What can we say August 14? 10th after Pentecost

   Isaiah 5:1-7 feels like late summer, outside, poking around in a vineyard that’s not doing so well, reminding us perhaps of Jesus being annoyed by that unfruitful tree. For us, a winery is a destination. In Bible times, based on what archaeologists have uncovered, wine presses were all over the place, common, as everyday people worked in vineyards, stomping grapes, processing the wine, close to the earth. Gisela Kreglinger, a theologian who grew up in a wine-producing family, has written a fascinating book, The Spirituality of Wine, well worth exploring! A barren vineyard would have raised questions about the roots, the weather, the soil, bugs, or the laziness of workers!

   Our text feels also like a love song, echoing the Song of Songs! But the tenderness turns to critique, with wickedly harsh wordplay in Hebrew: God looked for mishpat (justice) but found only mispach (bloodletting); God sought zedekah (righteousness) but found only ze’akah (a yelp of pain). Memorable, haunting words that cannot have been well-received by the smug who first heard them. Could a clever preacher devise some modern English equivalents?

   If you think you’ll preach on this, drive to a vineyard, get in a conversation with a laborer or two, or the vintner. Ask about frustrations. Get the feel of the place. Get the feel of what God felt. Or ask people around your parish or neighborhood of times they felt they had labored hard but earned nothing but exasperation in return. You’ll be getting close then to the heart of this text.

   Hebrews 11:29-12:2 is a great text, so preachable. Paul says Don’t boast, but Hebrews boasts – rightly – about the heroes of their heritage of faith. How cool is the “time will fail me” in v. 32! – kin to the scene in Sleepless in Seattle, when Jonah springs a phone call with radio therapist Dr. Marcia Fieldstone on his dad, Sam. She asks, “What was so special about your wife?” He responds, “Well, how long is your program?” The preacher can tantalize people by playing on this, and just rattling off names and brief summaries of the exploits of Bible heroes (including those saints who've lived past Bible times!).

   How intriguing is Hebrews’s spin that “They grew powerful out of weakness” – a common biblical theme, and one re-popularized in our day by Jean Vanier, Brené Brown and others, including closer to home my non-leadership leadership book, Weak Enough to Lead. Where’s your power? Not in your skills, experiences or strengths. Look into your weak spots, your woundedness.

   “Lay aside every weight” and whatever “clings.” We’re toting around heavy stuff, like an albatross or huge bags of krap we think we’ll need. It “clings” to you, sticky stuff. Let it go – you who preach, and then invite those to whom you preach to do the same. Go light – because it’s like running a very, very long race. If you aren’t a runner, or even if you are, interview a few runners. 

  Review the text and see what runners say to you about running, discipline, the mental battle, injuries, cheerleading, whatever. Luke Timothy Johnson’s image of an Olympic Marathon is spot on:  “The runners begin far away from the city in some remote place, move through growing crowds and greater fatigue, and finally emerge in the stadium before a massed assembly of spectators who applaud as they complete their final lap.”

   And the “cloud of witnesses” image is so powerful! I preached a few years back at our conference’s memorial service for clergy and their spouses who had died in the past year. I tried to think about tears – which are little droplets of water. What is a cloud, but little droplets of water all together? And that such little droplets are at their most colorful and beautiful – when? – at the end of the day, as the sun is setting. We have lost great ones, and we have tears – but those tears are gathered up into a cloud, and the refraction of light is stunning, lovely.

   It’s all about sticking close to Jesus, who shed his weights of glory to be one of us, one with us. Notice the text doesn’t refer to Jesus as the one “who endured the cross” but “for the sake of joy endured…” Whose joy? Ours? Really his! Jesus did what he did – for his own joy. It gives Jesus immense joy when we enter into this dispensation of weakness, travelling light, gawking a bit over the heroes of yesteryear and striving to be one with them.

   Luke 12:49-56. No sweet, gentle, friendly Jesus here. He’s calling down “Fire!” He brings not peace, not the “comfort” people want so much from church, but “division.” And it’s a most peculiar kind of division, a particular kind of division, not just any old division, and certainly not the political division we suffer from nowadays. Jesus is big enough, serious enough, and radical enough that he’s not a balm to families, but actually divides households, parents against children. So many stories abound. Maybe you have your own. I do. And we have someone like St. Francis of Assisi (who could be an addendum to the Hebrews 11 list!) winding up cut off from his father Pietro because of his following Christ (as depicted so powerfully in Giotto's fresco). Certainly Christian faith doesn’t make families chipper or hold them together. It might, but often does not. Idolatry of the family is one of the naggingly pernicious blockers to people following Jesus – again, growing out of our nasty tendency to think that the Christian life is about being nice, or my goodness, or as a prop to our prearranged, preferred lives. Serious adherence to Jesus inevitably breaks down human relationships.

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