What can we say Easter Sunday?

    I can never decide if preaching Easter Sunday is a holy, fabulous privilege, or a frustrating chore. Of course, it’s the resurrection! “Soar we now where Christ has led!” But folks are dressed for family luncheons, and if I talk resurrection they nod, as if I’d just spoken of how good it is to have gotten coffee and breakfast, or that gravity is still functioning.

   To say there’s nothing new is a happy truth, oddly. So I send you to last year’s Easter blog, which in turn has a link to an even better prior year’s blog, full of illustrations and preaching fodder. To all this, I would now add a few fresh thoughts.

   Acts 10:34-43. One year before I retire, I’m going to preach this text. It’s how the first Christians talked about Easter… I’m moved by Willie Jennings and his resistance to the standard, sneakily anti-Semitic view (which he puts with startling eloquence) that “The universal God was fulfilling a hidden wish to make Israel a doorstop put in place to grant the world access to salvation.” But this is a false read, as if Israel’s life with God is “simply a dress rehearsal for the real play.”  For Luke, “The divine touch is always unexpected and usually unconventional. In Israel God is schooling the creature in the ways of the divine life.” “Jesus will draw Jew and Gentile together, not moving past the one to get to the other, not choosing one and rejecting the other, but precisely bringing together, drawing close what was far apart.”

    Psalm 118 is an underrated, flexible, splendid text that fits Easter, and Palm Sunday, and a great many other days. “This is the day the Lord has made” are lovely words to whisper on waking each morning. But each day really only matters, and every morning is like a little Easter, because the Psalm originally was thinking “This is the day on which the Lord has acted.” In Israel, some unspecified, unexpected victory over some foe is celebrated. By extension, the words work on any grand day when the Lord has acted definitively – preeminently Easter!

   Colossians 3:1-4. I focus on this lovely text by recalling how Paul in chapter 1 went on a poetic frenzy rhapsodizing about the magnificent greatness of Christ. With all that wind in the sails, he continues with “If you have been raised with Christ.” If? A big if. Not yet? Partially? Proleptically? There’s that inevitably “hidden” aspect (verse 3!), like the barely submerged plot, or something in the air just over our heads and behind us, maybe like Augustine’s City of God, the true hidden plot coursing beneath and beyond the apparent unfolding of history – and your life.

   “Set your minds on the things above” – not invisible things, and certainly not irrelevant things. The key here is “where Christ is.” We stick close to Christ in our minds and hearts. We think of him, with him, and surprise of all surprises, I get glimpses that I have been raised with Christ, that we have, our church has, even the world.

    John 20:1-18. Lots of running! And Jesus (the gardener!) tenderly voicing Mary’s name. So personal. Mary believes Jesus' body has been stolen. But (as David Ford points out) that the linens are rolled up in place isn't the sort of thing a robber would take time to do! I've also skated past the "one at the head and one at the feet of where Jesus' body had lain," but Ford (such a wise new commentary) relates this to the cherubim on either side of the Holy of Holies in the temple, and earlier in the tent of meeting. This space only appears to be empty, but it is the invisible presence of God - and in this case of the risen Lord!

   For lots of illustrative material on Easter in general and this text in particular, let me direct you to 2 earlier blogs from prior years (this one, and this one!) - which I can't improve upon just now. So crucial to get the basic theme right: not Jesus is risen so we live forever! but Jesus is risen so we have a transformed community, his breath, authority, and forgiveness (for us and others). It's about the glory of Jesus, not us.

What can we say April 12? Easter 2

   Acts 2:14a, 22-32. Peter’s sermon puts starch in the sails of early Christianity, with elements of castigation (“You crucified him!” – which we should read not as anti-Semitic but as personal, as we crucified / crucify him). Interesting theologically that Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection were “foreseen,” that it unfolded according to “plan.” Dozens of questions stir: did Judas have to do what Judas did? Same for Pilate, Herod, the soldiers, the crowd? Is there some mix / intersection of human agency and divine plan? If it’s the divine plan, is it less gruesome for Jesus himself? I can’t recall who it was (Barth?) who suggested that when God created the universe, there was already at that moment a cross in the very heart of God.

   I love Willie Jennings’s thought (in his eloquent Acts commentary) – that Peter stands up with no gravitas, no training in rhetoric, no resume to command respect, setting the stage for what will always be an “eternal imbalance” between image and message that always marks preaching, his and ours. The message is so much more powerful than its messengers.

   Psalm 16 could be a worthy text for an Easter 2 sermon. Peter quoted it in his first big sermon after Pentecost (in today’s reading!). For the first few Easters, the only Scriptures they had were what we today call the “Old Testament” (or “First Testament,” as John Goldingay prefers). God as refuge, God as our only good (but don’t we grab onto a basketful of other good just to pad things?), how choosing other gods multiplies sorrows. God doesn’t give us up to Sheol – which for the Hebrew people would have meant nothingness; back then, when you died, you just were gone. You’re never nothing to God. “There are pleasures at God’s right hand” – but what are they? Eating bon bons in heaven? Singing praises eternally without wearying or getting bored? The sheer unadulterated presence of God? Are those pleasures present in attenuated but real form now?

   1 Peter 1:3-9. Verses 3-12 form a single Greek sentence; so our lectionary lops Peter off mid-sentence!!  “By his great mercy, we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.” It’s not that God is impressed by our faith or goodness. It’s by his mercy – which is great mercy. When you were born the first time, you escaped a dark, watery world and survived the traumatic shock of light, cold, air. Being born anew isn’t experiencing a swarm of religious feeling, or becoming 3 inches nicer. You did nothing to get born. It’s all gift, all surprise. Like Peter’s succeeding thought: it’s an “inheritance,” which is lovely but entirely unearned. It’s “his” (God’s!) faithfulness, not ours (verse 5) that matters.

   Joel Green’s clarification is eloquent: “Naming Jesus Christ as Lord undercut the lordly claims of the emperor and the imperial cult, tore followers of Christ away from the worship that pervaded everyday life in the world of Rome, and thus distinguished believers as aliens in their own communities.”

   “Rejoice, though now ‘for a little while’ you may have to suffer various trials.” Whew. Unlike other New Testament writers, he adds “may,” which implies “may not,” which we’d all hope for. But the “may” implies a radical risk in all this. There is a “testing of your faith,” which doesn’t mean God afflicts to test us. Afflictions there are, especially the more we’re in sync with this Lord, not the lords of the world, and God’s watching, and rooting for us in the testing. If you survive the test? You can’t pat yourself on back; the survival “redounds to the praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

   John 20:19-31. Dangerous ground, this text. “Doubting Thomas” has taken on heroic proportions, as we preen a little and feel quite smart when we have doubts. Mind you, doubt is good. All scientific progress has happened because somebody doubted the received wisdom. But can we see how prizing doubt keeps me as the center, me as the lone arbiter of truth?

   Our big doubts aren’t so much about the reality of God or the resurrection. We doubt – don’t we – that anything can ever be different. I can never be happy. My marriage can never be healed. I’ll never stay in recovery from addiction. Our society will never overcome division and rancor.

   The text circles the reality of so much fear. Reflecting on the divisions in our society, Walter Brueggemann so wisely pointed out that everyone is afraid: some are afraid that the world they’ve known and cherished, that made them feel secure, is crumbling around them; and the rest are fearful that the world they’ve dreamed of will never become reality. Of course, the quelling of fear is never just so you stop fearing – lovely as that would be. 

 Elie Wiesel’s humorous remark is always worth recalling: “If an angel ever says ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out: a big assignment is on the way.”

   The first hint of the huge Pentecost assignment for these disciples came in this moment. Before the might wind of Pentecost blew, Jesus simply “breathed on them.” I love letting that just linger during my sermon. It’s an awesome, inexplicable moment. There’s a hint, of course, of God breathing into Adam the breath of life – so these as good as dead, chicken disciples are being literally in-spired to new life. Also, you have to be very close physically for someone to breathe on you. Get close to Jesus, that close so his breath can fall on you, and you even share the same air.

   Notice the disciples don’t feel all jazzed up after he breathes on them. Americans are so confused about the Holy Spirit, identifying its presence and activity with an emotional rush. Nothing emotional. There’s work to be done. The Spirit elicits not a swoosh of feeling, but courage.

   The scars are a surprising proof about Jesus. You’d expect them to be erased by resurrection. We sing, “Crown him the Lord of love; behold his hands and side; those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” The scars remain – eternally! Every year this text appears, I bring up the scene in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. A woman notices the scar on lovers shoulder, and also the advancing wrinkles on his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of the scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man from a falling wall. The scar was part of his character, and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.” What scars will you and your people carry into eternity? Christ wants us to recall and reflect on his.

   Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral. Her caption? “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini… because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.”

*****

   Check out my Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week - which Adam Hamilton called "the best book on worship I've ever read." Good for laity (I hope), thinking about what we do in worship and how it matters when we're not in worship.

What can we say April 19? Easter 3

    Acts 2:14a, 36-41. From last week, now we continue Peter’s first and great Pentecost sermon. The whole thing makes me anxious. To say Christ is “Lord and Messiah”? Both are hugely important but dangerous terms!! Someone I read recently suggested that if you’re quick to think of Christ as Lord, like the one in church, the one before whom we are subservient, then you’re probably the kind of person who might accept or inflict an unjust hierarchy from or on others in this world.

   And ever since I tried to explain Jesus to a group of Jewish teenagers, I’ve found that a focus on Jesus as Messiah just feels misguided. He was, and is (a point crucial for N.T. Wright among many others) – but there are so many other ways to think about and name Jesus that we needn’t expend so much energy on a title that we’ve co-opted from our friends the Jews.

   Peter’s proof that he’s the Messiah pivots on the notion that the very people he’s preaching to were the ones who crucified him. Here’s the stunner: on hearing this, “They were cut to the heart.” That’s what’s hard to impossible to replicate (at least in my modest preaching). More resonant for our people today is when he urges them to “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation” (verse 40). All will nod! The problem is they will mis-locate where the corruption really lies – usually (in their minds) in those of the opposing political ideology, not in the problem of ideology (= idolatry) itself, and in the whole culture in which we are enmeshed.

   After noting “the divine propensity for interruption, Willie Jennings underlines Peter’s best point: “God will stand over against religious faith, as neither its friend nor its enemy, but as God. Here is the point of offense: all religious faith believe it already has God in its sight. Those who hear this message, however, encounter a difference born of the body of Jesus.”

   The appeal to repent needn’t be to feel grungy and guilty, but to rethink things, to realize the truth about yourself, God and the world, and orient your thinking and acting as best you can as liberated by that truth.

   Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19. Again, as with last week’s readings, we perhaps should preach just this text, as for the early Christians, they had no other Bible for decades! This Psalm: just 17 days earlier, Jesus and his disciples had sung these words at the Last Supper. Without stealing the Psalm from those who aren’t Christians, pondering it in this context is moving. “The snares of death encompassed me.” “I will lift up the cup of salvation” (which Jesus did within minutes!). “I will pay my vows” – made when? At his Baptism? When do we pay the vows made at our Baptism?? “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints”: Jesus and his friends sang this moments before he went out into the dark to be arrested, tried, and executed. Precious here implies both “dear” but also “costly” – and also “beautiful” (as Jason Byassee points out)

   Well worth noting: “I love the Lord” – but why? “He has heard my voice and my supplications.” Not “he answered and did what I asked.” There’s something in (a) the virtue of simply being heard, and (b) the truth that God doesn’t just do what we ask!

   1 Peter 1:17-23. I shiver when I read that God “judges all impartially according to their deeds.” Houston, we have a problem… The author (could it be the Peter?) is debunking the idea that God is partial toward the holy or the religious insiders of his day. That God isn’t just a judge adjudicating your behavior, notice Peter says that this Christ business was “destined before the foundation of the world.” As Barth put it, there was a cross in heart of God when about to create the universe.

    What did that cross achieve? We are “ransomed by his precious blood.” "Ransomed, lutro in Greek, means paid but also delivered, rescued – and it’s from “futile ways,” the Greek being better translated “idols.” These futile idolatries are “inherited from your ancestors” – and I get puzzled but hopefully inquisitive looks when I suggest in preaching that even some lovely religiosity and worldly wisdom you got from parents and grandparents might be curiously out of kilter when it comes to the realities of God’s kingdom. Joel Green’s wisdom intrigues: “Interestingly, in 1 Peter 1:18-19, sin and its consequences per se are not the focus of redemption; ‘the emptiness of your inherited way of life’ is.”

   St. Francis, interestingly enough, was reported by his first biographer to have been “reared by his parents according to the vanity of the age. By long imitating their worthless life and character he himself was made more vain and arrogant.” Parents in my church groom their children to fit in, to succeed, to get ahead – we might add “according to the vanity of the age.” Francis had to shed that vain way of life as he shed his clothing in the famous scene when he was put on trial by his father. As Flannery O’Connor is quoted as saying, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

   Luke 24:13-35. One of our richest, most evocative narratives! Hard not to over-explain or man-splain it. Tempting just to hold up the image by Caravaggio (or maybe Rembrandt’s) and just ponder in the quiet. The trudging disciples are deep in conversation; the Greek word here is homileo? Is a homily an intense discussion? Does the unrecognized presence of Jesus echo Genesis 28, when Jacob awoke and realized “The Lord was in this place and I did not know it”?

   Jesus noses his way in, asking what they are talking about. David Lyle Jeffrey suggests this might be “a warning for theologians… It is possible to be so engrossed in our wearied debates that we fail to know Jesus as he is.” It’s not reading another book to get better information about Jesus; it’s an intimate awareness of his presence. St. Augustine pointed out that “the Teacher was walking with them along the way, and he himself was the way.”

   It’s their disappointment that opens the window to the heart for our listeners. The great short story writer Raymond Carver declared the predominant mood among Americans in recent decades is “disappointment.” The Greek skythropos means even more, akin to “sadness,” but Amy-Jill Levine suspects the Greek has tucked inside it a hint of anger. Our people are disappointed in – gosh, everything. Do they harbor a touch of anger that things haven’t panned out as they’d wished, even their religious lives? I heard a phrase recently about “mourning the life you think you deserved.” That’s it, isn’t it?

   The crucifixion of Christ and the first reports of his resurrection did not provoke hymns or an explosion of faith, any more than Easter Sunday inspired your people to profound discipleship. Back to trudging down the old road. And yet there are glimmers of hope, even for our tired people overly familiar with the story. The guys on the road recognized Jesus only after three things happened:

   1. They delved into the Scriptures together. Too often we want to know God without troubling ourselves with the Bible, but (as Luther put it) the Bible is “the swaddling clothes in which Christ is laid.” The Scriptures are God’s divinely-ordained, merciful, gracious means by which we can know and experience God – and especially when we probe the Scriptures with other seekers. The book is hard, even weird, takes immense time and patience, has no quick answers – as I tried to explain in this short video to my people recently! Somehow owning the lunacy of it gives people permission to shudder – but maybe keep reading.

   2. Jesus was known to them in the breaking of the bread. Holy Communion is the highest moment of the Christian life, for Christ is mysteriously present each time we gather at the table and break this bread, symbolic of his act of salvation – and do so together, for we are one with him, one together because of him. And, surprisingly:

   3. Don’t forget that their simple effort at hospitality was the prelude to their awareness of Christ! He was going on, but they “constrained” him to stay with them, to share a meal. Again, we often feel we do not know Christ because we never meet up with the poor, we never reach out to those desperately in need of food and shelter. But when we do, not only do we help others, but we discover Christ, alive and blessing us. Can you tell a personal story, or a vignette from the life of your church, when the Scriptures did open some eyes, when being at the table really was an encounter with the living Lord, or when hospitality to the stranger did usher in Christ himself – or maybe all three?

*****

   Check out my Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week - which Adam Hamilton called "the best book on worship I've ever read." Good for laity (I hope), thinking about what we do in worship and how it matters when we're not in worship.

What can we say April 26? Easter 4

    Acts 2:42-47. How do we preach on this (as I will do!) to gritty consumer capitalists? There most clearly is a connection between what they did with their possessions, that their hearts were “glad and generous,” and that the Lord was “adding to their number” new converts. Easy to slide into a useless nag on such things. But really, it’s our attachment to our stuff, and our hankering for more or newer stuff, that pollutes any possible gladness of heart in us, and makes laughable the possibility of new converts. Why should anybody bother with church if the church people live just like everybody outside the church – but with a little smugness?

   There’s eloquence and a glimmer of hope in the way Willie Jennings speaks on this text. First the stinging diagnosis: “Time, talent, and treasures, the trinity of possessions we know so well, would feel the pull of this holy vortex,” namely the new orientation created by the Spirit. And then his pondering of the impracticality, and the human resistance to the very idea of shared goods: “The real questions are not whether this holy communalism, this sacred sociality, could or would be operative, be practical in this ancient world or any world, but what must it have been like to feel the powerful pull of the life of our savior, and what energy did it take to resist the Holy Spirit, to slow down this pull enough to withhold themselves and their possessions from divine desire.” Boom. Naming it takes effort to resist the Spirit, but tucked inside there is a least a holy craving.

   And finally: “What is far more dangerous than any plan of shared wealth or fair distribution of goods and services is a God who dares impose on us divine love. Such love will not play fair. In the moment we think something is ours, that same God will demand we sell it, give it away.”

   Psalm 23 is eminently preachable (although I worry it’s knuckling under to my people whom I wish loved or even knew even one other Psalm!). Check out my prior blog with my best thought and illustrative material; I remain fond of the idea that not only the sheep but also the sheepdog would have a shepherd!

   1 Peter 2:19-25. How odd that verse 18 is lopped off in the lectionary – as what we have in 19ff is the continuation of “Slaves, subordinate yourselves.” Avoiding a touchy subject? Scripture not as socially revolutionary as you’d like? Owning where Scripture was back in the day, and why we’d think differently – not because of personal preference or current political leanings, but because of what we learn elsewhere in Scripture! – is the way to hope.

   Peter (is it the Peter?) suggests (v. 21) that his suffering is the pattern, the hypogrammos, for these young Christians: a vivid image, as hypogrammos was the word for “alphabet,” what children would use to learn the pattern of language, words and eventually meaning. Ours is to “follow in his footsteps” (vestigiae) – so easy to trivialize or assume if I’m being nice and doing a little good I am actually in Jesus’ footsteps. St. Francis of Assisi’s whole life mission, as his first biographers all stressed, was to be in and to be the vestigiae, the vestiges, of Jesus. Jesus touched lepers? Jesus fasted for weeks? Jesus courted criticism and death? For Francis all this became his to-do list day by day. I expended most of my ink on this in my book, Conversations with St. Francis.

   Jesus wound up with nails in his body. Our text picks up on a key Greek term from the Gospel plot of Jesus’ life: he was “handed over,” paradidomi, sometimes rendered “betrayed.” Jesus was active, a man in charge, but increasingly the passive recipient of the acts of others – which cost him everything. St. Francis prayed to feel what Christ felt, to embody as a vestige what Jesus suffered – and so he wound up with his stigmata, bleeding wounds in his hands, side and feet. Do you really want to follow in the path of Jesus?

   On this passage, Joel Green speaks of “performance.” We perform God’s script, requiring some agility and wisdom in “improvisation” (as Sam Wells articulated and popularized it for us). You learn the character, the basic script, and then you make up not random stuff but fitting stuff to continue the act. I recently was stunned by a talk an 18 year old in my church gave at our Moravian Love Feast. Among many wise, marvelous things he said was this: when thinking of God’s will for the rest of his life, he said “I want to show off the way of God in my everyday life, with people I know, and with people I don’t know.” Boom. You can’t unsee that, or dodge it claim and think Nice, but that can’t apply to me.

   John 10:1-10 was my father-in-law’s favorite preaching text. The “abundant life” image pulsated through all of Bishop Tom Stockton's preaching; his car’s license tag was personalized: “Live alive!” I love him, and this – although it’s risky, as this “abundant life” can be confused in Christians’ minds as happiness, or success, or the moral goods the world has to offer. The Greek “abundantly” is perisson, meaning overflowing – perhaps an echo of Psalm 23? I saw a marquis the other day that said “If someone asks if my cup if half full or half empty, I just feel lucky to have a cup.” If there is an overflowing, an abundance, it’s not things or other measurables, but a sense of God’s mercy, an at-homeness with God, a realizing of reconciliation.

   Jesus is the “good” Shepherd. The Greek, kalos, can imply “beautiful.” I love that – although I’ve tended to recoil at pretty paintings of Jesus as this mild shepherd. Real shepherds are rough and tumble guys, hollering at sheep with a switch in hand. The text asks us to imagine a small stone wall enclosure, with a gate, just an opening. If we think of God and gates, the booboo is to think we’re shutting somebody out or protecting ourselves. The gate is an opening to let people in! Are our church gates open? How do we think of the church anyhow? I like what C.S. Lewis did with that wardrobe in his Narnia novels: you step through into another world!

   Raymond Brown reports on the habits of some shepherds who sleep across the entrance to the fold, serving thus as both shepherd and gate! Brown also notes how Palestinian shepherds frequently have pet names for their favorite sheep, like “Long-ears” or “White-nose.” Lamb chop? Jean Vanier ponders this: “To know someone by name implies a growing understanding of a person, of his or her unique gifts and weaknesses, needs and mission in life. That means taking time with the person, listening, creating a mutual relationship of communion, revealing that the person is loved, has value and is precious.” Didn’t Isaiah 49 tell us that God has your name tattooed on the palm of God’s hand?

   Preachers always remember they are also shepherds. Vanier: “It is not easy to be a good shepherd, to really listen, to accept another’s reality and conflicts. It is not easy to touch our own fears and blocks in relation to people or to love people to love.” But then isn’t it the peril of ministry that we are always holding the door open for people to go in but maybe don’t get in ourselves? Do you know that “I Stand By the Door” by Sam Shoemaker? Every clergyperson should reflect on this at least once a year.

*****

   Check out my Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week - which Adam Hamilton called "the best book on worship I've ever read." Good for laity (I hope), thinking about what we do in worship and how it matters when we're not in worship.

What can we say May 3? 5th Sunday of Easter

   With Mother's Day coming, the 1 Peter text (which I'll preach on myself) makes a fitting notice of the Hallmark holiday by reflecting on being born, born again - which is a Mother's day recollection "for everyone born."

    Acts 7:55-60, the martyrdom of Stephen, has little details rich in homiletical possibility. Saul/Paul is present – so is it a thing that Christians who misunderstand, who approve and participate in judgment, might actually see the light? And instead of me thinking of somebody else when I read that sentence, might I ask this about myself?

   Fascinating: Stephen saw the Son of Man, but they covered their ears. Vision vs. hearing. I recall from seminary days the brilliant Prof. David Steinmetz, explaining Luther’s theological epistemology, saying “The eyes are hard of hearing,” that the ears are the organ of faith, how what we see can be misleading. And yet some have seen the Lord. His foes shut their ears, not wanting to hear what had been seen by others.

   Then we have the quirky textual issue: Stephen, with his dying breath, pleads for forgiveness for his attackers. Was he mimicking Jesus? Or did early copyists of Luke 23 not want Stephen to appear to be more gracious than Jesus, so they placed these words on Jesus’ lips? It’s missing in several early manuscripts of Luke. Alternatively, did some copyist remove the words from Jesus’ lips, as they so loathed the Jews they didn’t want Jesus offering them mercy? Do textual debates ever belong in a sermon? I’d say occasionally. We just have to discern if a worthy theological point can be made. Here it’s possible: could it be that Stephen so profoundly understood all Jesus was about that he sought forgiveness for his killers – without Jesus having verbally done the same? What about the theory of anti-Semitism? Are there those for whom we’d delete Jesus’ mercy?

   1 Peter 2:2-10 slices off the first half of a sentence beginning in verse 1! The spiritual milk business isn’t some sweet spiritual thought, but about the setting aside of evil, deceit, jealousy and slander! Is the point of v. 2 then that infants don’t do these things, that they are learned in a corrupt, fallen world? It’s a riff on Psalm 34:8 (“O taste and see that the Lord is good”). The early Church Fathers allegorized, seeing the milk as coming from the two breasts of the two Testaments. I wonder if, as preachers, we can expand upon what 1 Peter would have known. In my Birth: the Mystery of Being Born book that just came out (just in time for Mother's Day...), I report on the way breastfeeding is surprisingly interactive. The infant’s saliva secretes something into the mother which tells the milk production specific things the infant needs. We spiritual milk-drinkers aren’t merely passive receptacles!

   Ernest Best reminds us that milk is what you need, spiritually. There is no greater milk or food than Christ himself! So there is no spiritual cockiness, as some might imagine they have advanced beyond simple milk to more complex foods. We are always children needing simple milk; didn’t Jesus say we must become like children?

   Might the author of 1 Peter have imagined a literal birth when he wrote in v. 9 “You were called out of darkness into marvelous light, you once were no people, now you are God’s people, now you have received mercy”? Maybe not. But he was “inspired,” and so can surely can. Infants emerge from the womb, the Hebrew word for which also means “mercy,” out of near-total darkness into near-blinding light – and voila! She’s a person who wasn’t before. Of course, the children of Hosea and Gomer whisper in the background, with their bizarre but prophetically suggestive names, Lo-Ruhama (same “womb” word!) and Lo-Ammi. The people’s infidelity, personified in Gomer’s waywardness (Hosea 1), results in a loss of mercy and being the people! – but all that is reversed in the dawning of Christ’s new way.

   My Birth book has a whole chapter on the meaning of being “Born Again” in light of actual, physical birth. To that, I’d add Joel Green’s pithy comment: “Conversion entails autobiographical reconstruction.” From whom and where have I come? Who is my family? St. Francis shed his clothing and lost his father’s affection when he became a friar, literally a “brother” to others in the family of God; at his trial, famously depicted by Giotto, Francis gave it all back to his father and said “No longer if Pietro Bernardone my father, but from now on my father is ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’”

   A few other preachable details: in early Church baptisms, when you emerged from the pool you were given a drink of milk and honey, emblematic of Israel and the Promised Land. Wish we still did that one. Verse 4 has a pun worth playing on: “kindness” is chrestos in Greek, barely a squiggle away from Christ. To be Christlike is quite literally to be chrestos, kind. And you have to love the Bible’s repeated usage of the passive imperative – illogical grammatically. It’s imperative! – that something happens to you. Stones, with no muscles, legs or agility, must be built into a temple. This is an improvement on Paul’s idea that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19), which is cool but could feel lonely. All bodies together are stones in the temple of God! And finally the “offense” the Bible regularly perceives in Christ as cornerstone, a stumbling block. I wish more offense were taken at Christ. Today we get lots of yawns and averted gazes.

   John 14:1-14 requires considerable care. Lots of people request some portion of this at funerals due to the “many mansions.” At Christmas, we visited the Biltmore House, which boasts of being the largest privately owned home in America. 58 Christmas trees, massive, elegantly decorated rooms, a warren of servant quarters below. Is that what heaven is like? Seems crass. The Greek, monē, was a night-stop or resting place. The Latin rendered it “mansion,” which back then still meant merely a resting place, which is what “mansion” meant even in Old English. The “many” implies not “lots of them” but rather There’s room for all.

   Maybe instead of thinking I get a fabulous house in heaven, we notice the relationship of monē to the verb menein, which means simply “to remain, stay, abide.” It’s not the place, the nature of the abode, but the abiding, the being with Jesus, not at all Tammy Faye Bakker’s famous “shopping mall in the sky where I have a credit card with no limit.”

   I cringe a little when v. 6 gets included in a funeral, and I cringe more over the way it is interpreted as if Jesus is giving a theological lecture on the relationship of Christianity to World Religions. It’s a somber meal, in shadows, the disciples trembling with anxiety. Jesus reassures them that there is a way. We do not normally use “way” in an exclusive sense anyhow, do we? I speak of “the way to my house” as simply a direction, it’s findable, it’s not barricaded with iron gates. The truth isn’t about intellectual assent or dogmatic assertion on my end; it’s all from God, and about God, it’s the truth about God’s heart. 

I put out this brief video (7 minutes) called “Jesus is THE way?” a few years back with my best take on what John 14:6 is about. I’ve done this with lots of lay people too. It’s all about your tone if you dream of explaining it in a sermon or elsewhere to your people – and yet important for those who’d swiftly judge others, and for those terrified by the deaths of loved ones who weren’t “believers.”

   Philip’s plea, “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied” is so preachable. Jesus showed us quite clearly the heart, mind and way of God his Father. And it’s this alone this satisfies, this alone that is enough. How much is enough? We think it’s additive, or novel: If I get more, or the newest, I’ll have enough! But it’s a fiction. When, after all, am I enough? The Jesus who shows us the Father says You are enough already. That includes you, the preacher, no matter what you tell them this Sunday.

   Realizing this, living in sync with this, then resolves the other weirdness in this passage, which is Jesus promising “Anything you ask in my name, I will do it.” People ask Does prayer work? – the wrong question, as if I measured my marriage by saying Yeah, Lisa does a high percentage of stuff I ask her to do for me. It’s a relationship, togetherness, gratitude, sharing, solidarity with God, way better than asking favors. The kicker is “in my name.” It’s not a formula, as if God’s waiting for you to say “in Jesus’ name” and then the wish is granted. “In my name” means being in sync with Jesus and his dreams, loves, projects, visions.

   So Christians need not pray, especially in public, non-worship spaces, “in Jesus’ name” in order for the prayer to be valid. Jesus’ way, after all, brought all paths to God to fulfillment - didn't he? His way was new in that he was one of us, one with us - a brother to all people in all places and in all times.

What can we say May 10? Easter 6

 

   The emotions that are Mother's Day are more complicated than usual. People with elderly moms they can't visit. Moms stressed by working from home while home schooling. I have a woman whose mom died last week without her being able to be there, or organize a funeral due to family with Covid and travel issues. College graduation day for several I know. We name the pains, the joys, the complications, never glibly glorifying motherhood. A strategy of mine always on Mother's Day is to spend some time of adoration for the greatest mother ever, Mary. No moral takeaways, no “lesson,” just pondering her, as she was a ponderer herself. No one has ever complained, and they oddly feel enfranchised even though I’ve never hinted at how marvelous mothers are. I have the advantage (or massive disadvantage!) of having had a mother who wasn’t one to sing and be effusive about. By all means, don’t give in to the church member I had years ago who insisted on standing at the door to hand out a carnation to every mother entering, or my first little parish where they gave an award to the newest mother, the oldest mother, and the mother with the most children – which sparked a heated argument between one who’d borne 4 and another with 5, but 2 were second marriage adoptions… 

   Acts 17:22-31. Fascinating: when Paul showed up in Athens, the Parthenon was already 500 years old; the golden age of Socrates and Pericles long past. And yet the city was (and is still) a marvel.

   Willie Jennings reminds us, so easily dazzled by the glories of ancient Athens, that the real dazzler here is Paul. His sermon makes it clear: “God desires those who desire idols. This speech is driven by the irrepressible longing of God to embrace wayward creatures by every means possible.” Idols aren’t foolishness so much as a fantasy of control. The gods (and we have plenty of our own!) are bogus; “yet Paul will not turn Gentile ignorance toward God’s condemnation, but toward God’s condescension.”

   By the warren of marble temples to pagan divinities, Paul was mortified - but the citizens of Athens must have been puzzled by his mood. They had countless gods, but weren't all that serious about any of them (except perhaps Dionysus, the god of wine and parties!). What was strange about Paul was not that he was a religious person; Athenians could prove their religiosity by simply pointing to the urban landscape. But Paul was zealous, daring to say his God was the lone true god, and all the others were fakes, zeroes. Theirs was a civil religion that accommodated everyone and offended no one - except Paul!

   Paul’s tone? No condemnation. He connects. He “argues” – and the Greek is identical to our word “dialogue.” He establishes common ground what he can about their culture while luring them into something richer and more noble. Can today’s preacher achieve the same?

   He goes to them, in the agora, the marketplace, the shopping mall of Athens. Can the preacher get out to prepare the sermon, maybe after conversation with random people in a shopping mall? To continue the conversation, Paul’s critics walk with him uphill to the Areopagus, Mars Hill, the stone court where generals decided whether to go to war or not. Paul comes peacefully, and suggests his God isn't limited to Athens or any other place or vested interest, but is for all people, everywhere, in every age.

   Acts 17 seems to ask and answer whether Christianity is intellectually respectable, as Paul makes his case before the most educated, cultured, philosophically sophisticated people in the world. Paul does his best, but knows he will never win the day on reason alone. Christianity is not unreasonable, but the Gospel embraces far more than reason can begin to grasp. Reason is faith’s greatest block, isn’t it? Paul proudly admits that the Christian message is “folly to the wisdom of the world” (1 Corinthians 1:19): a poor peasant, executed but coming back to life? No wonder in the philosophical mecca of Athens Paul was mocked as a “babbler” (Acts 17:18).

   A few Athenians converted, others couldn't accept the Gospel message; but notice the word of hope from many of the unconverted: “We will hear you again about this” (verse 32). Can we be faithful, can we articulate the hope that is in us, but with perseverance and patience, and in a way that even skeptics might want to hear us again?

   John 14:15-21 is, for David Ford in his new commentary, “a simple, practical summary of the ongoing life of prayer and action, both deepening and daring, inspired by who Jesus is, by what he does and says, and by love for him.”

   I’ve never slowed down enough to ponder Jesus’ promise: although we fixate on the maybe-not-true “I’ll do whatever you ask,” I am moved now by “I will ask the Father.” It’s not that prayer works (or doesn’t) – but the risen Lord, through the Spirit, actually asks God his and our Father for us. What love! And how would this reality change what we actually ask for?

   The whole passage teases out what agape love is all about. “If you love… you keep commandments” sounds conditional. But let’s be clear: Love has its conditions; love has its rules. Love isn’t a mood you feel or don’t. If I love my wife, I know the rules that bear witness to that love. We aren’t saved because we’re fastidious rule-keepers.

   And John’s rumination on the coming gift of the Spirit after Jesus’ departure is just astonishing. No systematic theologies to consult, Jesus was barely gone, and John writes with such tender wisdom about the mystery of this Spirit. Clearly, it’s not some emotional titillation, which many American Christians would pervert the Spirit into being. Ford’s phrasing is striking: “The most straightforward way of understanding the Spirit is as the shared, distributed, indwelling presence of the crucified and risen Jesus.” Distributed! It’s not just that you get the Spirit, or it’s there for you to access. It is distributed – reminding me that God bestows a variety of gifts on the members of the Body, and we need one another to get closer to the reality of God! To shut out voices that seem different or strange is to choke that distributed Spirit.

   The Spirit is your Advocate – and you’ll need a good one. And the Spirit is all about Truth – which is entirely up for grabs or viewed as nonexistent nowadays in our culture of warring political ideologies. There is Truth. There are facts. And not just facts but the deeper Truth that is the way things really are with God and God’s world. To get at this, I like to quote the popular historian David McCullough: “You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth. ‘I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,’ is the old piano teacher’s complaint. There has to be music. The work of history calls for mind and heart.”

   In my Birth: The Mystery of Being Born, I have a chapter on Adoption. We might fixate on the nuclear family, but the Bible is obsessed with language and images of foundlings, orphans, adoption. Check out this blog I posted (scroll down to the bottom half!) during Pentecost for a quick summation of how all this plays out, relying much on the insights of Kelley Nikondeha in her terrific book, Adopted.

   1 Peter 3:13-22 reveals how tough things were on early Christians, and thereby how the life of faith today is a walk in the park, eliciting more yawns than harsh critique. So how does our text’s counsel apply? Maybe you can say those who dare to live a radical faith have their troubles, or you can grandstand or confuse people by pointing to how mad people get over your political ideology. Let’s linger over a few intriguing items here.

   “Harm” has become a big word, from “First do no harm,” to the controversial but crucial “harm reduction” in substance abuse treatment, and then the “Reduce Harm” movement in Methodism – all 3 inviting people to courageous action to minimize harm to others. 1 Peter’s question: “Who will harm you if you are eager to do good?” I’m tempted to answer “Lots of people,” especially in this realm of the defense of the harmed. So today, doing good, not being a believer per se, can stir up trouble. Joel Green comments: “It is precisely by doing good that the righteous attract unwanted attention.”

   Maybe this text is a way to talk about issues that matter to you without nagging or condemning. So you simply observe that those who are trying to do good, sheltering immigrants, advocating for gun control, lobbying against abortion, striving for racial reconciliation, whatever it may be (and if you do a list, zigzag left and then right as I just did to avoid people thinking you’re just pasting faith on top of your agenda) do bear some misery – although you have to own that in the biblical world you could be imprisoned, beaten, or shut out of work, whereas today you’re more likely to get blasted on Facebook. The text reminds us of Jesus’ suffering, and this solidarity ennobles suffering and induces the strength to bear it.

   The RSV invites us to “sanctify” Christ. He’s already holy, of course… The verb, hagiasate, a quote from Isaiah 8:13, and the same word as “Hallowed be thy name,” means to reverence, to treat as holy. Live in a way that doesn’t embarrass Christ; tempt him to take pride in you. The “Be ready to make your defense” envisions being on trial, or pressured to renounce your faith. For us, is this finding yourself in awkward conversation where a neighbor make a chilling racist comment, or someone blasts a Mexican yard worker?

   Does this entail the simple skill of being able to give testimony to why and what you believe? I worry I’ve not helped my people enough to be able to articulate the simple basics of why and what they believe – and my church people who are glib and eloquent on this are too often the smug types who have all the answers and are all too eager to download their spiritual genius into others. I think of Lillian Daniel’s Tell It Like It Is: Reclaiming the Practice of Testimony or Tom Long’s Testimony as wise explorations of this, important for our people even if it’s only a quick mention in this Sunday’s sermon.

   I remind my people periodically that the Creed matters because it was devised to give people simple ways to talk about their faith. Every Sunday’s recitation is a little practice session. And this “defense” 1 Peter prepares us for isn’t dogma so much as a personal naming of to whom we cling; it’s not propositional but “the hope that is in you.” The average Christian needs to be able to say without being shrill or sappy, “My hope is in God” or “I believe Christ is with me.” And that “in you”: 1 Peter’s Greek is en humin, plural, really then “the hope that is in y’all.” We have good company as we believe, defend, bear witness and make testimony. We’re good listeners; we stand with others. And it’s always “with gentleness and reverence,” not cockiness or judgment!

   Speaking of the creed: verse 19 poses huge challenges with its mystifying talk of Jesus preaching to “spirits in prison… who disobeyed in the days of Noah.” Pseudepigraphical books like Enoch dwell on bound “fallen angels,” reminding us that even back in the first century, Christians believed some very curious things. Over time, the belief that Christ “descended into Hell” emerged, and has survived in many creeds. I included a chapter on this in my book The Life We Claim: The Apostles’ Creed for Preaching, Teaching and Worship. This descent is lovely to explore, raising questions about death and mercy, and the fate of those we spoke of in last week’s blog who don’t believe in Jesus as the way. Peter Jackson’s depiction of Tolkien’s allusion to this, when Gandalf plummeted into the abyss while battling Balrog, is unforgettable: “You Shall Not Pass!!!” – which can be an intriguing entrée to people otherwise baffled or uninterested.

 ** Here’s an excerpt from The Life We Claim, my little book on preaching the Apostles’ Creed, if you’re interested in the Descent Into Hell:

   The Creeds devised by the Church cannot seem to make up their minds:  should “He descended into Hell” be included? or not? The 1 Peter passage seems tantalizingly to suggest that between his burial late in the day on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, Jesus went down into the underworld to save those awaiting judgment. Many New Testament scholars construe the 1 Peter passage differently: if we sort through Genesis 6:1-4, Isaiah 24:21, Jude 6, 2 Peter 2:4, and 1 Peter 3:19-20, we glimpse a belief held by first century Jews, that disobedient angels were thrown into a pit and locked up – and that Jesus’ preaching mission was to these evil powers. Still, the Church has historically taught that Jesus “descended into Hell” – a doctrine that “need not be explicitly grounded upon specific biblical texts; rather, it must rely upon a reading of Scripture as a whole.”

   Hell, we know, is not a fiery cavern down in the earth patrolled by red men with pitchforks. Jesus’ journey there is symbolic, intimating that all people, in this life and even beyond this life, are offered the love of God.  Even the grave does not silence God’s call. “What is to happen to the multitude who lived before Jesus’ ministry? And what will become of the many who never came into contact with the Christian message? What is to happen to the people who have certainly heard the message of Christ but who – perhaps through the fault of those very Christians who have been charged with its proclamation – have never come face to face with its truth? Are all these delivered to damnation? Do they remain forever shut out? The Christian faith can say ‘no’ to this urgent question. What took place for mankind in Jesus also applies to the people who either never came into contact with Jesus and his message, or who have never really caught sight of the truth of his person and story” (Wolfhart Pannenberg). God is relentless, unfazed by time, space, or death itself. Even the pit of Hell is owned by the unquenchable love of Christ; the abyss is not bottomless, but has an opening to heaven. Or so many thinkers have argued, unable to make sense of the idea that God could love everyone with infinite power and wind up losing even one. Perhaps Christ’s descent into hell opens a window for those who have never heard of Christ, or have heard it from terrible people.

   “In view of what Jesus had seen the last few days of his life, maybe the transition to Hell wasn’t as hard as you might think (Buechner).” Many theologians have claimed that Christ descended into hell the moment he cried “My God, why have you forsaken me?” on the cross; “No more terrible abyss can be conceived than to feel yourself forsaken and estranged from God, and when you call upon him, not to be heard (John Calvin).” Jürgen Moltmann thought it really began in Gethsemane when Jesus’ request that the cup be removed was denied. Whichever side of the grave your Hell may be on, “there is no depth, no darkness, no unraveling of reality, which God’s Son has not shared” (Nicholas Lash). No matter what Hell I go through, God is in the teeth of it with me, descending into whatever abyss I have fallen. And, if Jesus descended into Hell, then I as a follower of Christ, and we as the Church of Christ, must follow, and seek out those whose Hell is palpable and devastating, and we become the embodied love of Christ for those who think they are totally sealed off from God.

   In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagined Hell as a dingy, dark place, the weather always overcast. People mull about, hanging their heads, depressed in this bureaucratic nightmare of a place. Curiously, they can leave as any time, but they prefer to stay in Hell. Accustomed to the place, they stay, relishing Hell’s activities calendar, including theological discussion groups where they talk about questions like what happens to people in Mongolia… Lewis provides us with some short quotations from Hell’s residents: “I don’t what any help. I want to be left alone. I’m in charge of my own life” – common sentiments in Hell. As Lewis surmises, “There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There’s always something they prefer to joy. There are only two kinds of people in the end. Those who say to God, ‘They will be done.’ And those to whom God says, ‘They will be done.’ And all that are in hell chose it.”