What can we say July 5? 6th after Pentecost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we say July 12? 7th after Pentecost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What can we say July 19? 8th after Pentecost

    Genesis 28:10-19a. A great text to linger over little details, not tying it all up in a bow, just letting it be there in front of people. Jacob came to “a certain place” – and it’s nebulous, meaning a specific place, or really just any place – and why? “He stayed there for the night, for the sun had set.” Indeed. It eventually gets dark. Your running has its limit, always.

   Jacob is in a desolate place, sleeping out of doors, a stone for his pillow. I might mention St. Francis sleeping on rocks and in caves – which he loved doing, believing it put him closer to God’s most enduring creation, and also in solidarity with Jesus, our ‘rock,’ who slept (or tried to sleep) on that Maundy Thursday night in Caiaphas’s prison.

   Is it over-psychologizing in a sermon to speak of finding yourself in a hard place? A few, like Franklin Roosevelt, do their best all day and then sleep like a baby no matter what. I struggle – and the night hours are the darkest spiritually and mentally. Could it be that, during such harrowing nights, “the Lord was in this place, but I did not know it”? Psalm 56 says “Lord, you have kept count of my tossings” – in the night, when God seems absent or silent or both. 

   To me, this text invites the preacher to make a regular cadence of “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it” throughout the sermon!

   I appreciate Walter Brueggemann's thought: "Jacob thought he was alone. He did not know that the Holy One could occupy empty space of the wilderness. The promise surges beyond stylized recitation. The promise is intimate and person: I am with you. I will keep you." Then he adds "The Bible is like that! The God is the Bible is like that! Places of desolation may become places of hope; places of abandonment may become venues for accompaniment; places of isolation may become places of visitation."

   Is it just a dream? Or a mystical reality conveyed through a dream? Jacob sees a ladder – although the Hebrew probably means more like a “ramp.” It’s okay to stick with “ladder,” given “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,” and the shrewd thought from Steven Covey that we spend our lives climbing the ladder of success, but then when we get to the top, we realize the ladder is propped up against the wrong wall.

   Is the church a ladder? Our way to God or God’s way to us? St. Catherine of Siena envisioned the cross as a ladder we climb to get to God the Father.

   So to reflect on “the Lord was in this place, but I did not know it.” Isn’t God there when we aren’t aware, when we aren’t praying or seeking God at all?

 I wrote something of a memoir called Struck From Behind: My Memories of God. It’s not a dull account of my career or life, but a collection of memories, of ways God was there when I didn’t realize it at the time, but only in retrospect, years later (playing on Thoreau's "Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark"). I love inviting people into this kind of exercise: take some time to think back over your life. When was God in some place and you didn’t know it? The preacher could play with this one all day.

   Lots of weirdness in family and personal memory! Jacob had more than his share, parents with favorites, brutal sibling rivalry – and way more dysfunction around the corner with his wives, concubines, and foolish children. God is still “in this place,” maybe especially in such broken, wounded places. If the Lord is in such places, even when we are unaware, then we are invited into the other great prayer Merton offered:  whatever the circumstances, whatever happens, “Lord, let this be my consolation – that wherever I am, You are loved.”

   Jacob was “a border crosser, a man of liminal experiences” (Robert Alter). And this (from my book on the theology of hymns, Unrevealed Until Its Season) – on who’s climbing Jacob’s ladder in the old spiritual / hymn: “Soldiers of the cross! Of course, the old spiritual was thinking one way. But maybe we can jump to the soldiers at the cross, the ones who nailed Jesus to it, the ones snickering, the ones gambling over his clothing. And the ones he forgave, although they didn’t repent or ask for any mercy. Pondering this, the way God showed up to Jacob in his anxious flight from God and goodness, and the way Jesus our ladder to heaven forgave unrepentant soldiers of the cross, we know the only answer to the hymn’s other questions: Sinner, do you love my Jesus? and If you love him, why not serve him?

   Psalm 139 is pitch perfect for this theme, this experience: on the run from God, but – dang – can’t quite elude the Almighty, the All-compassionate one.

   Romans 8:12-25. There’s just so much Gospel here! Verse 18: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed to us” – which is so true and the ultimate prophetic word. But when I spoke at the Festival of Homiletics in May (watch here!), I spoke on how clergy can give too much hope, or too much hope in false things, or an excess of hope that is a kind of theft. This idea was prompted by Kate Bowler’s fabulous thought in No Cure for Being Human: “Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered, or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present.” I’ve seen clergy offer a skinny feeling hope that is more misguided optimism to families facing horrors. I’ve known clergy have urged the downtrodden or oppressed to stay in their place because, hey, heaven will be so great you’ll forget all this! I alluded to Blanche Moore, a woman in North Carolina who slipped arsenic into her husband’s and then boyfriend’s food until they died – making me wonder if by injecting overdoses of hope we’ve killed the church.

   We should preach more often on “Creation sighing, in the pangs of futility… the whole creation groaning in labor pains.” All the bad news, weather disasters, pandemics, vast hordes of people displaced and miserable: instead of trying to justify why a good God would cause or allow such things, maybe we parse all the arrggghhhhh out there as creation in the birth pangs – and so it’s weirdly hopeful, although the realization of that hope isn’t any time soon. Back also to what Henri Nouwen wrote (see last week’s blog!) about the twins arguing in their mother’s womb about whether there’s life after birth, or birth at all, or a mother. The clincher is when the girl asks is her brother notices those painful squeezes. He has, of course, and calls them quite unpleasant. She says They are getting us ready for another place, a space of light and freedom, where we will see our mother face to face.

   Then – and it almost seems to easy, which is a warning flare!!! – Jesus and his alluring habit of addressing God as Abba, Father. Jesus did – and Paul picks up on this in profound ways. Notice it isn’t that you just decide, Oh, I’ll call God Abba. It is the Spirit that enables and empowers this “cry” (so it’s a plea for help?). It’s not the word Abba that carries any magic; it’s the deep sense of the intimate relationship. We are children of God, no small thing… and then heirs (getting better…) – but then Paul has to add “provided we suffer with him.” Not “in case, by some remote chance, we suffer.”

   God as Abba explicates Genesis 28 and Psalm 139. It is precisely because God is such an Abba that he materializes, he is mystically present, always, everywhere, even if unsought, unwelcomed, misunderstood. I think of Dar Williams’s moving song about her daughter, envisioning the day she will send her out into the world on her own: “You’ll fly away / but take my hand until that day / So when they ask how far love goes / When my job’s done you’ll be the one who knows.”

   Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.    One way the Lord is present and we do not realize or understand it, thankfully, is in the life of the church, broken and riddled with lunacy as it may be – and including the churches we think are irreparably flawed. Matthew 13, the wheat and the tares: I hope that the scholars who say the ‘interpretation’ in 36-43 doesn’t emanate from Jesus but is spin from early church leaders are correct. Jesus’ lovely, realistic, merciful parable is twisted into something ominous and threatening.

   The question in Jesus’ simple, unexplained parable isn’t Am I wheat? Or tares? You’re both, of course – The story is about the community, the people of God. The Church is wheat, and tares, both, and we like to think we know who’s who, as if you could simply put a sticker on each person’s nametag so we could accurately identify who’s who. Tares? Sit in the back on the left… Wheat? Up front, on the right… We’re so confused: can we even distinguish wheat from tares? We assume we’re the wheat and those guys who are so wrong are the tares – grieving Jesus’ heart.

   Churches divide, despite Jesus’ prayer for unity on the last night of his life (John 17). Ephraim Radner, in his dense but wonderful A Brutal Unity, speaks of the solidarity to which we are called: “Solidarity is about giving oneself over to another across an otherwise entrenched and immovable boundary… In doing this, we confront the ‘otherness’ of God even in the otherness of” the one from whom we are separated.” 

   Robert Farrar Capon points out, "This is no way to run a farm. Maybe Jesus was just not as good a gardener as he was a carpenter... Programs designed to get rid of evil are doomed to do exactly what the farmer suggests they will do. Since good and evil commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings, the only result of a dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody." He suggests that the devil's best strategy is to sucker good people into taking up arms against one another, while he sits back and laughs.

   Images are our only chance to help people imagine a diverse, divided church staying together. I was vacationing in Scotland and lucked into a conversation at a pub with a shepherd. Like a professional. One question I asked was Why do you never see just sheep, or just goats, but always both? He replied, We’ve found over the centuries that they just do better together.

   Francis Schaeffer, the godfather of evangelicalism, wrote about the way we fail to love within the church: Christians “rush in, being very, very pleased to find other men’s mistakes. We build ourselves up by tearing other men down.” We are to exercise love in even the toughest situations – the obligation of “loving our brothers when it costs us something, loving them even under times of tremendous emotional tension, loving them in a way the world can see.”

   I love this scene in Stephen Bransford's novel, Riders of the Long Road. Silas Will, a circuit rider back in the 18th century, was grilled with hard questions by a young man about God, evil and suffering. His response? 

 

   "'God sees much more than we see. He sees the beginning and the end of things and He is doing what is best from all that He sees. God would never kill a child. But there is an invisible war that goes on around us while we live here on earth. God promised to destroy the Devil.' The young man asked, 'Why won't God finish it now?' Silas was thoughts for a moment, and then suddenly leaped up, bent over with excitement. 'They asked Christ the same question.  Look here, watch down here.' He bent over. 'Christ said the Kingdom is like a sower who sowed good seed, but in the night his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. See, here are the good grasses' - his hands stroked the grass - 'and this pennyroyal here is like the weed.' One hand closed upon a large mint-leaves pennyroyal stem. 'Look at it, and look what happens when I pull it out.'  Silas yanked the pennyroyal up by the roots. It exploded from the ground, showering both of them with dirt from its spreading roots. 'This is what Christ said. The people urged Him to pluck all the weeds from the wheat field, but He said, no, let them grow together because to pull them out now will destroy much innocent wheat. See the grasses that have died here because I pulled up the pennyroyal? We know pennyroyal roots grow under ground, tangled beneath the other grasses. God knows the roots of evil grown around every sickness since Adam and Eve. Yes, God can purge the world of sin and death right now, but He doesn't because all have sinned and we are all so tangled with the corruption of sin that He would destroy us and the whole world in that selfsame moment. What kind of God could do that?'"

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

What can we say July 26? 9th after Pentecost

    Summer is whisking along… This week I’ll open with Romans, reflect on a dare that worked out well with the Rachel / Leah business, and then touch on our Gospel.

   Romans 8:26-39. If Paul had written nothing but Romans 8, we would lionize him. If he’d written nothing but this portion of Romans 8, we would extol him as one of our greatest. Better to let such a text linger in the open space of a sanctuary than to attempt much mansplaining!

   I love to imagine Paul pacing the room, blurting out his latest thoughts, the scribe scrambling to get it down on parchment, thinking “Wow, this guy is on fire today!” So much here: “We do not know how to pray as we ought,” which is an understatement. So often parishoners in crisis say they don’t know what to pray, or feel they can’t pray. I ask if they’ve done any sighing. Of course they have – and we note how Paul dares to suggest that our “sighs too deep for words” are really the Spirit praying in us. Wow – so encouraging for me as a pastor, and as a guy who sighs a lot. Preaching this requires no illustration, except the shared bonds of humanity.

   Verse 28 is a favorite, finding its way onto posters and cross-stitching – but when people think it means God is orchestrating everything in your life so you have a happy ending and all goes swimmingly well? A sign of 1^st World theology and a lucky pile of circumstance, not divine arrangement. Michael Gorman’s pointed words: “This means neither that God orders all the details of believers’ lives into a rose-garden experience, nor that God inflicts suffering. Rather, Paul proclaims that all things contribute to the final good of glorification, of conformity to Jesus.”

   Indeed: panta, “all things,” clearly refers to the sufferings of the present time (verse 18). And sunergein, “works together,” more likely connotes “assists,” or “are profitable.” John Calvin explains: “Paul does not mean that all things serve the comfort or convenience or worldly interests of believers; it is obvious that they do not. What he means is that they ‘assist our salvation.’” It’s about the assurance of a future with God, and how present sufferings can’t unravel that relationship with God and with others in the Body of Christ. Scripture does of course have the Genesis 45 and 50 belief – that God uses evil for good. But this is a far cry from God using little circumstances and happenings to make my life fun.

   People also love that “more than conquerors” (sometimes with militaristic images),which feels like winning at the game of life, with God’s powerful assistance… The verb means “hyper-conquer” (hypernikomen)! – and the context sobers up us who fantasize about being “more than conquerors”: “These words undoubtedly brought immense comfort and hope to the suffering Christians of the Roman house churches. Some probably suffered for lack of sufficient food. Others were likely victims of abuse from their masters. Still others may have endured economic reprisals for having abandoned pagan worship at their guilds, or emotional mistreatment from family members or fellow synagogue members for having confessed Jesus as Messiah” (Michael Gorman).

    On a dare, I preached on Genesis 29:15-28 a few summers ago (check it out!) – and surprised myself by how well it went. I used “In the morning, behold, it was Leah!” as a cadence / refrain throughout. By the end they were saying it out loud with me!

   It’s all about how disappointment works – in marriage, friendship, life, with the church, yourself, God even. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noticed how Jacob’s trickery earlier in the story boomeranged on him; the medieval rabbis imagined Jacob chiding Leah: “Why did you deceive me, daughter of a deceiver? Didn’t I call out Rachel in the night, and you answered me!” Her blunt reply? “Isn’t this how your father cried out Esau, and you answered him?” There’s also the rich irony of Laban’s assertion that “this is not done in our country,” giving the younger before the firstborn – which is exactly how it does wind up happening in the strange world of the Bible.

   Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52. In v. 51 Jesus asks, “Have you understood all this?” They answer, “Yes” – but I’m a little puzzled. I’m not sure Jesus’ stories are really supposed to be translatable into some logical proposition. He told stories with vivid images because that was the way he wanted to communicate what he had to say. The vivid image is his message. It’s all mind-boggling. A tee-tiny mustard seed burgeons into a big shrub which can accommodate birds. Treasure hidden: how often do you find such a thing? What’s the nuance? The joy? The finding? That it’s hidden? That it’s precious? That sacrifice is required? The answer is Yes – and more. Pearls, and then the pearl; I love it that the Greek word for pearl is margarita – although I may not share that (or sing the Jimmy Buffet song as our anthem!).

   If I make a connection for people, it might be revisiting the unforgettable, moving ending of the film Good Will Hunting. On the advice of his therapist, Will drops his new job and his settled life and drives off to find the girl. He’s full of joy and hope – but even those he abandons are filled with joy that he’s gone.

   And then Rick Lischer, in his great book on the parables, passes along a quirky reading of the hidden treasure from a sermon he stumbled upon: “‘When Jesus was taken from the cross, they hid his body in a tomb and then sealed it lest someone find him. For 3 days, Jesus himself was the Treasure hidden in the field; for 3 days he was the seed lying dormant in the ground. He was a human parable of God’s love and power.’ It is fair to say that neither Jesus nor the author of Matthew’s Gospel intended that to be the meaning of the parable. Nevertheless, the preacher, not schooled in the church’s rich tradition of theological interpretation, has managed to speak in perfect continuity with the tradition and declare something ‘new.’”

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

What can we say August 2? 10th after Pentecost

    Let’s start with the Epistle, which clergy should ponder even if it’s not your preaching text this week, and the Gospel before my longer reflection on Jacob wrestling with… well, who was that? – which I’ll be preaching on, and I suspect you should too!

   Romans 9:1-5. Michael Gorman introduces the section, Romans 9-11, noting how theological and practical it is: “It celebrates the mystery and magnificence of God’s mercy… It is not, however, for the faint of heart. It may be best to begin where Paul ends, ‘O the depth of the riches, wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgment and how inscrutable his ways!” (11:33). Not bad to begin this sermon – or any sermon! – this way.

  Notice Paul’s intense sorrow and anguish over unbelief. What do I feel when I see it out there? I ignore it, or I’ve normalized it – or I get frustrated. Paul issues “an outburst of sacrificial, or cruciform love” (Gorman, noting Paul’s willingness to be cured – like Jesus was [Galatians 3:11], and to forfeit his own salvation for them!).

   Of course, Paul maybe doth protest too much: “I am not lying!” So defensive! And yet so effusive in his adulation of Israel. Anti-semites never read Romans 9: “To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs.” Exactly. We Christians would always do well to reflect with endless gratitude and joyful solidarity with our Jewish neighbors.

   Matthew 14:13-21. Jesus’ habit – that he “withdrew to a deserted place” – is exemplary. Is he really “alone” in this “deserted place”? Hardly! Solitude is being alone – and not alone at all, the antithesis of loneliness, which can happen in a crowded, fun-loving room. Notice the crowds heard of and invaded his private, quiet space. Always the way in ministry, isn’t it?

   Notice Jesus’ “interruptibility.” This is the ministerial life, and also the ideal life of the laity, as we zigzag between the discipline of time alone with God and then being willing to be interrupted to respond to a person needing mercy. Jesus’ “compassion”: the Greek, esplangnisthe, is so evocative, meaning an inward turmoil, a twisting of the guts. Jesus really feels what he feels for the people. He’s not ordering them around or judging them; his entrails get all contorted, like a woman’s womb in labor.

   Hard not to admire his reply to the disciples informing him of the obvious – that the crowd is hungry: “You give them something to eat.” Emphasis on the you. The 5 loaves and 2 fishes were commemorated in an unforgettable mosaic in the little church on the shore of Galilee. My questions, raised in a sermon I preached on this text in Duke Chapel a few summers back (which I’d commend to you as the best I have to offer), are Wouldn’t a better miracle have been to have produced just enough for the crowd instead of all the leftovers? What did they do with the leftovers? Worship the bread (in Catholic style)? Distribute it to the poor? Why the waste? Or is it a story that shows God’s lavishness, that God really does give us more than enough – what Sam Wells calls a “superabundance”?

   At Duke I told about Dorothy Day giving away a big diamond ring to a poor person. Who says it should be sold and distributed according to the world’s calculus? Maybe God wants fabulous things for the poor as well. I’d encourage the preacher to think of moments of God’s superabundance. I told about an ordination I preached in Haiti. 

 We had a lovely service planned, a nice dinner, and appropriate gifts for the ordinand. But we got the idea of loading extra suitcases full of Oreos for the kids (and grownup kids). It was a giddy feast, unexpected, yes a bit wasteful – but God’s like that, right? {Check out my daughter's painting of one child there!}

   The leftovers simply amaze me. In my Duke Chapel sermon, I explored this at some length.  Jesus should have dazzled them with precisely the amount of food needed! Or maybe he should have been like even our churches, giving them just a smidgeon to get by, questioning them sternly regarding why they were out of food…. 

 But there is this lavishness, this bounty, this superabundance. Sam Wells has written so profoundly on this aspect of God’s nature, and what it means for us as a Church (in God’s Companions, for instance). 

   Genesis 32:22-31. Sermons on this are so – personal? Here’s one I preached a while back. It’s inspiring (and quotable!) to look to Frederick Buechner’s “The Magnificent Defeat,” which I suspect is way better in the reading than in the talking it out loud? Our text is one you just hear, stare at and then just marvel. I’m not sure there’s a lesson or a takeaway at all. It’s Wow, what an amazing night for Jacob.

   I’m tempted, as we all are, to psychologize. I dig Sara Bareilles’s song from Waitress – of a woman who’s lost her self somewhere along the way, like Jacob: “Most days I don’t recognize myself – I’m not anything I used to be… I still remember that girl: She’s imperfect but she tries, she is good but she lies, she is hard on herself, she is broken but won’t ask for help… she is lonely most of the time, she is all this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie /Not what I asked for, sometimes life just slips in thru a backdoor, I would give it up for a chance to start over and rewrite an ending or two for that girl I knew.”

   The Bible doesn't speak of not being the person you used to be. But it gets at the heart of human existence, and is "biblical" without being in the Bible - and the song is the sort of secular song one could use in worship without needing to baptize it....

   Edgy and aggressive, yet alienated and floundering: Jacob gets jumped – or did he do the jumping? and he wrestles all night with – God? an angel? A stranger? Himself?  Preachers here can just tease and ask, no need to answer, no need to choose. 

   I may open my sermon by telling about the Father's Day night I came home alone to a dark house. Everyone in my family had to be somewhere. I was feeling a touch sorry for myself. Unlocked the door, and before I could turn on the light, I was grabbed by a screaming man who wrestled me down. Terrified, it was only when he laughed that I knew it was Love that had attacked me in the dark. It was my son, who'd parked down the street and was determined to surprise me. Was I ever...

   I wonder what sudden assaults we undergo. There is actual assault, of course... but then, the Pandemic? A sudden, unanticipated, unsought encounter with truth? What about news, like "it's malignant," or "your dad died"? - and you are face to face with horror, hope, death, life... God. Perhaps here I will bring in the subject of the loss of my dad. Moments in history: George Floyd's death said Now is finally the time to deal with it. Harvey Weinstein's ugly story said Now is finally the time to deal with it. Jesus, after all, was above everything else so very urgent in saying Now. Decide Now. Follow now.

   Brueggemann's insights intrigue. Noting how Jacob is unsure who's attacking him, Brueggemann suggests "It is like that in a nightmare; identities are not clear; nor are they constant." He then proposes that Jacob thought "this man is surely Esau." "Perhaps it is God who blesses; perhaps it is Esau who haunts; more like it is both." What he teases out is this: "We are invited to see how, in our own vexation, the struggle with siblings and confrontation with God are meshed together. At daybreak, we know this much of hard truth: when we do not love our siblings whom we see, we cannot love God whom we cannot see" - and then he glimpses in this those twin "great commandments" to love God and love neighbor. "Both meet us at night."

   Can we read a text from the perspective of a hymn? Charles Wesley, before composing “Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown,” must have spent a lot of time ruminating on this story. Estranged from his brother for decades, with a troubled marriage, Jacob is alone, anxious, on the run, evidently thrashing up against the limits of existence.

   He can’t even get a good night’s sleep. Terror of all terrors, he’s tackled by… well, it’s too dark to see. A robber? Is it Esau? An angel? God? The ambiguity is the reality for Jacob – although the implication is that God is somehow, mysteriously in the thick of this life-threatening assault. Wesley’s surprising insight is that he imagines Jacob actually inviting the perilous encounter: “Come, O thou traveler.” Come. Bring it on. Jacob never shrank from trouble, and instigated plenty of it on his own. He’s a fighter, someone who weirdly enjoys conflict. The Bible portrays a God who enjoys it as well. What an odd religion Israel and then Christianity have: we argue with God; we can do combat with the Almighty. God allows this. God welcomes this. God seems to want a relentless, ferocious openness, honesty and grappling from us.

   There may be something in here about how we think about strangers. A “traveler unknown” arrives in Jacob’s camp. Who are the strange travelers in our world? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reads Genesis and Exodus as if God is telling the truth about the stranger to each one of us: “If you are human, so is he. If he is less than human, so are you. You must fight the hatred in your heart as I once fought the greatest ruler and the strongest empire in the ancient world on your behalf. I made you into the world’s archetypal strangers so that you would fight for the rights of strangers… Though they are not in your image, says God, they are nonetheless in Mine. There is only one reply strong enough to answer the question: Why should I not hate the stranger? Because the stranger is me.” Indeed, Wesley’s hymn presses the traveler: “Tell me if thy name is Love.” God is in the stranger. Love is in the surprise encounter in the dark. God is with Jacob – by being against him, by wrestling with him.

   Jacob doesn’t try to escape. The hymn grasps this: “With thee all night I mean to stay and wrestle till the break of day.” Does Wesley’s hymn help us see this, which might be implied in Genesis 32? Jacob has chutzpah, a cockiness that dares to fight anybody, God included. And he fights even God to something of a tie! And he isn’t merely a survivor. As always, he’s getting something to take home: “I won’t let you go unless you bless me.” He had stolen the blessing from his brother – and now he insists on blessing again. Is it a model for prayer: we grapple with God, then we grab hold of God and won’t let go until we get the blessing? Isn't Jacob the surprise winner of this nocturnal battle?

   Just as the sun begins to rise, Jacob limps away from the scene. He is wounded, marked by the encounter. There are pains that come from our battles with life and God. Sacks speaks of “honorable scars.” In Graham Greene’s novel, The End of the Affair, a woman notices what used to be a wound on her lover’s shoulder, and contemplates the advancing wrinkles in his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of a 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." Jesus' scars persisted, and they still do. Jacob is scarred; he limps, his wound the badge of honor from having engaged mightily with the Almighty.

   Jesus, we might recall, had scars after Easter, scars he earned when he gave life to all of us, not blotted out by the resurrection (John 20:27). Frederick Buechner envisioned this when he preached on Jacob limping away from his contest with God: “Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.” Genesis 32 isn’t about Jesus. Or to the eyes of faith, is it? Wesley’s hymn imagines an inquiry into the name of this nocturnal stranger, guessing that it’s Love – with a capital L – and finally, and delightfully concluding, “Tis Love! Thou diedst for me.”

   I love the “I won’t let you go until you bless me.” Is this the exemplary prayer? The blessing somehow though is the struggle; the blessing somehow is the wound, causing him to limp away. Buechner understood this so well. Sort of exposes those “touched by an angel” stories as vapid; if an angel touches you, you’re wounded.

   And I love to play with Bible names. Jacob would have been the Hebrew name of Jesus’ brother James. Did they ever wrestle? What is it to engage with God, barely survive, and stagger away? No simplistic prosperity Gospel here, and please don’t then simplify or trivialize it. Watch Jacob in the shadows, and be lost in wonder.

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