What can we say November 17? 26th after Pentecost

    I love the story and song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:4-20, 2:1-10. After commenting on the Epistle (briefly) and the Gospel (a bit more) I’ll return to this text, which I'll be preaching on - with a great quote from another Hannah, Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter).

   Hebrews 10:11-25, for me, continues the circling of Hebrews – so not sure I’ll preach the Epistle. I am intrigued by the idea of, because of all Christ has done, “Let us approach with a true heart… Let us hold fast to the confession without wavering.” In her way cool book, The Beatitudes Through the Ages, Rebekah Eklund explores what guardrails there might be on the multifarious interpretations of Scripture – and points to Perpetua and Felicity, two canonized martyrs who stood their ground, refusing to knuckle under and abandon their belief. How are they different from today’s church people who want to split up over doctrine? They didn’t harm others, whereas today’s peace-breakers do! “Let us hold fast,” indeed, but who’s harmed when I hold fast?

    “Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” Dangerous, as it can slip into nagging judgmentalism: Hey, you should love and do good deeds! And yet, so very hopeful. What if we took as our mission statement that we might not only love and do good deeds, but actually provoke others to do the same – not as in needle or cajole, but inspire, doing good with them? The verb paroxmuson implies inspiring more than provoking.

   “Not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” Indeed, perhaps especially post-pandemic, people are happy to neglect meeting together. There’s this story from John MacArthur that preachers love to tell. A man who had once been active in a church stopped coming, and after a few weeks the pastor decided to visit him in his home. When the pastor arrived, he found the man sitting in a chair in front of his fireplace where a fire was roaring. Without saying anything, the pastor took a seat beside the man and sat in the silence, watching the flames.

   After a few minutes, the pastor reached for a pair of tongs and pulled a single, burning ember out of the fire, setting it off to the side on the hearth. Before long, the ember’s flame had reduced to a glow, and then it went out completely, eventually growing cold. The pastor and the man sat in silence a bit longer, and then the pastor again took the tongs, picked up the dead ember, and put it back in the middle of the fire, where it sparked back to life. As the pastor got up to leave, the man spoke for the first time, saying, “Thank you for your visit, and especially for the fiery sermon. I’ll see you on Sunday.”

   Mark 13:1-8. I just adore the way the disciples’ jaws gape open at the sight of Herod’s temple – which still has that impact on pilgrims today. “What large stones!” indeed. We can inspect many astonishingly large stones from that temple – one of which is 40 feet long, 11 feet tall, weighing in at 300 tons! Herod’s recently completed platform, 900 by 1500 feet, of gleaming, flawlessly cut ashlars. A wonder of the world – Herod’s clear intent, both from ego and his desperate need to impress his former foe, the emperor Augustus.

   Jesus throws cold water on these country boys, slack-jawed in amazement, with his prophecy that not one stone will be left upon another. A few actually did remain after the catastrophe of the Roman crushing of the Jewish revolt in 70: the Western Wall, today’s “wailing wall,” still there. Did Jesus have a crystal ball type prediction? Or was it more rational, wise, insightful? Pompey had invaded the holy precincts, Herod erected a Roman eagle on the entrance, Caligula crafted a statue of his divine self to be placed in the Holy of Holies. Trouble was indeed coming.

   Jesus goes apocalyptic – which is a feature in preaching and theology we might avoid, given all the abuses of Gnostic end-of-time predictions. Yet at some point, the only shred of hope we have left is for God’s ultimate intervention beyond history itself. Jesus, unlike other apocalyptic writers, so productive in those days, reports no visions, but speaks only of his own authority.

   I recall as a boy watching Billy Graham preaching on “Nation will rise against nation,” and he explained this was precisely what was unfolding in the 1960s. Fact is, if you study history, it’s always this way. Peace is our dream that in our gut we know is a fantasy. So much pain. Jesus opens a window of hope, explaining that our intense sorrow over the world now can be compared to labor pains. Wow. Although it tiptoes into being silly, there’s a way to reflect on those birthpangs:

   With a playful imagination, Henri Nouwen (in Our Greatest Gift) pondered these pains that ferry us into life. In Our Greatest Gift, his thoughtful book about dying, he tells a story about fraternal twins talking with one another in the womb: The sister said to the brother, ‘I believe there is life after birth.’ Her brother protested vehemently, ‘No, no, this is all there is. This is a dark and cozy place, and we have nothing to do but cling to cord that feeds us.’ The little girl insisted, ‘There must be something more than this dark place. There must be something else, a place with light, where there is freedom to move.’ Still she could not convince her twin brother. After some silence, the sister said hesitantly, ‘I have something else to say, and I’m afraid you won’t like that either, but I think there is a Mother.’ Her brother became furious. ‘A Mother!?’ he shouted. ‘What are you talking about? I have never seen a mother, and neither have you. Who put that idea in your head? As I told you, this place is all we have. Why do you always want more? This is not such a bad place, after all. We have all we need, so let’s be content.’ The sister was quite overwhelmed by her brother’s response, and for a while didn’t dare say anything more. But she couldn’t let go of her thoughts, and since she had only her twin brother to speak to, she finally said, ‘Don’t you feel those squeezes once in a while? They’re quite unpleasant and sometimes even painful.’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘What’s so special about that?’ ‘Well,’ the sister said, ‘I think that these squeezes are there to get us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this, where we will see our Mother face to face. Don’t you think that’s exciting?’ The brother didn’t answer. He was fed up with the foolish talk of his sister and felt that the best thing would be simply to ignore her and hope that she would leave him alone.

   And now, to return to 1 Samuel 1:4-20, 2:1-10, and how Saul was Israel’s first big, tall, impressive leader – and how we not only preach on 1 Samuel 1-2 but actually lead based on it:

   If we turn back a few pages, we discover the real dawn of a new day for Israel was not when Saul was crowned, but when a woman, a nobody, unable to conceive, surprisingly gave birth to a son – as if the script for what would unfold for Mary and Jesus fluttered down to earth centuries earlier. Hannah was barren, which was the ultimate weakness for women in the Bronze Age. She had nothing going for her except the tender love of her husband, Elkanah. She was taunted by her rival, Peninnah, whose cruel words twisted like a knife in her gut. How much of our suffering is comparative in nature? I see others having, laughing... but I was left out, unchosen, sad.

     There is a theological quandary in the writer’s assertion that “the Lord had closed her womb.” The preacher may or may not engage the question – but it’s well worth pondering even in the background. Ask an infertility doctor why a woman hasn’t conceived, and she can explain to you facts about sperm counts, fallopian tubes and more. Did God so arrange such things to frustrate couples? Or do we see, again, the lovely faith of Bible people whose lives and realities were so hinged to God that they could not imagine anything apart from God? – and yet it is not that God blocks the pregnancy (which God should do a bunch of other times when God seemingly doesn’t…), but that she just hadn’t gotten pregnant?

    Hannah did what the helpless do: “Hannah rose and presented herself before the Lord… She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly” (1 Sam 1:9-10). Anguished prayer is weakness splayed all over the floor. And notice it's "year by year." No quick allaying of her suffering. It's a marathon.

   Eli the priest observed her, and assumed she was drunk. Then he took pity on her. Or perhaps he realized he was witnessing what every priest longs to see: a soul entirely abandoned to God. He blessed her. And then this woman, with no natural strength in her womb, conceived and bore a son, Samuel.

     The mind-boggling wrinkle in Hannah’s story, though, isn’t the seemingly miraculous birth. What staggers us is that she kept an outlandish promise she had made in her desperation. Trying to coax God into giving her a child, she pledged to give that child right back to God. She could easily have reneged on the deal once she cradled her precious son in her arms, nursing him, giggling with glee over his arrival. He was all she’d ever wanted. And in those days, a son was your social security, the one a woman needed to care for her in old age.

     But she took the boy to Shiloh, and left him there to serve in the temple as an apprentice to Eli. What more poignant words are there in all of Scripture than these? “She left him there for the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:28). The world says Grab the gifts you can, hang on to them, accumulate strength and resources. But Hannah, instead of clinging tightly, opened her hands, and let go of the best gift ever. She chose to return to her weak, vulnerable state. “She left him there for the Lord.”

     There is a kind of holy leading the world will never understand. After his election, Pope Francis handed back the powers of the papacy he’d just won, riding in a Ford Focus instead of the papal limousine, moving into a guesthouse instead of the Apostolic Palace, wearing a simple cassock instead of regal finery. Henri Nouwen left a faculty position at Harvard to live in a L’Arche community in Canada, where his job was to care for a single, severely handicapped young man named Adam. Maybe the most effective pastor I’ve ever known declined multiple promotions, quietly mentored dozens of young clergy, and in her parishes she happily beamed offstage as her laity excelled as they never had before.

   Imagine all those obscure people who have led so marvelously that we have never heard of them. Leadership is letting go, a refusal of possession, control or manipulation, an offering to God. Letting go must be the secret to leadership, since it is the secret of all of life; the results are those immeasurables, like contentment, gratitude, and the flourishing of others.

    I love Wendell Berry’s novel about a Kentucky farm mother, Hannah Coulter, who muses, “The chance you had in life is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be someone else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.” Leaders let go of fantasies and selfish wishes, resentments and any sense of entitlement or deserving. How counter-cultural! Leaders can be content; we already have enough, and so we are freed for joy. Who wouldn’t follow a leader to a place of joy?

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   My little book of theological reflections on lines and characters in Christmas carols might bless your people and your preaching! Why This Jubilee?: Advent Reflections on Songs of the Season.

What can we say November 10? 25th after Pentecost

   The reading from Ruth would require a retelling of the whole story – which is one of high drama, romance and wheeling and dealing. Naomi persuades Ruth to get dolled up and seek out her rich kinsman Boaz, and lie down with him in the dark – but not until he’s had a few drinks… The scheme works, they marry and conceive an ancestor of David. Naomi’s bitterness (“Call me Mara”) is turned to joy restored (Naomi meaning “pleasant”). The “point” of so many Bible stories is not “Go thou and do likewise,” but rather noting the pluck, and courage, the resourcefulness of people in our heritage – and ours is to say Wow, great story. Redemption, the desolate enfranchised, hope restored.

     Hebrews 9:24-28 continues what Hebrews has been reiterating. Christ the priest offers the sacrifice of himself once and for all. Two fresh twists (if you’re preaching the Epistle). Christ enters a sanctuary “not made with hands,” reminding us of Paul in 2 Cor. 5:1 – where the body, your “earthly tent,” has a destiny of becoming a “house” in the heavens. In Heb. 9, heaven is now the sanctuary not made with hands. The temple we know isn’t, as it turns out, the real sanctuary at all, but merely a “copy” of the true heavenly sanctuary. The preacher could explore this, or just name it: we are sitting in a room that is a replica, an imitation, a xerox if you will of heaven, where worship goes on now and will forever. This is a paradise on earth. So we treat the room, and those in the room with us, very differently, finding ourselves together in this copy of heaven.

     The Greek word translated “copy” is antitupa, which means literally to strike against something hard and thus form an image. I think of Karl Barth’s powerful thought (in his Epistle to the Romans) – that the activity of the Church’s relationship to the Gospel “is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself…” And then Oliver O’Donovan (in Desire of the Nations) suggested ways the society, while not converted, bears the crater marks of the Gospel’s being lived among Christians.

     What do we do together in this copy of heaven? We worship, yes – and we “eagerly wait for him” (v. 28). Are we living, surviving, clinging to life as we know it, anxious for the future, or even hopeful? Hebrews suggests a disposition of waiting – not to die, or for the next titillating experience, or for any thing, but for him, for the coming of Christ. Maybe before Advent arrives we might sing “I’m looking for the coming of Christ; I want to be with Jesus” (“I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light”).

     I’m preaching on Mark 12:38-44. I preached on this last go-round, pointing (obviously) to myself as one of the guys “in long robes” Jesus warned about. I get and like favored seating. And I worry about my prayers being showy. I worry so much that I’m an anxious pray-er in public, and usually try to get others to pray. Often, visiting in the hospital, when the time comes for our closing prayer, I’ll ask the patient to pray. No show with them; and they pray wonderful, simple, from the gut prayers.

     Once there was a boy, born with an acute case of cerebral palsy, who was treated terribly as a young child, and then went to another home where his mother noticed how he watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She believed Mister Rogers was keeping her son alive. Some foundation worked it out for Mister Rogers to visit this boy, and when he did, Mister Rogers asked, “Would you pray for me?” The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for anything. He was the object of prayer, not the one to pray for anybody. But now he prays for Mister Rogers and he doesn’t want to die anymore. A journalist, Tom Junod, witnessed this and privately congratulated Mister Rogers for being so smart. But Mister Rogers didn’t know what he meant. He really wanted the boy’s prayers, saying, “I think that anyone who’s gone through challenges like that must be very close to God.”

     Of course, the focal point of the text, and the poignant preaching opportunity is this: “Jesus sat down where they made their offerings and watched.” Without being too manipulative, I will ask people to imagine Jesus watching us and our offerings – which isn’t a fantasy, as it turns out.

   The temple was outfitted with trumpet-shaped offering boxes so that when people “threw” in their coins, the clanging announced loudly the generosity of the giver. It’s hard not to think of Luther’s annoyance at Tetzel and the sale of indulgences: the indulgence hawkers toted around large brass chests and sang their ditty, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

     Jesus contrasts the poor widow who would satisfy the old saying that “God notices not how much but from how much.” Of course, in church we have anonymous giving. This worried Martin Luther King Sr. (“Mike”) when he began his ministry at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1931. He believed “anonymous giving” provided a grand excuse for what he called “anonymous non-giving.” So he opened up the registers, and listed what each person gave for all to see. Donations soared in just a week.

     What we see in Jesus’ story is the poor giving to support the poor. It’s a Christian obligation for all… incumbent upon even the poor. The preacher can find some story about the poor being in powerful ministry. Here’s one I’ll tell – excerpted from my book Struck From Behind: My Memories of God – about a woman I know in Lithuania.

     My daughter Grace and I discovered Regina Židoniené to be gregarious, hospitable but not fussy, more eager to talk about God than the weather. You and I might think of Regina as poor. Our small, cramped quarters did not feature running water – although it took us two days to realize the toilet didn’t actually flush.  Regina’s husband, who’d lost a leg due to inadequate healthcare years before, hobbled down to the creek while we slept to fill buckets with water to pour into the tank so we soft Americans wouldn’t feel inconvenienced.

     Regina was obviously a woman of immense faith. Like so many people in eastern Europe, she had grown up as an atheist. After she’d raised her children, she got to know the handful of women that were the heart of the fledgling Methodist congregation in Birzai, began to study the Bible, and then became a sledgehammer of belief and action. She had bragged to me about a little ministry she and the women ran: these women we’d rank as poor spent three days each week giving what little they had to the women they regarded as poor, those who lived in the “villages,” remote, outlying areas of extreme poverty. “Would you like to see our work?” she asked. It doesn’t take much for me to abandon manual labor, even if it is mission-related, so I said yes.

     We stopped by the grocery store, and I gleefully filled basket after basket with essentials, and paid for it all with somebody else’s money, plunking down the church credit card. I had no authorization or budget, so I made an on-the-spot, Robin Hood-like decision to steal from the rich to give to the poor. Then we drove out of the city.

     That’s correct: we drove. At first, Regina drove – like a banshee. She mashed the gas pedal as hard as she could, bounding over curbs and then skimming the edges of ditches, crushing bushes that frankly weren’t on the road, backed into a tree, jostling the food in the back out of the bags – as if she wanted to get to her destination right now, not in an hour; she pressed that ramshackle old rusty car to keep pace with her missionary zeal. After we got out and pushed the car out of some mud she’d driven into, she asked me in exasperation, “Will you drive?” Good Lord, yes I’ll drive.

     The first woman we visited lived in a tiny clapboard house – “house” being used loosely for this cold, breezy, varmint-infested awful excuse for shelter where she was raising her four children. As we approached, Regina told me she was gravely concerned about this woman’s romantic situation:  seems she had fallen in with a man Regina suspected of drinking, and being lazy. Regina banged her fist on what passed as a door, and we made our way in. The mom, I thought, would have been some sort of beauty where I lived, married to a doctor or lawyer and putting her kids in private school. But here she was poor, and embarrassingly so even by Lithuanian standards. She blushed, smiled and said Thank you (and jabbed her children with her elbows to remind them to say the same) as we placed what were thankfully non-perishables on a wobbly table as a few roaches scattered. 

     Then Regina got close to the woman, looming over her, wagging a finger in her face, and spoke sternly for quite a long time – a lecture about the ne’er-do-well boyfriend, no doubt. The woman cowered, but bore it as best she could. Rising to a crescendo of vehemence, Regina wound up her tirade, then paused, held out her arms to us and the children, and sweetly said, “Now let us pray.” And she prayed – at length, in Lithuanian, then in English, displaying a shimmering intimacy and strong urgency with God who most certainly hears such prayers. She thanked God for us, prayed about various health or learning challenges the children were facing, and then called down a curse on the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. That poor guy was in some trouble.

     In all my days, I have never seen such stellar mission work. Regina, with virtually no resources except the little bit she and her handicapped husband could muster (but also with her extraordinary determination), banded together with other women like her, and went out to their poor. They didn’t simply drop off the goods; they got involved in their lives. Fearlessly she castigated her poor friend about a relationship she knew would harm her; and she prayed, offering blunt pleas to God on her behalf. And then we went to more such homes, until the food ran out.

     Grace filmed an interview I conducted with Regina in which she spoke of coming to faith in Christ, her love for her little church, and her ministry in the villages. I asked her, “Why do you do this?” – and she frowned, puzzled I would ask such a silly thing. “This is just what Christians do, isn’t it?” When we left for the airport the next day, I simply asked her to pray for us, and I am sure she has, and does and will, and I take comfort in being prayed for by someone who knows how to do what I could never in a million years figure out how to do:  deliver food, a lecture, and a prayer.

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 Looking toward Advent: My book, Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections, has much of what I've used as preaching material over the years, and also serves as a good group study for your people.

What can we say November 3? All Saints Day

   The texts for the 24^th Sunday after Pentecost could serve well for All Saints. Ruth and Naomi face intense sorrow, and together – and hope against hope for a future. Hebrews 9:11-14 once again envisions Jesus as overwhelming the temple/sacrifice system by entering permanently into God’s presence – and bringing us along in tow. And then Mark 12:28-34, reiterating the great commandment to love God: isn’t this what sainthood is finally about? Not perfection or superhuman holiness but simply love for God and neighbor? And Jesus: he didn’t merely command love. He loved. He demonstrated. He put it on display so we’d know the way, but his display isn’t just for watching; we receive his love, his embrace. That’s what makes us saints.

 This year I might explore the delightful ambiguity (or is it confusion) with the whole notion of a saint. We have the official saints, and even the famous yet still unofficial (or Protestant!) ones who show us the way, who were heroic in the dogged allegiance to God. When I was researching Servants, Misfits & Martyrs: Saints & their Stories, I found cool stuff, like “In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints” (Frederick Buechner). Such exemplars, such flirtation devices are more important than ever in our vapid culture where we have celebrities who are (as Daniel Boorstin put it in The Image) famous for being famous… Christopher Lasch: “Celebrities are welcome in a culture of narcissism, for we lack courage and imagination. Demands are implicitly made by traditional heroes; celebrities are not imperatives.” We need saints who make demands. I have St. Francis images in my hallway – not only to admire, but to remember he’s watching me, he’s raising (or lowering!) the bar on how I’ll act today.

    Brian Doyle told of a couple whose child was born with no limbs. They freaked out - just couldn't accept such a child. But the labor and delivery nurse and her husband were happy and eager to take the child home. They adopted her, and said she was "the best kid ever." After she died at age 8, they adopted more special needs children. Doyle wrote, "There really are people like that on this planet."

   Or consider the beautiful story this week the ER doctor, nurse, and hospital President at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, all Jewish, treating Robert Bowers, the killer, still shouting "I want to kill all Jews" as he was hauled into the ER.

     And yet, as I wrote in the book, “These friends of God are not superhuman. Saints do not possess an extra layer of muscle. They are not taller, and they do not sport superior I.Q.s. They are not richer, and their parents are not more clever than yours or mine. They have no bat-like perception that enables them to fly in the dark. They are flesh and blood, just like you and me, no stronger, no more intelligent. And that is the point. They simply offer themselves to God, knowing they are not the elite, fully cognizant that they are inadequate to the task, that their abilities are limited and fallible.”

     Saint is a christological hero. Saint is a viable possibility if we have availability, not ability. And Saint is one who trusts and has trusted in the Gospel, and is finally redeemed 100% by mercy and God’s determination to win us in the end. The texts are lavish in their portrayal of the zealous heart of God. Isaiah 25:6-9 should probably be read and re-read instead of preached upon. I always wonder about the sermon that just relishes a text, the way a docent in a museum would say Wow, look at those brushstrokes; I just adore this. Revelation 21:1-6a is a shimmering window into God’s future which we lucky dogs get to be a part of. I could delve into lots of historical and cultural background about Roman persecution and apocalyptic symbolism. But again, the text speaks beautifully and triumphantly across the centuries. Besides, in our place we have special music, and we read the names of those who’ve died in the past year – which takes awhile… The names, the music, the hope in silence: that’s the Word of God for this day.

     I know for me, All Saints Day, and trying to preach, will pose a challenge, as my much loved mother-in-law died back on Nov. 11. I will, of course, speak of her, and our grief. I love John Irving's thought in A Prayer for Owen Meany: "When someone you love dies, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

     Of course, the lectionary Gospel, John 11:32-44, picks up mid-stream of a long story at verse 32, with the hard questions our grievers will have been feeling. No surprise that in the catacombs of ancient Rome, this story was featured when artists adorned the walls. If I must as docent point to a few details, I’ll remind us that this text has the shortest, and yet most elegant and meaning-overflowing verse in all of the Bible: “Jesus wept.” There it is, the full heart of God on bold display. Verses 33 and 38 say that Jesus “grieved” or was “deeply moved” or “troubled.” The Greek, embrimaomai, has the connotation of anger or outrage. Is it their lack of faith? Scholars say yes, I say no. I think it is that Jesus is flummoxed by the cocky overreach of evil, that death has dared to reach into beloved human life. In Jesus’ gut, at this moment, I think he says of evil, I’ll show him. Clearly, in John’s plot, it is this miracle that provokes the Sanhedrin to plot Jesus’ death (11:46-53).

     A kind of anger is nestled into the heart of hope. St. Augustine said that “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Anger at the way things are, and courage to see to it that things do not remain the way they are.” We might piggyback on Jesus’ embrimaomai and get mad, and then courageous, we people of hope, we would-be saints.

     Tourists can visit Lazarus’s tomb in Bethany. It is of the sliding stone, not rolling stone type – so not into the cave of a hillside, but down into the ground. Picturing the stone on the floor being shoved aside, and then Lazarus coming not out but up: wow. I think there is something profound in Jesus’ words, “Unbind him and let him go.” Yes, the corpse was wrapped in fabric. But there is also something about the resurrected life that is a being unbound, being liberated, being freed to be your true self, set free to follow Jesus.

 For fun, or for contemplation, I'm showing you Giotto's fresco from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.

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 Looking toward Advent: My book, Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections, has much of what I've used as preaching material over the years, and also serves as a good group study for your people.

What can we say October 27? 23rd after Pentecost

 To preach Job chapter 42 you’d have to establish the context of the previous 41 chapters… Not impossible! Especially after Job’s extensive misery, met only by extended silence, and then the whirlwind tour of the wildness of creation, Job’s final words to the Lord, “I know you can do anything,” are a sober, hard-won affirmation of divine omnipotence, which was never doubted by Job or anybody else. The shape of that omnipotence, what God does with God’s unlimited power is always the question. Omnipotence is hard to love. God’s power is expended in creating life in the thick of death, relationship in the midst of loneliness, a dazzling dance of light and darkness. God “can do anything,” and so God is not imprisoned by human notions of right and wrong; God isn’t stuck rewarding the righteous or punishing the wicked. God quite freely reigns. Only when God is thus free can God be a God of mercy.

   Job quotes the Lord’s own opening volley: “Who is this darkening counsel without knowledge?” He realizes it’s not that he lacked knowledge or was wrong in his knowledge. He’s now been granted now a fuller, deeper knowledge. He’s learned plenty about frost and goats and lions, stars and alligators. But the great lesson for Job is there in 42:5: “My ears had heard about you, but now my eyes have seen you.” How often do churchgoers and Bible students know things about God, without knowing God? Job and his friends had been clinging to a god who was nothing but their notions of right and wrong, the great retributor. The true God is greater, better, more mystifying, and wonderful.

   Job humbly declares “Therefore I relent.” Not repent! but relent. Job doesn’t confess his sin; and God never asks him to. Job gives up his mistaken understandings of God. He is disillusioned – as in his illusions have been shattered, as now he sees the true God who isn’t the righteous judge but the profligate creator of life and mystery, the one who speaks, and is with us.

   Then God turns on Job’s fake friends. Had they overheard the whirlwind business? God is angry because in speaking glib half-truths about God, they spoke falsely. Stunning. This, coupled with Job’s intimate realization in 42:5, is very close to the point of the book. Job, railing relentlessly against God, accusing, blaming and demeaning God, has spoken correctly about God! – while the friends, with their holy, righteous, even biblical defense of God’s honor, have spoken falsely. In such a messy, complex world, God prefers outcries and blatant honesty to smug piety.

   God affectionately calls Job his “servant” twice in 42:8 – and then, with some amusing irony, says that he will ask Job to pray for them. They had, after all, urged Job to lift up his hands in prayer. It never dawned on them (until now) that those prayers needed to be for them, not Job himself.

   The prose ending to the tale, in 42:9-17, is dissonant, almost corny, virtually anticlimactic. Remove the poetry in chapters 3-41, and you get this dumb plot the larger book is designed to subvert: God brags on Job, the satan challenges God, then inflicts Job with horrors; but Job is resolutely pious – so God wins the bet, and restores Job’s vast possessions, even doubling them.

   Our listeners know their own fantasies are a lie. You’ve never met anyone who lost everything and suffered horrifically who then wound up richer and with ten more children. Speaking of whom: Elie Wiesel, chronicler of the Holocaust, was mortified by this hokey ending to the story; remembering Job’s ten murdered children, he imagines Job chillingly telling God, “I forgive you, but do my dead children forgive you?”

   Christian theologians would not be lying if they read into this conclusion things the author never intended. After all is restored, Job’s family gathers to break bread in his house – just as followers of Christ gather around a table, not to hear about God, but to see and taste God. And then 42:12: “Then the Lord blessed Job’s latter days more than his former ones.” The creator God who will try anything, the one who springs life on the earth in every place, is the good God who insures we will have our “latter days” of blessing, not as any sort of reward for good behavior or right belief, but because God just can’t stop making life happen. And then the very last word of the book is “satisfied,” which Job was. The satisfaction isn’t the doubling of his stuff or even the restoration of his health. Philip said to Jesus, “Show us God, and we shall be satisfied” (John 14:8 RSV). Job has seen God, no longer “in a mirror dimly,” but “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

   I wrote a short commentary (just 23 pages!) on the whole book of Job - and it is a whole, not just parts! - for the Wesley One Volume Commentary. Check it out!  

     Hebrews 7:23-28 intrigues, especially as (for us) we celebrate Reformation Sunday.  I like always at the end of October to touch on Martin Luther and the church’s ongoing need for reform. Without sliding into supersessionism or anti-Semitism, it’s possible to notice that Hebrews diminishes the power of the earthly priests; Jesus renders them less essential or even unnecessary. This was, of course, one of Luther’s key principles, the priesthood of all believers, and thus an end to the abuses of clericalism. I wonder in our day if we have the opposite problem: not too much power in the priesthood, but trying to function while viewed as a laughingstock with no authority at all. Best we can do is point to the high priest, like a docent in a museum, exhibiting in our preaching and praying our own devotion to what he has accomplished for all of us.

     Hebrews offers the highest possible Christology (what George Lindbeck called “Christological maximalism,” our theological burden to glow as enthusiastically as possible about Christ), and yet with little human, earthy touches. Jesus’ priesthood never ends – for the simplistic reason that the others die! “Mortal priests are therefore necessarily multiple” (as Luke Timothy Johnson wryly put it). Hints of Platonism here, where the many are inferior to the one.

     I’m not preaching on Hebrews, but I love to play with the merging of roles in Jesus. He is the priest, he is the sacrifice, he is the judge, he’s all in all – and what that means for us is he gives not blind justice or fairness. This judge is entirely biased – as he’s also the defense attorney, and the one offering the most profound sacrifice ever, his own self. We’ve got it made with such a priest.

     Mark 10:46-52. Last stop before Holy Week - in the Bible's chronology! The Bartimaeus text is astonishingly rich.  I think it happened.  I think it’s richly symbolic. Both. Here is a sermon I preached on this a couple of years ago that I felt pretty good about. Interestingly, we often speak of the plot of Jesus’ life shifting at Caesarea Philippi. Before that, he’s a man of action, in control, dazzling the crowds – but afterwards he becomes passive, bent on facing his fate in Jerusalem. The exception is this vignette in Jericho – which I think makes it stand out all the more. This miracle is a shimmering emblem of them all. Yes, a blind man sees – but it’s about everyone seeing, seeking mercy, and finally following.

     The Jericho in question isn’t the breadloaf-like hill from the Bronze Age most tourists visit (where the wall came a-tumblin’ down). Below a few find their way to what remains of Herod’s winter resort (how many resorts did one man need?). But the linkage to Jericho has its resonance: Jesus is a new Joshua, invading the Holy Land, not to seize it but to reclaim it, not by savage force but by suffering love.

    A close, slow reading of the text reveals so much we might miss. His cry isn’t “Jesus, heal my blindness,” but “Have mercy on me.” That’s the pain, that’s the need: some mercy. Pope Francis deemed 2016 as the “Year of Mercy.” Should have made it a decade… Like the children clamoring to see Jesus, this blind man is rebuked, hushed by the ever vigilant and dimwitted disciples.

   Then notice this. Jesus stops: the consummately interruptible one… and says “Call him,” which is a little odd. They say to him, “Take heart, he is calling you.” Not “Take heart, you’ll be seeing soon.” He can take heart because he is called. We tend to think if we get healed or blessed, then we might tune in for God’s call. But the very fact of God calling is cause to take heart. For all Bartimaeus knows, Jesus will be calling him – as a blind man.

     Instead of simply taking charge, Jesus again, with more questions than answers, leaving people space instead of commandeering them, asks “What do you want me to do for you?” He had just asked this of the sons of Zebedee, and their reply was their vain pursuit of power and glory. Bartimaeus keeps it simple. He wishes to see – and the text invites us to realize our deep need to be able to see. Joel Marcus relates this to a Holocaust survivor who wore dark glasses while giving testimony at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her points, which she clarified, was that she appeared to be blind – but then with dramatic force she said “I saw everything.”

   And I love this: Jesus says “Go your way.” Not “Follow me,” or “You sure owe me.” And yet, Bartimaeus “followed him on the way.” Those are pregnant words, implying he didn’t follow for 100 feet and then go home. He followed (which is what disciples do with Jesus) “on the way,” the road, which is the long, symbolic road of discipleship. And they’re headed to Jerusalem for a massive crisis and terrible danger. Why, after all, did they remember Bartimaeus’s name? He had to have been among the company of the early followers. And if he followed: was he there on Palm Sunday? Did he glimpse the crucifixion? Was he among the witnesses Paul points to in 1 Corinthians 15??

     The name: bar-timaeus means “son of a guy named Honored.” This beggar, probably shunned by many, pitied by others, is, like all who suffer or are poor, somebody’s son. I’ve always envisioned Bartimaeus casting away his cloak to get to Jesus – with the preaching trope where we ask What do we need to cast aside to follow Jesus? Morna Hooker suggests he may have had his cloak spread out on the ground in order to collect alms – so he would be pushing it aside more than taking it off.

   Either way, the abandonment of key clothing: I think of early Baptismal rites, where you shed your dirty work clothes, descended into the pool, then emerged to be clothed in a pure white robe. Or even better: St. Francis of Assisi, embracing poverty, sued by his father, removing the fine clothes his father had provided for him to return them, standing naked in the city square. Ridding himself of stylish finery, he donned the apparel of the poor in solidarity.

     Kelly Johnson has gifted us with a marvelous book on the history and theology of begging: The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics. Beggars make otherwise invisible poverty visible, unavoidable. Yes, begging can be sloth or avarice, but the beggar still is always a challenge to holiness, wealth, generosity. In the Middle Ages, the Dominicans and Franciscans, chose to become beggars – in solidarity with the poor, and deliberately distancing themselves to the church’s corruptions with wealth. John Wesley saw beggars as a question: “The Lord has lodged money in your hands temporarily; what return will you make?” And Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day’s mentor, repeatedly said “What we give to the poor for Christ’s sake is what we carry with us when we die.”

     Yes, we have to parse dependencies, and how we contribute through agencies. But we can always be kind to the poor, to beggars, giving them the gift of love. Marion Way, a great friend and longtime missionary in Brazil, would always stop when encountering a beggar, ask the person’s name, lay hands on him and pray.

    Johnson teases out the way theologians over time have come to understand God posing as the beggar, awaiting our response of love.  I tend to think the stories that report the healing of the blind are a problem, as we don’t see this miracle much. But in my time, I have twice had a lay reader in church to read (from a Braille Bible) this very text. The first thanked me for asking him, and told me it was his favorite passage in the Bible.
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 Looking toward Advent: My book, Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections, has much of what I've used as preaching material over the years, and also serves as a good group study for your people.

What can we say October 20? 22nd after Pentecost

   Again, it’s unwise to land on Job 38:1-7 without retracing the steps of how Job got to this point, an extended period (years?) of flailing and wailing against God, who never said a mumblin’ word until now. 

   I wrote a short commentary (just 23 pages!) on the whole book of Job - and it is a whole, not just parts! - for the Wesley One Volume Commentary. Check it out!

   When God finally speaks, it’s hardly a word of comfort or answers or pledge that all will be well. A whirlwind, then a megapoem?

    God asks – rhetorically? – “Who is this?” God knows, of course. Then God urges Job to “prepare yourself” (or better, the King James Version’s “gird up your loins”). Brace yourself – not for answers, but a barrage of rhetorical questions. “Who is this speaking darkness?  Where were you when…? Do you know…” What is God’s tone of voice? A thundering, intimidating Wizard of Oz type bass? Something more plaintive, and gentle? Could we imagine a feminine voice? Is God squashing Job, hushing him? Or ennobling him, expanding his mind and soul? Francis Anderson: “That God speaks at all is enough for Job. All he needs to know is that everything is still all right between himself and God…. It does not matter much what they talk about. Any topic will do for a satisfying conversation between friends.”

   But Job had to have been befuddled at first, just as we are, because of the topic God chose to cover. God takes Job on a jaw-dropping tour of all of creation, far up in the sky and under the sea, millennia back in time, to the hidden haunts of fabled creatures. Job does not know how the world came to be, or how weather happens, or how eggs are hatched up in rocky crags; the smartest among us would have only the vaguest notions of such things. God knows. God makes it all happen.

   In God’s tour, human beings are omitted. Humanity isn’t the center of creation! God has vastly larger enterprises than people and their issues. To understand life, we listen to the world. The intrepid John Muir, who chronicled his journeys through previously unknown places like Yosemite, wrote, “As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near to the heart of the world as I can.” 

   We need guides like Annie Dillard, who in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek went out and noticed the world teeming with variety and life, or Carl Sagan and then Neil deGrasse Tyson in their Cosmos productions, exposing us to the breadth, depth, immensity and minutiae of the universe.

   Lots of birth going on out there, and not just when God is referring to mountain goats, deer or ostriches giving birth. The oceans “burst out from the womb.” Ice and snow come forth from the womb of the world. Light emerges from darkness, portrayed with language reminiscent of an infant emerging from the dark womb into the light. Job had cursed the day of his birth, and wished himself dead. God replies with life, which is all over, and always has been, everywhere.

   There’s also death, and darkness. The lights of the heavens, are set against a backdrop of extreme blackness in space. Lions have their prey; young eaglets gobble up bloody flesh. Karl Barth pondered the profound truth about God’s reality:

   “Light exists as well as shadow.  Creation has not only a positive but also a negative side.  It belongs to the essence of creaturely nature, and is indeed a mark of its perfection, that it has in fact this negative side.  In creation there is not only a Yes but also a No; not only a height but also an abyss; not only clarity but also obscurity; not only growth but also decay; not only opulence but also indigence; not only beauty but also ashes; not only beginning but also end.  In the existence of man there are hours, days and years both bright and dark, success and failure, laughter and tears, youth and age, gain and loss, birth and sooner or later its inevitably corollary, death.  In all this, creation praises its Creator and Lord even on its shadowy side.  For all we can tell, may not His creatures praise Him more mightily in humility than in exaltation, in need than in plenty, in fear than in joy?  May not we ourselves praise Him more purely on bad days than on good, more surely in sorrow than in rejoicing, more truly in adversity than in progress?  If there may be praise of God from the abyss, night and misfortune… how surprised we shall be, and how ashamed of so much unnecessary disquiet and discontent, once we are brought to realize that all creation both as light and shadow, including our own share in it, was laid on Jesus Christ, and that even though we did not see it, while we were shaking our heads that things were not very different, it sang the praise of God just as it was, and was therefore right and perfect.”

   The animals God selects for Job to see not only live in remote, mysterious places. There’s a “wildness” about the lion, the raven, mountain goats, deer, the wild ass and wild ox, ostriches and eagles. None are tamed or tamable; none are domestic. God doesn’t ask Job to consider the house pet or the mule who pulls your plow. There is an unpredictability, an utter lack of control about creation. And your life. In creation, God brought order out of chaos. And God left a lot of chaos out there. God speaks to Job from a whirlwind, not a placid pond. Our fantasy that things are ordered, controlled, fixable or fair? The very idea of such a thing is laughable – as comical as the ostrich, an awkward, gangly bird with spindly legs and goofy wings. God chuckles, and so might we – at the astonishing variety of creatures God dared to make, but also at our pet ideas of justice, and even at ourselves.

   Hebrews 5:1-10. All the priests Jesus’ listeners and Hebrews’s readers had ever seen wore showy regalia, signs of their priestly authority, almost like decorated soldiers. Hebrews envisions a priest “clothed in weakness.” Jesus wasn’t merely dressing up as weak, pretending for a time. He truly was weak – just as we are. I keep alluding to my book, Weak Enough to Lead, which I think captures the weird biblical dynamic that weakness isn’t a condition God helps you overcome. It’s just who you are. It’s not a bad thing, either. And it’s certainly the realization that enables not just Jesus our high priest to “deal gently,” but for us to be gentle with others.

   Notice Jesus, this humbly attired, weak priest, was known for his “loud cries and tears,” and probably not merely in Gethsemane. I want to ponder that Jesus was “heard because of his fear.” Was Jesus fearful? Isn’t this more of a trembling awe before the powers of life in the universe – perhaps the way a new parent has a bit of a trembling fear when first holding a newborn. You aren’t afraid of the baby – but you do realize what’s at stake, how much tenderness, patience, longsuffering and time will be required.

   Mark 10:35-45. Feels a little brash, Hey, powerful one, do whatever we ask! But hadn’t Jesus invited them to do just this? “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matt. 7:7), and “I will do whatever you ask” (John 14:13). Maybe they’re missing the underlying clue of “in Jesus’ name,” which isn’t a formula to make sure a prayer works. It obviously indicates being in alignment with Jesus and his ways. Here, they mistakenly imagine there’s a hierarchy within the kingdom.   There isn’t – unless it’s that the least, the lost, the lepers, the unwanted rank #1. We’re different: in the world, one lords it over another. But not among us – and then the first, last, servant, lowliest, humble lines. Sarah Ruden renders v. 44, the son “didn’t come to have attendants but to be an attendant.”

  Matthew blames it on their mom, Mrs. Zebedee! There are pressures we feel (as pastors, as do our people) from others to succeed, to rise up. Even the zeal to be a righteous sufferer with Christ can scramble the soul. He asks if they can drink his cup – an allusion to Psalm 116:13 to make you shudder. Naively they exclaim, “We are able.” My intro theology professor at Duke, Robert Cushman, called “Are Ye Able?” the worst in the hymnal, as the point is you most assuredly are not able – which they proved in a few days by hiding out and denying Jesus at his trial and cup-drinking on the cross. Who wound up on his right and left that day? Common, despised criminals.

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 Looking toward Advent: My book, Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections, has much of what I've used as preaching material over the years, and also serves as a good group study for your people.