Of course, just days after our national holiday (as Christians celebrate their religious freedom by not showing up in worship!) - we have to weigh Jesus and July4. My blog from yesteryear still holds...
I'm sure tempted to preach Psalm 48! The whole art of preaching Psalms, so pivotal in the history of Christendom (see Augustine, Luther and Calvin among many others!) is huge - and treated, I think, fairly well in my book (with Clint McCann) Preaching the Psalms.
In this case, the gift of a city - really any city for such a nomadic, recently enslaved people - is huge, the cause of much gratitude. This Psalm's tender appreciation for the city - I mean, it is like a woman in labor, birds finding a home - is lovely, and if you've been to Jerusalem, reason for wonder. God and place matter - together. I can conceive of a sermon that does what the Psalm suggests - simply walking around Jerusalem, speaking of its walls, towers, various buildings and features, and the pilgrims who've come from all over, full of faith and joy. Jesus chose this stage as the climax of his mission. How crucial must it be?
Before turning to the Gospel, I think it is worth passing along a word of
encouragement to preachers that I cite at the end of Weak Enough to Lead;
it is from Michael Knowles, and reminds me that we preachers need encouragement
more than we need material: “The vast majority of preachers throughout the
entire history of the Christian church have conducted their ministries in
either relative or absolute obscurity. And they, by virtue of such
obscurity, best exemplify cruciform preaching as Paul intends it.
Wherever preachers stand before their congregations conscious of the folly of
the Christian message, the weakness of their efforts, and the apparent
impossibility of the entire exercise… there, Paul’s homiletic of cross and resurrection
is at work. The one resource that genuinely faithful preachers of the
gospel have in abundance is a parade of daily reminders as to their own
inadequacy, unworthiness and – dare we admit it? – lack of faithfulness.
Yet these are the preconditions for grace, the foundations for preaching that
relies on God ‘who raises the dead.’”
Our Epistle offers a word our people need
to hear – although probably not as much as we the clergy need to hear it. In 2
Corinthians 12:2-10, Paul weirdly boasts of his profounder-than-yours spiritual
experience (as he had also boasted of his zealous adherence to the Torah). The
latest on Paul is N.T. Wright’s odd and yet
lovely new biography. He places this dramatic moment during the “decade of
silence” between Paul’s earliest conversion and then his hyper-activity in
missionary journeys and epistle-writing. Paul was “snatched up to the third
heaven” (and you have to love Wright’s aside: “Since heaven was subdivided into
seven, this itself might have seemed a bit of a letdown”). Paul’s pathetically
attempted modesty is laughable: in the way people say “I’m asking for a friend,”
Paul refers to “someone” who had this experience.
But to any who place much value at all on
having some supreme spiritual moment, Paul immediately plunges back to earth to
speak of his “thorn in the flesh.” What was it? Wright speculates: a bodily
ailment? A recurring temptation? A recurring nightmare of the stoning of
Stephen? The continuing resistance to the gospel on the part of people he loved
dearly – not just Jews in general, but his own parents, siblings and closest
friends?
Paul’s credentials to be an apostle have
nothing to do with scintillating experiences or personal holiness. It’s simply
that Jesus told him to be an apostle. His qualification? Just one on that
resume: weakness – which Paul had in spades, as do we all. “My power is
perfected in weakness” – which Wright calls “exactly what Paul needed to hear,
and exactly what the Corinthians did not want to hear.” People in our world,
including those to whom you preach, do not want to hear this either. We turn to
“strengths-finders,” and you’d best be strong too. We want skills, jammed
resumes, dazzling productivity. But Paul’s message is the antithesis of all
this: "My grace
is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. So, I will boast
all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in
me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions,
and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
Paul’s rhetoric about the hope in
weakness, that God’s weakness is stronger than our strength (by light years,
not an inch, and not by a last-second basket), shows us that weakness might be
the key to a great many things for us, including leadership – which is what I
tried to explicate in my newest book, Weak Enough to Lead.
Weakness isn’t something you grudgingly acknowledge. Weakness isn’t something
to be overcome, or you do well despite inevitable weaknesses. Weakness is who you are, what you are. God is
there, not fixing it but using it, the shattered opening to the flourishing
life of God who is met not in the stalwart, tall, good-looking or capable, but
in the broken, the wobbly, the unable, even the disabled.
Mark 6:1-13 is rich with preaching
possibilities. The existence of Jesus’ siblings: at this point in the story,
they are cause for doubt (like hey, we’ve seen him with his brothers and
sisters, he’s just a guy!); later they will be (for me at least) a ringing
endorsement of Jesus as Christ (I mean, if James, his brother, who’d played,
slept and certainly fought with him as a boy, became a leader of the church
that worshipped him? – Who better to say He
was just a guy if he was just a guy?).
Jesus sent his disciples out two by two –
with next to nothing. They weren’t
paupers when he met them! The fishing
business was semi-lucrative; tax collectors were prosperous. The disciples were downwardly mobile. What
intrigues is this: after sending them out nearly penniless, we hear that “They cast out
many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.”
According to the Bible’s logic, there is an inextricable connection between
them divesting themselves of comforts, and success in ministry. In Acts 2 and 4
we hear that the first Christians shared possessions – and not coincidentally “Wonders
and signs were done… and the Lord added to their number.”
St. Francis of Assisi took Mark
6 literally. He and his friars took nothing for their journeys, no gold, no
silver. They begged. I’m struck by what Ulrich Luz (in his great little book, Matthew
in History) had to say about Matthew 10 (the parallel to Mark 6): “Almost never in
its history has the church resembled what is here described.… The church has
not consisted of itinerant radicals; quite the contrary, the radicals, whenever
they existed, were considered suspect… The idea of itinerant radicalism
disappeared almost entirely. The churches were extremely successful in ignoring
it. No wonder: a church that constructs cathedrals and that offers not only
food but both houses and cars to its workers cannot appreciate this kind of
tradition.”
Want another illustration? St. Francis’s
contemporary, St. Dominic, lived a life of humility, holiness, and service,
taking our Mark 6 text seriously – and literally. On pilgrimage to Rome, he
visited the Pope, who took him on a personal tour of the gilded, opulent papal
palace and the sumptuous, glittering Lateran basilica. Alluding to what Peter and John had said to the
lame man in Acts 3, the pope boasted, “No longer need we say ‘Silver and gold
have I none.’” But the humble Dominic answered, “Yes, and at the same time the
church can no longer say ‘Rise up and walk.’”
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My new book, Worshipful, now has an online study guide with video clips.
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