What can we say April 30? 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.

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   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.