What can we say January 29? 4th after Epiphany

    Before turning to our texts, I think it’s worth sharing with you an encouraging word for preachers from Michael Knowles’s rumination on today’s Epistle: “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.’”

   All 3 of our texts are quite familiar – making them (I think) surprisingly hard to preach, because they are so… familiar. It’s tough to capture the shock and awe that Micah’s first hearers, or Paul’s first readers, or those gathered on a Galilean hillside must have experienced. Maybe naming the surprise that was theirs might help pew-sitters this Sunday. Quite oddly for me, I have written a book on both the Micah and Matthew texts. Doesn't guarantee a good sermon though, does it?

   Micah 6:1-8 turned out to be more intriguing than I’d imagined when I was assigned this one to write upon. Micah (meaning “Who is like the Lord?”) was from rural Moresheth-Gath – and in those tumultuous 8th century days, the rural towns bore the brunt of foolish policy-making in the big city of Jerusalem. Would a rural church pastor dare join in with Micah complaining about policy in urban places?

   Ellen Davis, btw, gave me a great conversation online in my Bible study on Micah. So much wisdom!

   The question, “What does the Lord require?” needs parsing. The verb, require, is a translation of darash, which is not like a teacher requiring homework or a judge requiring punishment. Darash is the way a child requires its mother’s love, a flower requires sunshine, a lover requires the beloved’s presence. And God darashes 3 things, which may really be 1 thing viewed from 3 perspectives.

   1. Do justice, not think about justice or believe in justice or hope for justice. DO justice. And “justice” is our rendering of mishpat, which isn’t fairness or getting what is deserved. Justice, mishpat, is when the poorest are cared for. There’s that statue of justice outside the Supreme Court – showing that “justice is blind.” God’s justice isn’t blind at all. God sees, God cares. God isn’t unbiased. God is immensely biased, toward us, hoping for the best conceivable outcome for our lives.

   2. Love kindness. Kindness seems vapid, although we should be kind, especially in such an unkind era. The Hebrew is hesed, steadfast love, covenant loyalty. Really it’s about mercy. Pope Francis proclaimed 2016 as “The Year of Mercy” (and he showed mercy to any and everybody) – but God knows we still need it in 2023 and every year. God is all mercy. We are called to be merciful (as the Beatitudes will show!).

   3. Walk humbly. In a cocky world, we are asked to be humble – not humiliated, but humble, which really is nothing other than the truth about ourselves. We are weak, vulnerable, in need, dependent upon God, not all that brilliant or strong after all. And we walk, not standing still. You go – for God.

   Matthew 5:1-12. Jesus, as full of desire for the wholeness and love of people as God speaking through Micah, began his sermon to a bunch of nobodies by blessing them. The Beatitudes aren’t commandments: go be these ways! What we see is that God blesses what the world despises. Matthew has “poor in spirit,” but Luke 6’s version has just plain “poor.” Most Americans will want to keep “in spirit,” but it’s both, always. Jesus blessed those who “mourn.” We pity them – but in God’s heart they are blessed. Jesus admires the “meek.” Put that on your resume and see how swiftly you lose an interview! But with Jesus, meekness is holy. Help your people feel the shockingly counter-cultural feel of all this! No conventional wisdom or trite soundbytes here.

   Jesus blessed those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Not those who ARE righteous, just those seeking it, craving it, grabbing what they can and discover then they really want more. Then we see his blessing of the “merciful” – and it’s reflexive: they receive mercy. We could spend our lives well just striving for mercy; we’re all desperate for it already. Jesus knows – and simultaneously blesses the peacemakers, and those who suffer for righteousness...  So much in this rich text.

   What fascinates me is thinking of people whose photo you might attach to each Beatitude. St. Francis? Dorothy Day? Your grandmother? I suspect though Jesus didn’t think of these as eight distinct things. They are, again, really one. The meek can be merciful; those who hunger and thirst for righteousness make peace. And so forth. Stories of holy, courageous, blessed lives always work well in preaching!

   The real picture to attach to these Beatitudes is Jesus himself. It’s virtually autobiographical. Jesus was all these things. He’s showing us what it’s like to be close to his heart.

   So to preach these texts: I think I'll begin by inviting people to imagine what God is like - and some mix of that darash-kind -of-God, and Jesus looking with deep care and compassion at people on a hillside above Galilee. That's the kind of God we're talking about. He dreams holy dreams for us. He longs for the happiest, most joyful life for us. He's not a commander so much as he's a yearner, and is willing to show the way by being our best selves so we could see and believe. I might rifle through each thing (do justice, hunger for righteousness, etc.) or pick a couple. Maybe meekness, which is so out of style (and fits walking humbly): where have I seen this around our church or in the world? And the merciful, or peacemakers: where are these guys needed in a clashing society? Can I find a story where mercy was enacted, and the world changed?

   What about the church? Is the church poor, meek (yes?? - in this declining culture), merciful and a doer of justice (not so often)? When has the church looked like Micah 6 or Matthew 5? Can we dream of such a church? This is a church that does justice because it has received mercy, that loves hesed because this is what we hunger and thirst for, and walks humbly because we acknowledge joyfully our meekness.

   So it's not Go thou and do likewise! but painting a beautiful image of what holy living looks like, so we'll be attracted, so we'll discover we already have more meekness and mourning than we let on in public... How good of Jesus to bless them and us with such a humble, holy, soaring vision of life with him!

   1 Corinthians 1:18-31. As a preacher, I worry that when I preach on “the Word of the Cross is folly,” it will turn out that my words about the Cross will be folly. The gravest risk for preachers who’ve grown up in our thin, vaguely revivalistic environment, is that we will minimize, individualize, trivialize and thus confuse and empty the Cross of its richer meaning. If you had time to read N.T. Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking the Meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion, you’d be well-served; suffice it to say that his endeavor is to broaden the context and significance of Jesus’ crucifixion, which is more than Jesus died for our sins. Such eloquence: “When Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place…  The death of Jesus was the moment when the great gate of human history, bolted with iron bars and overgrown with toxic weeds, burst open so that the Creator’s project of reconciliation between heaven and earth could at last be set in powerful motion… Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross.” A revolution in all of creation began, and we aren’t saved from the trouble but are called to be active participants in God’s undeniable labor of reconciliation.

   We have pretty crosses adorning our churches, not to mention jewelry, posters, clothing… The cross in the first centuries was horrific, from which you would avert your gaze. Christian art even avoided the cross for several centuries, and even then the first ones were golden and bejeweled (Robin Jenson’s The Cross: History, Art & Controversy is a lovely study of the cross in historic art). Consider the first instance of a cross – in that laughable graffiti found near the Palatine Hill in Rome – depicting a man bowing down before a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, with the inscription, “Alexamenos worships his God,” clearly ridiculing a late second century convert to Christianity.

   We speak of “apologetics,” the intellectual defense of the faith. Paul surrenders before beginning, making zero apologies for the absurd, unexpected and not prophesied idea that the Messiah would not crush his foes but be crushed by them; the Scriptures themselves indicated that being killed on a tree was an offense. How can the preacher resuscitate the disgust, the offense, except just to name it? Or maybe we show horrific images, maybe von Grünewald's Christ, pierced hundreds of times, 

or maybe that startling bronze crucifixion by Floriano Bodini… This is God? Looks entirely God-forsaken – which is a pitch-perfect way of speaking of it, since Jesus screamed in misery, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”  So many Protestant churches suffer from adornment with slick, brass, polished wooden crosses that are allegedly empty - due to Easter? The crucifix tells the deeper truth of God's heart. As Rick Lischer put it in his memoir about his son's death (Stations of the Heart), when battling the cancer, they looked into a church and saw a crucifix - prompting them to know this was the place for them, for such a church, and such a God, "is not freaked out by death."

   God certainly gave us brains God would have us use in the life of faith; but the perils of being so smart and learned are many – perhaps especially for the clergy. Martin Luther, when castigating some foe, loved to label him “Mr. Smart-Aleck.” Anthony of Padua was one of Francis of Assisi’s most brilliant followers – but Francis was exceedingly wary of the life of scholarship, fearing that books and learning would become property to be protected, and would puff people up. Finally and reluctantly, in a fascinating letter, he agreed to allow Anthony to pursue a life in scholarship, but only “on the condition that you do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion.”

   Speaking of St. Francis, and the folly of the Cross: while most devout Christians have gazed at the cross and felt considerable relief that Jesus suffered in their place, Francis longed so deeply to be one with Jesus that he prayed, “My Lord Jesus Christ, two graces I ask of you before I die: the first is that in my life I may feel, in my soul and body, as far as possible, that sorrow which you, tender Jesus, underwent in the hour of your most bitter passion; the second is that I may feel in my heart, as far as possible, the abundance of love with which you, son of God, were inflamed, so as willingly to undergo such a great passion for us sinners.” And with that, a seraph flew toward him and burned wounds, the holy stigmata, into his hands, feet and side, which bled intermittently until his death two years later.

   If we ponder the cross, we try to choose among or amalgamate various theories of the atonement. I love Robert Jenson’s remark (in Systematic Theology): “The Gospels tell a powerful and biblically integrated story of the Crucifixion; this story is just so the story of God’s act to bring us back to himself at his own cost, and of our being brought back. There is no other story behind or beyond it that is the real story of what God does to reconcile us, no story of mythic battles or of a deal between God and his Son or of our being moved to live reconciled lives. The Gospel’s passion narrative is the authentic and entire account of God’s reconciling actions and our reconciliation, as events in his life and ours. Therefore what is first and principally required as the Crucifixion’s right interpretation is for us to tell this story to one another and to God as a story about him and about ourselves.” Wow. Can the preacher simply trust the story, which has worked for centuries, instead of over-explaining it?

   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), then weakness might be the key to a great many things for us, including leadership – which is what I tried to explicate in my book, Weak Enough to Lead. I address Paul in the final chapter, as Paul ingenuously plays on the weakness of the cross and his own, and how this is God’s true way of redemption in the world.