Wager: Beauty, Suffering, and Being in the World, on this). People know if you press them: “I was with my mother when she died, and it was a beautiful moment” - although care is required in talking this way, as some haven't had that beautiful experience, and suffering for many is brutally ugly...  Paul has in mind some origami in the soul that suffering initiates. His lovely litany is memorable, and worth repeating (or cross-stitching): “Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope.” I’m tempted to edit Paul a little by inserting the word “might” or “sometimes.” Suffering can make you bitter or mean. Why does it produce character and hope sometimes, and not in others? It's too cheap just to say "If you have faith, if you trust God." Isn't community involved? Doesn't God have mercy on is when suffering drowns us in depression?

   “Hope does not disappoint.” Christopher Lasch clarified how optimism, the sunny view that tomorrow will be a better day, and it’s up to us to make it happen, is vastly inferior to hope, the substantive faith that all will be well, even if tomorrow is worse – for this future is in God’s hands ultimately.

   I may fiddle around with the “poured out” image from v. 5, a picturesque image of the lavishness of grace. Jesus’ blood poured out, pouring coffee in the morning, the pitcher pouring water into the baptismal bowl, Jesus pouring water over the disciples’ feet, the bartender pouring you a drink, the woman pouring oil over Jesus’ head, the priest pouring wine into the chalice, your mother pouring you a glass of milk, a waterfall, water over a dam, a garden fountain. Is there a way all of these and more not only symbolize but actually are the pouring out of God’s goodness?

   “While we were still weak” reminds me of a terrific story. In 1980 I was running “Helping Hands,” a ministry to folks in need at Myrtle Beach, S.C. Our most problematical guy was named Belton. I drove him to the job I’d helped him get; when I came back for lunch he’d quit. I bought him groceries; he sold them to buy queludes. He tore up the temporary living quarters we found for him. Finally the board and volunteers met to decide how to cut him off, I think. All was proceeding in that direction until a woman said “You know, the Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves.’”

   Everyone nodded, except a very old, frail woman, who countered: “That’s not in the Bible. That’s Ben Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack.” I was impressed. She then opened her New American Standard Bible to Romans 5:6 and read “While we were helpless, Christ died for the ungodly.” And she added “That would be all of us.” The vote was unanimous. We’d keep doing whatever we could for and with Belton. I wish I had a happy ending, like He got on his feet, went back to school, and now is an executive at Bank of America. But no. We hung together another month or so, and then he just vanished. Did we fail? I don’t think so. We kept one of God’s helpless children alive a little longer, which is good. And God’s other helpless, ungodly children got a refresher course in theology from the physically weakest but most spiritually astute one in our group.

   Matthew 9:35-10:8 (9-23) provides an intriguing snapshot into a turning point in Jesus’ ministry – between when he dazzles the crowds and draws a following to his sending out his followers to continue, expand and even augment his ministry. Matthew reports that Jesus has been curing “every” disease and “every” sickness – which can’t be reality. Donald Hagner calls the “every” here “hyperbolic and symbolic.” People still had cancer and Alzheimer’s and tooth decay and deafness after Jesus left town. If anything, his healings weren’t so people could feel better, but so serve as object lessons for his sermons. His #1 cure was for blindness – and he always then pointed out how the righteous people thought they could see but couldn’t.

   This Jesus, the one who wept when Lazarus died and prayed in intense agony, had “compassion” on the crowds. The Greek esplanchnisthe connotes a twisting pain in the entrails, a writhing, intense emotion. It’s a common translation for the Hebrew riham, which means “womb” and then the pangs the womb underwent during the agonies of childbirth. Watch a woman in labor: that’s how Jesus felt when he saw the crowds, total strangers – and yet he knew them so intimately.

   He didn’t blame them for their plight, or pity their lackluster, colorless, futile existence as the utterly impoverished and despised people in the Roman empire. He understood that they were “harassed and helpless.” How harassed are your people? By their employers, by heartbreaking friends and family, by the chipper Facebook culture that depresses them, by the rancor of political ideology, by ads, by loneliness. The Greek for “helpless,” errimmenoi, means literally “cast down to the ground.” The preacher portrays, imitates and embodies Jesus himself by simply naming the miseries and niggling frustrations people undergo all the time.

   In Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus, besieged by throngs seeking help, sings “There’s too many of you; don’t push me; there’s too little of me; don’t crowd me.” He needs help, more of himself. In our Gospel, Jesus asks his laborers to pray for more laborers! How do we join him in this prayer today? By poking around for laity who’ll get busy? Connecting with non-church people who might turn out to be the naïve, zealous type of new Christian who doesn’t know to be a lazy Christian yet? Or even investing time with sharp young people, middle- and high-schoolers, college students, and daring to ask if they’ve thought about ministry? I became a laborer in the field because an Episcopal priest took an interest in me, somebody with a zero religious resume, and asked if I’d thought about ministry. Never, ever… but it planted a seed that grew years later.

   What does the relationship with Jesus look like? I’m fond of “following” as the image. Jesus goes, I try to stay close. He sets the path, I simply trail behind in his wake. In Matthew 9, Jesus looks at his followers and “sends” them. That is, without him – unless you count spiritually or mystically. They have to figure out where and how to go, and what to do. They have “authority” – but what would that be for us? Not an M.Div. or that some bishop laid hands on me. It’s something more organic in me, or despite me. Maybe it’s just being fool enough to try: is that the authority? Is it trying to get out of the way and let Jesus be where I am?

   I love it that the Gospels provide names of the twelve – although the lists are happily inconsistent. A dozen – with some wiggle room. They are in stained glass in my sanctuary, and little biographies (95% of which is total guesswork/fiction!) are posted in our children’s building.

   Jesus, unhappily for me, directs them not to go to Gentiles but only to the Jews. I wish he’d urged the opposite, given anti-Semitism and often strained relationships with Judaism. Hagner reminds us that this limitation is “temporary,” as Matthew’s Gospel later on sends Jesus’ people to the whole world. Maybe, if you're white, we translate this into our world as We begin with white people. So much to work on in here before we can connect and change out there - although dithering on self for long is so lame.

   Maybe we do go to the Jews first – not to proselytize, but to find common ground. As you saw above, my greatest learning in Scripture lately is from Rabbi Sacks (who died just too young for my tastes and homiletical needs!). In our city of Charlotte, we have more in common, and can work more effectively with the synagogues than with many of the churches – including my own cantankerous Methodist denomination!

   St. Francis heard Jesus’ words about “take no bag, no silver,” and he and his friars (Italian for “brothers”!) did just that. I can't get there. I'm taking my bags, checking out my pension portfolio, garnering funds. I can only stand in awe, with a restless sense of penitence and yearning. {You might enjoy my book, Conversations with St. Francis, based on the many pilgrimages I've led to Assisi and other Francis places!{

What can we say June 21? 4th after Pentecost

    Genesis 21:8-21 is a harrowing text, with an unexpected hopefulness. Phyllis Trible (Texts of Terror) read the text from a feminist perspective: Hagar symbolizes countless women trapped and abused by the power of men. Patriarchy and race are written all over Abraham’s awful shunning of this woman. And yet she finally achieves liberation despite all that. She isn’t shunned by God, who sends a messenger, a promise, water in the wilderness, and comfort. 

   Check out Gustave Dore’s image, one among many artistic images of this haunting scene. Frances Klopper, the South African scholar, notes that “the frequency with which the expulsion scene has been painted testifies to a fascination with the fate of the slave-woman who has been wronged by her master and mistress.” Her tribe is legion indeed. Getting inside Hagar’s sorrow: the poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker imagined her thinking “She threw me away like garbage… But I still wonder Why could she not love me? We were women together.” Can the preacher use this moment as a time to lift up domestic abuse and how women still get short shrift?

   How cool is the image of the little boys Ishmael and Isaac playing together? What’s more intriguing is that, evidently after years of isolation, Genesis 25:9 reports that Isaac and Ishmael bury Abraham. How did they get back in contact for the funeral? Jonathan Sacks, after raising this question, also asks Who was Keturah, Abraham’s way late in life wife and mother of his subsequent children? Among many medieval rabbis, Keturah was none other than Hagar! After Sarah’s death, Abraham found Hagar, redeemed and married her, reuniting Isaac and Ishmael – which Sacks sees as a Scriptural warrant for friendly relations today between Jews and Muslims.

   Romans 6:1b-11. I never encounter people who think I’ll sin more so grace will be even greater! We do presume upon God’s mercy, or maybe God’s laid back, laissez-faire attitude we fantasize God must feel. Voltaire famously quipped “God will forgive me; that’s his job.” Paul’s query, “How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” elicits the obvious answer: “Plenty of ways!”

   I like Michael Gorman's rendering of Paul's response to such craziness: "Are you out of your mind?" As he explains, "There is absolutely no place for cheap grace in the Christian life. In Baptism, we have been relocated." Relocated! "To believe the creed is not merely to assent to its truthfulness, but to enter it, even, in a sense, to become it. Creeds have consequences. Christ's story becomes our story, and our story is folded into his."

   Since Paul’s line of thought is so alien to how American Christians think, this is good cause to reiterate it and help people reimagine it. C.E.B. Cranfield opens a window by analyzing “four quite different senses in which Christian die to sin.” We die to sin in God’s sight; it’s God’s decision to crucify our sin. In Baptism, God seals and ratifies God’s own decision. Then death to sin is our calling to be holy – and as God calls, God simultaneously give us “the freedom to die daily and hourly to sin by the mortification of their sinful natures.” And death to sin is an eschatological promise; in eternity, sin will be no more.

   Austin Farrer’s terrific (and sadly out of print) The Crown of the Year puts it this way: “You are to become Jesus’ body. You are to be nailed to Christ's sacrificial will. The nails that hold you are God's commandments, your rules of life, prayers, confessions, communions regularly observed. Let us honour the nails for Christ's sake, and pray that by the virtue of his passion they may hold fast.” And another: being born again. In my Birth book, it’s a whole new life, a whole new identity, learning dependence, mercy.

   Death “no longer has dominion”? Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize by assessing how all our craziness and the havoc in our heads and relationships grow out of The Denial of Death. Recently I re-read Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love, where he speaks tantalizingly: “You are so afraid of dying alone. Your deeply hidden memories of a fearful birth make you suspect that your death will be equally fearful… Maybe the death at the end of your life won’t be so fearful is you can die well now. Yes, the real death – the passage from time into eternity from the transient beauty of this world to the lasting beauty of the next, from darkness into light – has to be made now.” Unsure how to preach that – but I bet it’s important for us clergy to live into as people and would-be leaders.

   Matthew 10:24-39. I so long to say Beelzebub out loud in a sermon! Just fun to utter – as are the possible translations, “lord of the house,” “lord of dung,” “lord of the flies.” Jesus is all over the place in this text. Even if the lectionary has trampled over periscope divisions, Jesus must have talked like this, one topic, shifting to another, blurting out a reminder on something else. The preacher should take care not to latch on either the comfort or the severity themes here. Jesus clearly was comfortable with both, holding both together always.

   Our people believe (why??) Jesus brings family stability and happiness – yet the real Jesus comes, “setting a man against his father.” Examples abound, such as St. Francis divesting himself of his father’s goods – and how his father never spoke to him again, spitting in his direction as they passed on the streets of Assisi.

   Jesus wants to be acknowledged, not denied – not as a double dare you, but because of the blessing to the acknowledger and any who notice, and the dissonance in the soul of the one who denies. What does denial look like in 2023? Myriad stuff, like conventional living, fitting in, letting a racist slur slide on by, on and on. I wonder if piety can be a paradoxical denial of Jesus? You make sugary but harmful theological remarks (“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” or “Everything happens for a reason”) – which deny the more robust reality of Jesus who doesn’t deny but embraces suffering?

   Taking up one’s cross? Losing one’s life? I really appreciate Joel Marcus for reflecting on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in (of all places) his Anchor Bible commentary on Mark! “From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you.  At the threshold, you must say to yourself: ‘My former life is over, I shall never return.  I no longer have property.  Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious to me.’”

   Jesus points to the sparrow! We have the new hymn, “God of the Sparrow,” which is lovely – but it’s tough to top that oldie, “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” It’s been recorded countless times: by Gladys Knight, Whitney Houston, Jennifer Holliday, Sandi Patty, Marvin Gaye, and even Michael Jackson but I’ll take Mahalia Jackson any day. Here’s a reflection on the hymn, and on Jesus’ regard of sparrows, for my book, Unrevealed Until Its Season:

   When I was a young pastor, I had a handful of members who were most unhappy with our “new hymnal” (which was nearly twenty years old at the time!) for several glaring omissions, the most egregious being “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” 

   “We should never have replaced the old Cokesbury Hymnal!” They had plenty of copies on hand, but none of my people really needed a book to sing “Why should I feel discouraged?” Despite my resistance, a warbly soprano I loved deeply would do it as a solo now and then, although I detected a few semi-restrained eyerolls when she’d sing it. I just found it to be kind of corny, sentimental, not made of strong enough stuff for the tough theology I was lifting up to my people.

   I must have been just the kind of guy Jesus hoped would overhear when he told people who didn’t matter in the world’s eyes that in God’s eyes they were fabulously precious. Thankfully I’ve fallen back in love with this old hymn I heard my grandmother sing while she went about her chores. Jesus asked us to see God’s handiwork and sustenance in mere sparrows. 

   Walter Brueggemann (in A Glad Obedience) calls them “model citizens in the Kingdom of God.” They nest inside the glorious temple itself, too high to be swooshed away by the priest and their acolytes. God feeds and clothes them, quite naturally; these non-acquisitive, trusting creatures have no worries.

   Easy for sparrows, I’d say. The hymn asks “Why should I be discouraged?” Let me count the ways. “Why should the shadows come?” is worth pausing over, not merely to count all the darkness that imposes itself in every life. 

   Ray Barfield, in his book on beauty and suffering called Wager, speaks of “reverencing my shadow.” If you’re in the world, you cast a shadow; it’s proof you’re here. If there’s light, there is shadow, and if there’s shadow, then there’s light. Obviously – but that is why the shadows should come.

   What’s so lovely about the hymn is that it doesn’t pledge or expect a quick fix or any fix at all. It’s not God will do what I ask, or God will repair everything tomorrow. It’s simply that God cares. God sees. His eye is on the sparrow – and as virtually worthless as a sparrow might seem to be (Jesus pointed out that five are sold for two pennies!), God miraculously cares intensely for each one. 

   God sees the sparrow, and you and me. And it’s not just a passing glance. Birdwatchers are patient, focused people, gazing at length through their binoculars, noticing the slightest flutter of a feather, turn of the head, opening of the beak or twitching of a talon.

   Who was Jesus? Who is he? His nickname at birth was “Emmanuel,” God with us. And his parting words were “I will be with you.” Not a magical fulfiller of wishes or fixer of all troubles. He is with us. That’s what my grandmother was singing about while sweeping and ironing. God’s abiding presence infused her with joy and strength. She was still dirt poor, and her arthritis pained her. But Jesus was her “portion,” a lovely echo of Psalm 73:26.

   Indeed, my grandmother and my warbly soprano soared to the climactic high note in the hymn, which occurs on “I’m free.” Not free American-style, the paltry notion that I can do whatever I dang well please. No, I’m free, like a bird, as in Paul’s ringing declaration that “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Free from the cruel bondage of sin, anxiety, fretting over self-worth or terror of mortality.

   Civilla Durfee Martin wrote this poem, later set to music by Charles Gabriel, after visiting with her friend, a Mrs. Doolittle, bedridden for over twenty years. Martin’s husband asked Mrs. Doolittle her secret of joy in the thick of affliction. “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.” That was in 1905. It was back in maybe the year 28 that Jesus said pretty much the same thing. No wonder the hymn, and more importantly, the reality of God’s tender care for sparrows and us people, lingers despite failing to make the hymnal committee cut.

*****

   You might enjoy my book, Conversations with St. Francis, based on the many pilgrimages I've led to Assisi and other Francis places.

What can we say June 28? 5th after Pentecost

    Romans 6:12-23 feel timely as we approach July 4: freedom isn’t my right to do as I wish, so cherished by Americans, but being set free from slavery to sin, and for obedience! In fact, instead of celebrating my freedom, I grieve my shackled self. In this text, whose topic Michael Gorman calls “the present character of resurrection,” Paul’s psychological insight is striking. Sin isn’t a deed, but a tyrant who “makes you obey their passions” (v. 12)! It’s me, but it feels like some alien in me forcing me against my own will – by crushing the shreds of will I have left – to do its bidding. We are indeed “slaves.” Plaster that on your float for the July 4 parade! “Slaves of America! Your wills are bound.”

   On Ash Wednesday, I told a story about my dog, Abigail. My first parsonage backed up to hundreds of acres of woods. She loved to run and gambol in them. But one day she didn’t come home. I traipsed all over the place, and finally heard her whimpering, crying. Back in the day, somebody had strung up a barbed wire fence. It has tumbled into the leaves and brush over the years – and she was hopelessly entangled. The more she struggled, her lacerations only worsened. All I could do was speak softy, and stroke her gently. Shhh. Be still honey. Be still. You’re ok. Finally she rested, and I could pry the barbs from her flesh, take her in my arms and back home to begin to bind up her wounds. So it is with us and the sin that entraps us. Strive hard to be good! – but you’ll only get more enmeshed. We have to be still, to let God extricate us, and then heal our wounds.

   It’s worth pointing out that Paul isn’t obsessed with narrow personal holiness, the avoidance of sin – although it involves that. It is rather “an appeal for a radical identification with God’s purposes in the world over against powers and forces that oppose God’s purposes and ways” (Gorman). Don’t fritter your self, your energies away. Save up, expend yourself on the things of God.

   Matthew 10:40-42 is short, a bit simplistic – and therein is its power. “Whoever gives a cup of cold water”? Seems easy – but it requires proximity, and tenderness. You don’t drop off a cup of cold water in a collection bin. Think of that pair of corny but still powerful moments in Ben Hur. Judah has been taken captive, and as he trudges miserably, so parched, a shadowy figure gives him a drink. Hint hint: it must be Jesus! Of course, later Jesus is struggling under the weight of the cross – and it is Judah Ben Hur who bolts from the crowd to give him to drink.

   Genesis 22:1-14. Ellen Davis made me laugh: “Here we are, only 22 chapters into the Bible, and already our skin is crawling.” Most listeners will shudder, unknowingly siding with Immanuel Kant, who asserted that if you hear a voice commanding something contrary to moral law, it is not God’s voice. Only a deranged person would harm a child!

   But don’t we sacrifice our children on quite a few altars? Don’t we bind them to the altar of money, or alcohol, or dizzying busyness, or our anxiety or society’s false deities? A conservative might say we sacrifice the unborn, a progressive might say we sacrifice the born but disadvantaged. No shortage of sermon material here! We’re all unwittingly bad parents. Tom (in The Prince of Tides) tells his children, “‘I know we’re screwing you up a little bit every day. If we knew how we were doing it, we’d stop, because we adore you. But we’re parents, and we can’t help it. Do you understand?’ ‘No,’ they agreed in simultaneous chorus. ‘Good. You’re not supposed to understand.’”

   Walter Brueggemann made this same point in his final book. "What father would offer up his son like this? What father indeed?? What father or mother would send a son of daughter off to mindless imperials wars as cannon fodder? What father or mother would consign a son or daughter to drown in a surfeit of consumer goods? What mother or father would risk a daughter of son by substituting technology for protective affection? The answer, of course, is that we, many fathers and mothers, are swept into ideology that makes us crazy. We flinch before the command. We compromise to get along."

   Plenty of sermon fodder here, isn’t there? Bad parents, all of us… and if you’re a Family Guy fan, this hilarious clip about the worst dad in the world elicits a chuckle (but best not to run this video on your worship screens). And yet if it’s to false gods we poor parents sacrifice the children we adore, can’t church correct us, at least somewhat, and steer us in healthier, more spiritually wise directions?

   To me, the simplest homiletical conclusion to be drawn is that Genesis 22, written during the days when Israel’s neighbors did in fact sacrifice their children to placate angry gods, stands as a bold witness to say It shall not be so among you; this will not be done in Israel.

    But is that it? Isn’t there some mystery, some clue here about deeper discipleship, and what the heart of God is like? You can read the text as a one-off: it’s about Abraham, not you and me. There’s no (whew!) “Go thou and do likewise” in every text.

   As a young preacher, I praised Abraham as a shimmering example of total devotion to God. More recently, I’m leaning toward Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who makes a big deal of contrasting Noah, who said not one word in response to God but simply dished up blind obedience (which didn’t impact anybody else!), with Abraham, who talked back to God, who took responsibility, who instead of just letting Sodom and Gomorrah burn fought back, advocating for the citizens there. Why then is Abraham so meek and blindly obedient here? Sacks doesn’t offer us much, except this: “We cherish what we wait for and what we most risk losing… Judaism is a sustained discipline in not taking life for granted.”

   More than any passage in Scripture, Genesis 22 is to be read slowly. Each word bears so much weight, and the emotion – never stated! – is intense. Take your son. Pause… Your only son Isaac. Pause… underlining the ‘only,’ and thus the whole story of barrenness, and then reminding him of his name… which had just meant joyful laughter. Whom you love. Long pause… again, reiterating the obvious, expanding the interior horizon. The pace remains slow, rising early, and as he saddles his donkey.

   When they get to Moriah, he takes the wood, and the fire and knife. Then the text lingers: So they went, both of them together. Pause. Absolutely tender, harrowing. These very words are repeated two verses later. Isaac calls out to him “My father!” (which is how Jesus would teach us to pray). Abraham responds, “Here I am, my son” (echoes of Isaiah 6 but with the tender ‘my son’). I love it that the text never tells us how either of them feels. The intensity is greater than if the mood had been depicted in a bunch of adjectives. We read. We listen. We ponder. So moving. No mansplaining allowed.

   Søren Kierkegaard gifted us with a profound rumination on this text (Fear and Trembling), in which he points out that if Abraham had been heroic, he would have raised the knife and plunged it into his own chest: “He would have been admired; but it is one thing to be admired, and another to be the guiding star which saves the anguished.” Kierkegaard’s best line? “Only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”

   And Brueggemann ruminates on God saying "Now I know": "Better if God had been omniscient and had not required the test; but God did not know."

   Ellen Davis, in her wise reflection on this text in Preaching the Luminous Word, speaks of “vulnerability” as “the enabling condition of covenant relationship with God.” Abraham could not be more vulnerable – and he makes himself even more vulnerable by responding “Here I am.” Perhaps he should have run, hidden, or just said No way. “Here I am” is how we always stand before and with God.

   She considers the vulnerability of children in the face of their parents’ faith. How vulnerable was Isaac to his father’s piety? Might this cause the preacher to shudder a bit over the cost to our children of what we think we are doing for God?

   So we have a startling text. Abraham is “tested,” not tempted (as is the case for Jesus in the desert). Russ Reno (in his Brazos/Genesis commentary): “Trials and tests are consistent with divine love. They work against our hopeless hope that our finite powers can see us through. To be tested is to be brought back to reality. It is a spank that awakens us. Trials and tests not only purify us of delusions, but also prepare us for a proper loyalty to the world and its finite goods.”

   The best I can think to ask is What sort of test was the crucifixion for the heart of God the Father? We know Jesus’ cry of dereliction. How did God hear him? What was God’s swirl of emotion when the taunters jeered, “Save yourself”? There is some harrowing in that moment, some unspeakable agony – which words just cannot capture. Rembrandt’s pen and ink profoundly and unforgettably captures Abraham’s face just at the moment he is relieved of his crushing duty, when he who drew the knife actually got Isaac.

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   Check out my newest book, The Heart of the Psalms: God's Word to the World! I've been meaning to write this one all my life, since I did my Ph.D. on the Psalms and have taught and prayed them endlessly. Abingdon also has a study guide and a video series, which groups enjoy.

What can we say July 5? 6th after Pentecost

    Genesis 24:34-67 (various verses). Such an earthy (and long!) story! Could be fun to preach – but it may be more fitting as Bible study material, I’d say. The drama happens at the well – which must be the Bronze Age equivalent of a bar! – where you might meet a guy, a girl? Too hilarious for overly sensitive people regarding tattoos and piercings: “So I put the ring on her nose.” Oh my. Rebekah and her maids mounting their camels: these are not poor people! I love the tender, hopeful, and oddly romantic notice that as it reports how he took her – “and he loved her.” Almost surprising, in such a world, maybe in ours. Isaac gets a wife – “and so Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” Is that the point, or a benefit of marriage? Then? Now?

   Walter Brueggemann (as always) had a lovely thought. Striking a deal with Rebekah's family, Isaac's representatives lavish a stash of jewelry upon Rebekah - "an effective persuader!" Her father and uncle "did not quibble or demur, but promptly agreed. Perhaps they are moved by the jewelry." But the narrator winks and invites us to see how God's faithfulness, God's hesed, is at work. "We are yet again dazzled by you, God of all promises, by your underground governance... We are reminded by your hidden governance that the world is at your behest; you are the worker of the extraordinary in, with, and under the ordinary workings of humanity." Good stuff there.

   Romans 7:15-25a. Michael Gorman calls this “one of the most difficult and diversely interpreted texts in Romans,” and he’s right. Who’s the “I”? Paul himself? His pre-conversion experience or his current struggle as a believer? Gorman surveys the scholarly options, and concludes that Paul probably is speaking “imaginatively about the experience of nonbelievers: – either Jews or Gentiles. He’s giving voice to what it’s like to live “in Adam” instead of “in Christ.” His thoughts on the "I" are especially compelling given that Paul yields to a "We" in chapter 8: “The introspective, frustrated ‘I’ of Romans 7 has become the liberated, united ‘we’ of Romans 8.”

   Yet as a reader in 2023, I have to say the words on the page flawlessly portray what I find life as a Christian to be like. I don’t understand much that is in me, and much that I do. I lunge toward things I prefer not to do (or think or say or feel), and goods I intend (to think, do, say or feel) don’t happen.

   Mind you, we recoil at verse 18: “Nothing good dwells within me.” I’ve felt that and so have many of my listeners – but that is a voice that barks in the dark from an unhealthy place, not a spiritually discerning place. Scripture here can reiterate the harm my negative views are already wreaking on me – and my people.

   If Paul didn’t struggle as you and I do, I have to wonder if he, who’d been super-zealous as a Jew, was similarly super-zealous as a Christian, not veering off course or struggling with things much at all. I know, and semi-understand and lean toward either envy or pity of such people…

   For preaching, I’m not sure I could devise a solid sermon just on this text. To me, it’s better to life a few phrases from it while illuminating some other text. That’s preaching a text without letting it become a straitjacket.

   Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30. Oh, this piping and children business must have made a big impression on Jesus’ first followers, but it’s a bit elusive nowadays. Davies and Allison see Jesus’ listeners as being “like disagreeable children who complain that others won’t act according to their desires and expectations.” You wonder if some children were doing just this nearby! They complete their read of the comparison: “John the Baptist came not eating or drinking but demanding sackcloth and ashes – but people wanted to make merry! Jesus came asking for joyous fellowship – but they demanded he fast!”

   The lectionary skips over verses 20-24 – either understandably or sadly. “Woe to you, Korazim!” You can visit its ruins easily, just a little ways off the road from prettier stops like Capernaum and Tabgha. Grey stone construction, mere rubble. Was it the centuries doing the damage or Jesus’ curse? We like Jesus weeping over cities – but cursing them? He must have, or some whitewasher would be expunged this – like the lectionary gurus did! He has a go at Capernaum too – which isn’t lying in ruins so much nowadays. Jesus – not the sweet shepherd cuddling with a little lamb! – compares the judgment bearing down on them to that of Sodom. Like a nuclear wasteland? Oh my.

   Then back to something you can read in front of your five year old: verses 25-30 – clearly, since Jesus says what is “hidden” can be revealed “to babes.” The Greek, nepioi, means simple, childlike. What a God is our God! God’s highest wisdom and truest self, not requiring immense intelligence or piles of learning, but a simple, childlike trust, wonder, curiosity. No wonder we baptize such people. They don’t mind vulnerability. A newborn’s eyesight is a mere 20/400 – perfect for seeing the mother who nurses you, without getting distracted by the troubles way across the room. All this and more in my book on Birth: The Mystery of Being Born.

    On all the mystery: St. Augustine, who knew and explained and helped us understand so much about God, reminded us, “If you understand it, it is not God.” Whatever we glimpse has been “revealed,” not figured out or deduced!! That word “revealed” in Greek is apokalupsis – an apocalypse, something earth-shattering and world-annihilating, definitive, ending the old, ushering in the new and unfathomed.

   Speaking of Greek: one of the New Testament’s most intriguing words, “handed over,” paradidomi, is exploited in a unique way here: it’s not that Jesus is “handed over” or “delivered,” but rather “All things have been delivered to me by my Father.” What things? Important things? The truest things? Hidden things? Let these questions linger, as they aren’t answered in our text either! Not bad sort of to zigzag around the reality the passage must have in mind.

   I think it’s crucial to emphasize sabbath with our people – genuine rest, disconnecting from social media and the so-called smart phone. Sabbath isn’t just doing nothing or a vacation or taking a nap. It’s a day for God, a day of a break from the grind, a day for delight. Read, if you haven’t, three fabulous books on Sabbath: Abraham Heschel’s Sabbath; Christopher Ringwald’s A Day Apart: How Jews, Christians and Muslims find Faith, Freedom and Joy on the Sabbath; and Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (maybe his best of all his books?) – all three just fabulous, wise, quotable, amazing.

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

What can we say July 12? 7th after Pentecost

    Genesis 25:19-34. Rebekah’s discomfort with her twins in utero would prove to be nothing compared to her pains over them as grown men. Our text raises important and awkward questions about God and fertility (which I explore in some depth I my book Birth: The Mystery of Being Born). I think it’s important to clarify, even as a sermon aside, that Bible people or at least the writers perceived their lives as entirely hinged to God, so that whatever happened must have been at God’s behest. My OB/GYN friends understand well why infertility happens, and it’s not in any direct or fathomable way God’s infliction of God’s plan or will. No theological problems arise, really, from this assertion, as the gap between the Bible’s worldview and our own is always across such gulfs.

   The twins struggling in Rebekah’s womb: it’s slightly different, but Henri Nouwen’s great story (in Our Greatest Gift) about fraternal twins arguing in their mother’s womb bears repeating here; check it out. The girl tries to persuade her brother there is life after birth, and that there is a mother. He pooh-poohs such a notion. She then reminds him of the painful squeezes they experience – which she believes are getting them ready for this better place where they’ll see their mother face to face. Lovely stuff.

   Our story is lovely in its earthiness. They were “quiet, living in tents.” You let that linger. And then the family dynamics – hardly a family to emulate! Jacob is the mama’s boy; Isaac and Rebekah have their favorites. The famous Alan Bennett “On the Fringe” comedy routine pokes fun at the text – and I suspect the storytellers who passed all this along before it landed in Genesis, and throughout history, there’s a chuckle in here somewhere. Maybe at Jacob’s expense. I wonder if a sermon would dare to name gender stereotypes and how they lead to misperception and trouble.

   I wonder, given where we are in 2023, if these unidentical, combative twins might mirror race, or political ideology in our country - or traditionalists and progressives in United Methodism. Black and white, Progressives and Conservatives, clearly kin... and yet so different, so implacable, so ill-equipped to get along. Yet Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper was that we would be One. It wasn't a command, but a prayer - and the enabling of oneness was to come the next day in his crucifixion, and in the sending of that Spirit he promised right before he prayed. Esau and Jacob are at odds for years - but at the end of the story, even these two reconcile. 

    I'm drawn to speak of race - noting our genetic closeness (blacks and white virtually as identical as twins...), yet our sibling rivalry type division - perhaps explained in a fascinating way by Lloyd King, a man Studs Terkel interviewed for his book Race. King said our problem isn't that we hate each other. Rather it's that we love each other. Like a marriage that got off to a rocky start, we think we might prefer separate lives so we don't kill each other. But we really do love each other.

   The lentil stew: always remember Esau when you eat lentils, anywhere, anytime! He sought immediate gratification over long term goods – but we can’t praise Jacob for being far-sighted. He’s atrocious, a tad wicked, ripping off his own brother, defying Psalm 133.

   Psalm 119:105, incidentally, is the cadence we use after the Scripture reading each week in our contemporary service!

   Romans 8:1-11. I’ve often thought that if Paul wrote only Romans 8, and nothing else, we would still praise him as our grandest theologian. What a chapter! Beginning with the simplest, most crucial declaration: “There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus.” Churches have spewed, and still spew, endless volumes of condemnation – and many, like myself, have become adept at self-condemnation. None of this is of God.

   Notice verse 8: “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” – which implies you are so amazing, no matter how small you might be fooled into thinking you are, that you can actually please God! I am fond of Michael Gorman’s new commentary and his wisdom on this text: “In Romans 8, the Spirit is clearly the Spirit of cruciformity,” a “cross-shaped participation in Christ.” “Life in the Spirit is a life of joyful, resurrection-infused cruciformity.” I had to read and re-read that slowly. Joyful resurrection-infused cruciformity?! Is this an oxymoron? Irony? Paradox? And Gorman brings to resolution what he argued about the “I” in the previous lection: “The introspective, frustrated ‘I’ of Romans 7 has become the liberated, united ‘we’ of Romans 8.” I’d not noticed Paul’s shift from 1^st person singular to the possessive plural!

    This liberated “we” is God’s new family, united with God as our Abba, intimate father. So lovely and tender! We see here “in” and “with” modes of participation – reminding me of Sam Wells’s case that the most important theological word in the Bible is “with”: God is with us, and thus we are with one another, and with others. Notice also for Paul, here, grace not only forgives sin, but “defeats the power of sin.” It’s medicinal. It heals and liberates. Thankfully, verse 11 appears in our funeral liturgy – as it should.

   I love preaching on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, Jesus’ parable of the sower. Every few years, when this text appears, I get a bag of seeds and fling them around the sanctuary as I’m preaching (you can watch one example here!). My history with this text goes back to a summer internship I did during seminary. The pastor, Marion Crooks, began his sermon by singing “What Kind of Soil Am I?” (to the tune of “What Kind of Fool Am I?”). He asked Am I thorny, a barren road, or fertile soil for God’s Word? Great sermon. But years later I read lots of commentaries on the parables, and they all were obsessed with the weirdness of this sower – which must have been Jesus’ point. What kind of sower is this? I might sing. Willing to waste seed, not frugal, downright profligate – like grace.

   In my sermon last time, I spoke of my first rural appointment where I attempted a vegetable garden. I measured seed, bought just enough, planted so very carefully – and as unlike Jesus’ sower as possible. The surprise came when my carefully planted squash was mediocre – but then I had what country folk call “volunteer squash.” I must have spilled some seed in an unplowed area just outside my garden – and that was the fabulously productive squash. Why? There’s power in that seed. There’s power in the Gospel. You never know where it’ll spring up.

   I make this a parable about church life. We are so careful. We measure predicted results. We don’t risk much. Then Jesus lures us to be like this sower, flinging it around everywhere, trying any and everything. So what if stuff doesn’t work? It’s always been that way. But then you get volunteer squash people where you least expect it. And you’ve embodied as a church what the grace which founded the church is like, not measured, or plunked on the likely ones, but strewn all over the place.

   How lovely of Jesus, by the way, to be preaching and find his illustrative material in a day laborer working in a field behind him. Millet's painting (above) captures the peculiar beauty of such everyday labor. Van Gogh did his own cover of the Millet. He'd started into the ministry before becoming a brilliant painter; he wrote that "I have sometimes had a lesson from a German reaper that was of more use to me than one in Greek." The simple observation of labor, so lovely, inherently godly, worth noting with no moral in a sermon. 

   I’d add that scholars generally regard Jesus’ explanations of his parables as later interpolations. They usually are pretty lame, like explaining a joke, or taking the rough edges off a bawdy story. In the case of the sower though, the interpretation isn’t so bad, especially part 3, where it is “the cares of the world and the love for money that choke the word.” Indeed. Back to What kind of soil am I? or maybe rather, What kind of world is this where the Word of the crazy, generous Sower is always being swept aside?

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   Check out my book Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week - in which I explore each act of weekly worship, and then how that act is lived out between Sundays. Great group study (people tell me!).