What can we say March 30? Lent 4

       Joshua 5:9-12. A little obscure, but fascinating. Could title a sermon “Rolling Stone,” as the story intimate there were large round stones to mark where Israel crossed the Jordan (“Gilgal” is translated “rolled”). The notice that “the manna ceased”: is this good news? Thank goodness, we’re so tired of that crusty, tasteless food, every day for decades? Or is there some nostalgia? We miss the good old days when we were so close to God, so dependent upon God’s daily gift? Now we have to be responsible, to labor hard for it all?

   2 Corinthians 5:16-21. Reconciliation: if any word sums up what the life of faith is about, here it is. We are reconciled to God, and we go about the business of reconciliation with others. What could be more needed in our fractured world? And more arduous, well-nigh impossible?

   Before the pandemic, my church had a significant series on Reconciliation; check it out! A seasonal emphasis drills in to our folks that this is serious, hard, marvelous. It’s weirdly beyond forgiveness. A restored relationship – although care must be taken not to make the abused feel they need to feel good about their abusers, and so on.

    Paul’s counsel, “Regard no one from human point of view,” is the baseline for Christians functioning in the world – but do we even try? Culture wages aggressive war against this ministry – and thus against our own personal sense of being reconciled to God! Christena Cleveland (in Disunity in Christ) is especially sharp on the nature of the work of reconciliation. We can meet God in our cultural context, but then to follow God we must cross over into other contexts. She explains how “group polarization” works – we experience confirmation of our views because of our narrow social circle or social media tricks. Church makes it worse! God calls us to “cognitive generosity,” as we expand our “we,” and discover the fruit and joy of the hard labor of reconciliation.

    What can preachers do, but to name it, to embody it, to lift up the beauty of reconciliation by telling stories (if they can be found)? And clarifying, gently, that reconciliation isn’t an optional add-on for some churches. This is the church’s work, always, everywhere. Not splitting up, or even being “right.” Sam Wells (in God’s Companions) reminds us that, for us, ethics isn’t so much about what’s right and wrong, but what builds up the Church. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out how our “goodness” can actually get in the way of us doing God’s will; God doesn’t ask for goodness, keeping our hands clean, but prefers we do whatever God asks, which will likely involve getting our hands dirty.

   Notice Paul begins with “from now on” – assuming the saving work of Christ and consequent community engagement and commitment to holiness he’s just talked about. This is totally new – a “new creation.” The Christian isn’t 14% nicer or 11% more generous. We are all new. And we see others through new eyes. Echoing the haunting truth that “God does not see as we see” (1 Sam. 16:7 – when David was the one chosen, not the taller, more muscular sons of Jesse).

   And why do we see differently? Not just because God said Look at them this way! For Paul, it is that Jesus was once viewed as merely a guy. But now he’s the risen Son, the Messiah, our Savior. We, too, used to be mere people; but now we are “ambassadors” for God!  Then, as if to be sure we don’t miss it (since we might), Paul pleads, urges: “See?!?!” And our transformation looks like this, well-described by John Barclay (in Paul and the Power of Grace): “Christ takes on the human condition and participates in the limitations and vulnerabilities of human nature… But this has a purpose and a result: Christ’s self is given into the human condition but not ultimately given away, because in the resurrection and exaltation of Christ a new era is begun and a new life released, in which we may participate. Christ participates in the human condition in order that we may participate in his condition.” Susan Eastman calls this “mutual assimilation.”

  Thomas Merton, ever helpful: "For the 'old man,' everything is old: he has seen everything or thinks he has. He has lost hope in anything new. What pleases him is the 'old' he clings to, fearing to lose it, but he is certainly not happy with it. For the 'new man' everything is new. Even the old is transfigured. There is nothing to cling to. The new man lives in a world that is always being created, and renewed. He lives in life."

  Luke 15:1-13, 11b-32. Oh, so much to say. Amy-Jill Levine has taught us not to read such texts anti-semitically, as if Jewish dads were legalistic judgers as opposed to the Christian vision of the running, welcoming dad. Grace dominates both religions. George Balanchine’s ballet has the son whirling and writhing in a long dance of remorse: lovely choreography but bad theology. Amy-Jill also points out that riotous living and the party life aren’t inherently sinful – and Jesus nowhere in this parable mentions anything about anybody’s sin! It’s foolishness, for sure – but the story isn’t about sin and the son doesn’t really repent, does he? Is he really sorry? Or just cynical or desperate? He’s just hungry and journeys to the only place he bets he can get a square meal. It's all about home with God, God's yearning for us to be home with God, and mostly the joy of being there - which is precisely what the elder son, who never left, missed, as he was never really home, failing to comprehend what home and life and joy were all about.

   And who could forget the mesmerizing, emotionally riveting way the TV miniseries from the 70’s, Jesus of Nazareth, handled this! Peter is indignant Jesus has gone to the home of a tax collector. At dinner there, Jesus tells this story – as Peter peeks in through the tent opening. Everyone is transfixed – and then Peter and Matthew… oh, you have to watch it for yourself!

   Isn’t there a curious kind of judgment in this father’s lack of judgment? Want to feel really sorry for how you mucked things up? Receive total mercy with no requirement for an accounting or an apology! Indeed, Robert Farrar Capon is always eloquent, noting how real confession only comes after forgiveness: “Only when, like the prodigal, we are finally confronted with the unqualified gift of someone who died to forgive us no matter what, can we see that confession has nothing to do with getting ourselves forgiven…. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have.”

   I’ll thumb through my favorite Henri Nouwen book, at least one-third of which is underlined. Such marvelous stuff. Nouwen, feeling for the steely, distant brother in Rembrandt’s painting of the moment the younger son returns, asks about his own soul: “Had I really ever dared to step into the center, kneel down, and let myself be held by a forgiving God, instead of choosing over and over again the position of the outsider looking in? There are so many other voices, voices that are loud, full of promises and very seductive. These voices say, ‘Go out and prove that you are worth something.’ Do you know these voices like I do? They cut deep inside into those vulnerable recesses where we doubt our worth, where we know we can never achieve enough; they wrap ‘what I do’ around ‘who I am’ and cruelly lie to us. They suggest that I am not going to be loved without my having earned it. They want me to prove to myself and others that I am worth being loved. They deny loudly that love is a totally free gift.”

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   Check out my latest book, Everywhere is Jerusalem: The Holy Then & Now - which has a study guide and video - and now it's on Audiobook!

What can we say March 23? Lent 3

    Isaiah 55:1-9. How eloquent, hopeful, countercultural, stunning! God’s prophet speaks to hopeless exile saying “Come and buy” – and “without money”! You can almost hear a street peddler hollering out to come and buy his wares – but at below bargain basement prices. You’re broke? You’re like that kid in that Norman Rockwell-ish postcard with empty pockets – but no worries. Come. Eat. Eucharistic. Grace.

   It’s all free. You who have no money? Come. Buy. And not the cheap, blue light special stuff. What is fabulously precious. Steve Shoemaker preached a brilliant sermon years ago playing on Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Ezra Tull takes over Mrs. Scarlatti’s restaurant, and decides to make whatever food people are homesick for. Then Steve wound up the sermon by inviting the listener to imagine coming into God’s very fine restaurant. You survey the menu – and realize there are no prices listed. You assume therefore it’s absurdly expensive, and you’re in trouble. Just then the waiter asks you what you’d like, what you really want. You pause, then take a leap… but ask how much it costs. The waiter says, Nothing, it’s on the house.

   Via the prophet, God asks why we spend so much for what doesn’t satisfy. Walter Brueggemann speaks of the “junk food” of the empire. The Rolling Stones sang it: “I can’t get no satisfaction.” William Temple suggested the world is like a shop into which some mischievous person has sneaked during the night and switched all the pricetags around – and so our tragedy is we spend ourselves on what has little to no value, while the precious things are quite affordable or actually free.

   There’s so much in this short text! “Seek the Lord while he may be found, while he is near.” Is the Lord going away soon? Or is the “while” always? Claus Westermann translated it “Seek the Lord since he may be found, call on him since he is near.” The language of return, “abundantly pardon,” and God’s thoughts being so much higher than ours. Let these thoughts rumble around the room. Don’t over-explain.

   God’s grace is unconditioned (unearned, undeserved) yet not unconditional (as in, a response really is required, and is empowered!) – as John Barclay puts it in his book Paul & the Power of Grace. Clearly – as the prophet who just spoke of eating without paying says “Let the wicked forsake their ways” and “Return to the Lord.” Isaiah might help us not to be so confused about Paul, or grace!

   The prophet’s (and God’s!) question, “Why spend money for what is not bread, what does not satisfy?” evokes some images. Thomas Merton – or was it Stephen Covey? – suggested that we spend our lives climbing some ladder, only to get to the top and realize the ladder was leaning aginst the wrong wall. William Temple envisioned a shop window into which some devilish person has sneaked during the night and switched all the pricetags around – and so we spend our lives on what seems valuable but is worthless, and then miss what is precious but apparently cheap or free. Fritz Bauerschmidt notices that “When we expect the passing things of this world to bear the full weight of our love, they collapse under that weight, their own structural flaws revealed in their inability to bear that weight.” Ponder this! Preach this.

   God’s ways “are higher.” There is a hidden plot beneath, or above, the obvious plot of the meandering of the world as we superficially experience it. We observe things from on high, as if on a high mountain surveying things – or to use Ron Heifetz’s business model, from the balcony, looking down so we get what’s going on big picture down there.

   1 Corinthians 10:1-13. Paul (for my tastes) over-spiritualizes real historical things that happened for the Israelites. They at “spiritual food, drank spiritual drink – from the spiritual rock.” His angle on the exodus story could be read as anti-semitic or supersessionist – but need not be. It’s a long way from saying, lamely, “like Jews do, those Jewish idolaters rose up to play” and saying truly “like we all do, they rose up to play.” Echoes of the funny but humbling Exodus 32 here.

   Arrggghhh. Paul utters one of those awful tidbits Christians toss out to make sense of and attempt to comfort those facing tragedy. “You will not be tested beyond your strength.” Many of us cope with issues far beyond our strength – but you just hang in there. Does God dole out our troubles, almost flattering us with more trials than the few the weenies must bear??

   Context, context, context. Ben Witherington reminds us that in this chapter, Paul is a pastor for those tempted to indulge in pagan feasts. God gives those so allured to resist. “The Corinthians then are to endure and prevail over the temptation to go to idol feasts. God will provide them with an out… Paul believes that God never allows a Christian to be tempted to such a degree that by God’s grace one cannot resist or find a way of escape. This does not mean one will necessarily resist.”

   Roy Harrisville makes it more contemporary: “This test you face, this possibility of idolatry, of conceiving God in your own image, as a projection of your own willing and feeling… of understanding God as designed to actualize your potential, the option to define faith hope and love from below is as common as breathing. To resist it lies within the will and permission of God who will see to it that the test is matched by an escape.”

It’s instructive to see Paul not being a full of laid back grace here. Plenty of Don’t!s. You have to wonder how the Don’t!s, surely needed in cosmopolitan Corinth which earned its dubious party reputation, actually played there, especially with the nuanced reading of an old Israelite wilderness tale.

   I’m a little bit bugged too by verse 13, which resembles the awful “God won’t give you more than you can handle” silliness church people trot out when sorrow strikes. Kate Bowler (Everything Happens for a Reason), among others, has assessed the futility and theological weirdness of such a notion. If we pay attention to Paul, he’s a little better than what we presume. He chides the Corinthians who must feel their tests are so great; he’s saying Hey, it’s common to humanity to struggle to be holy. If there’s strength required, it’s God-given, God-inspired, not just strength you happen to wield. 

   More importantly, the “you”s in verse 13 are plural. Paul Sampley wisely clarifies that testing “is never presumed by Paul to be borne by an individual alone… So the text supposes that God will not test us beyond what all of us can bear together.” I like that. Being holy is tough; bearing suffering is harrowing. We do these things together, or not at all.

   Luke 13:1-9. Two News Flashes! Pilate has ordered the execution of a group of Galileans, which takes place as they are offering their sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple. Josephus doesn’t mention this… Jesus hears this news, and reminds his listeners of the 18 who died when a tall stone structure hovering over the Pool of Siloam crumbled. Pilate’s bloodletting sounds a note of injustice, while the collapse of the wall feels tragic. Was the tower part of an aqueduct Pilate was building with pilfered treasury funds?

   Injustice and tragedy are clamped together here with a single response. Jesus might have consoled his friends with judgment on the wicked foreigners, the Romans. Instead, he invites the fuming disciples to repent! Self-righteous bluster can only shield one from the ongoing responsibility simply to repent.

    Those who suffer injustice themselves need, always, to repent – and those who’ve endured tragedy need to repent, to turn to God. Bonhoeffer suggested that repentance “is not in the first place thinking about one’s needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ.”

   Jesus clearly refutes any notion of retribution – which Dorothee Soelle called “theological sadism.” His query, “Were they worse sinners?” is simple for the wise to answer. Of course not. 

   Wendy Farley is insightful here: “One of the most terrible beliefs of Christianity is that God punishes us with suffering. It is a belief inflicted on grief-stricken or pain-ridden individuals to justify their suffering and on groups to justify their continued oppression. The association of suffering with punishment denies the right to resist suffering. This sadistic theology conspires with pain to lock God away from the sufferer. This is the theology of Job’s comforters.”

    Jesus’ parable of the fig tree turns tragic news into hope. It’s time to chop it down – but Jesus says Wait. God’s mercy extends – for years! Your ministry isn’t bearing fruit? Your people aren’t? You aren’t? Hang on. It’s God’s work.

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  Check out my book, The Will of God - on precisely these hard questions about why bad things happen, and when bad things happen.

What can we say March 16? Lent 2

  We have great readings for Lent 2. Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 is the most quoted, theologically pregnant and productive text in all of the Old Testament, with its “the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” But did Genesis mean what Paul had in mind in Romans?

   Genesis 15 begins with “After these things” – meaning chapters 14! First, Abraham led 318 (an astonishingly exact number) men from his home far in the south to the far north to Dan. When I take folks to Israel, I love to show them the Bronze Age gate in Dan – as a place where Abraham came! Not many places in Israel do this. And then we have the curious Melchizedek passage – much beloved in the New Testament and early Christianity, and entirely mystifying to us.

   God reiterates the promise God made in Genesis 12 – and Abraham asks, like Mary centuries later, “How?” God here is a promiser. Americans love God-as-promiser – but they are thinking what God will do for me this week. God’s promise in the Scriptures is centuries – centuries! in the fulfillment.

   Abraham is asked to look up at the stars and count them. We can actually do this today, pervaded as our night skies are with so much ambient light. But Psalm 8, Job 38ff and Genesis 15 know of a darker – or brighter – sky, with countless stars, maybe like the sky I saw as a child, or the sky you can see if you go out West someplace.

   I'm haunted, when I think of Abraham looking up and counting the stars, by the Children's wing of Jerusalem's holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. A dark room with mirrors, reflecting the light of just 2 candles in an array like the night sky. Day and night, the names of children who died at the hands of the Nazis are read aloud. It takes 3 months to cycle through all of them.  God's promise to Abraham, fulfilled, and then tragically annihilated.

   That key verse 6, quoted as manifest proof of the life of faith vs. works in Paul: Abraham believed. His “belief” was trust, consent to God’s future, a commitment to stick things out, fixing his life on God’s direction. Ellen Davis reminds us (thinking on chapter 22) that with Abraham the question really is never "obedience," but "trust" - and it's his trust in God's presence, and God's promise, not merely to get the desired outcome, but to stick with God whatever unfolds. This was “reckoned” (imputed?) to him as “righteousness.” Certainly for Paul, and even in the Old Testament, righteousness is relational. Even when you live out the regulations of the Torah, it is because of a trusting, grateful, intimate relationship with God.

    You have to admire Abraham for taking God’s promise into his own hands, for making it happen – by adopting Eliezer. Rational, practical – but not God’s plan!  The promise of the land has been hugely problematical through history.  We might wish God had promised a great people, and a blessing – but the land pledge has precipitated so much conflict. Walter Brueggemann’s new, short, and incisive book, Chosen? Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is so very helpful in sorting out the issues.

   The vision here of birds swooping down on bloody carcasses might make you shudder; the gauntlet of fire between the slaughtered heifer, goat, ram, turtledove and pigeon feels like an ancient agrarian hazing… but it was an ancient covenant ceremony of immense purpose.

    Psalm 27. So eloquent, the shining gem of all the Psalms, I would say. What do we desire? God’s presence? The “Beauty of the Lord” is undertreated in preaching – and I wrote a whole book on preaching called The Beauty of the Word to try to capture why the beauty that is God figures so prominently in preaching.

    Our Epistle, Philippians 3:17-4:1, is rich in theological implications. Paul, not bashful at all, invites imitation! I don’t do this so often, out of humility, and a frank realization that my people should not imitate me. I wonder if we clergy should dare to hold ourselves up, in some humble, self-effacing way, as exemplary of a life with Christ.

    How odd for Paul to speak of religious, spiritual people who claim to follow Christ as “enemies of the cross”! Back then, Paul saw grave danger in those who believed Christianity was all about the mustering of good deeds. Today it’s more about feeling and emotion – or maybe what Paul says: “Their god is their belly, their glory is shame.” We are first and foremost consumers: we buy, we eat, we collect, we shop more, we drink more, and it’s all about me, how I feel, my sense of fulfillment. We even enlist God to help us consume, to feel full – but can’t we see how our minds are really stuck on “earthly things”?

     What once was shameful we now glorify: the “seven deadly sins” (greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, anger, envy and pride) now describe the good life in America! We fantasize about and are intrigued by what is shameful – because we’re after a rush of feeling, a higher high. But God isn’t a feeling more titillating than any other: God is a stable rock enduring every oscillation of feeling. God you cannot buy or consume. God calls me out of self-indulgence, away from it being all about me, and into the adventure of God, far grander than me and my small satisfactions. Preachers have to help people with this…..

    Citizens of Philippi took great pride, as settled military veterans, in their membership in the commonwealth that was the Roman empire; their citizenship (politeuma) wasn’t Greece where they were located but Rome! Paul plays on this: for Christians, our true citizenship is in heaven: it was to God’s kingdom we belong. And try as they might to straddle both worlds, you have to make a choice, a big choice but also a lot of little choices – just as we do as Christians who belong to heaven but are pressed to get too enmeshed in the habits and ideals of our culture. 

    “We await.” We live in anticipation of something that has peeked out from behind the veil but is not fully revealed: our mood is Advent-ish, waiting, longing – and not for just any Savior! The emperor claimed to be soter, savior – but of the upper echelons, keeping a heavy boot on the lower classes. Ben Witherington: “Paul was offering a very different sort of savior, one who was for everyone, even those in the lowest status in society, even slaves.” 

     We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself (Philippians 3:21). In my book, The Life We Claim: The Apostles’ Creed, I tried to clarify what this “glorious body” is about: “When we speak of the resurrection, we do not mean that Jesus’ soul survived the death of his body, and yet we do not mean the mere resuscitation of a corpse. The risen Jesus is not recognized, but then is recognizable. He can be touched, but then he pulls back. He materializes, and then he vanishes. Paul spoke of the resurrection as involving a ‘spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15). A body, yes, but spiritual, not merely a spirit, but a body, totally transformed, animated entirely by the Spirit, not liable to disease or death. So for those whose understanding of anatomy makes a resuscitation seem ridiculous, the Bible narrates something different, and far better – better even than the immortality of the soul. The Bible promises the resurrection of spiritual bodies.”

     It’s a “lowly body” though now, not yet glorified, and something of a struggle, like a burden – and yet the Body is God’s temple (1 Cor. 6). Paul’s tone in all this is never castigating or harsh. How tender is he? How tender must the preacher be? Where else but in the Church do you get called “beloved”? Henri Nouwen’s book, Life of the Beloved, articulates God’s hopeful message for each of us who live a world where “beloved” doesn’t compute.

    Paul and the Philippians share love (review the origin of the church in Acts 16!) – but their love isn’t spontaneous affection, or the fact that they think alike or enjoy leisure activities together. It is Christ who is their friendship, who cements their relationship; it is Christ they share, and their zeal for the present work and future hope of the kingdom of God. Love? “My joy”? “My crown”? Hard of me not to think of the consummation of Tolkien’s The Return of the King. The crown falls to the new king, Aragorn, but he yields to the wonder of the small people, the hobbits. They are friends. As Merry famously said to Frodo: “You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. You can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.” This is the life of the Body of Christ.

   Luke 13:31-35. Finally we come to the Gospel. Jesus has Paul’s tender love – for Jerusalem. Its people, of course, but the larger dream and destiny of God’s chosen place. Warned by the Pharisees (was this a friendly warning? or are they trying to goad him into shutting up?) to flee, Jesus has a snarky response, calling Herod a “fox.” His poetic declaration about his as-yet incomplete work (today, tomorrow, third day) is haunting, beautiful, courageous. 

   His lament is moving, and picturesque. If you get to travel to Jerusalem, you often get your first glimpse of the old city as you round the crest of Mt. Scopus. Tourists get giddy, or play that old song “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” on the bus’s loudspeakers. Jesus at this point fell on his knees and wept – just as he’d wept for his friend Lazarus on arriving at his tomb. He would have seen, in the Kidron valley, the “tombs of the prophets.” So he wasn’t just recalling history. He sees and points to their tombs! – a haunting glimpse of his fate to come. I even wonder if “stoning those sent” might look forward to Stephen, the first martyr, which Luke of course knew about.

My friend Jeremy Troxler, on the last night of our awful General Conference in February, suggested that if you look at a religious institution you love and it is a travesty, profoundly disappointing - or if you know things you know, try to explain them to other people, and they just don't get it, then in that terrible, painful, frustrating place, you are very close to the heart of Jesus.

   And then the lovely image of a hen gathering her brood. It’s lovely – and not just because it’s a feminine image. In the traditional “Upper Room” in Jerusalem, the site where pilgrims have believed (wrongly, but still…) the Last Supper transpired, there is a carving on one of the columns of a pelican and her chicks. Evidently (is this true?) a mama pelican goes out in search for food for her chicks. But if everything is dried up and she finds none, she returns to the nest, pokes holes in her own flesh with her beak, and the chicks feed on her. Eucharistic. Cruciform. Sacrificial gathering. Grisly, and lovely.

*****

   Check out my latest book, Everywhere is Jerusalem: The Holy Then & Now - which has a study guide and video - and now it's on Audiobook!

What can we say March 9? Lent 1

   Deuteronomy 26:1-11, a text Gerhard von Rad dubbed a “creed” for the ancient Israelites, would work well to kick off Lent: we offer our first fruits, we give up what is precious, in recollection of God’s deliverance. Similarly, in Romans 10:8b-13, we’re invited to confess – but not your sins! Rather, confess that Jesus is Lord. Everything is different because of what God has done in Jesus – beautifully articulated by Fritz Bauerschmidt (in his marvelous The Love That Is God): “The words and actions of Jesus do not so much seek to tear down the walls of earthly kingdoms as to undermine their foundations so they will collapse under their own weight.”

   And so, in Romans, or in any Lenten text, we reimagine our relationship to everything. Bauerschmidt again: “When we expect the passing things of this world to bear the full weight of our love, they collapse under that weight, their own structural flaws revealed in their inability to bear that weight.” Jesus, therefore, was not much troubled by the contagion of sin, and so he easily and naturally befriended outcasts and sinners. His lordship can be vividly envision as (to cite Bauerschmidt one more time!) “love running forth in joy to embrace the wayward human race, journeying even as far as the place of death, and bringing humanity into the interpersonal, generative and joyful love that is the Holy Trinity.” The first place he ran was into the wilderness:

   Luke 4:1-13 is in a way an astonishing text to open Lent. It’s not about our sin, it’s not really about our being tempted (as in the thin, vapid sermon that might say We’re tempted like Jesus, so let’s resist the way he did!). It’s a story about how great Jesus is, how he became that Lord named in Romans 10. Luke 4 is my parade example (discussed in my The Beauty of the Word) of the way we mis-read texts in preaching. We make texts about us: my faith, my struggle, my serving, my doubts, my discipleship. But most texts aren’t actually about us. They are about God. Jesus did what you and I could never do, and that we (what a relief!) don’t have to do. Jesus isn’t our moral example, showing us how to combat Satan. Jesus is our Savior, for all the times, for all of life, when we succumb, when we drink the koolaid and fall for the devil’s wiles. This story should make us fall on our knees in awe. Jesus. Wow. What a Savior.

   In his wonderful The Whole Language, Father Gregory Boyle narrates his mother's final days, way past ready to go. She'd awaken in the morning, and after an exasperated "Oh for crying out loud," she'd fix her gaze on one or 2 or 4 family hovering nearby and say "You're here, you're here. Boyle wonders if the temptation narrative was really God saying tenderly to Jesus "You're here!" and Jesus not really knowing what to say in response but "YOU'RE here." "God meets our intensity of longing with intensity of longing. The Tender One whom we long for, longs for us. Maybe the desert is really a time to notice the notice of God."

   Luke sets Jesus’ ministry in the context of the political powers of his day: Tiberius, Pilate, Herod. Does Luke imply in chapter 4 that Satan is the source of their power? Luke’s genealogy of Jesus traces his lineage back to Adam. Luke 4 shows Jesus succeeding where Adam failed; with Paul in Romans 5:12-21, we see Jesus correcting and healing the Fall.

    Jesus, Luke alone mentions, is “full of the Holy Spirit.” He’s not beaming or having a titillating emotional experience. The Spirit, for him, stiffens his resolve to be at one with God the Father in the most arduous circumstances imagineable. And he’s not alone out there! The preacher might contrast solitude with loneliness. Jesus seems never to be lonely, although he’s often alone. Luke makes his solitude-ness explicit: the Spirit is with him, in him. When we are alone, we get lonely because we hear voices in our heads, negative messages… Preaching should make some attempt at comfort – while still fixed on the fact that this story is about Jesus, not us.

   It’s helpful for the preacher to describe the locale. Not a “desert,” like a stretch of sand with cacti. The Judean wilderness was a rocky zone full of cliffs and caves, with dangerous predators lurking behind every rock. A gravity-defying monastery clings to a cliff there, marking the traditional spot of Jesus’ testing. It’s a wilderness, again reminding us where Israel was tested (and failed). Again, Adam failed, Israel failed, we all fail. Jesus alone is our Savior.

   I love Nikos Kazantzakis’s image of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ: every time young Jesus reaches out for pleasure, “ten claws nailed themselves into his head and two frenzied wings beat above him, tightly covering his temples.  He shrieked and fell down on his face.”  His mother pleaded with a rabbi (who knew how to drive out demons) to help.  The rabbi shook his head.  “Mary, your boy isn’t being tormented by a devil; it’s not a devil, it’s God – so what can I do?”  “Is there no cure?” the wretched mother asked.  “It’s God, I tell you.  No, there is no cure.”  “Why does he torment him?”  The old exorcist sighed but did not answer.  “Why does he torment him?” the mother asked again.  “Because he loves him,” the old rabbi finally replied.

   This devil is more sinister and sneaky than a red guy with a pitch fork. The devil’s greatest wile? To persuade us he doesn’t exist, or to dupe us into seeing the devil behind every rock. Thomas Merton spoke of “the theology of the devil,” suggesting that what the devil wants most of all is attention. Clearly, if evil is alluring, we should look to things that are beautiful, attractive, even appearing to be holy – and that’s where evil sets its trap for us, as it did for Jesus.

   After teasing Jesus to turn rocks into bread (after all, he’d been born in Bethlehem, the “house of bread,” and he was on his way to becoming “the bread of life”!), the devil fights 2 more rounds. Luke reverses temptations #2 and #3 from Matthew’s version. The offer of the kingdoms: I can’t talk about this without lifting up Tolkien’s marvelous Lord of the Rings, in which he quite wisely showed that the ring of power shouldn’t fall to those who believe they’ll wear it well; it must be destroyed for there to be peace and goodness.

   Jesus is taken (spiritually? in the imagination? or literally?) to the “pinnacle” of the Temple. Does Luke mean the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, looming 400+ feet over the Kidron Valley? How many televangelists, or even parish pastors, would indulge in a bit of razzle-dazzle? Henri Nouwen (in In the Name of Jesus) reminds us that we clergy fantasize about doing something impressive for God. Sometimes, I worry if I see in others (and in myself!) a kind of ambition to be somebody, to matter, to stride forward to validate self - in a religious cause, of course! But this is not God’s way.

  The devil quotes Scripture! And from this Sunday’s Psalm (91) – that the angels won’t let us fall. I’ve called this the devil’s favorite passage, since it speaks of God protecting us from harm. People experience harm, pain, loss – and believing thinly that the Bible promises God won’t let that happen, people just give up on God and don’t believe any more. Every time this happens, the devil smiles, thinking My favorite Bible passage brought down another one!

   The angels adored and worshipped Jesus – but clearly, in the end, they not only let his foot be dashed against those stones near the Temple. They let Jesus’ blood be shed, his body be pierced. This story points toward that day – as Luke adds the tantalizing, haunting footnote that once Jesus won round 1, Satan “departed from him until an opportune time.”

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What can we say on Ash Wednesday?

  Ash Wednesday. I always tell myself and fellow clergy that they don’t come for the homily. They come for the ashes. I still love the great reflection Martin Sheen offered when interviewed by Krista Tippett: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m just overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

   I continue to commend some sort of Lenten fast, although it gets watered down into dieting or substituting beer for wine or whatever you gave up. Jesus fasted for his 40 days, and the saints we adore did the same. The location of his fasting: simply harrowing. Lisa and I visited the St. George's monastery that hangs perilously from a cliff overlooking the Wadi Qelt. It's hot, it's steep, and even today they warn you of brigands and carnivorous creatures in the area. 2 hours almost wore us out. Jesus did 2 hours 12 times daily for 40 days.

   I am enjoying and admiring Chris Green's new Being Transfigured. He confesses, as we all can, that "my sense of sin is warped / There is nothing more sinful than what we’ve said about sin, and what we’ve done in the name of our hatred of sin." How very "Self-absorbed – and self-negating" our sense of sin can be. "We’re nice but not kind, indulgent not compassionate, permissive not forgiving." Our need isn't to try harder, but a miracle; we need to be released by a divine intervention. 

   I think of my first adult life dog, Abigail, who loved to run in the woods of my rural parish. After she didn't come home one day, I finally found her - enmeshed in some old barbed wire somebody had used as a fence back in the day. The harder she struggled to get out, the more the barbs gashed her skin. I had to urge her to be very, very still, to trust me, so I could extricate her  - and then her wounds required some healing. That's what Lent, and the whole Christian life is like.

  William Placher's terrific Mark commentary cites Alexander Schmemann ("Fasting makes us light, concentrated, sober, joyful, pure"), Macrina Wiederkehr ("Fasting is cleansing. It lays bare our souls. In the Divine Arms we become less demanding and more like the One who holds us. We hunger and thirst for justice, and holiness. We hunger for what is right. What hunger to be saints"), and St. Basil ("Fasting is to refrain from vice"). I'll ponder those for me, whether they worm their way into a sermon or not.

   Our Psalm, the 51st, one of the church's historic "penitential Psalms," bears the weight of this day and season - although we might quibble with the unforeseen implication that David, having seized Bathsheba (the patron saint of #MeToo?), simply repents and expects cleansing - and we conclude all is well. What's the lesson in the ripple effects and lingering impact of our sin - even forgiven (by God) sin?

   Matthew 6 is perfect yet terribly odd for Ash Wednesday. Jesus tells us not to practice our piety visibly (v. 1), and not to disfigure our faces but to wash them (v. 16) – on the very day we disfigure our faces publicly. Nobody at my place though is showing off, sporting ashes for the rest of the day. If anything, they’ll get some strange stares at the store on the way home.

  When I get home, I try to take some time to linger before a mirror – to ponder that I have just been marked with the horror and hope of Jesus’ cross. No hymn captures so thrillingly the paradox of this horror and hope as Isaac Watts’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” We “survey” the cross. We don’t just glance at it. The soldiers didn’t survey this one. They’d seen plenty of crosses, and had no reason to think this was God. All they saw was a dying, despised person – which was precisely what God was hoping to achieve. More lines in that hymn bear reflection: “Sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Onlookers saw tragedy, maybe justice mingled.

   “Did e’er… thorns compose so rich a crown?” At Elizabeth II’s coronation so long ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed St. Edward’s Crown on her head. It was heavy, forged of 22 karat gold, with 444 precious stones, aquamarines, topazes, rubies, amethysts, sapphires. She then knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord. Did she ponder Jesus’ very different crown, its only ornaments those harsh thorns gashing his forehead, scalp and temples?

   “My richest gain I count but loss.” Lent is the season to reassess what has value, what doesn’t, how much we offer up to God. Do we urge our people to embark on a fast? It’s not dieting. It’s not being glum and feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s solidarity with those who aren’t choosing to fast. It’s weaning ourselves from dependencies on things. It’s an awakening to where our treasure is.

   Where are the “Take the Bible literally!” people when it comes to “Do not lay up treasure on earth”? We prudently save, we check our retirement portfolios, we pay off the house. No use castigating the people, or ourselves. It’s a mark of our brokenness, our desperate need for the true God. The ashes are lie that mark on Cain’s forehead. It’s guilt, and grace.

  And so we invite people into (hopefully) a growing devotion, a loosening of our grip on our treasures, an expansion of God and grace into daily life. Here’s something we did a few years back. At the Baptism of the Lord, we handed out shower tags (we got the idea, and even purchased the tags from Adam Hamilton!), which you hang in the bath: “Lord, as I enter the water to bathe, I remember my Baptism. Wash me by your grace, fill me with your Spirit, renew my soul. I pray that I might live as your child today, and honor you in all that I do.”

   On Ash Wednesday, we picked up on Matthew 6 and handed out closet tags. Jesus said “Go into your closet to pray.” The Greek tameion is an inner room of the house, a storeroom, small, private – reminding us of the need for a dedicated holy space at home. I love this – that if you go into your closet and pray, you are doing God’s will! Picking up on other clothing images in Scripture, here’s how that tag reads: “Jesus said, ‘Go into your closet and pray in secret; and your Father will reward you.’ So pray. Prepare for your day with God. As you dress, remember Romans 14:8, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and Colossians 3:12, ‘Put on compassion, patience, forgiveness, love – and be thankful. Whatever you do, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus.’”

   Two more items while we’re on Matthew 6. Jesus says “When you pray,” not “If you pray” – and he was assuming 3 set times of prayer as was common Jewish practice then and now. When Will Willimon was Dean of Duke Chapel, he told about a Muslim student who asked him, “Why don’t the Christian students ever pray?” He obviously observed the 5 set daily times for prayer in Islam, and was puzzled that he never ever saw Christians stopping to pray. It’s a judgment call whether you can mention this to your people. I think it’s compelling, and inviting – but some folks have such potent, irrational anti-Muslim feelings that they’ll shut down on you.

   And then Jesus talks about “reward,” shunning earthly reward, but implying quite clearly there are rewards, ultimate rewards to the life of faith. I for one downplay this, remembering a very smart college student who asked me if he could become a Christian if he didn’t believe in eternal life. His angle was he wanted to follow Jesus just because it was good, right, noble and true, not to secure any prize for himself. I admire that – but quite clearly the Gospels and Epistles lay out for us fabulous, unspeakably fantastic rewards, or ultimate realities, for those who believe.

 ** Check out my new podcast, Maybe I'm Amazed - amazing conversations with amazing people who've done amazing things! Recent guests: Kate Bowler, David Wilkinson, Lillian Daniel, Chris Green - and earlier in the series, Civil Rights hero Dorothy Counts Scoggins, UNC basketball coach Roy Williams, 7 time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson, Walter Brueggemann, Amy-Jill Levine, and more!