What can we say May 12? Easter 7

   Yes, it's Mother's Day - and our texts give us the chance to name mothers without glorifying mothers...? Mary is among the early Christians gathered to decide what to do next in Acts 1. Can we ruminate on her a bit? I can never think of any better way to take note of it being Mother's Day than to reflect a while on the mother of all mothers, the mother of our Lord. No big moral takeaways. Just her, her life with him, her life after he's gone.

    Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 narrates the choice – by the casting of lots – of Matthias to fill out the twelve, Judas having turned out to be… Judas. Jesus clearly didn’t have precisely 12 – count ‘em! – disciples at every moment in time. It’s a symbolic number. And yet the simple existence of 12, even if we fudge and 3 others have tagged along, embodies Jesus’ mission to redeem the people of Israel. I like things like this: the church, simply by being the church, fulfills God’s vision for redemption. What if we chose our leaders for our congregations this way? How boring is it to put bankers and accountants on Finance? What if you put the person no good with numbers but with a passion for the poor on Finance? The kingdom might just dawn.

   Our two Johannine texts leave me a little cold. It’s as if Jesus, and then John, tried to be philosophically reflective, offering high-minded but rambling explications of intimate relationships within God and with us. Confounding, possessive pronouns abounding.

   There are little tidbits pregnant with preaching possibility. 1 John 5:9-13 is fixated on “testimony.” The Greek is the same as “martyr.” And, the testimony in question is that “God gave us eternal life, in his Son.” That’s worth unpacking. Most Christians think of eternal life as quite distinguished from the Son, or at most that it was the Son’s death and resurrection that opened up the path to heaven. But this eternal life is in God’s Son, not me living on forever playing golf or enjoying my family. It’s finding myself in him, in his Body, so it’s all about the Son, nothing else – and it will be way more than enough.

   John 17:6-19 intrigues. Jesus – on the last night of his earthly life, at the Last Supper – says of the followers God gave him, “I have been glorified in them.” Really? You’d think he’d be embarrassed all the time. This text explores the “in but not of the world” notion. Most of my people, me included, are very much in the world and most assuredly of the world too! Or they are of the world and so therefore not much in the world as Jesus’ witnesses. I love to picture John writing all this. “I protected them; not one was lost!” – at which point the secretary interjected, “Uh, what about Judas?” “Oh, right, he lost one. But that was God’s plan.” Problems abound.

   So I will preach, as I’m fond of doing, on the Psalter: Psalm 1. My book, co-authored with Clint McCann, Preaching the Psalms, is still in print, and not bad! Psalm 1 is the exception among the Psalms, being a blessing more than a prayer. It mirrors what we read in Proverbs and the life of wisdom, the choice between two ways. Wisdom is so worthwhile to explore in preaching. If I ask rhetorically, Can you name smart people? Or good looking people? Or successful people? my listeners nod. Then I’ll say But can you name someone who is wise? They look befuddled. Most, if pressed, resort to somebody who’s dead: my grandmother was wise!

   What is wisdom, anyhow? In my introduction to Proverbs in the Wesley One Volume Commentary, I wrote “Ralph Waldo Emerson mocked Harvard as having ‘all the branches of knowledge, but none of the roots.’ Wisdom is deep underground, not just lying around on the surface. Wisdom thinks about the purpose of life. Wisdom is serenity and patience. Wisdom must be cultivated over the length of life. Wisdom treasures what is old, believing what is ancient survived for good reason. Wisdom is born out of the cauldron of experience: hard times, grief and sacrifice. You can’t just pick up an idea and suddenly become wise the way you crack open a fortune cookie. You live it, wait on it, test it, let it seep in from the good earth through the soles of your feet. You begin to notice you are becoming one with God who is Wisdom.”

   Our Psalm speaks of the one who is “happy” or “blessed.” The Hebrew, ‘ashre, is echoed in Jesus’ Beatitudes, which aren’t directives on how to be happy or blessed. Jesus looks at those who are poor in spirit or merciful, and he blesses them. The Psalm looks at the wise life, and pronounces God’s blessing. 

   "Blessed" is how Jesus, Mary's son, began his preaching. "Blessed" began the Psalter, which Mary taught him, and recited from memory. "Blessed" was what Elizabeth uttered to Mary in the Visitation.

   "Blessed": it’s not a still life entirely. It’s a way (the Hebrew is derek) – a road, a moving forward. I love Pasolini’s great Italian film The Gospel according to St. Matthew, where Jesus is always walking briskly, teaching over his shoulders to breathless disciples trying to keep up. And yet this moving way is also a sigh. It involves meditating, the Hebrew hagah meaning to breathe, to sigh.

    I’ll illustrate with someone like a man in my first parish. I asked him once how he came to be so wise. As wise people do, he demurred, professing I’m not wise. When I pressed him, he said Well, I go to work early in the morning. When I get home, I do some chores around the house. After dinner I help my wife clean up, then I go down into my basement, where I pull up an empty peach crate. I sit on it for a couple of hours, and just think.

   The Psalm’s vivid image is of a tree planted by the water – a reminder that wisdom happens underground, unseen, not flashy on the surface. Ellen Charry’s comment (in her consistently splendid Brazos commentary on Psalms 1-50) is spot on: “Even if God is silent in the short term, the faithful triumph spiritually because they are the strong trees that bear fruit and vibrant leaves; they know themselves to be so, and that is rewarding.”

   I won’t be able to resist alluding to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents, those tree-like beings who help save the day in The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard explains their peculiar language, Entish: “It’s a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.” Of course, I’ll drag those quote out, so very slowly, to drive home the point.

What can we say May 5? Easter 6

    Acts 10:44-48. Plopped down in the middle of a dramatic narrative, that of Cornelius and the opening of the Church and its Gospel to Gentiles. Considerable confusion – not surprising, with no seminaries or tomes of theology yet! – over who can be baptized and when. The pivot is simply the surprising movement of the Spirit. How did they have a clue what it was, or how to measure its authenticity? 

 Willie Jennings has an eloquent comment: “In a quiet corner of the Roman Empire, in the home of a centurion, a rip in the fabric of space and time has occurred. All those who would worship Jesus may enter a new vision of intimate space and a new time that will open up endless new possibilities of life with others.” How hopeful (for them, and for us!) is the phrase, “even on the Gentiles”! 

   Psalm 98 is … Easter-ish? A new song, God has done marvelous things. I’d linger over “his right hand and his holy arm getting him victory.” Jesus’ hands, extended to touch a leper, to heal the sick, to embrace the lonely, a gesture in teaching, lifted in prayer, then pierced by nails, his arm extended around people and then across the crossbeam as he was crucified. This is “in the sight of the nations” – or was it at their hands? Or ours?

   The idea of this “new song” reminds me of a sermon a very young Martin Luther King, Jr. preached at his dad’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, entitled “How the Christian Overcomes Evil.” It was punctuated with an illustration from mythology. The sirens lured sailors onto the rocks and devastating shipwreck. Two managed to navigate those waters safely. Ulysses stuffed wax into his rowers’ ears, and strapped himself to the mast of the ship. But that’s not the Christian’s way. We can’t just shut out the world, or cling to some notion of Bible authority. No, we look to Orpheus who, as the sirens began to sing, pulled out his lyre and played a more beautiful tune, so the rowers listened to him and did not notice the sirens.

   I would commend to you Wendy Farley’s marvelous book, Beguiled by Beauty, in which she weighs the way beauty, noticing it, letting it come into play in the mundane realities of a busy life still with some moments of meditation and prayer, informs everything from faith to social justice. {My "Maybe I'm Amazed" podcast convo with her was just terrific!}

   1 John 5:1-6. Interesting how this epistle frames things: God and Christ as parent and child, if you love one you love both. If you love me, you love my child – thinking of Christ, but then all the children of God! The answer to the question, How will they know we are Christian? evidently isn’t answered as simply as the hymn “They will know we are Christians by our love,” but “that we love the children of God.” See the difference?

   The “conquerors” language makes me uneasy, reminding me of bold Christians I’ve known “claiming” answers to prayer, as if God were their performing pet. Can “love” do something overpowering, like conquering? Or is “conquer” being radically redefined before our very eyes?

   Love is commanded. It doesn’t just happen – or not happen. Paul Victor Furnish (in The Love Commandment in the New Testament): “Christian love isn’t a heat-seeking missile that directs itself to something inherently attractive, but perhaps especially to the unlovely and those who see themselves as unlovable.” The love Jesus talks about is the love Jesus embodied, and if we approximate this love, we approximate all he was about.

   How do we love God? It seems different from love for other people, or my child or spouse or friend, as it’s not a feeling or even a doing-for, but obeying God’s commandments. Commandments aren’t this external code I should adhere to to stay out of trouble, feel pious or judge others. It’s how I enact my love. Really, our earthly relationships bear a similar dynamic, don’t they? If I love my wife, I follow the commandment to be faithful, to help with the dishes, to listen, etc. If the love is genuine, and robust, this commandment fulfillment isn’t burdensome but a great joy – as illustrated in Psalm 19. And isn’t there a lovely echo of Matthew 11:28-30 here – of Jesus’ welcoming the weary with his light burden?

    John 15:9-17. When we ponder the Last Supper, we reflect on the meal, the footwashing, and Jesus’ words of hope about mansions in heaven or sending the Advocate. Jesus actually expends a lot of his air time talking about commandments. When he said “If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love,” what did the disciples infer that he meant? Jesus’ commandments would have been identical to the Torah, but with immense depth. No adultery? No lust. No killing? No anger. Loving your enemy. Giving up your coat. Finding the lost sheep. Welcome the prodigal home. Not being smug like the smug. Taking up a cross. Losing your life. I think a sermon could poke around in all of these and more. Not vague love, or generalized goodness or niceness. Something more radical, startling, full-bodied. As Kavin Rowe put it, “Human life is just too hard to have a boring Christianity.” An un-boring “love” has its requirements to love, rules, boundaries, habits, and thus surprises and long-term joys.

   Jesus isn’t wagging a finger, urging us to behave ourselves. It’s “that your joy may be complete.” The Greek, plerothe, means full, overflowing. It’s not Do this and you’ll be swimmingly happy, or it will be great fun. Joy is richer, deeper, sustainable during the darkest days, undefeatable by circumstance. If it feels like pressure to feel this way, we’ve missed the point. It’s a gift. The fruit of the Spirit (echoed in Jesus’ words here!)? Love, and there it is: Joy. A gift you discover has happened in you when you were fixated on something else – or rather, on someone else, not yourself, but Jesus. Our people are mostly joyless, as are we clergy. Perhaps the recovery of joy as a thing, in preaching, in church life, is the secret to Christianity not being so boring.

   Jesus calls them friends. I’ll close with this rumination, excerpted from my new book on the theology of our hymns, on what friendship with Jesus looks like and is about:

   At the Last Supper, Jesus tells the disciples “No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends” (John 15:15a). Up to this moment, Jesus has given them good cause to think of him as Lord, God, Word incarnate, Light of the World, Savior. This utterly magnificent, inspiring, divine one invites them to see him as a friend. What could he mean?

   For us, a “friend” might be someone you have fun with, someone who likes what you like, someone like you, someone easy to be around. But such friendships can be thin. We hold back from going very deep, not wanting to risk disagreement. So we stick to chatter about food, ballgames, lifestyle nuggets. Or we find our way into little enclaves of people who agree with us, echo chambers for our biases, feeding our narcissism. Isn’t it true that if you only hang around with people like you, you become ignorant and arrogant?

   Ancient philosophers like Socrates defined “friend” as someone who helps you to become good and wise. Aristotle wrote that the opposite of a friend is a flatterer. Christian thinkers, from St. Augustine to Søren Kierkegaard, thought of friends as those who help you to love God, and whom you help to love God. Paul Wadell reminds us that “Friendship is the crucible of the moral life.” You become the people you befriend. It’s formative. If Jesus is your friend, you become like him, touching untouchables, seeing through fake religiosity, prayerful, generous, ready to lose everything to do the will of your Father.

   The secret to young Methodism’s vitality was that John Wesley wisely insisted that people get organized into small groups to share in the quest for holiness. We need friends who care about and dare to cultivate wisdom, and holiness, to hold one another accountable for progress toward Jesus our shared friend. Jesus explained why he would be calling the disciples friends: “For all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15b). Friends share God’s knowledge. They are learners, egging one another on to more expansive understandings of the heart of God.

   Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth century Cistercian, said to his friend Ivo, “Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our midst.” What would it be like if Christ, the third, were in your friendships? Whom are we called to befriend, if Jesus, befriender of a scandalously diverse grab bag of people, is our friend? G.K. Chesterton wryly declared that St. Francis liked everybody, but especially those others disliked him for liking. Sounds like a friend of Jesus.

   When Jesus is our friend, we celebrate differences with friends. You disagree? Instead of drifting away, we friends of Jesus labor toward reconciliation, knowing Jesus didn’t run off when we were difficult or thought wrong or were less than faithful. Martin Luther King’s insight, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend,” makes me wonder how many friends I’ve missed out on.

   What are the habits of friendship? They eat together. We dine with Jesus at the Lord’s Supper, and hopefully at all our meals with friends. We dare to be vulnerable. Brené Brown has drawn quite a following by simply reminding us that friendship never happens without the courageous risk of vulnerability, candor, sharing. “What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer,” and what a privilege to carry everything to a friend down here over dinner. Jesus “knows our every weakness” (echoing Heb. 4:15), inspiring us toward friendships here that know weakness and love.

   Friendship is encouragement. “We should never be discouraged.” The tenderest way Jesus our friend alleviates our discouragement is when a friend encourages. And friendship is sacrifice. Jesus, the best friend ever, said “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13) – and then he went out into the night to be arrested, tried and crucified – for us, his friends. What is Lent, and every season, if not being drawn into a deeper friendship with Jesus?

   {Here endeth the book excerpt! In that same book I have a rumination on “Abide with Me,” which fits this text as well!}

What can we say April 28? Easter 5

    Acts 8:26-40 is a spectacular text, of high drama, portraying the excluded one being included, and the simple power of the Scripture story, not a saga of winning and success, but of shared suffering and redemption. I preached on this after an especially messy and disheartening General Conference for our denomination… The Ethiopian’s question in reply to Philip’s question “Do you understand” “How can I unless someone guides me?” is perfect. To understand Isaiah 52-53, you need some guidance. Or the story of Jesus crucified. Verse 34’s question: “Is he speaking of himself or another?” is precisely what commentators on 2nd Isaiah have asked! And then the priceless, “What is to prevent me being baptized?” The Church’s historic, embarrassing reply has been Plenty of things. The leading questions in this text, leading us to questions about God, faith, Scripture, evangelism and the Sacraments are best raised quizzically, not answered too primly.

  1 John 4:7-21 is way tougher. Everybody loves. Everybody is a fan of love. We get lost in parsing it as an emotion that happens – or doesn’t. “Love wins” is a skinny half-truth that can’t carry the weight of morality or holiness. It’s not that we know Love, and infer God is like that. God is Love, and we learn Love from God. It’s a sacrifice (v. 10) – not grudgingly giving up something you dig, but losing self and life, suffering for the other, the undeserving other, the uninterested other. Cruciform.

   The immensity of this divine love is “perfected in us.” Or not… My life mission is that God’s sacrificial love will find its completion, its purpose, its embodiment in me – and more importantly, as we over-individualize what the New Testament does not, in the Church. Church is, or dreams of being and strives to be, the perfection of God’s love. Put that above the entrance. The proof of such love comes, not with smiles and hugs, or big coat collections in winter, but “boldness in the day of judgment.” Churches are to be bold. The world is watching – or not.

   Lots of “abiding” here, he in us, we in him. “Abide” is such an intriguing word, implying staying, something calm tucked inside the staying, sticking with. Of course, “abide” can also mean “tolerate” or “bear,” as in “I cannot abide his behavior.” Grace is that God abides us, abiding with us.

   “Perfect love casts out fear” merits attention. Our people suffer much anxiety – and everybody is fearful of so much. I admire Scott Bader-Saye’s great book on fear and faith, which includes this wisdom: “We fear excessively when we allow the avoidance of evil to trump the pursuit of the good. When we fear excessively we live in a mode of reacting to and plotting against evil rather than actively seeking and doing what is good. Fear causes our vision to narrow, when what is needed is for it to be enlarged… Our overwhelming fears need to be overwhelmed by bigger and better things.” Like the sacrificial and courageous Love of God.

   John 15:1-8 would probably be best preached once the preacher has visited a vineyard (if possible), toured the vines and interviewed the vintage. Jesus, his disciples and first listeners participated in the production of wine, given the finds of so many wine presses all over ancient Judea. And it was at the Last Supper, as Jesus peered into a cup of red wine and saw a haunting glimpse of his own blood soon to be shed, that Jesus spoke of being this true vine.

   If you can’t get to a vineyard… Gisela Kreglinger has written a fascinating book called The Spirituality of Wine. {I shared some of the following a few years back in this blog.} She grew up in a wine-producing family, and teaches us much about how alienated urban people are from the land and what unfolds there. Jesus spoke to people who knew vines, vineyards, winepresses, and so his very vivid image of life with him would have been utterly memorable – and as listeners found themselves back at work, pruning, pressing, keeping the bugs away and such, would have seen, felt, and smelled quite tangible images of their relationship to Jesus.

   Acknowledging the woes of alcohol mis-use, Kreglinger shows how flowing wine is a constant image of the dawn of God’s kingdom. Then, her details drawn from viticulture are intriguing – and preachable. Sap from the rootstock journeys through the vine and gives life to the grapes. There’s this: “When a vine lacks water and is under stress, it is forced to develop deeper roots… The deeper the roots, the more the roots interact with and drawn from different layers of soil, and the more complex (and desirable) the wine becomes.” Vintners can’t just grow the maximum amount; sustainability requires some restraint, a long-terms care for the soil.

  And then there’s this: “Left to themselves, vines grow like weeds… Part of cultivating the vines is to prune their branches and tie them onto wires….” Pruning has its homiletical possibilities – and Kreglinger suggests that the wires onto which vines are tied “are like the structures and rules in a religious community; we need them… they give us support and stability.” I find all this to be wonderfully suggestive, and may well preach a sermon in which I reflect in a leisurely way over vines, roots, being stressed, pruning, trellising (especially if I can track down a vineyard worker for an interview!). After all, monks back in the Middle Ages became the great wine producers, and tended their vines as a spiritual practice accompanied by prayer. Even we grape-juice Methodists, with our peculiar and unhappy relationship with fermented grape juice, can ponder with profit the image of Jesus as the vine.

   This business of fruitfulness is always ripe for preaching. (Pun intended). Bearing fruit, from the vine’s perspective, is different from the way we think about being good. Ripening fruit doesn’t grit its teeth and strive really hard to get bigger and change color. It’s a passive thing, nutrients being pumped into the fruit, entirely dependent on uncontrollable rainfall and sunshine, and processes that are hidden underground where no one can see. Holiness is like this; do you remember how the doctrine of Sanctification actually works?

   And then I recall when I was in the thick of writing on The Will of God. I asked a bunch of theologians about the subject – and one replied quite simply by saying “If you want to do God’s will, start with the Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. That can keep you plenty busy for the rest of your life.”

   Prepositions matter in theology. A lovely hymn prays, “Abide with me.” But Jesus doesn’t speak of being beside us, but actually in us, and we in him. Mind you, Jesus isn’t going for any bland “I feel God in me” or “God is in each one of us.”  It’s way more serious, and downright fleshy than all that.  Jean Vanier rephrased it, “To abide in Jesus is to make our home in him and to let Jesus make his home in us.”

   Raymond Brown rightly says this vine language has “eucharistic overtones.” To think of the Lord’s Supper – in my book, Worshipful, I quoted Austin Farrer and then explored this thought and its inversion: “Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples in bread and wine. Amazed at such a token, and little understanding what they did, Peter, John and the rest reached out their hands and took their master and their God. Whatever else they knew or did not know, they knew they were committed to him… and that they, somehow, should live it out.”

   When a disciple is filled with Jesus, he remembers what his physical body is to be: a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). As N.T. Wright rightly suggested, when we eat and drink at the Lord’s table, “we become walking shrines, living temples in whom the living triune God truly dwells.” To ingest Jesus is intriguing: we take Christ into ourselves, and he is then within us. This goes beyond even the closest human relationship, even sexual intimacy. If Jesus is in us, there is zero distance between us. Over time, creative theologians would reverse the image: we are consumed by Jesus. We enter into his body; we get inside Jesus himself. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke imaginatively about this: “My penitence, my salvation, are His food. I myself am His food. I am chewed as I am reproved by Him; I am swallowed as I am taught; I am digested as I am changed; I am assimilated as I am transformed; I am made one as I am conformed.”

What can we say April 21? Easter 4

    Four, not just three great texts! I’ll touch on Acts and the Epistle, then focus on the Psalm and Gospel – on which I’ll be preaching.

   Acts 4:5-12. Think ministry’s hard today? Jesus’ first leaders wound up in jail and on trial! Willie Jennings, noting how we expect Jesus to provide us a life different from Jesus’ own, namely that we will be liked or at least tolerated… “Jesus ended up in exactly the same kind of place that now his disciples Peter and John stand, the judged. But he got there before them in order to meet them there when they arrived and to guide them precisely from that place of being judged. Jesus never sought to escape the place of judgment. He planned to seize it.” Boom.

   1 John 3:16-24. Such a lovely, harrowing, inviting and challenging text! Raymond Brown speaks of the Greek as “infuriatingly complicated,” and he awards it the “prize in grammatical obscurity.” St. Augustine and John Calvin read the passage as about the severity, the high demands of God; Martin Luther, always the contrarian, sees the text as all about God’s mercy. The ambiguity is pitch-perfect, isn’t it? Scripture is obscure; we keep digging; it’s demand, it’s mercy. Life as a follower of Jesus, and life for the Body of Christ, is just like that, always.

   Easy to moralize on verse 17’s hard rhetorical question, How can God’s love be in someone who has stuff, sees someone in need and refuses to help? Is this a sign God’s love isn’t in or with such a person? Is it aspirational? Not fully there just yet? Aren’t there pagans with means who help those in need? And is it a constant helping of those in need, a genuinely sacrificial helping? Or an occasional spasm so you can check this off the list? I think simply raising such questions in the sermon is a good exercise for the listener, and prevents the preacher from wagging a finger of accusation.

   Luther must be right on the mercy since in the next verse we’re called “little children,” not “you grownup dufuses.” Let us love, not merely talking, but “in truth and action.” We might prefer him to have said “action,” and leave off “truth.” What makes love “in truth” beyond “in action”? I can’t interview the writer… but I will explore stuff we’ve heard in recent years, starting with “toxic charity.” What a relief (I suspect) for many of our people to learn there is such a thing, that doing for others can actually cripple them. Just let them be!

   And yet, in what I’m still regarding as maybe the most important theological book of the decade, A Nazareth Manifesto, Sam Wells reveals how the Christian doesn’t mail in or drop off charity, and we also don’t just ignore others because we fear we’ll damage them by our charity. There is a doing for people that diminishes them. There is mission-as-fixing. You have a problem? I’m the solution? – which is an inch from You are a problem. We can do for others. We might think it nobler to work with others, or to be for them. Sam says God invites us, best of all, to be with them.

   Indeed, the seeds of a community’s redemption lie within the community itself. Jürgen Moltmann: “The opposite of poverty isn’t property; the opposite of both poverty and property is community.” We have coffee with someone, not to save them, but to enjoy friendship. Only in this way are they ennobled; only in this way are we ennobled. Could 1 John imply this is the true way to care for (and really with) those in need? Or do we drift even further to Mother Teresa’s articulation of things: we don’t do what we do for other people. We do it to Jesus. Literally.

   Psalm 23 can be risky preaching, as so much sugary sentimentality has attached itself to this overly familiar text. No need to ding people or jolt them out of their warm fuzzy mood on hearing it; hey, I get warm fuzzy feelings from hearing it – especially when we read it aloud, together as a Body, at funeral services. It’s just a matter of the preacher taking them further into what they were sure they already comprehended well.

     A few points of interest. To speak of the Lord as shepherd isn’t flattering to us – although much like sheep, we are foolish creatures, driven entirely by appetite, easily lost and in peril. I heard a preacher years ago say “Sheep nibble themselves lost.”

   And then, the shepherd. We romanticize them as rural simpletons. But rulers throughout the Ancient Near East were called shepherds. As a business, flocks could number in the tens of thousands, so shepherding required considerable administrative savvy. Travellers to the Holy Land have observed that shepherds are a bit rough in appearance, and are quite rough with their sheep. First shepherd I ever saw was wearing an Elvis t-shirt, big green golashes, swatting sheep on the rear end with his stick, and hollering expletives. The Lord is my shepherd.

   The shepherd’s care can be tender and personal. It was common for shepherds to give sheep names. I was never sure, as a child, by that TV program in which Shari Lewis spoke to her little sheep puppet she called “Lamb Chop” – a name that sounds more like a meal than a pet. If you want to ponder the shepherd’s personal care for the sheep, flit over to Jesus’ great story about the shepherd who had hung onto 99 out of 100 – a super high percentage – but was restless until he found that one. Jealous, protective, resilient, doggedly loyal: shepherds. No wonder the angels chose them for their audience when Jesus was born.

   Most pastors are cognizant that “I shall not want” might be better rendered as “I will lack no good thing.” This opens up some reflection on our wanting, what is genuinely good, etc. The “paths of righteousness” – good roads to take, but what kind of righteous, holy, Torah-filled, disciple living is required of those who can truly claim to walk there?

   Someone counted all the Hebrew words in Psalm 23, and it turns out that the word smack dab in the middle is “with.” The center of the Psalm, the center of the life of faith, is “thou art with me.” This bears homiletical reflection. Wells’s A Nazareth Manifesto again: God isn’t primarily a fixer or protector or guarantor of this or that we think we must have. God’s identity and purpose: simply to be with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, not God fixing us or doing favors for us. This then redefines our mission. We don’t do for others or fix others; we are called to be with them – as explicated now in Sam’s companion volume on the nature and mission of the church, Incarnational Ministry.

    “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies” bears some thought. It’s not a taunt (as a scholar I’ll leave unnamed has insisted). From a Christian theological perspective, the Lord’s table is the place where reconciliation begins and ends. When you have a dinner party, do not invite those who can invite you in return (Luke 14). We are to make peace, at table, not with our pals but with those where relationships are broken or nonexistent.

   I had a strange compulsion a while back when preaching on Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd – but what is the antecedent of “my”? Sheep, surely? I tried my hand at putting these words into the mouth of another creature in the pastoral scene: the sheepdog (catch it on YouTube). It’s his shepherd too. I latched onto this because of a lovely quotation from Evelyn Underhill I’ve long treasured: “You want to be one among the sheepdogs employed by the Good Shepherd.  Now have you ever watched a good sheepdog at his work?  He is not at all an emotional animal.  He just goes on with his job quite steadily, takes no notice of bad weather, rough ground, or his own comfort.  He seldom or never comes back to be stroked.  Yet his faithfulness, his intimate understanding with his master, is one of the loveliest things in the world.  Now and then he just looks at the shepherd.  When the time comes for rest they can generally be found together.” I love Underhill, always spot on, always wise, always full of clarity and insight.

     The Lord is the shepherd of us, the Body of Christ. This is more evident in John 10:11-18 – where the emphasis is on the courage, the stick-to-it-iveness of the shepherd. Wolves go on the prowl, but this shepherd doesn’t duck behind a rock. He “gives his life for the sheep.” 

    I am increasingly drawn toward preaching to the Body as the Body, not to each individual sitting there individually. If we are Christ now, if we are his body, then we have shepherding to do.

   The Greek kalos isn’t simply “good,” but may well mean “beautiful,” or even the “model” shepherd. Bonhoeffer was onto something when he showed us how our goodness can be a block to doing God’s will. We want to be good, to keep our hands clean; but God asks us to get our hands dirty for God. Shepherding is dirty work. Out of doors, exposed to the elements, trudging through mud and overgrown fields. That’s Jesus’ beauty, right? And ours, when we are the Church in this world.

   And costly work. Ben Witherington points out that in John’s plot, at this point they are in Jerusalem for the Feast of Dedication,” which celebrated the military victory of the Maccabees: “True leadership does indeed mean laying down one's life for the sheep, as some of the Maccabees had in fact done.” Yet Jesus isn’t fighting the enemy with weapons, but with vulnerability, his own body, the instrument of love.

   What does this text say to us as pastors? Pope Francis reflected on bishops who “supervise/oversee” versus those who “keep watch,” like a shepherd: “Overseeing refers more to a concern for doctrine and habits, whereas keeping watch is more about making sure that there be salt and light in people’s hearts… To watch over it is enough to be awake, sharp, quick. To keep watch you need also to be meek, patient, and constant in proven charity. Overseeing and watching over suggest a certain degree of control. Keeping watch, on the other hand, suggests hope, the hope of the merciful Father who keeps watch over the processes in the hearts of his children.”

   And Jean Vanier (before we learned about his problematical behaviors...) pointed out how false shepherds “are more concerned about their salary, their reputation, structures, administration and the success of the group. They use people… They are closed up in their own needs.” And then – what can we say? – Jean Vanier turned out to be Jean Vanier, a user of women. Lord, have mercy.

    Back to the Pope: “To become a good shepherd is to come out of the shell of selfishness to be attentive to those for whom we are responsible, to reveal to them their fundamental beauty and value and help them grow and become fully alive. It is not easy really to listen. It is not easy to touch our own fears. It is a challenge to help others gradually accept responsibility, to trust themselves. When people are weak or lost, they need a shepherd close to them. Little by little, however, as they discover who they are, the shepherd becomes more of a friend and companion.”

   Of course, John gives us that mysterious “I have other sheep not of this fold.” Does he mean other religions? Or as one friend of mine believes, Jesus has people on other planets in other galaxies! Jesus is thinking Gentiles of course – but here we see his abiding, deep desire for unity among God’s people, which is the reality in God’s heart, even if our hearts are divided from one another.

    How to preach all this? Be sure that it looks, when delivered, like this thought from Jason Byassee: “In John 10, an odd text is read in an odd way by an exceedingly odd Savior and dished up for an odd people becoming odder. That is, holier.” A superb goal all of us might keep in mind as we study, prepare, write, practice, deliver, and reflect on what unfolded...

What can we say April 14? Easter 3

    How do we get Easter to feel like a season, not just a day? Does it matter? We can invite our people to live into the earliest days of the church, the confusion, then inspiration and buzz of missional activity in the wake of this shock of all shocks. But it’s not a smooth road, is it? Acts 3:12-19, one of those bizarre “Old Testament” readings the lectionary strays into, has dreadful anti-Semitic overtones: “You Israelites killed Jesus.” Daniel Silva’s novel, The Order, is terrific with how the New Testament has fed and still feeds negative sentiment toward Jews. Yom HaShoah, the annual Holocaust remembrance day, is coming up in a couple of weeks...

   Early, post-Easter Christianity thrived because of the exchange and circulation of letters. 1 John 3:1-7 is so lovely. A preacher could ruminate on various aspects of it for weeks. “See what love.” We forget that God’s love isn’t a heavenly mood beaming down on us. It’s historical, real, something visible. “See”: not just glance at, but look, peruse, survey, study. “What love”: the Greek potapos expresses both quantity and quality, so how much love, but also what amazing love, agape love.

   “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” It has been revealed, but not really, not fully. Clearly resurrected life for us won’t be a pleasant continuation of all we’ve dug on earth, golf with regular holes-in-one or, as Tammy Faye Bakker fantasized, heaven as a shopping mall where you have a credit card with no limit. There, “we will be like him.” What was Jesus like? That’s ultimate humanity, your truest self, what you’ll be like… but then John adds, “For we will see him as he is.” I can’t explicate that sentence well enough. I think in my sermon, I’ll just repeat it, slowly, two or three times, and let it linger. For. Seeing him will… make us like him?

   Maybe the beauty of Jesus, the reality of his compelling self, will capture our attention and other interests will just melt away, as we’ve come upon this pearl of great price. This must have been what happened to those fishermen whose family business, Zebedee & Sons, fell apart when they saw Jesus, whom they’d never seen before, and dropped everything to traipse off after him, to go… well, where? They had no idea.

   Luke 24:36b-48 feels like some scribe, fond of John’s Gospel and a tad disappointed by Luke’s version, spliced in a pericope so much like John 20! Suddenly Jesus appears in a room (not that much unlike his behavior at Emmaus!). They aren’t comforted, but startled, terrified. He invites them to look at and touch his hands and feet. I love Sarah Ruden's new translation: "Look at my hands and feet, and you'll know it's me, in person. Feel me over and see, because a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones, as you can observe that I have." 

   It's the scars. Robert Barron, commenting in the lovely new The Word on Fire Bible: "A woundless Christ is embraced much more readily by his executioners, since he doesn't remind them of their crime." So the scars remind of the forgiveness they need (and that he gives). Barron goes on to point out the plot of history and the world: "Order, destroyed thru violence, is restored through greater violence." (Think Rambo, Dirty Harry). Jesus undermines all of this. The scars remind he's not returning a greater violence for ours.

    Speaking of John: every time I work chapter 20, I go to Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, who posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral with this caption: “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini… because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.” Earned scars, earned through the enfleshing of love.

   I’m fond too of the insight Graham Greene shared in The End of the Affair.  A woman notices what used to be a wound on her lover’s shoulder, and contemplates the advancing wrinkles in his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of a scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man from a falling wall.  The scar was part of his character, and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.”

   The scars in Jesus’ hands and side, earned when he gave life to all of us, were not blotted out by the resurrection (John 20:27). Caravaggio painted it graphically. I love that Jesus shows up, not as powerful but as the wounded one. The wounds are his glory. What do we sing in "Crown Him with Many Crowns”? Behold his hands and side. Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified. 

    His wounds - glorified. Beauty. Jesus showed his scars. St. Francis of Assisi, who prayed to be like Christ so seriously that God actually answered his prayer by wounding his hands, feet and side, hid his wounds out of humility!

   The humility of the risen Christ? He’s hungry – and they give him a piece of broiled fish. Eat some broiled fish in preparation to preach. Report on what it tasted like, and what that might have been like for Jesus, and the astounded disciples. Who could have anticipated that over time the Greek word for fish, ichthus, would become a widespread acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior?

   I might just play with this in my sermon. Jonah and the fish. God creating the fish. Jesus retrieving a coin from a fish’s mouth. St. Anthony of Padua, following St. Francis’s example of preaching to birds, preaching to fish, encouraging them to be grateful to God for water, gills, food, that they survived the flood in huge numbers, and found their way onto the boat of the disciples just after they saw Jesus – in John again!

 

What can we say April 7? Easter 2

     Easter 2's texts astonish us with the difference resurrection makes. Acts 4:32-35 describes a vital church not much like ours at all. What was the greater miracle for those first Christians? That they coughed up all their possessions to insure no one went without? or that they were of one heart and soul? I've tried in sermons to name this. People nod - but no property changes hands.

   Willie Jennings phrases the issue eloquently, speaking of "the new order of giving rooted in the divine wanting, rooted in the divine desire to join us together... Money here will be used to destroy what money normally is used to create: distance and boundaries between people... God watches and waits to see faith that connects resource to need."

   Psalm 133 is a fitting Easter text: How lovely when brothers dwell together in unity. Or we might today say, How rare. Or How miraculous. How resurrection-like. There is an inextricable link between "No one said any of the things he possessed was his own but they had everything in common" and "And with great power they gave testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" and "There was not a needy person among them." We can talk evangelistic tools or church growth strategies all we'd like; but the early Christians expanded exponentially because their witness was what they did with their possessions. We are so enmeshed, we prefer to keep our own stuff and blame others who don't have enough, or we feel noble if we toss some loose change or some leftover canned goods into a basket.

   Speaking of testimony: in my circles, we do not attend sufficiently to the remarkable epistle text for Easter 2, 1 John 1:1-2:2.  The writer speaks urgently about what they had seen "with our own eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands... We saw it!" Richard Bauckham wrote a fantastic, definitive-feeling book (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) about how the Gospels came to be, and it's all about the piling up of eyewitness accounts.  The earliest Christian preachers could say We saw him, we touched him, if anybody could debunk the resurrection or his lordship, it would be us. 

   I continue to speculate over the role of testimony in preaching. I suspect that while I engage in it, I don't go far enough.  I think people want to hear that Yes, I believe this - as opposed to I've gotten up a sermon for you today. 

   And notice in 1 John the purpose of them sharing what they saw and touched: so we can have fellowship with each other and with God, and so that "our joy may be complete."  Love it: not You better be joyful, but We are joyful.  Joy isn't happiness jacked up a notch or two.  It's so very different - and I would commend to you Christian Wiman's lovely collection of poetry about joy, with his startlingly wise commentary. And, as I've said in this blog repeatedly, the point of Easter is forgiveness, not I get eternal life now.  How much clearer could it be?  1 John goes from fellowship with God via the resurrection to being forgiven and forgiving.

   It’s not OK, he was real, but his mission and theirs is “the word of life,” and the ultimate goal, “so you may be in communion with us.” The Greek koinonia is narrated in Acts, where the first Christians held their possessions in common, and cared for the needy all around. Way more than “fellowship,” the kind church people rightly enjoy where they delight in seeing one another – the big loss during the pandemic! It’s welcoming the stranger, friendship among the unlikely, sacrificial sharing – in short, our relationships being mirror images of God’s with us, and the only meaningful result of God having koinonia with us.

   Quotable, this Epistle text! “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Switch on a light or a candle and see how the darkness flees. Less cherished are other quotables, like “If we boast to be in communion with God while walking in darkness, we are liars.” Verse 1:9 explicates forgiveness, and we needn’t bother with the fineries of what is expiation vs forgiveness vs cleansing, as we’d best first and lovingly persuade our people that it isn't so much that they have a problem, like Apollo 13 hurtling without fuel or air in space – but rather, they are a problem, savable not by human ingenuity though but only by divine intervention. The rescue is the death of the person we saw, heard and touched – and the Calvinists’ TULIP will struggle to explain away the seemingly unLimited atonement in 2:2: “not only for our sins but also for the whole world.” That’s worth quoting, and pondering. We yearn for – and can expect! – forgiveness, not for me, or those I love, but the whole world?

   John 20:19-31. The preacher can set a mood people can understand easily: doors are locked, fear dominates.  And they can't seem to recognize Jesus (Mary Magdalene or the twelve!).  "I think they are blinded by their unfulfilled expectations and their feelings of loss and despair" (Jean Vanier).  To fearful people behind locked doors (pandemic-like?) Jesus speaks Peace into their fear – and hopeful and hard-to-believe word for us obsessed with locks, security systems, urban anxiety, even the proliferation of guns. 

 There’s even a civilizational kind of fear well described by Walter Brueggemann: all people fall into 2 categories, those who fear the world they treasured is crumbling all around them, and those who fear the world they dream of will never come to be. I have found in declaring this that people, even if for a moment, find some common ground.

   There is no fear near Jesus – but this doesn’t mean you can relax. Elie Wiesel famously said “If an angel ever says, ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out: a big assignment is on the way.” Jesus comforts with one hand and then shoves them out into hard labor and danger with the other. These disciples, and ours today, have work to do, requiring courage, and some peace.

   The scars in Jesus’ hands and side, earned when he gave life to all of us, were not blotted out by the resurrection (John 20:27). I love that Jesus shows up, not as powerful but as the wounded one. The wounds are his glory. What do we sing in "Crown Him with Many Crowns”? “Behold his hands and side. Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” His wounds are his love.

   Every time I work at this text, I go to Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, who posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral with this caption: “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini… because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.” Earned scars, earned through the enfleshing of love.

   I’m fond too of the insight Graham Greene shared in The End of the Affair.  A woman notices what used to be a wound on her lover’s shoulder, and contemplates the advancing wrinkles in his face: “I thought of lines life had put on his face, as personal as a line of writing – I thought of a scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man from a falling wall.  The scar was part of his character, and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.”

   Jesus breathes on them. Fascinating – especially after the pandemic. Of course we are to think of God’s breath giving life to the first humans (Genesis 2), and the reviving of the dead nation during the exile (Ezekiel 37), not deadly with the Coronavirus, although deadly perhaps to sin, self and a vapid life. I like to ponder that, for Jesus to breathe on them or anybody, they’ve got to be standing close, right next to him. Is discipleship just sticking as close to Jesus as possible, to feel his breath?

   I’m wary of sermons that get fixated on “doubting” Thomas. It’s a thing; I’m unsure if it helps parishoners if the clergy say “I have doubts too!” We’ve all heard sermons about “doubting Thomas.” Doubt is hardly praised in this story. If anything, Jesus dings him, contrasting him with those who haven’t seen and yet believe. He is loved and treated with immense compassion; Jesus invites him to touch the wounds. The Greek is graphic, with Jesus saying “thrust” or “press” or “cast” your finger into (like down in there) my side. Caravaggio captured this in a stunning way…

   I might still want to celebrate doubt, which isn’t a failure of faith but asking darn good questions. Mark Helprin, in Winter’s Tale, writes “All great discoveries are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.” Robert Penn Warren wonderfully said “Here, as in life, meaning is, I should say, often more fruitfully found in the question asked than in any answer given."

   And then Simone Weil: “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth… Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”

   My doubts are less about the existence of God or the resurrection of Christ, but rather about the possibility of forgiveness or the reality of miraculous transformation! – which seems to be what this text is ultimately about, and what Easter in the Bible is entirely attentive to. Jesus is risen, so therefore – you are forgiven, and you go forgive. Startling. If I tell stories of forgiveness, the Amish at Nickel Mines, Pa., or Corrie ten Boom and her sister's executioner, will anyone believe?