What can we say March 15? Lent 4

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say March 22? Lent 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say March 29? Palm/Passion Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   I also like to think each year about Howard Thurman's lovely thought (whether it winds up in my sermon or not) - all the more interesting in light of Peter Eisenstadt's new, great biography, Against the Hounds of Hell (also the topic of one of my “Maybe I’m Amazed” podcasts!): “I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey. Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes in his father’s shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him this Great Necessity that sent him out on to the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from Isaiah, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.’ I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey.”

What can we say Maundy Thursday?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples in bread and wine. Amazed at such a token, and little understanding what they did, Peter, John and the rest reached out their hands and took their master and their God. Whatever else they knew or did not know, they knew they were committed to him… and that they, somehow, should live it out.” I like that. We are mystified – but we know we receive Jesus himself, and we are thereby committed to him, come what may. As N.T. Wright rightly suggested, when we eat and drink at the Lord’s table, “we become walking shrines, living temples in whom the living triune God truly dwells.”

   What do our people think as they amble slowly forward? I invite them into what Martin Sheen said to Krista Tippett in an On Being episode: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

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

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

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

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

What can we say Good Friday?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say Easter Sunday?

    I can never decide if preaching Easter 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.