What can we say February 13? 6th after the Epiphany

    Three great texts present themselves to us in this longer-than-usual Epiphany season! Hard to choose. And daunting to figure out how best to allude to/play on Black History month. Some congregations are open/eager, others stiffen at the mere mention. Best not to castigate people for being racist or something they can't quite comprehend. How to use stories from Black history to illuminate the Gospel? I'm grateful for this conversation I had with Yale's Willie Jennings on "Jesus and... Race" (and here it is in podcast form!). And our church's Book of the Month is Clint Smith's amazing How the Word is Passed - a fresh perspective on these issues.

   Jeremiah 17:5-10. In our culture, where choices are matters of taste, personal preference, of little import, Jeremiah poses a deadly serious choice with all-encompassing consequences. Oddly, our people make such a choice, day after day, but never realizing the scope of what seem like little decisions over what to buy, watch, say, think or do. Preachers are to unveil how in a thousand little ways we are choosing for God, for wisdom, for holiness – or not.

   The images are profound, echoing this Sunday’s Psalm, the 1^st. Those who trust in mere mortals – those out there, whether politicians, bosses, salespeople, or lovers, or the more relied upon but least trustworthy mortals of all, ourselves! – are like a desert shrub in a parched place. Shriveled, lifeless, gasping for life. But those who trust in the Lord? Like a tree planted by the water. “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree” (Thomas Merton). The glory is hidden. What makes a tree thrive is in the dark, underground, unseen, even if you know it’s the river that provides the life up and through the trunk, branches, and leaves.

   Jeremiah’s warning is stupendous, and harrowing: “The heart is devious above all else… who can understand it?” The preacher’s task is to reveal to folks how duplicitous, how gullible, how easily duped the human heart is – theirs, of course, but mine too, even the hearts of the holiest. You talk yourself into… consumption, self-doubt, recrimination of others, political ideology: you name it. You’d think our hearts would be wiser, smarter, more potent somehow. God made the heart! But it’s malleable, easily tugged toward foolishness. We need mercy. We need healing. We need power we don’t have.

   1 Corinthians 15:12-20. When I was growing up, I pondered the strangely popular Peggy Lee hit, “Is That All There Is?” Not as profound as Paul, but reflecting on what’s left to do if this life is all there is: “Let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze, and have a ball.” Paul, having pointed out there are hundreds of people who saw Jesus after Easter morning, rhetorically quizzes his readers on the implications. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain… your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Two items matter especially: notice the resurrection is about liberation from sin! We think “Christ is risen; I get eternal life!” But in the Gospels and Epistles, it’s “Christ is risen; forgiveness is real.”

   And then how the reality of the tangible resurrection matters? vs possible spiritual spins on new life? Frederick Buechner put it best, in his longish quote from The Alphabet of Grace: “We can say that the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than the literal… Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity. Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points. But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this "miracle" of truth that never dies, the "miracle" of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the "miracle" of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.”

   Indeed. Listen to Sartre, Nietzsche, all the hollow existentialists and brilliant doubters of the supernatural, and you land where Paul did: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” No wonder people are cynical, jaded, anxious, depressed. Ours is to offer the radical alternative. If the preacher does slightly less, he/she is to be pitied, or maybe censured, if we had a mechanism to do such a thing.

   Luke 6:17-26. Jesus’ familiar “sermon on the mount” in Luke takes place “at a level place.” Jesus taught this stuff all over the place! Surely he spoke words like Luke 6 and the more familiar Matthew 5 many times and in many places. We might ask ourselves why Matthew 5 is in fact way more familiar. In The Beatitudes for Today, I concluded it is because Jesus, rather unpleasantly we might suppose, didn’t stop with his “blessed” sequence, but tacked on a “Woe” series. I tend to overhear Jesus’ tone as harsh, berating, judgmental: “Woe!” But maybe he was more plaintive, almost in tears, so deep was his love for those bearing such woes.

   And Jesus blesses, in Luke, not the poor in spirit – for that can be me, even while I live an indulgent, pampered life! It’s more simply “the poor.” Notice Jesus doesn’t say Glamorous are those poor! No idealization of poverty. But in Jesus’ heart they are blessed because of his regard for them. And it’s in the second person! Not blessed are those guys who are poor. No, it’s Blessed are you who are poor. He’s speaking with them – and has listened to them, understanding them and their plight and challenges, and virtues.

   The beatitudes, here or in Matthew, aren’t commands. They are blessings – or as Rebekah Eklund puts it in her fabulous new book, The Beatitudes Through the Ages (which I reviewed in Christian Century – and catch this great conversation she had with me on this text!), they express value judgments, a field of what matters in the heart of God, in the Gospel’s upside-down vision of worth.

   When I think of preaching on these or really any texts, I try to remember what Luke says here about Jesus’ first listeners. They “came to hear,” yes, but they also came “to be healed.” Both – although as they trudged through the discomforts of ancient travel, I’d bet their deepest fantasy was that they would be healed. People come broken. They need, and seek healing, something beyond what they can muster. Ours is to be sure the hear – not a clever homiletical tirade, but a life-giving word of hope, the word that itself creates what only God can do.

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   Check out my new book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.