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.

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.