What can we say November 23? Christ the King

    Jeremiah 23:1-6. Pondering Christ the King, the lectionary suggests we should contrast the bad shepherds, the lousy kings, of which there were (and are!) plenty. We think “shepherd” as lowly, but in the ancient world, kings of vast empires were often spoken of as shepherds. Interesting, but this would be an unusual choice of lections for such a Sunday.

   Colossians 1:11-20. What a great text for Christ the King. I recall reading and then watching the film, The DaVinci Code, with my much beloved Ian McKellen playing the smug, sinister Leigh Teabing spouting absurdities about the 4^th century emperor Constantine imposing views of Jesus as divine on the subordinates in his empire. Colossians stands there, a mere 2, 3 at most decades after Jesus’ death, making the most extraordinary, divine claims about him. All of creation was about Jesus, by him for him. The language soars: he was/is/will always be the “image of God,” the “fulness of God,” “in whom all things hold together,” “the Head.”

   Colossians invites us to do what sermons too rarely do: simply to contemplate Jesus, to gaze, to be in awe. No moral, no takeaway. Dorothy Day, late in her life, was asked by Harvard sociologist Robert Coles to write some autobiographical recollections. Her reply? “I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me; the other day I wrote down the words ‘a life remembered,’ and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most – but I couldn’t do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”

   He is the image. Coins in Paul’s world featured the image of the divine emperor. Jesus is fully stamped with God, and the image is genuine, not faked or exaggerated. Thinking image: I’m still stunned by Daniel Boorstin’s astonishingly perceptive book, The Image, which reads as if written in 2022, but it’s 60 years old now: “In this book I describe the world of our own making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology and our progress to create a thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.” He assesses our society’s self-deception, our national self-hypnosis, our insatiable demand for illusions. Celebrities substitute for heroes; American dreams are pitifully replaced by American illusions; images overshadow ideals. To say Jesus is the image of God could not be more counter-cultural.

   The beauty of Jesus as image of the true God? Dorothy Day fixated on Jesus, which served her and thousands of others well. David Ford wrote that the antidote to despair is praise. We praise Jesus. Despair flees. We are surprisingly liberated from the world portrayed by the Beatles’ “I me me mine.”

   He is the Center; in him all things hold together. In 1919, in the wake of the ravages of World War I, the Irish troubles, a flu pandemic to put Covid in the shade, and his wife critically ill, William Butler Yeats wrote, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; everywhere innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely the second coming is at hand.” There is no center any more. Only Jesus can fill that space.

   And he holds what is separated together. He’s all about reconciliation. He can do this as we turn to him, as we embody his compassion, his listening, his empathy. It’s like Fr. Greg Boyle’s “Geiger counter”: we look for beauty and goodness. We don’t measure, we meet; we see not sin but son. It works in the way Christian Wiman narrates falling in love, that “sudden rift in my life and mind, as if our love demanded some expression beyond blissful intensity our 2 lives made. Love isn’t limiting. He quotes Elizabeth Bowen: “To turn toward one face is to find your self face to face with everything.” Could it be that God turns toward us in this one child, and as we turn to him, we turn toward each other in hopeful, reconciling ways?

   He is our Head. We may be fond of thinking of the hands and feet of Christ, and dream of being these. But it’s his head, thinking, looking, talking, weeping, sighing, hearing, pierced… O Sacred Head Now Wounded indeed. This is his kingship on this Christ the King Sunday. A crown of thorns, not Queen Elizabeth’s crown of jewels and ermine.

   The notion that the whole purpose of creation was… Jesus: I try to think of the whole purpose of my life being something or another. Maybe it was that day I reported in Christian Century when the infant child of precious church members was rushed to Duke Medical Center, as they’d discovered a malignant tumor wrapped around her spinal cord. I drove 3 hours to be with this family, but I had no words. I just cried. A grinning pastor kin to them somehow materialized, spouting words of confidence – which I did not have. The pediatric oncologist got to me: he had a plan, something to be done. I was so useless, and wished I’d gone to medical school instead. I decided to leave ministry. Really.

   Then, late into the night, as I was about to excuse myself, the parents asked me if I could hold their daughter for a while. She hadn’t stopped crying for hours. They were exhausted, and had a massive day ahead. Yes, I could hold her. They went off, somewhere, and I rocked this crying baby. Finally, she settled and fell asleep. What did I have to offer? Brilliant sermons? Wise theology? Clever prayers? All I could do was hold her.

   It occurred to me that all my training, my Ph.D. in theology and all my worships and experience in ministry, were preparing me for just this moment, to do nothing but hold a crying child in the dark of night. She got some rest, as did her parents. Really: what more did I go into ministry for, after all? I thought of Mary and Joseph rocking Jesus in the dark. It really was all about just this. Maybe all of creation was just about this, Jesus, God’s precious, vulnerable, suffering child, held, cradled, much loved.

   Luke 23:33-43. Christ is king? Want to see what his reign is like? He looks down, suffering the worst physical horror, personal shame and terrible ignominy, and forgives the jokesters who are mocking him. They don’t ask for forgiveness; they don’t confess their sins; they have zero clue who he really is. Unasked, he forgives. That’s all we need to know about the vastness of God’s mercy.

    The thief, portrayed in medieval art as holding Jesus’ hand as they march into heaven, has no stake to mercy, but receives it, and lavishly. What could be more elegant than the Taize chorus, “Jesus, Remember me, when you come into your kingdom”?

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What can we say November 16? 23rd after Pentecost

    Isaiah 65:17-25. God’s dream, our dream, such wonder – and yet when I read this text I sag a little and ask “How long?” Verse 17 says “I am about to…” That was in the 6^th century BCE. I guess “a thousand years are like a day” (Psalm 90:4) to God! – so we’re deep into God’s third day of God’s “about to.” Not cynical, but realistic – and well-worth naming in an honest sermon. This post-exilic prophet wasn’t merely expecting heaven / eternal life, but a real dawning here and now. Ours is to name it’s not here fully or all that obviously – and yet ours is to look for signs, glimpses, manifestations.

   Time works mystically for this prophet – and for God. Verse 22: “The work of their hands shall my Chosen outlive” (Robert Alter’s rendering). I think of Nouwen’s lovely thoughts in Our Greatest Gift on finding ways to be fruitful beyond our seasons of productivity. “The question is not how much more can I achieve or do, but how can I live so I can continue to be fruitful when I am no longer here?” Paul’s great resurrection chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, concludes with a plea that God “establish the work of our hands.” And Niebuhr’s wise thought: “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a single lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope.”

   If “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven” is a thing, Isaiah 65’s vision that “no longer shall an infant live only a few days” might remind us that infant mortality or thriving is a reliable index of the quality of community life – making us attentive to the ways medical care and nutrition can be inaccessible or lousy, and what tasks we have now as we consider this. Housing – affordable, clean, even glorious – also figures in this text, and is another valid index of whether we are a just society or not, and what moves toward the top of our to-do list.

   And we cannot hear verse 22's prophetic claim that it cannot be that one builds and plants, while another inhabits and eats - but all must enjoy the work of their own hands without thinking of the soaring rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln; I so wish I could preach like the marvelous "Lincoln Portrait" by Aaron Copland (especially when starring Henry Ford)! Give it a listen.

   I’m inspired, as you probably are, by Father Greg Boyle’s astonishing work with gang members. He never boasts of figuring out some clever technique for such work, but instead talks about seeing what God is doing in them, of seeing beauty in them, and celebrating God’s wonder with them. And I recall an amazing podcast about John Garland’s ministry at the Mexican border (“Maybe God: Can Loving ‘Illegals’ Save our Souls, part 2”) where he says it’s not so much doing something for someone, but just being there to bear witness to the beautiful thing God is doing. Indeed, Isaiah 65 was right, and continues to be right: God is and is about to do a new thing.

   Walter Brueggemann calls this text “a glorious artistic achievement. It is also an act of daring, doxological faith that refuses to be curbed by present circumstance. This poet knows that Yahweh’s coming newness is not contained within our present notions of the possible.”

   2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 would be daunting (for me at least) to preach. If I lay the text out, people would holler not “Amen” but “Get a real job!” What’s the trouble Paul’s dealing with? Had some in Thessalonica reverted to Greco-Roman patron-client relationships – within the Body of Christ? Or were some so enlightened, so sure the eschaton had dawned, that they forsook their jobs? Paul’s interest is pretty clearly mutual responsibility within the church.

   Luke 21:5-19 isn’t all that promising either. Jesus offers up a doom and gloom message. He certainly doesn’t promise peace or ease – a word for us clergy and for our laity. On the day I am writing this, I received 2 prayer requests from church members, noting how the world is such a mess, and so that wanted me to pray for them to have joy and peace despite all that. I replied by suggesting that if we are close to the heart of God during such times, we will not feel so much peace or joy, but we will share in God’s agony. Ministry, in sync with God, simply will not feel sunny or successful – if Jesus is any guide.

   I continue to be struck by the words of Maria Skobtsova, known as Mother Maria of Paris, and now St. Mary of Paris, born 1891 in Latvia, executed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 for being part of the French resistance: “It would be a great lie to tell those who are searching: ‘Go to church, because there you will find peace.’ The opposite is true. The Church tells those who are at peace and asleep: ‘Go to church, because there you will feel real anguish for your sin and the world’s sin. There you will feel an insatiable hunger for Christ’s truth. There, instead of becoming lukewarm, you’ll be set on fire; instead of being pacified, you’ll become alarmed; instead of learning the wisdom of this world, you will become fools for Christ.”

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What can we say November 9? 22nd after Pentecost

   Haggai 1:15b-2:9 is appealing to me for two reasons. It’s just fun to say the names (and the weighty impact of them piling up must have been part of Haggai’s intent!): “Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak.” God’s engagement with the people, in history, where political powers reside but can’t get done what’s required.

   The demise of the church is worth reflecting upon (Haggai 2:3). Care is required if we get nostalgic about “this house in its former glory.” He is speaking of the meager temple the Israelites rebuilt after the exile, a pale, puny successor to Solomon’s. Could it be that the real “former glory” of the church wasn’t in the 50’s or some sunny season we pretend was cool. Maybe it was during the Roman persecution, or as Luther was hounded at the beginning of the Reformation?

   To ancient Judeans, and to today’s church, the Word through Haggai summons us to “Take courage” – 3 times! And why? “The Lord is with you.” As Sam Wells rightly named in his A Nazareth Manifesto, “with” is the most important theological word in the Bible. God is with us: this is the Old Testament’s constant story, the very nickname Jesus was given (Emmanuel!), and his parting words at his Ascension. God doesn’t fix everything, or shelter us from unpleasantness. God is with us. Somehow, ultimately, that is enough.

   The promise, “The latter splendor will be greater than the former,” is ostensibly about a cooler, more magnificent temple yet to be built. Justinian’s wry remark, when the Hagia Sophia was finished? “O Solomon, I have surpassed you.” We might read Haggai’s promise eschatologically – or we might wonder if our church, with its crumbling denominations and ever lessening profile in society, will enter a new era of glory, not defined by size or institutions, but by holiness and a radical embodiment of what church was supposed to be about all along.

   Frederick Buechner’s old quote might pertain: “Maybe the best thing that could happen to the church would be if the buildings were lost, the bulletins blown away by the wind, the institutions all gone – and then all we’d have left would be Jesus and each other, which was all we had in the first place.” Of course, in the meantime, especially if you're in the thick of your annual pledge campaign just now, you need some interim money to keep the Jesus and each other functioning!

   2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17. With its apocalyptic trappings is unpreachable to me; too much “man-splaining” would be required. It’s possible to reflect on “holding fast to tradition,” although we have to own that traditions can be evil and should be let go. And so now we turn to the Gospel:

   Luke 20:27-38. I saw a colleague dare to title his sermon on this “7 Brides for 7 Brothers.” Not quite… A common enough pastoral question is Will I be with my wife in heaven? Or if married twice, Which will be my wife in heaven? Or children decide where to bury dad: With wife 1 or wife 2? Some of my more intense pastoral moments have actually been sitting with people asking such agonizing, mystifying questions. Best for the preacher just to own the agony, the heartfelt depth of love and fear being exxpressed. For Jesus, unmarried and not exactly a matchmaker or glorifier of marriage, would explain theat marriage is an earthly institution, not necessary, or even heavenly. St. Augustine: “Where there is no death, there are no marriage.”

   I never enjoy deflating people’s vapid visions of what heaven will be like (golf every day! or as Tammy Faye Bakker put it as she was nearing death, “I think of heaven as a giant shopping mall where I have a credit card with no limit!”). Heaven will be about God – whose glory will so mesmerizing, we will never in a zillion years tire of gazing on his face, and singing our praises. We will even then find the true union in relationships: not looking at one another, but together looking to Jesus. If that’s our destiny in heaven, perhaps the more we might approximate that here in friendships and families, the greater our joy might be? At the same time, you have to love C.S. Lewis's wisdom - that however we might in our wildest imagination envision heaven's wonder and goodness to be, the reality will be exponentially greater. So if I adore being with my spouse now, heaven will not be identical to or any less than the best life now has to offer.

   David Lyle Jeffrey, wisely reflecting on Jesus’ interaction with the Sadducees interrogating and trying to trap Jesus, asked “Was Jesus wearied by them? Did he laugh out loud? The absurdity of their question is a function of their rationalism taken to an extreme.” Their goal wasn’t to establish to whom you’re married in heaven – and so Jesus doesn’t answer that! They aim to expose the absurdity of belief in the resurrection – a belief that we might as well own isn’t without its lunacy and unanswerable questions. The preacher might chart why she or he believes in eternal life, and trusts in it, even if with the inevitable mystery.

   I love what Amy-Jill Levine reported when commenting on this passage. At her mother’s deathbed, her mom asked, “‘What will happen to me when I die?’ I immediately answered, ‘You’ll see Daddy.’ My father had died decades earlier. She replied, ‘I look like hell.’ ‘Well, Mom, you’ve looked better, but when you see Daddy, you’ll look as beautiful as you looked the day you got married.’ ‘How do you know this?’ ‘Mom, I‘ve got a Ph.D. in religion; I know these things.’”

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What can we say November 2? All Saints

   Preparing for All Saints, I stumbled across a marvelous passage in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Animal Dreams, which tells how the citizens of a town called Grace observed the Day of the Dead: lavishly decorating the cemetery, nothing solemn, but much laughter, running, and many flowers. "Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones.  The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care.  It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead.  In these families you would never stop being loved.."

At our church's 100th anniversary worship last week, we sang "The Church's One Foundation." I'll never hear these words the same again... "Yet she on earth hath union with God the three in one, and mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won; oh happy ones and holy, Lord, grant us grace that we - like them the meek and lowly on high may dwell with thee." I was ready for All Saints.

 Worship idea: we've asked people to bring a small picture of a loved one to hold during the service. In my sermon, I'll play off John O'Donohue's poem about the loss of a child: "No one knows the wonder your child awoke in you, your heart a perfect cradle to hold its presence. Now you sit bereft, your eyes numbed... You will wear this absence like a secret locket... Let the silent tears flow, and when your eyes clear perhaps you'll glimpse how your eternal child... parents your heart and persuades the moon to send new gifts ashore." 

   While in our worship we’ll use the All Saints’ Day lections (see below), the November 3 readings are themselves powerful and sufficient to the day. Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 images a sentinel on a watchtower (I’m listening to Bob Dylan’s, and then Jimi Hendrix’s versions…) – an impeccable image for our longing and patient waiting for the dawning of God’s good kingdom. Near the end of Homecoming, Marilynne Robinson’s best (maybe? my opinion?) novel, we find this reflection on memory and death: “But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting so long.” Not accidentally, this watchtower moment climaxes in Hab. 2:4 – the verse Paul alighted upon when he was figuring out how to explain the way faith in grace is what saves.

   Luke 19:1-10 similarly would work for All Saints. Jesus comes to the home of Zaccheus (“a wee little man was he…”). We are titans, and even the saints weren’t giants. Zaccheus’s smallness is a mirror – or perhaps we ponder Tolkien’s hobbits from the shire as the hope and future of Middle Earth, or that other child’s song, “They are weak, but he is strong.” Luke’s punch line zooms in on what matters: “The Son of man came to seek and save the lost,” not the clever or well-placed or even the church members, Bible readers and believers. Jesus’ intriguing, mystifying use of “Son of man” (as the Ethiopian eunuch asked, “Does he refer to himself or another?”) leads us to the first of our All Saints Lections:

   Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18. The exotic setting and vivid language of verse 1 sets the tone for high drama. It’s just fun in the pulpit to say “Belshazzar,” and perhaps then to image Daniel, in the shadows of such a dreamy place, dreaming – not the kind Freud could explain, but the kind God gives and in which we share. Dreaming still matters – and just as a knot in the gut may turn out to be a malignancy or a pregnancy, the dream may be a nightmare or something glorious. Daniel is terrified – but the monsters haunting him in the dark are nothing more than the temporary, vapid powers of this world about to be defeated by the powers of good, light and love. I wouldn’t squander much time explicating which beast represented Persia and which the Greeks – as later on it’s Antiochus Epiphanes, then Nero or Domitian, and ultimately the Hitlers, Stalins and other arrogant megalomaniacs who strut across the stage of history. They are undone by a humble, unarmed, suffering one.

   Daniel’s dream vision has been made the linchpin in N.T. Wright’s explication of Jesus as Son of Man instigating The Day the Revolution Began. Daniel 7’s “little horn” is silenced, the monsters condemned, God’s kingdom inaugurated – reminding us that All Saints’ Day isn’t merely about eternal life for those who’ve died, but the comprehensive, cosmic dawning of God’s kingdom in its fulness! Again, the new ones who will reign are the little people, the hobbit-like ones, the “saints.” 

   Christians have often been irresponsible hopers in God’s ultimate victory, not engaging in God’s work now. Sib Towner explains why quietism isn’t the interim ethic for those with apocalyptic hope: “The waiting is an active waiting. It includes the maintenance of sharp identity, the heightening of interpretative skills, faithfulness before unjust demands of the foreign rulers, and fidelity to Yahweh in all things.” 

  Before I deal with death and resurrection, I'll focus on holy lives, courageous lives. Hard not to, as I'm just returning from our church's "Deep South Pilgrimage." In Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, we retraced the steps of heroes who shed blood on holy ground. John Lewis, after nearly being killed, crossed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge - so can I play on "crossing over" as heroic action now and entering eternal life later on? Without diverting into race-as-an-issue, I hope it will play in the background and invite us to ponder how much courage matters - still.

   I’ll allude to Daniel but will preach primarily on Ephesians 1:11-23 (although we’ll sing David Haas’s wonderful “Blest Are They,” and I will allude to the Gospel also). I doubt I’ll do a lot of explaining the text, and I certainly wouldn’t try to make such powerful words “relevant” or any such nonsense. They speak for themselves. Mine will be to relish the words, being personally awed by them, like a docent in a museum, pointing with gawking delight. The luxurious, lavish verbiage had to be mind-boggling to the early Christians, meager as their resources and prospects were. Frank Thielman is right: “Words that emphasize God’s meticulous planning pile up one upon another – purpose, work, counsel, will – how privileged are we!” Heirs, inheritances, riches, glory, destiny... 

   This last word needs a little parenthesis, doesn’t it? The old “God is in control” notion is ridiculous, of course. I love how Markus Barth (Karl’s son!) clarifies how personal this destining is: “It pertains exclusively to the relationship of the Father to his children. If no wise human father would treat his children according to a schedule fixed before their birth, how much less would the Father who is blessed in Ephesians 1:3-14!”

   The responsibilities of even the most fabulous heirs was driven home to me at the World Methodist Council in 1986 when Donald English reported on attending the wedding of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew – and how the couple, immensely wealthy, able to do whatever they might wish, had bowed and pledged fealty to the crown, to the “rights and responsibilities” that went with being a royal couple.

   I love Paul’s “prayer report” here. It’s not so much that What we asked God for was ‘answered.’ What intrigues is the content of his prayer – that the recipients, the objects of his praying, might have a “spirit of wisdom and revelation,” that their “eyes of their hearts might be enlightened” 

(reminding me of St. Francis’s constant prayer during his season of conversion, “Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart, and give me, Lord, correct faith, firm hope, perfect charity, wisdom and perception, that I may do what is truly your most holy will.”

   Paul also prays for 3 things (Do you wish people prayed this for you? for one another?): (1) the hope to which he has called you, (2) the God’s glorious inheritance, and (3) the magnitude of God! Do we get such prayer requests? What if we did? The hope business: Emily Dickinson suggested that “Hope is the thing in the soul with feathers…” – but is it in the soul? Or is it more about God? Markus Barth, again: “The emphasis lies not so much on the mood of the person hoping as on the substance or subject matter of expectation.” It’s the thing hoped for. 

Christopher Lasch (in his marvelous The True and Only Heaven) clarified that optimism is the fantasy that all will be better tomorrow, and it depends on us; but hope is the ability to deal with tomorrow if things aren’t better – and it depends not on us but on God.

   Luke 6:20-31 fascinates as the parallel to Matthew 5’s more familiar and beloved “Beatitudes.” Why more beloved? Matthew omits the “Woe” moments in Luke… and Jesus suggests the “poor in spirit” are blessed – instead of merely the “poor.” 

Clarence Jordan shrewdly pointed out that the poor prefer Luke, while the rest of us delight in Matthew! Jesus spoke to the poor, the nobodies – and blessed them. They were accustomed to being cursed, ignored or blamed – as we see in our world today. How amazing was Jesus? For All Saints’ Day, it’s hard not to hear the line “Blessed are those who mourn.” We come mourning, indeed – but we grieve as those who have hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Again, I trust the reading of the names in God’s holy place more than I trust my frail words to express the hope of the Gospel!

   Robert Schuller tried to modernize the text with the rubric “The Be-Happy Attitudes.” Just thumb through Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship to his pages on the Beatitudes and you'll get why Schuller is laughable. Jesus isn’t issuing commandments on how to live, much less doling out advice for a chipper life. He blesses, he embraces, loves, knows, recognizes, and gives hope to the hopeless, to the people nobody else wants – and then he brings down a Woe! on the big dogs, those who think they’re somebody, and especially the self-righteous. Jesus’ words are light years from the conventional wisdom of our day. He doesn’t say Blessed are the good-looking, the successful, the well-connected, the white Americans, and he doesn’t say Woe to the immigrant, the unemployed, the lonely or the homeless. The preacher has one more chance just now to chip away at the façade of thin, culturally-mashed-down thinking, and open the window into Jesus’ revolutionary worldview.

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 You might appreciate my Advent book picking up on phrases and themes in various Christmas carols: Why This Jubilee? Useful for church people - and for preachers.

What can we say October 26? 20th after Pentecost/Reformation Sunday

   Joel 2:23-32. I’ve never warmed up to Joel much – certainly not in the way Peter did in the first ever big important Christian sermon in Acts 2, which lifts our text as key to understanding Jesus! It’s easy to play on “sons and daughters, old men and young men, even servants” – launching us forward toward “neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female…” But it’s that all these will “dream dreams.” I hear preachers now veering toward “dream,” Martin Luther King-style. In Scripture, a dream is something God uses to reveal what God is about to do. It’s not an eloquent vision, or sorting our your anxieties while asleep. Joel envisions something we don’t quite expect to unfold.

   He alludes to a “Teacher of righteousness,” which was picked up in a big way at Qumran. It’s dicey to take today’s reading out of context: it’s sunny and optimistic, but only because the sense is that Joel’s dire threats and summons to radical repentance have, shockingly, worked. The people are imagined as having turned, finally taking the Day of the Lord seriously, gifted thereby with healing and restoration. Hans Walter Wolff provides two stellar comments: “Not only will earlier conditions be restored; they will be exceeded.” And, “The pouring out of God’s spirit upon flesh means the establishment of new, vigorous life through God’s unreserved giving of himself to those who, in themselves, are rootless and feeble.”

   It’s a scary text, moon-to-blood stuff. And it's almost Halloween!! Of course, change is scary. Joan Chittister, in The Time is Now, shows how the prophets “chose courage. They chose to stake their lives on what must be rather than stake their comfort, their security on what was.” Joel prevents us from shrinking the Gospel to mere personal salvation. It’s a whole new world.

   2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18. Paul poignantly looks back as he nears the end of his life. So moving. What’s to come? Not a pot of gold or a luxury cottage on another continent. 

 It’s “the crown of righteousness,” maybe like those orphans in Cider House Rules, bidden goodnight by Dr. Larch with the words “Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.” Paul’s Greek tense here indicates his being sacrificed is already in process.

   Luke 18:9-14. Spirituality gone bad! The pious man refers to himself 5 times in just 2 verses! Indeed, he is quite literally praying “with himself,” talking to his true favorite person. And utterly secular, if the theme of Charles Taylor’s massive tome (A Secular Age) is adopted – that the “secular” is whenever we see meaning with the self rather than beyond the self.

   Luther launched the Reformation in reply to theologian Gabriel Biel’s dictum, “Do what is in you.” What is in me is brokenness, a self shackled to sin and self, and inability to do God’s holy bidding. How lonely is the effort! Notice this Pharisees is “standing by himself.”

   This guy’s attitude was also criticized by Jewish writers, like Josephus and in the Babylonian Talmud. No one likes it when Holiness slides into self-righteousness which slides into despising others.

   Then there’s the tax collector, the “moral equivalent of a leper” (N.T. Wright). Luther’s despair, in striving to be holy enough, is a later echo of the shameless plea of the tax collector, who cannot even raise his eyes. Humility is faith, humility is the need for and reception of grace, mercy requiring nothing but humility. These 2 are of utterly divergent social situations, one admired, the other despised, one of fair means, the other probably wealthy. 

“The prayers of the 2 men are even more a contrast than their social station” (David Lyle Jeffrey).

   The contrast is such a laughable caricature that we might lose the point. I’d fix on how thankful the pious one is that he is “not like others.” Thank you Lord I’m not sick like those guys, that I don’t think wrong politically like those guys, that I have children and grandchildren unlike my friend Bob. Pity is the core of such prayer – or judgment, neither in sync with the heart of Jesus. Prayer is never comparative in nature, tone or content.

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   Check out my brand new book, valuable for preachers and laity during Advent (if you're looking for a devotional or group study - even for your church!), And His Name Shall Be Called - reflections on Isaiah 9:7, with Handel's Messiah in the background!

What can we say October 19? 19th after Pentecost

    Jeremiah 31:27-34 provides a resounding echo of Jeremiah’s call, where God invited him into the labor of plucking up and breaking down, then to build and to plant. Now God is ready to sow. The image of God as sower: did Jesus ponder this when fashioning his parable? Gotta pluck up first, dig up some furrows, rid the field of the weeds and rocks.

   Late in Jeremiah’s ministry, after the agony of Jerusalem’s destruction, God promises to “watch over them.” Such a tender image! Do preachers ponder this for preaching or to reflect on their own call and ministry. What has unfolded? What has God done? Or not done yet? Can we without being trite promise our people that God still has a good work to do? Or are we still at an early-Jeremiah stage, where more plucking up and breaking down is in store? I think it’s entirely valid for the preacher simply to raise questions, and let the people ponder.

   Gazing off toward the horizon of God’s future, Jeremiah upends a proverb Ezekiel also used about the sour grapes and descendants’ teeth being set on edge. Americans fantasize they are independent and free, but quite clearly parental stuff creeps into the children. Genes determine so much. Adverse Childhood Experiences determine so much of our mental and even physical health. The old saying “Jesus might live in his heart, but grandpa lives in his bones” is hauntingly true. Not to mention historical and cultural impacts. One generation makes a pact with the culture (Let’s have smart phones!) and the next can’t extricate itself (I’m addicted to this thing). One generation indulges in foolish foreign policy, and the next can’t figure out a simple exit strategy.

   Sam, a character in Christopher Beha's novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, always felt he "was in permanent danger of turning into his father... Sam hadn't entirely purged this atavistic terror that the father's sins might be visited upon his son." A common theme in literature, film, music... and so we'd best be attentive to the fear, and the reality - despite Jeremiah, who bothered to say this for stellar reasons.

   Jeremiah overhears in God’s vigilance a day when this chain will be broken. That’s the goal of the church’s work, right? Not a little charitable patch or salve here and there, but a generational breaking of the cycle of poverty, or spousal abuse, or injustice in the streets. We don’t seem entirely capable of pulling this off. But God is, and our privilege and responsibility will be to share in God’s labor for such a day.

   A new covenant will be forged. Teaching, and laws won’t be required. People will simply know the Lord. It will be engraved on their hearts – which can be our goal even now. We preach and minister so our people might develop muscle memory, instincts, a kinship with the mind and heart of God so they needn’t check the rules but will spontaneously embody God’s way. I like Sam Wells’s suggestion – that God isn’t a 911 resort in a crisis, but such a constant that we actually then manage to steer clear of many crises.

   2 Timothy 3:14-4:5. I’m the rare clergy person on this – but work with me: avoid doing what Paul does! “From childhood we’ve known the sacred writings,” and “Those from whom you learned the faith” are phrases that make sense for lifelong churchgoers. The newbie will shrug. Or someone like me, whose parents were quite like that, will feel alienated. And how many people learned so much Bible and churchiness growing up and as big people feel utterly smug – and are transparently mean and judgmental?

   Paul is coping with a cultural crisis he sees dawning. “A time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine but have itching ears, accumulating teachers to suit their own desires.” That time is right now – and probably has held at countless points throughout history. Surely for us. What’s the counter? Paul relies on the astounding claim that Scripture is inspired.

   What is Scripture? Never have we experienced such a huge preaching/pastoral question!!! Maybe need a class (or classes) instead of a sermon. And yet to stake out the beauty, wonder, and life of Scripture in preaching is essential. It’s “inspired.” Not radioactive, or dictated by God. In-spired means “breathed into.” God breathed life into this book, and breathes life into us through this book. So much of it is puzzling, crazy, rambling, confusing, a big problem. God wants us to read such a book.

   Chris E.W. Green (check out my podcast with him!) writes wonderfully about Scripture. Hospitality is required, and induced by reading. “Our readings of Scripture can be sanctifying if they actually change our lives so we become more and more strangely roomy and inviting.” This happens best through what puzzles and troubles us. “What seems to us wrong or strange in Scripture is in point of fact simply a reflection of what is wrong and strange in us.” Indeed, “receiving the Scriptures in all their humanity, we find ourselves humanized.” “God uses Scripture to overthrow our false conceptions of God.” We pray for that in-breathing Spirit to inspire our reading, expecting that “the Spirit at times obscures the Scriptures sanctifyingly for us. The Spirit keeps us, for a time, from seeing clearly the meanings of Scripture so we can begin to learn Christ.”

   You might also conclude that if God wishes to be known through tales of dysfunctional families, court cases, love poetry, wars and outlandish dreams, then it must be the case that the God in question is right there in the thick of our dysfunctional families, legal doings, romance, battles and fantasies. God isn’t confined in a pretty chapel, or to the times our eyes are closed. With eyes wide open, we see God everywhere, with everybody. If we believe this, then we can begin to think differently about other books we might read. God loves books, and reading – and not just pious stories and books, if the Bible itself is any indication! More on this later.

   Inspired Scripture isn’t a bank vault of golden truth, and it’s not a weapon to wield to judge others. It’s “useful” – for? “Teaching, reproof, correction, training,” to make us “proficient, equipped for good work.” It’s functional, not ontological (fancy words, but you know what I mean). The test isn’t what we think about this book, but what work we let it do on us and in us – and on us and in us as the Body of Christ.

   Chapter 4 offers wise counsel for clergy, to proclaim in all weather, to convince and rebuke (do we even try?), to be patient in teaching, to endure suffering. I can complain or feel sorry for myself when I suffer in ministry – or I can sense some deep solidarity with Paul himself. At least I can try.

   Luke 18:1-8. What an unusual context Luke provides: this parable is “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” – assuming you won’t – and will! A lousy judge responds to a pestering woman. Is the widow like God, pestering us to do justice?? Ben Witherington warns against utilizing or playing on the stereotype of nagging woman.

   On our “need” to pray, I think of Isaac Bashevis Singer: “I only pray when I am in trouble. The problem is, I am in trouble all the time.” Allegory isn’t the way, or else God is the judge who says “I have no respect for anybody” and gets sick and tired of her bugging him. Of course, there is a bit of a theological wink in pondering God as the unjust judge. God isn’t fair. The courtroom is rigged, for the judge is also the defense attorney, not to mention the victim who will bear the penalty.

   Anyhow, it’s not that God “grants” justice, so much as God “does” justice: the Greek is poies. Our minds flit, rightly, to Micah 6:8, where we learn that God desires that we to do justice (the Hebrew Jesus would have had in mind was mishpat). In my book on Micah 6:8 (What Does the Lord Require?): “It seems that God does not merely want us to want justice, or to wish justice would happen. God doesn’t say ‘Think about justice’ or ‘Campaign for justice’ or even ‘Pray for justice.’ Justice reveals what is in the heart of God. Mishpat is God’s dream for a special kind of community… A thumbnail summary of what mishpat justice is about in Israel would be this: justice is when the poorest are cared for. A just society is not necessarily the one where fairness reigns and the diligent are rewarded. A just society is the one where everyone belongs, where the neediest are taken good care of, where no one is hungry or disenfranchised. Walter Brueggemann suggests that justice requires us ‘to sort out what belongs to whom and return it to them.’” It’s all God’s – and so the Haitian proverb applies: “God gives, but God doesn’t share.”

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   Check out my brand new book, valuable for preachers and laity during Advent (if you're looking for a devotional or group study - even for your church!), And His Name Shall Be Called - reflections on Isaiah 9:7, with Handel's Messiah in the background!