What can we say come Christmas Eve?

   Christmas Eve!!  Preaching is a challenge, and a joy (I think). There's still usable Advent material in my previous blog, "Preaching Advent" - but beyond that, here are some key questions and thoughts I’ve assembled over the years of preaching Christmas Eve.

     (a) What do they come for? I try to remember what people came for – and precious few would say We come on Christmas Eve to hear Rev. Howell’s sermon.  They come for the music, and at our place for that magical moment when we sing Silent Night, lower the lights, and raise our candles.  It’s hokey – and I love it.  I’ve tried to name the wonder so it isn’t just “pretty.”  If it’s beautiful, it’s because it happens in the dark.  Lots of darkness in the world, and in our lives; so the little candle is a promise, a pledge, a defiance.  It’s a parable of a faithful life of resistance to evil. 

Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) said it well: “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”  Or this, from the medieval Franciscan, Giovanni Giacondo: “The gloom of the world is but a shadow / Behind it, yet within reach, is joy / There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see / And to see, we have only to look / I beseech you to look.”

     It’s also helpful to help them hear their own music.  We have a soprano sing “O Holy Night,” and there’s much in there (“chains shall he break…”); last year I drew their attention to “Then he appeared, and the soul felt its worth” – suggesting that the order matters:  it is the appearing of Jesus that defines our worth.  We sing “Away in a Manger,” and I’ve invited them to pray the last stanza (“Be near me Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay close by me forever, and love me I pray; bless all the dear children in thy tender care, and fit us for heaven to live with thee there”). When I wrote a book about Christmas music (Why This Jubilee?) a couple of years ago, I found myself surprised, delighted and moved over and over by the depth of theology and psychology and geography and history in our simple carols; I now try to help people really hear what they've sung by heart forever.

     (b) Who comes?  It’s a cheap shot to ding the C&Es.  We aren’t crowded on Dec. 24 because of them.  Rather, everybody comes – and they bring visiting parents, aunts, grandchildren, etc.  But you do have the very occasional attender – and how to speak to them invitingly?  I’m fond of what the novelist Julian Barnes said:  “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”  I believe the most adamant atheist, and the most casual spiritual person have a deep-seated longing for home – for Christ.  Name the hollow place for what it is.

     (c) What do they need to hear?  I’ve chided the sporadic attenders and pleaded with them to continue coming.  Not helpful.  I do suspect Christmas Eve isn’t a bad time to quite gently take on popular atheism.  Among the many anti-Christian bestsellers was God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens (may God rest his soul…).  I’d play on that and say, Correct, God is not great.  God, rather, is quite small, vulnerable, a God who doesn’t conquer everything but gets defeated in the most profound embodiment of suffering love ever.  Jesus did not rise up miraculously in the manger and denounce his foes.  Jesus has a tender place in his heart for Christopher Hitchens.

     And Bart Ehrman.  Amazingly, and weirdly, a few years ago I received an email from him – on Christmas Eve.  I had been trying to connect with him on something – and he finally responded around suppertime on 12/24.  I had reviewed his book, God’s Problem, which is an embarrassingly vapid regurgitation of the most simplistic, easily answered critiques of Christianity – and his email to me said he didn’t like worshipping with his Episcopalian wife on Christmas Eve, because they raise all those candles.  “If good Christians would do something for the poor instead of raising those candles, I would think more highly of Christianity.”  I replied to him that, yes, a few thousand would raise candles at my place on this evening – but we also would raise over $100,000 for the poor.

     (d) What mood are they in?  Some are sentimental, some are giddy, some are edgy – facing family dysfunction.  Some have already been drinking.  I think almost all are in a bit of a “What really matters” mood.  If you’ve never read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, you should.  He says this: “One Christmas was so much like another… I can never remember if it snowed for 6 days and 6 nights when I was 12 or 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6… All the Christmases roll down to the sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street.”  I’ve used this tactic: I’ll ask, What did you get for Christmas in 1998? Or in 2004?  No one can remember, of course.  Then I ask, Whom did you love in 1998?  Who was with you in 2004?  “Through the years we all will be together.”  It’s not the stuff.  I giggle when I recall my girls getting bikes on Christmas Eve.  But what year was it?  And where on earth are those bikes now?  It’s the people, the love, the relationship.  That’s all we have to give, all we really want to receive.  And that’s what God gives.  Not this thing or that answer to prayer.  God gives God’s own self at Christmas.

     (e) What is my tone?  Of all preaching moments, my tone on 12/24 had best be gentle, slower than usual, resonant with wisdom, patience, kindness and wonder.  Sighing is in order.  If you have a smart-alecky voice like mine, you have to practice.

     (f) Where do I go first?  Since homilies on Christmas Eve should be short, you have to take people somewhere quickly.  Not a lot of reiterating the text, or ramping in with chit-chat.  And you have to take them to a very different place quickly.  Could be your grandparents’ Christmas tree.  I like a couple of historical moments.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife died in 1835, he remarried in 1843, then she died in a house fire in 1861; shortly thereafter his son was wounded in the Civil War.  With war raging, and bearing so much loss, he woke up on Christmas day and wrote, “I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, good will to men.  And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom Had rolled along the unbroken song of peace on earth, good will to men.  A voice, a chime, a chant sublime of peace on earth, good will to men. The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound the carols drowned of peace on earth, good will to men. And in despair I bowed my head ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.’

     This sequence moves me every time.  There is sorrow and good cause to feel forlorn at Christmas – but Longfellow continued: “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: ‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail With peace on earth, good will to men.’”  That was my sermon one year.

     Or you have Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s amazing letter from a Nazi concentration camp:  “I think we’re going to have an exceptionally good Christmas.  Since outward circumstance precludes our making provision for it will show whether we can be content with what is truly essential.  I used to be very fond of thinking up and buying presents, but now that we have nothing to give, the gift God gave us in the birth of Christ will seem all the more glorious; the emptier our hands, the better we understand what Luther meant: We are beggars, it’s true.  The poorer our quarters, the more clearly we perceive that our hearts should be Christ’s home on earth.”  The image of no presents, empty hands, in poor quarters, even being apart.  Christ comes to humble hearts.

     (g) What about the text?  If you follow my blog, you know I’m big on attention to exegetical detail.  I think I am less so on Christmas Eve – although there are little details in the texts that intrigue and could be lingered on to make a whole homily.  The name Augustus – who promised everything Christ came to deliver: peace, salvation, good news, unity.  You could cite historians regarding the situation when Jesus was born – but it would be hard to top Madeleine L’Engle: “That was no time for a child to be born / With the earth betrayed by war and hate / In a land in the crushing grip of Rome; / Honor and truth were trampled by scorn / Yet here did the Saviour make his home. / When is the time for love to be born? / The inn is full on the planet earth, / Yet love still takes the risk of birth.” The phrase, “No room in the inn”: easy to spiritualize, and I’d commend Frederick Buechner’s eloquent lament over the fate of the innkeeper.  Mary “pondering” in her heart.  So much in Luke 2, much less John 1…

     (h) Anything you might report on?  I think of the prophets and their symbolic actions: is there something you can do and then just tell about it?  A couple of years ago, in the gap between Christmas Eve services, I drove to inner city Charlotte just to see what if anything might happen, if I might notice something.  I parked, and immediately (as if God set it up) a city bus stopped where I was standing.  An older woman, looking utterly exhausted, got off with a battered, rolling suitcase.  She sighed and looked at me.  I innocuously said “Merry Christmas!”  She moaned a little, and said, “Not for me.”  I said, “Tell me about it.”  She squinted, looked me over, dressed as I was in dress shirt, wool slacks, and with my very Caucasian complexion, and said, “You don’t look like the kind of fellow who would understand.”  I hung in there and said, “Try me anyway.”

     I reported this in my homily that evening – and tried gently and briefly to explore who’s hurting out there, would we understand, and how Jesus came not so much for us but for her and her kin, looking very much like someone who would understand.

     (i) The main thing, the only thing.  It’s the Incarnation.  God became flesh; God came down; God is as close as my own heartbeat and the breath I just took.  God understands us, and redeems us from the inside out.  This is why God’s revealing of God’s heart and mind came through an infant – something we all once were, something that elicits tenderness from even the hardest among us.  This is the only real unique thing about our faith.  Hans Urs von Balthasar: “Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.”

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   ** Check out two of my books, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, and Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us About Powerful Leadership, are available.

What can we say December 29? 1st after Christmas

    Low attendance warning!! December 29 follows December 26, Boxing Day, not a day for fighting, but a day to box up gifts to give to the unnoticed people in your world: the mailman, the grocery clerk, the garbage pickup guys. A lovely custom, preachable (if we avoid trivializing the rare, seasonal spurt of kindness which should go on all year). It's also St. Stephen's day - if you think folks are in the mood to hear about the first Christian martyr!! Of course, if you're still doing Christmas in the pulpit, I refer you to my blog, "Preaching Christmas," with loads of illustrative material.

   1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26. Somehow this time zone just after Christmas has an Old Testament feel to me, although I’ve no idea why. Each year, Hannah would take her son a little robe – like a Christmas gift, the bathrobe a child would wear to open gifts, a new outfit for the poor. Samuel is reported to do what Jesus was beginning to do the day after the first Christmas: growing in stature, wisdom and favor with God and the people (echoed in Luke 2:52). I wrote a short chapter on Jesus’ very earliest days as an infant in my book, Birth: The Mystery of Being Born, which I’d commend to you.

   Psalm 148. I preached on this eloquent text a few weeks back, and it could easily be adorned to fit the day after Christmas by riffing on the infant Jesus as the pinnacle and purpose of all the wonders of Creation, or that the universe and the earth were concocted by God to serve as the theater in which God would dazzle and safe us all by becoming flesh in it. Much of my Psalm 148 sermon focused on St. Francis of Assisi. On him, for this day, we could add that he created history’s first manger scene in the village of Grecchio. Imagine no one ever having heard of such a thing – but he gathered the people, friars, animals, and preached a beautiful sermon about Jesus’ first cry sounding like the bleating of a lamb. His tender love for the infant Jesus is ours to emulate.

   Colossians 3:12-17, another lovely text, the one read at my wedding! The “put on…” admonitions work well with the little robe Hannah delivered to Samuel, or the swaddling clothes in which the Christchild was wrapped. Do we invite people to think about any clothing they might have received for Christmas as these holy traits of compassion, kindness, meekness, forgiveness when they get dressed in the morning? A few years back, we printed this text on little hanging cards for people to drape over their clothing racks, to envision themselves dressing for a holy life - along with Jesus' command to "Go into your closet and pray." Boom. Done. Every day you can please Jesus in this way!

   Luke 2:41-52. How can the lectionary add a dozen years to the boy Jesus in a single day? Fascinating text, but honestly… He’s some sort of prodigy, but let him lie in the manger for a few days at least! The magi haven’t had time to show up yet. All the more reason to go with the Psalm, or Hannah and Samuel, or even the Epistle.

What can we say January 5 / 2nd Christmas? Epiphany?

    What to do with January 5? There are 2^nd after Christmas lections, and then many churches (like mine) will observe Epiphany. Let me touch on several of the texts in question, all just fascinating. All in some way wrestle with mystery.

   Ellen Davis (in Preaching the Luminous Word) noticed that the Church of All Nations next to the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem has a sign that sternly warns, “No explanations in the church.” That’s directed to the tour guides, of course – but as Ellen muses, “We’d all do well to heed it. We in the church have been baptized into the mystery of Christ; so long as we attend to God, with every heartbeat we are drawn more deeply into a mystery that infinitely exceeds our understanding, a mystery of mercy that goes beyond even our wildest hopes and imaginings. So no explanations in the church; rather, let us speak softly and with wonder, as befits a holy place.” I’m trying more soft speaking, silent pauses, some stammering in 2022.

   Ephesians 1:3-14. There is so much theology and wisdom packed into this 202 word sentence (yes, these 12 verses are one run-on sentence in the Greek) – impossible to diagram! Paul’s zeal for God and the people bursts over the edges, as if he couldn’t stop rambling, could stick a period anywhere.

   Some cool details: God has “made known the mystery of his will.” That’s perfect (and the subject of my book, The Will of God). God’s will isn’t a hunch you feel. It’s been made known – and yet it’s still a mystery, not as in puzzling, you can’t figure it out, but mystery as in beyond the prosaic, something profound, mystical, beyond what we can reckon and just get done easily.

   “Saints” – not superhuman spiritual heroes, or prissy avoiders of earthly pleasures, of champion do-gooders. The saint is one whose thinking and living at least strives to be different, special, not blending into the mobs out there. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says holiness is simply making space and time for God.

   It’s aspirational. We dream of being what Paul calls us: holy. Mary Oliver’s words always move me: “Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. Oh Lord, grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” Isn’t Richard Rohr right? “We don’t have to make ourselves holy. We already are, and we just don’t know it.”

   “Chosen”? Americans think of choice as limiting - as if you choose which cereal among many in the store to buy, or the bachelor choosing which bachelorette pleases him. Ephesians does this over and over: you aren’t on the outside looking in with God. You don’t have to go find God and get God. You can be confused or even uninterested. God chose you. God is in you. Preachers should and can boggle their minds with this: Want to know how amazing you are? God chose you “before the foundation of the world.” That’s right: when God thought, Let’s make a universe with galaxies and nebulae! God also thought of you, God decided you would be you. And for the noblest conceivable purpose: that you would live with God’s Spirit in you. Go outside tonight. Gaze up into the heavens. Billions of years ago, when God imagined the vast cosmos, God was already making plans for you.

   Adoption. I love Kelly Nikondeha’s marvelous theological reflections on this! Adopted people often want to find their birth parents. Why? “We want that dark corner illuminated. We imagine our own transformation at the revelation of our true origin. What goodness might be unlocked, what possibility unleashed?” Isn’t church a quest to discover our true origin? Nikondeha offers a picturesque retrospective on what being adopted was about: “A woman scooped me out of the white-wicker bassinet in the viewing room of the adoption agency and claimed me as her own. Her physical emptiness prepared the way for my fullness.”

   Does the birth mother “abandon” her child? Or is it a “relinquishment”? So different. Abandonment is unfeeling and cruel. Relinquishment may be the highest form of love – as Jesus, certainly feeling abandoned by God, relinquished his divine power and his life.

   Isaiah 60:1-6 is way more than “Rise and shine and give God the glory glory…” The vision is way higher, cosmic in vastness. God’s project isn’t me feeling better or getting saved. It’s the redemption of the created order – and it is God’s act, illustrated well by the common distinction (Christopher Lasch, Martin Luther King, Jr.) between optimism and hope. Optimism is the sunny dream that tomorrow will be better, and it’s up to us to make it so. Hope can hold it together even if tomorrow is worse; hope trusts in the larger, longer future – and it’s up to God, not us. Ours is, as our text puts it, to “stand.” I saw a doctor ask a woman to stand as he told her her husband had just died. We stand (and argue about it!) for the National Anthem. We stand at the end of worship. This standing in the soul is all about dignity, readiness, an eagerness to see and be ready to move.

   I think of Oscar Romero’s words, which I might use as my benediction: “When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt. Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong, to face the world’s difficulties.” Isaiah envisions a great gathering of the nations (not just our neighborhood!) – and in my blog 2 years ago I suggested the feel might be (corny as it seems) kin to the dramatic ending to “Field of Dreams” – 

or visually, John August Swanson’s “Festival of Lights.”

   Ephesians 3:1-12. Paul doesn’t write from the comforts of a library or his home. He’s a prisoner – literally! And figuratively: he’s a prisoner to Christ’s will. We can think of so many in history who’ve wound up in prison, like Paul, because of their commitments to do good for others: St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas More, Jean Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela… too many to name or number. Playing it safe, being a law-abiding citizen? God called Paul, and God calls us to something higher, riskier, more courageous.

   It’s probably worth recalling, every now and then as we read anything from Paul, that he was the perhaps the greatest but surely the unlikeliest of early Church leaders. He wasn’t a slacker or an impious, blatantly sinful guy. He was quite pious – and an implacable, aggressive, angry foe of the early Christian movement. “Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace which was given me by the working of his power.” What a mystery! – such a radical about-face. That’s what grace does. That’s how powerful God’s work is, and can be even in us today. Any of that in your calling? You became a minister – by choice? Or by the gift of God’s grace?

   Paul’s mission, and the Church’s, is “to make all people see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God.” The mystery, the secret that is now out in the open, is God’s plan for the unity of all, for dividing walls to be broken down, for all hostility to cease. The Church witnesses, not by chatting about such things, but by simply living out the mystery of a people unified in Christ. 

Stephen Fowl points out that “the very existence of the gathered body of Jews and Gentiles reconciled to God and each other in Christ makes known the manifold wisdom of God.” As we sing, “They will know we are Christians by our love,” not for the people who are like us, but for the people the world can’t believe we can love. We show the world a better way.

   We’re not good at this. But it’s God’s work, and if we let God’s Spirit achieve this in and through us, the world will be in awe, and eager to join us. Fowl wrote that “the attractiveness that first drew Gentiles to God should be even more attractive in the light of this reconciliation.” That is, unlikely people were drawn to Christ, and that religion looks even more alluring when the unlikely enjoy unity with the others…

   …which makes me wonder about racial reconciliation. The biggest shock of religious history might just be that black Americans actually believed in the slaveowners’ God! That says a lot about the marvel, the attractiveness of Christianity. So then, what if we white and black Christians genuinely became close to one another and pulled off reconciliation in our country. Who then could argue for a second that Christianity is a lame religion? Everyone would know This really is flat out amazing, compelling, a difference maker, a blessing to all

   Matthew 2:1-12. The magi arrive. Not as in “wise men still follow him,” but astrologers! – an art, an alchemy condemned in Judaism and Christianity! Yet, so eager is the Christchild to be found, and by everybody, that these deluded ones find their way to Bethlehem, and the Scripture, Bible-is-Clear! people miss out. He’s a Capricorn? 

   It’s a tad irreverent, but the bawdy scene in “Life of Brian” when the magi show up at the wrong house might help us see that there’s some sarcastic humor tucked inside this text. Or maybe Owen Meany’s remark while singing the gory 4^th stanza of “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying? Doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.”

   We also have that great line in The Shack: Mack asks Jesus, “Do all roads lead to you?” He replies, “Not at all. Most roads don’t lead anywhere” – and then adds “I will travel any road to find you.” The road our people have just taken may veer them away from the Christ child: the frenzy of gift giving, decorating, entertaining – as if when Jesus was born the angel said “Thou shalt shop and travel and party in his honor!” Mike Slaughter put it well: “Christmas is not your birthday.” How do we delicately remind people that Jesus’ way is one of truth, simplicity, welcoming strangers – and even suffering? Just as The Shack begins with the murder of a child, so Jesus’ story features the slaughter of children. Jesus enters a world where paranoid powers harm children. Explore a few of the ways in your sermon.

   The notion of God going to any and all lengths to find us: Peter Shaffer’s great play, “Amadeus,” notes how the official court composer Salieri is devoured by jealousy when he hears Mozart. Overhearing the Adagio in E flat, played from Mozart’s first and only draft, completed entirely in Mozart’s head, Salieri was staggered: “It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God,” or rather, that Mozart heard his rapturous music from heaven, and merely wrote it down, as if by dictation. Offended by Mozart’s sophomoric, immoral behavior, yet awestruck by his talent, he later said “God needed Mozart to let Himself into the world.” God surprises us by showing up in church, but out there also, in holy people but also the questionable characters, in what seems obviously religious but in countless other manifestations.

   Ray Barfield muses on the way Aristotle believed stars left a trail of music as they travelled through the heavens. Science has said No they don’t – and yet now we’ve lost the joy in delighting in the stars and their movements. “Children look at the night sky and say, ‘I want to go there.’ If we ask, ‘Why?” the only answer that makes sense is, ‘I just do.’ They are not merely interested in seeing variations on the rocks that they find in their back yards.”

   What astral phenomenon did the magi see? Halley’s comet? A supernova? Check out the great scene (view here! – trust me, 3 minutes well-spent!) in Pasolini’s Italian film, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” where the magi show up in the daytime, and have silent, tender interactions with Mary and her baby.

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   Check out my book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.

 

What can we say January 12? The Baptism of the Lord

    The renewal of Baptism we do on this day, as much as any service all year, moves me. Seeing the people in line, dipping a finger into the font, touching their foreheads, mouths, making the sign of the cross occasionally, each one bringing some hope, expectation, hopefully zeroing in on the whole point of a new year. I love the people coming, standing in line, many largely clueless about the deep meaning of it all, yet eager to receive, to be blessed. A mystery, in the best sense.

   Sometimes, instead of preaching the obvious text of the day, I like to ponder the texts the characters in the obvious text knew and loved, and that may well have resonated with them on the day of the obvious text. 

   Isaiah 43:1-7. Jesus, and John knew their Scriptures – so did this eloquent moment in Isaiah occur to either or both as Jesus stepped into that stream, and a voice was overheard from heaven? “Do not fear, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.” So insistent! “When you pass through the waters, through the fire…” The Jordan waters were overflowing with historical memory as Jesus passed through – and there’s some fire in the way the Baptism is narrated! Then, Isaiah revealing God’s words: “You are precious in my sight – and honored! And I love you!” Pondering this, we realize the Baptism was super-special, but in full continuity with the heart of God for centuries, the latest chapter in a long narrative of “Don’t fear, I call you by name, you are precious.”

   Acts 8:14-17. With no New Testament, no catechism, no books of theology, it’s no wonder the early Christians were baffled and utterly mixed up about Baptism. In the Holy Spirit? What? You only baptized using Jesus’ name? What an egregious error! I could theologize about Baptism, the Spirit’s role in it, etc., but this little text leaves me a little cold, and maybe baffled with the first guys standing around with quizzical looks.

   Luke 3:15-17, 21-22. Open up your Gospel parallels, and you notice Luke is onto some interesting stuff. “As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning…” Not just seeking to repent and be cleansed, but rippling with anticipation, and asking a lot of questions! – which must be good, despite clergy and parent compulsions to be answer-people. The Greek rendered “questioning” is dialogizomenon. They were dialoguing! I’d love to listen in on those conversations! Fitzmyer translates this nicely: “They were piqued with curiosity.”

   Unlike many of our baptisms, nothing sweet unfolds, no grinning families posing for Facebook. There’s a purifying, judgment, the fire. Søren Kierkegaard’s ribald mockery of thinly religious people bringing infants for the sacrament, Karl Barth’s decision to oppose infant baptism (including for his own children!) after his jarring pastoral experience of its trivialization – or Annie Dillard’s jaunty counsel that we should wear crash helmets in worship: countless thinkers shout to awaken us to the weightiness of baptism.

   Luke understates the physical baptism itself, instead fixing our attention on what Jesus did immediately afterward (and it's the afterward that is depicted in the Saint John's Bible!): “When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying.” He was praying. And then – then! – the heavens opened. The Greek verb borders on the violent: schizomenous is more like “ripped open” (captured, maybe, in Giotto's messiness at the top of his fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel, depicted above). If something opens, it can close easily. But if it’s ripped open, lots of luck getting it closed! Through that permanently ripped open heaven, the Spirit descends on Jesus, “in bodily form” Luke says, like a dove. And the voice: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Is it a faithful theological move to turn that “You are beloved” on the congregation?

   The question, Why did Jesus need to be baptized? - answered eloquently by Barth, "no one came to the Jordan as laden with sin as he," our sin, that is... assumes there are levels of goodness. Jesus must be "good enough" not to need baptism, whereas scuzzy sinners need it plenty. I may drift to Fr. Greg Boyle's new book, The Whole Language. His interactions with former gang members, homies, is riveting, and healing. They feel like krap, including when they hear clergy speak of the burden of sin. He always responds, "God sees son, not sin," or "You are beautiful, you are good, you are wonderful." What does God say to Jesus wading in the Jordan? Not Well-lived! or Well-repented, but Beloved. Dare we suggest God sees Son, not Sin in us? 

   The dove transports us back to the ark, the bird of redemption as the perilous floodwaters subsided, an airborne sign of God’s presence, and assurance. Notice this is the first, and maybe the clearest, mention or explication of the Trinity in Scripture. No wonder we use the Trinitarian formula in Baptism! No theological postulates or explanations about this Threeness in God. It’s a story, it’s all relationship, everybody else gets drawn in.

   Theologians have fretted over why Jesus was baptized, being sinless. Clearly he comes to the river to be one with us, to bear the sins of others, indeed of the world. I’d fret more over the idea here that the heavens were visibly opened. Everybody got a glimpse into whatever’s up there. Streets of gold, pearly gates, angelic choirs with harps? I can’t preach on the heavens being ripped open without recalling Martin Luther King’s last sermon in Memphis: “It’s alright to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism.  But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here.”

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   Check out my book from last year, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.

What can we say January 19? 2nd after Epiphany

    Preachers always want, on this weekend, to make note of Martin Luther King, deploying some story from his life or some of his remarkable words – especially during these days when race as an issue is up for grabs, as if it reared its head just a few months ago. We have great, hopeful texts this Sunday!   Isaiah 62:1-5. God’s promise of vindication feels as perilous as it is alluring. God’s reversal of suffering is a vital hope – but would we have the disposition not to sink into a nya nya nya nya nya taunting in return? And yet, after so much shaming Israel has undergone, and others in our world (to whom we don’t generally preach!), vindication is only healthy and holy.

   The imagery shimmers with beauty: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” You wonder if the average Israelite ever saw a shiny crown or a bejeweled diadem. In 1953, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the heavy St. Edward’s Crown, of 22 carat gold, a foot tall, velvet and ermine, set with 444 precious stones, her scepter also of gold, with 333 diamonds. When she knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord, did she ponder the crown of unmatched beauty that Jesus wore as he trudged to Calvary and breathed his last? I wonder how heavy it felt on Charles's head?

   Israel, and we in the Church, value words over things, always. The long-shamed Israelites are promised a new batch of adjectives: once Forsaken and Desolate, now they are Delightful and Married. For all its woes, marriage looms for us, not as the ideal life, but as a potent image of what the divine intimacy with us can be. Ponder what theologians have done with the erotic but not pornographic Song of Songs over the centuries! The vindication might look like King’s last speech in Memphis, getting to the Promised Land, or his Lincoln Memorial speech envisioning hand-holding and justice rolling down all over the place.

   1 Corinthians 12:1-11. January is a get-serious month for lots of churchgoers. The residual joy of Christmas, it’s cold and ark out, New Year’s resolutions – so perhaps urging folks to think about their place within the Body and to get with it is helpful to the church, and to them and the world. I’m the outlier who worries that the way we talk about “spiritual gifts” might be tinged with a little paganism – which is Paul’s concern! Are my native strengths, unearthed in interest and ability inventories, really “spiritual” gifts? Do I do what I like, and what I’m good at, for God? Yes – but the spiritual gifts might be alien to my nature, surprising to my preconceived notions, something hard or uncomfortable, something I’m no good at, something noticed only in my brokenness. Remember Leonard Cohen’s line? “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

   It’s all about the “common good” (verse 7), the Greek sumpheron literally meaning “bearing together.” Uphill battle for the clergy, persuading hyper-individualists that it’s all about the common good, the health of the Body, not me and my satisfactions. Martin Luther King, Jr. was endowed with remarkable gifts – not so he could get rich and famous, but for the building up of the community.

   And in such divided times, politically and religiously. Why not just divide and go be with Christians like us? Hans Urs von Balthasar cuts to the quick: “We cannot find the dimensions of Christ’s love other than in the community of the church, where the vocations and charisms distributed by the Spirit are shared: each person must tell the others what special knowledge of the Lord has been shown to him. For no one can tread simultaneously all the paths of the love given to the saints: while one explores the heights, another experiences the depths and a third the breadth. Noe one is alone under the banner of the Spirit, the Son and the Father; only the whole Church is the Bride of Christ, and that only as a vessel shaped by him to receive his fulness.” Church division impairs and eviscerates the Body, and shrinks our knowledge of God, much less our ability to do good for God and to bear witness to a divided world!

   John 2:1-11. This wedding scene is profound beyond any preacher’s abilities, a mystery we can ponder forever. I might set the stage with some dumb humor. If you go to Cana today, they sell little pottery contraptions obviously equipped with some dye inside so that when you pour water in the top, it comes out red. And then there’s the kooky greeting card I’ve received too many times to count where the policeman has pulled a priest, asking him “Reverend, have you been drinking?” Reply: “Just water, officer.” Policeman: “Then why do I smell wine?” Priest: “Good Lord! He’s done it again!”

  One of our earthiest Jesus stories: so mundane, attending a wedding, with his mother. He’s a little snarky with her – and we have to notice that her words to the hosts, “Do whatever he tells you” (verse 5) is the best counsel ever. Wine requires time, aging, vintaging – but Jesus’ batch is ready, and tasty immediately. Is he showing off, still maturing from a Bruce Almighty-ish dazzler to a more mature raiser of the dead and healer of the blind?

   Jesus’ first miracle: he’s not on stage, just one guy in a crowd of guests. Easy for the preacher to say Be sure he’s on your guest list! Or Can you notice Jesus in a crowd? Or Jesus blesses love, relationships, commitments being made. How many of his parables touched on wine and wedding feasts? He’d been to weddings, drank and produced the wine – so he knew.

   The story begins in disappointment, in there not being enough. Isn’t this the spiritual malaise for our people? They don’t think they have enough, or that they are enough. Jesus bolts from the gate clarifying he’s not about scarcity but abundance. He doesn’t produce just enough wine, but way, way more than is required, just as he made so much bread (John 6) there were basketsful left over. Sam Wells theologizes brilliantly on abundance, how there’s more than enough with God, and for us (in God’s Companions, especially). God gives us everything we need, and more. Not everything we want, but what matters. Indeed, God gives, gives, and gives, more and more, more than enough – and it’s a celebration, a party, a feast. That’s why the first miracle is at an extended festive celebration – as a hint that Christianity isn’t some dour, boring, stiff thing, but immense joy.

   Rudolf Bultmann points out that John is less interested in the miraculous per se, but rather on the revelation of the glory of Jesus. And as Wells ponders things, John 2 “is a story of the inadequacy of fallen creation being transformed by the generosity of God. Can we who preach come up with a story to match the marvel here? It’s hard, in our flattened, pedestrian, dull world.

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   Check out my book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.

What can we say January 26? 3rd after the Epiphany

  This week's texts are pretty much about what happens what Bible is read out loud to people!  Nehemiah 8:1-10. When I was discovering the life of faith in vibrant community during my college days, we sang “The Joy of the Lord is your Strength” (yes, this one) – clapping along to its chipper melody. The songbook had Nehemiah 8:10 in parentheses, which made it feel really biblical! I never looked it up though.

  Context, context. Ezra, who seems like a deadly serious priest, somehow gets word out to the masses that there will be a public reading of Scripture. The Law, the Torah – and in the “seventh month,” Tishri, latter September for us, the ultimate high feast month, including the Feast of Tabernacles and the Day of Atonement. Not in the temple, but at the Water Gate (still being excavated, but massive!), facing across the Kidron Valley toward the Mt. of Olives. The hill must have formed a bit of an amphitheater, the stone wall of the gate a sounding board backdrop.

   Preachers more clever than I might figure out what to do with the inevitable echo of "Watergate" from modern times, the Nixon break-in fiasco, and Monica Lewinsky's home in DC! Reading God's Word is the end to secrecy, infidelity, the truth coming out?

   Had they not heard this text for some time? They didn’t own Bibles; most were illiterate. Ezra reads – for hours, sunup until noon. Clearly not the entire Torah, which would require more time. What portions did he select? Laws about holiness? Probably. Stories of Adam and Eve, or Abraham offering up Isaac just up that hill, or the parting of the sea, the manna? The drama: they stand, they raise their hands, they bow, they weep.

   We learn that “interpretation” was provided as he read. Were the Levites translating into Aramaic for those who didn’t know its ancient kin, Hebrew, any longer? Were some expository remarks prepared? I wonder about a sermon where I simply read portions of the Torah to my people. Can I trust the Scriptures, even or maybe especially the Law, to elicit that “joy of the Lord” which is genuine “strength”? The Psalter is about joy in reading, and our Gospel reading similarly depicts Jesus simply reading from such a scroll.

   Psalm 19 certainly finds immense joy in this Law! Psalm 19 is pretty inviting for a sermon. I preached on it during our Psalm series in the Spring (watch here). We begin with Creation, big creation, like from 15 billion years ago, inviting us to be in awe, not because it’s photogenic, but because it reveals God’s mind and heart. There’s music in the air… Ancient people believed the stars left music in their wake as they streamed across the sky. Science says No, but then we miss the awe, the joy. Paired quite naturally with this is the Psalm’s pleasure, sheer delight in the Law. Not a burden, not to make us chafe, but the marvelous gift of the God who created so we then can be created, re-created as beautiful people in sync with God’s lovely, sweet ways in the world.

   This law is “perfect,” reminding me of a lovely reflection from Kathleen Norris. She was asked by a priest if she'd pray for him. She fretted about whether she could do this well or not: "I realized that was my pride speaking, the old perfectionism that’s dogged me since I was a child. Well, or badly was beside the point. Of course I could pray, and I did. Perfectionism is one of the scariest words I know. It is a marked characteristic of American culture, a serious psychological affliction that makes people too timid to take risks and causes them to suffer when, although they’ve done the best they can, their efforts fall short of some imaginary standard. ‘Perfect’ isn’t about striving for impossible goals. It is taken from a Latin word meaning ‘complete, entire, full-grown.’ To those who originally heard it, the word conveyed ‘mature’ rather than what we mean today by ‘perfect.’"

   1 Corinthians 12:12-31a. One of my main points in The Beauty of the Word is the reminder to us to preach not merely to individuals but to the Body, not focusing on the solo listener out there, but speaking to the Church as church. To me, that’s even more interesting that poking around the various gifts enumerated here by Paul. After all, his list isn’t exhaustive, but representative.

   This Body, this coalescing and organizing of the gifted, is a supernatural entity, as Ben Witherington reminds us. “Diversity” can be one of those code words that divides us (as clarified beautifully in my podcast with Amanda Ripley on her great book, High Conflict). Whether we use the word or not, we recognize that diversity simply is. God made us with more diversity than we realize.

   The Corinthians were confused about their bodies. Paul counters by declaring You are a Body! Pagans used this image to reinforce upper-class ideology; you’re part of the body, so stay in your place. Paul does his theological origami on this image, lifting up the weakest members as the key to the functioning of the whole!

   Luke 4:14-21. Jesus taught in the synagogues around Galilee. You can see all the way across, with glimpses of little towns, some of them now excavated – like Magdala, where we can now visit the ruins of that synagogue where Jesus taught, and one Mary Magdalene heard him and traipsed off after him. We forget Jesus wasn’t some new thing. “Today Scripture is fulfilled.” God’s old thing continues, or climaxes, or is enfleshed in Jesus. But he’s a Bible guy, as in the ultimate expression of the whole book, and also as someone who knew the book and taught it himself. No wonder artists over the centuries have depicted him holding a Bible!

   Context, context, context: Jesus has just returned from being tempted in the wilderness, far to the southeast, barely surviving a brutal bout against heat, brigands, predators, and the devil himself. After the harrowing, he wanted to get back home – understandably. But not really to rest up or escape the troubles of the world for a while.

   Jesus went to the synagogue – “as was his custom.” I will mention, but hopefully not nag, that Jesus and all people close to God through history have made it their custom to be in God the Father’s house.  No single Sunday wins the day. Attending sometimes is an exercise in frustration.  It was Sabbath. Jesus went.

    No one there knew where he’d been, or what he’d endured. Church people might remember this when they see someone not entirely hospitable on the pew, or someone who is in a chilly mood. We are attentive to the ways people have been through a lot they’ve not shared with us (at least not yet) – and we welcome, accept, bear, love, and understand.  It’s our custom, right?

    Nazareth is where Jesus was “brought up.” I’ve often thought that the greatest proof that Jesus was really the one is that his brother James and his mother Mary wind up as disciples. If anybody knows you have feet of clay, it’s the family, the neighbors who knew you when you were a little kid, an adolescent. I might linger on this thought for a few moments… like those Gnostic gospels that narrate Jesus being picked on as a child, retaliating, and then relenting.

   Imagine the drama in Nazareth: “He unrolled the scroll.” This would have taken some time – so is suspense building? It also would have been heavy, a physical challenge to unroll the thing to just the right location he’d chosen. The greatest of the Dead Sea scrolls is the complete scroll of Isaiah from roughly the time of Jesus! This artifact is 24 feet long, and 50 pounds in weight! For Jesus to take it in his hands, and unroll it all the way to chapter 61? This would have taken some time, and a good bit of physical strength. In my sermon I will simply ponder this amazing moment, the pregnant pause as people waited – and perhaps how reading and understanding Scripture for us takes a lot of time, and considerable effort and strength. AND:   The Isaiah scroll, quirkily enough, was the first one found at Qumran – as if God wanted us to find this one first, and ponder Jesus’ reading from one just like it. Scholars didn’t find it either! Some shepherd boys, messing around, peeked into a cave. One threw a rock in, and heard a clatter. Who will find God’s word? And how?

  Jesus reads from Isaiah 61. Was it Jesus’ choice – which would tell us a lot about him? Or was it the lectionary reading for the day – which would tell us a lot about God’s coincidental timing in play here?  Isaiah 61 is a text about being sent on a remarkable mission – and it’s about God’s people returning from exile. N.T. Wright has helped us understand how Jesus’ ministry is the fulfillment of Israel’s long yearning to return home from exile writ large.

   The lectionary lops off the important second half of the story – that the crowd nearly assassinated him for connecting the ancient text to the present day, and to himself! But the preacher can (and should?!) still go there. 

  This is fascinating: the initial response of Jesus’ lifelong friends was that “all spoke well of him.” “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” – which has a touch of irony, doesn’t it? Like, Yes, but… Jesus could’ve basked in their praise – but instead went on a little rant about Elijah and Elisha in which he exposes the lackluster faith in Israel, the homers, and how God sought out and healed the despised foreigners instead.

  No wonder they got mad. The preacher might explore the ways we may not really want Scripture to be fulfilled. We like to read it in a safe classroom, or hear about it, or pick and choose moments in Scripture that pander to us. But the fulfillment of the biblical vision? Scares the daylights out of us – and we may recoil in rage.

   Talk about physical strength: they grabbed not a heavy scroll but Jesus’ own body and hauled him out to the edge of town, ready to throw him off a cliff. When I take groups to Israel, we visit the “precipice,” an impressive dropoff with astonishing views. Reading well past the lectionary’s cutoff (which we should in this case), Jesus narrowly escaped (again!) – and in verse 30 we read the startling notice that “Passing through the midst of them, he went away.” The mob, about to hurl him off the cliff, still angry, stood helpless as he simply walked, not sprinting or desperately scrambling, among them, and safely home. Reminds me of the little noticed moment in Gethsemane when the soldiers stormed up to arrest Jesus. “When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he,’ they drew back and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). Jesus’ physical presence must have been something.

   Back to Jesus’ reading from Isaiah: if we were like St. Francis of Assisi, we’d make this our to-do list. And Jesus’ reading also shows us how to be the Body in the Epistle reading. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove has reflected (in his book Reconstructing the Gospel) on Jesus' first sermon - and what it tells us about his priorities, and what ours probably should be too: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19).

    Jonathan points out that churches, for some reason, ignore this mission, and instead we build up and support "an institution where people like us show up to receive spiritual nourishment. Whatever material ministry the church engaged in was secondary... Works of mercy are imagined as auxiliary ministries. But what if the church was something else? What if it was the movement Jesus invited people into when he invited them to join together in setting the oppressed free?"

  His church got out a map of Goldsboro (where he was a pastor) and drew a circle with a 2-mile radius around their building and said "This is where we're called to set the oppressed free. Whatever is enslaving people, we commit to fighting it by the power of the Spirit."

  What if your church, if my church, laid out a map and drew a circle with a radius of 2 or 5 miles, and asked this question: Who's oppressed, and why? And what can we do (besides the frequent resort to blaming or ignoring)? What enslaves people? Alcohol? Work pressure? Outsized expectations? Lousy work environment? Racial prejudice?

   And then we make it our business to join Jesus in his business of bringing good news to those places and to those people, to work for freedom and recovery. That, indeed, would be the reconstruction of the Gospel, the dawning of God's kingdom right here, where we live, work, and worship.

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   Check out my new book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.