What can we say July 27? 7th after Pentecost

    Hosea 1:2-10. On the prophet Hosea, and his quixotic marriage to Gomer, watch this great conversation I had with Donna Claycomb Sokol of Mt. Vernon Place United Methodist a few weeks back. Parents of young children will not want you talking about God directing Hosea to marry a – what? All the words scholars use to translate get trapped in filters. If it’s that awful, that morally bankrupt, how did the word get through to Hosea himself?

   Was she such a woman already, and Hosea married her? If so, was she a simple businesswoman selling herself? Or was she part of the cultic apparatus featured in the Ball worship industry? Or did Hosea marry her, and then she stumbled? The gender and womanist issues make talking about it even thornier. How were women mistreated, abused, and used in those days? And today? If she is judged here, if her children are symbols of judgment, who’s being judged really? Her? The men? The society? And so if there’s mercy, does it let the men off?

   All these questions intrigue, and aren’t finally answerable – and so the preacher might best simply raise them. Too many sermons feel some compulsion to answer questions and tie them up in a nice bow – but if Jesus was an example to us, then the raising of good questions is a fabulous sermon. Besides, in this case, Hans Walter Wolff is spot on in reminding us Wolff: “In Israel, the concern for divine oracles dominated any interest in the ‘biographical.’”

   Hosea’s oracles are agonizing and offensive to bear. Is human infidelity to God really like crass adultery or selling one’s very body? The Bible tells me so. It’s bodily. It’s intimate. It’s your usually hidden self. And Hosea is thinking the people of God as a nation, a community, not just this or that random Israelite sinner. The indictment is stunning, and therefore the mercy is even more so.

   Two final thoughts. Israel worshipped Yahweh alongside neighbors who were devoted to Baal. I feel pretty sure it unfolded as follows: Israelites, new to the land, were still picking up farming tips from their Canaanite neighbors, who advised them, plow, get the rocks out, plant seed, fertilize, weed. The Israelite farmer, laboring hard, after a few weeks asks, Hey, I’ve done all that but it’s not raining! The Canaanite says, Come on down to the Baal worship center and make sacrifice – and there are these women there… Israelite shudders and declares, I would never go there or do such things! But no rain. In desperation, one night he tiptoes off when no one is looking, pays a tribute to Baal, admires the dancing – and then next day a cloud rolls in with even a brief shower. He’s hooked. Do the deities of our culture not hook us in just this way?

   And then: the children bearing those awful names, like those Isaiah gave his children, not names at all but words of judgment. Little Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah and Lo-Ammi had to go to school to be bullied and mocked. Clergy are on good ground to ask, not in the sermon but when home alone, what is the carnage to my children for me being one daring to tell God’s truth in a broken world? I devoted a chapter to this in my Weak Enough to Lead.

   Psalm 85 is a profound and elegant text! Summertime is a great time to preach Psalms – the texts that some of our Hall of Fame preachers spent more time preaching than anything else (Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon!); check out my book with Clint McCann, Preaching the Psalms. There’s much wisdom and profound theology in the first 9 verses. “You forgave the iniquity of your people” – not a long line of individuals, but the people as community. “Revive us again” – but why? “So your people may rejoice in you,” not “so they will feel better or get into heaven or lower their anxiety.” “Show us your hesed” – a Hebrew word well worth introducing. And “He will speak peace to his people,” which Jesus did after waking up in the boat and after materializing in the locked room once resurrected.

   It’s verse 10 that you can linger on. “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.” The poet personifies hesed, emet, zedek and shalom as having one joyful reunion, a hugfest, conjuring up for me that climactic scene in Return of the King, the exuberant laughter when Frodo awakens in Rivendell to the arrivals of Pippin, Merry, Logolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Gandalf and Sam; Tolkien reported that as he wrote this scene, his own tears of joy splattered onto the page. Small, these virtues, winning after severe danger and only at the end of the day. There’s a kiss – so tender, the mouth that speaks and consumes and smiles touching another.

   Mark Helprin’s luminous lines (in Winter’s Tale) come to mind: “The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.” This Psalmist, relishing what he’s inspired to write, presses on with more: “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground; righteousness will look down from the sky.”

   Colossians 2:6-19. Usually I find lections in Colossians to be incandescent. Paul (or his diligent student writing in his name) is white hot inspired and eloquent. Here, Christ as “the fulness of deity,” not just a fair representation of God, “dwells in bodily form – and in him you too are brought to fullness.” Just saying these words to our people is powerful, opening massive doors into the open air and light of God’s presence. God isn’t the ineffable, omni- this or that far away; it’s intimate, personal. “God has chosen to provide us with a ‘dial tone,’ and it is not an ‘abracadabra’ but a name with a history of judgment and forbearance known within a specific relationship of trust and obedience and failure and forgiveness” (Christopher Seitz).

   Paul is expansive about truth, but it isn’t just any old kinda true or truthy thing. There clearly are rival versions, fake truths, not mutually supportive or overlapping with the true Truth. The challenge in this text is deciphering what Paul is countering, what was going on in Colossae – but does it matter? “A modern historical-critical difficulty in recovering the religious world of Colossae reveals a kind of accidental benefit of wider appropriation” (Seitz). His readers and their neighbors do seem to suffer an intellectual idolatry, so smart, almost gnostic, knowing insider stuff others are too dim-witted to grasp. Christ is for the brilliant, but isn’t accessible through brilliance.

   Luke 11:1-13. Let me commend another conversation I had, this time with Prof. Rebekah Eklund, on Jesus and… Prayer, especially this “Lord’s Prayer.” Primo stuff. Jesus’ model prayer undermines most praying by our people, although it’s hardly worth scolding them for it. Even the whole idea of praying “for.” There’s a bit of a “for” in Jesus’ prayer, but I think he’d invite us to pray. Period. Not for this or that.

   The ask, “Teach us to pray,” implies we have lots to learn. Bonhoeffer says it’s not only what we want to pray that matters, but what God wants us to pray. The Psalms, and Jesus, are our tutors. Beginning with the Father/Abba. The “daddy” angle gets overdone, although it’s not wrong. I was moved deeply what I watched ZOE’s Reegan Kaberia preach on “our father” to a group of Kenyan orphans who had just entered his program; they were in tears as well. God as father to the fatherless. God as father to those with vacant fathers, or cruel fathers, or even stellar fathers. Martin Luther paraphrased this: “Although you could rightly be a severe judge over us, instead through your mercy implant in our hearts a comforting trust in your fatherly love, and let us experience the sweet savor of a childlike certainty that we may call you Father.” 

Rembrandt’s painting of Jesus’ best story sparked Henri Nouwen’s best ever book, The Return of the Prodigal, which clergy should read, not for sermon material, but for the healing of their own souls.

   And I’m increasingly drawn to Karl Barth’s realization that in Jesus’ time, a son was apprenticed to his father. You learn the business, developing skills. I’m an apprentice in God the Father’s kingdom! Of course, Francis of Assisi was being apprenticed into his father Pietro’s lucrative cloth business when he gave it all up to enter the business of God, Jesus’ Father.

   There’s so much preaching stuff tucked into this text. Who was it who first said “Thy kingdom come means My kingdom go”? “Thy will be done” is echoed in Gethsemane, and the “on earth as in heaven” carries me to Martin Luther King’s final sermon in Memphis: 

   “It's all right 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. It's all right to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis.”

   Forgiveness? So much to unpack there – and I’m still chuckling over what Willie Jennings said to me in our “Jesus and… Race” conversation: 

  When his father taught him to use various tools, he warned him to watch out, that he might hurt himself or something else if he didn’t learn how to use each one rightly – and isn’t it so with forgiveness? The temptation business must be tempered by “The Lord tempts no one” (James 1:13), noting a test is different from a temptation. Is Jesus really praying “Deliver us from the evil one”? The verb “deliver” gives the preacher a lot of fodder. What else gets delivered? The mail, yes, a package – and a baby!

What can we say August 3? 8th after Pentecost

    Hosea 11:1-11 is one of the Bible’s tenderest, most revealing moments. Hosea, after all he’d been through with his marriage, and his children, and the people, priests and government leaders, listens in to a tempest of turmoil in God’s own heart. His words sound like a creed, rehearsing Israel’s history with this Divine heart – so less a list of things to be believed, but a relationship to be acknowledged with immense gratitude.

   God’s accusation against sin morphs into a lament, the agonizing breaking of God’s heart. Maybe like a parent coping with a grown child, the mind drifts back to infancy and childhood, when the child was dependent, helpless, not useful at all. Hans Walter Wolff: “The first event in the life of young Israel worthy of report is that Yahweh loves him.” Indeed, “Hosea was the first to use the word ‘love’ as an interpretation of the election of God’s people.”

   The Divine condescension is so moving: like a tall parent bending far down to feed and nurture the wee one. And then wrestling – maybe like Jacob wrestled with God? – with what to do. In the Ancient Near East, the sophomoric, moody deities bickered among themselves, and their actions often conflicted with one another. Enlil might toss down a thunderbolt while Ea yearns to rescue the people – who only experienced their deities as capricious. Israel’s experience has been – or could be again – like a child with mom or dad. Yahweh absorbs all the conflicts the Ancient Near Eastern gods argued about into God’s very own heart, bearing the rage, the sorrow, within, and finally acting against God’s own just judgment.

   Should Israel hear God’s plaintive “How can I give you up?” they might presume upon such mercy and continue in their bad behavior. But if God’s people ever really reckon with the depth of God’s condescension, God’s tender mercies, God’s patience, the only reply can be “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

   Colossians 3:1-11. Paul segues into his next section. “Since” you have been raised – not “if.” And “you” is plural: “Since y’all have been raised, seek the things above.” Things? Seek the One who is above. It’s not the goodies of heaven, but being near Jesus Christ. Notice how repetitive Paul is with the word “Christ” lest we misplace our dreams of what’s above! What is lethal in me, in us, must be removed, put to death. God is invited to be the surgeon, to cut out whatever malignancy threatens to kill us.

   The “neither Jew nor Greek” presented itself just last month (June 19) on Galatians 3. I’ll reiterate: there were, of course, still Jews and Greeks, women and men. It’s the division, it’s the rankings that are shattered. Differences are not abolished; God loves diversity! It’s the end of bias, hierarchy, chauvinism – an end to segregation. On this score, we are manifest failures. But it’s still God’s way, and the more we approximate this, the closer we are to God (and the less we approximate this, the further we are from God as well).

   The new reality can elude us. Thomas Merton, ever helpful, wrote this in his Journal: "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 12:13-21. Vintage Jesus here! Two brothers bickering over their dad’s inheritance (which people swear they’ll never do – until the last parent dies!!), and one asks Jesus to lean in on his side. Jesus doesn’t take sides, or say “Be fair now.” Instead? “Beware of covetousness.” Really? It’s not coveting if he just wants what’s rightly his – is it? Jesus cuts to the heart of even a just claim: “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Recoil if you wish, but even our fair claims can expose how hitched our hearts are to things, wealth, more. I’d love to explore the quirky phrase, “all kinds of greed.” There’s not just one kind, is there!

  True to form, Jesus has a story to match: a farmer had a bumper crop. I remember last year, several church members told me they’d had unusually productive years – and brought a check for the church! Not the farmer in Jesus’ parable. Jesus takes us inside his head for an intriguing inner chat: “He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do?’ He said to himself, ‘I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones…’ And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have plenty laid up now for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, be merry.” Jesus’ humor is subtle: the guy calls his soul “Soul.” The whole scene is so insightful, funny in a way, telling in every way.

  Just as he’s plotting bigger barns, he drops dead. God isn’t punishing him for his plan, or for his productivity. God isn’t punishing him at all. His time simply is up. “Fool” indeed. All lost in the moment of death. “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” Would Jesus allow you can lay up treasure and be rich toward God? Or is it an either/or? Jesus believes and warns us that in the soul it’s a zero sum game. There’s only so much of you to invest. Will it be the earthly or the heavenly?

   In this context, Jesus continues: “Do not be anxious” – leading us to intuit that in Jesus’ deep wisdom, it is the gathering, augmenting, and protection of things that induces much anxiety. Since he’s out of doors, Jesus beckons them and us to look around: “Consider the birds. They have no barns! Aren’t you more valuable than the birds?” I’m not really sure of the answer to this… St. Francis preached to birds as if they were his equals.

  Notice Jesus asks way more questions than he gives answers. “Which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life?” We can subtract from that span, in both quality and quantity! Still glancing around the hillside, Jesus continues: “Consider the lilies… Even Solomon was not arrayed like one of these.” What a brilliant rhetorical choice! Solomon – not only the richest guy ever, the most splendid dresser ever, but the one who stumbled into idolatry and led others there too.

  Jesus isn’t scolding. His tone of voice must be so very tender, his eyes overflowing with love: “Fear not, little flock.” And his way for them to shed fear? Not locked doors, or better weapons. “Sell your possessions and give alms.” My fear level shrinks as my generosity widens. An unforgettable image: “Provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old.” Surely someone was standing near him with an old leather pouch, worn to threads by years of coins in, coins out. A new purse not subject to aging, or wear and tear is one that holds “treasure in the heavens that does not fail.”

  His clincher: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” I want my heart in heaven even while I live down here. As we sing some Sundays, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.”

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  Check out my book, not on how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.

What can we say August 10? 9th after Pentecost

    Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 functions as an overture to Isaiah’s overall message, an intro anthology of his central themes. Not cheerful in tone, not a snazzy attraction for visitors, Isaiah’s mission is the disclosure of Israel’s sin (and ours), the certainty of judgment, and how dire the need is for repentance. Fascinating: our lectionary scoots right past verses 2-9, which expose the extent of Israel’s sin (not a little booboo now and then, but an all-encompassing fallenness!) and the severity of God’s judgment.

   Maybe this is important for visitors and old-timers too; we dare not skip the revealing of sin and summons to repentance. Preaching this is risky, as an appeal to repent can turn out to be a thinly-veiled expression of my frustration and anger at my people, or else a weirdly popular kind of grandstanding where our summons to repentance is nothing but an opaque critique of what we (and the people!) don’t like out there. Can chatter about repentance get shimmied down to what we think somebody else out there ought to be doing? Alternatively, if we internalize, theologically robust and hopeful repentance morphs into a mood of guilt and remorse, with much of the shuv, meaning to make a 180° turn, or even the Greek metanoia, meaning a change of mind.

   Isaiah (whose name means “The Lord saves”) sees a vision. Fascinating: like the author of Revelation, he is vouchsafed a glimpse into heavenly realities, into God’s very presence. Down on earth, the year must be 701 B.C.E.  After the stranglehold of the Assyrian juggernaut, Zion alone is left, and barely. The people foolishly saw its survival as a great blessing, as if God were pleased with them and not others. Always beware any theology that says I made it, they didn’t, God has sure been good to me.

   Isaiah shares with us God’s exasperated assessment of worship. At a recent United Methodist General Conference, I penned a blog on this that went viral – as it wasn’t hard to imagine, after our lovely, moving worship, overhearing God saying “Remove from me the noise of your worship,” as we fought like cats and dogs once worship had ended. Isaiah’s God chides them for the futility of their sacrifices – making me shudder, as we don’t even bother with the sacrifices before we cause God to shudder.

   How gory: their “hands are full of blood” (v. 15). In Israel, worshippers’ hands were not just metaphorically stained with blood. The animal sacrifices would have left bloody traces on their hands, a graphic image indeed. The preacher can play with this: Pilate tried to wash his hands of Jesus but could not. Lady Macbeth could not rid her house of its guilt. Jesus, the bearer of all guilt, died with his own blood all over his own hands. I wonder if this is a Sunday to revive a couple of those old, gory but theological pointed hymns about the blood of Jesus.

   With the numbing horror of so many mass shootings and wars civil and international around the world, this “hands full of blood” image makes you shiver. We need to speak in wise ways on this. I tried to in last Sunday's sermon - echoing some of what I blogged about a while back about the futility of “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims.”

   Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 begins a long, eloquent text, a roll call of heroes of the faith, as if the author was thumbing through Scripture in his mind. I wonder if the preacher might do just that: hold a Bible, start in Genesis, thumb through, mentioning Abel, Abraham, Moses, David. I’d add a few from the New Testament, and church history (“By faith, St. Francis…” “By faith, my grandmother…”).

   People think faith is believing spiritual things, or having religious feelings, or trusting God will do stuff I ask for. Hebrews, with simplicity and yet near-philosophical sophistication, defines faith as the substance (hypostasis, what stands under or supports, a foundation, and thus the real nature of things, with the added nuance of serving then as a pledge, a down payment) of things hoped for (elpizomenon). Hope is always worth repackaging for our people. Late in his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., said “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful.” Christopher Lasch distinguished these well: optimism believes things will get better tomorrow; hope is ready if things don’t get better. Optimism is up to us doing better; hope depends on God.

   Faith is “the conviction of things not seen.” What isn’t seen? Invisible, spiritual realities? Not in the Bible’s understanding. The unseen things are in the future. Our future is secure with God, so faith can live in the uncertainty and even agony of now. Luke Timothy Johnson: “Faith makes actual, or makes ‘real,’ for believers the things that are hoped for, as though they were present… They are understood to be as real, or even more real, than things that can be ‘seen,’ that is, verified by the senses.” Here I love a thought David Steinmetz used to emphasize about Martin Luther – for whom “the organ of faith” was the ear, not the eye. The eye can deceive; we are fooled by what we see (or don’t see). The ear hears – and hears God’s Word, which can be trusted no matter how things look.

   Hebrews jogs back in time to the call of Abraham: “He went, not knowing where he was to go.” God told him to go – where? “A place I will show you.” Jesus called his disciples to go… where? They had no clue. In my Will of God book, I explore this at some length: we want a map, or to know “God’s plan for my life,” when in reality we simply follow, taking the next step. “Thy word is a lamp to my feet” – not a brilliant Coleman lantern, but a Bible-times little pottery lamp that might light up the road for about 4 or 5 feet. You go, you take the next step, then the next.

   Faith is going, moving - as Father Greg Boyle reminds us, “Faith isn't about saluting a set of beliefs. It's about walking with Jesus and being a companion, particularly standing in the lowly place with the easily despised and readily left out.” Is his model of how to be in ministry with gang members a window into how to transform our violent society?

   How poignant is it that Abraham (just like Moses) died not seeing the fulfillment of the promise, not participating in what all of life had been a pursuit of. No, he “greeted it from afar.” Moses did this from Mt. Nebo: Hello, promised land… The preacher would be wise to point to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final sermon (“I’ve seen the promised land… I may not get there with you”) – or Reinhold Niebuhr’s great wisdom (“Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope”).

   Luke 12:32-40 grab-bag of some of Jesus’ short, memorable sayings. A modern parallel would be Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto” (“Every day do something that won’t compute. Work for nothing. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Give your approval to what you cannot understand. Praise ignorance. Ask questions that have no answers. Plant sequoias. Practice resurrection”). No conventional wisdom with Jesus – or Berry!

   For Jesus, not being beaten is being blessed! The thief image is quirky. Jesus doesn’t really burgle, as in ripping you off of your things – although he might aid your shedding of things!

   How tender, Jesus calling them his “little flock.” Humbling for them, too. “Let your loins be girded” means, as Levine and Witherington put it, “Let your long, ankle-length robe be adjusted by the waist-belt to ensure readiness for action or departure.” The “breaking into” of the thief literally means “dug through” – as in the mud-brick walls houses had in Jesus’ day. Such digging requires time and patience; think Andy’s escape from prison in The Shawshank Redemption!

   Jesus forever reminds us to travel light, own little, give with abandon. Laying up treasure in heaven is accomplished not by being pious but by outlandish, generous giving to those in need (as Augustine, Ambrose and Chrysostom understood so well). Wonder why we don’t experience much Jesus or resurrection? Look no further. Can we, we Christian preachers, make even incremental progress on such things – and then maybe invite our listeners to do the same? 

 Levine and Witherington again: “By supporting the poor, disciples obtain wallets that are never empty and that can never be robbed; that is, they heave treasures in heaven. In turn, if they have these heavenly treasures, their heart is directed toward heaven and they no longer will have the cares of the world.”

What can we say August 17? 10th after Pentecost

   Isaiah 5:1-7 feels like late summer, outside, poking around in a vineyard that’s not doing so well, reminding us perhaps of Jesus being annoyed by that unfruitful tree. For us, a winery is a destination. In Bible times, based on what archaeologists have uncovered, wine presses were all over the place, common, as everyday people worked in vineyards, stomping grapes, processing the wine, close to the earth. Gisela Kreglinger, a theologian who grew up in a wine-producing family, has written a fascinating book, The Spirituality of Wine, well worth exploring! A barren vineyard would have raised questions about the roots, the weather, the soil, bugs, or the laziness of workers!

   Our text feels also like a love song, echoing the Song of Songs! But the tenderness turns to critique, with wickedly harsh wordplay in Hebrew: God looked for mishpat (justice) but found only mispach (bloodletting); God sought zedekah (righteousness) but found only ze’akah (a yelp of pain). Memorable, haunting words that cannot have been well-received by the smug who first heard them. Could a clever preacher devise some modern English equivalents?

   If you think you’ll preach on this, drive to a vineyard, get in a conversation with a laborer or two, or the vintner. Ask about frustrations. Get the feel of the place. Get the feel of what God felt. Or ask people around your parish or neighborhood of times they felt they had labored hard but earned nothing but exasperation in return. You’ll be getting close then to the heart of this text.

   Hebrews 11:29-12:2 is a great text, so preachable. Paul says Don’t boast, but Hebrews boasts – rightly – about the heroes of their heritage of faith. How cool is the “time will fail me” in v. 32! – kin to the scene in Sleepless in Seattle, when Jonah springs a phone call with radio therapist Dr. Marcia Fieldstone on his dad, Sam. She asks, “What was so special about your wife?” He responds, “Well, how long is your program?” The preacher can tantalize people by playing on this, and just rattling off names and brief summaries of the exploits of Bible heroes (including those saints who've lived past Bible times!).

   How intriguing is Hebrews’s spin that “They grew powerful out of weakness” – a common biblical theme, and one re-popularized in our day by Jean Vanier, Brené Brown and others, including closer to home my non-leadership leadership book, Weak Enough to Lead. Where’s your power? Not in your skills, experiences or strengths. Look into your weak spots, your woundedness.

   “Lay aside every weight” and whatever “clings.” We’re toting around heavy stuff, like an albatross or huge bags of krap we think we’ll need. It “clings” to you, sticky stuff. Let it go – you who preach, and then invite those to whom you preach to do the same. Go light – because it’s like running a very, very long race. If you aren’t a runner, or even if you are, interview a few runners. 

  Review the text and see what runners say to you about running, discipline, the mental battle, injuries, cheerleading, whatever. Luke Timothy Johnson’s image of an Olympic Marathon is spot on:  “The runners begin far away from the city in some remote place, move through growing crowds and greater fatigue, and finally emerge in the stadium before a massed assembly of spectators who applaud as they complete their final lap.”

   And the “cloud of witnesses” image is so powerful! I preached a few years back at our conference’s memorial service for clergy and their spouses who had died in the past year. I tried to think about tears – which are little droplets of water. What is a cloud, but little droplets of water all together? And that such little droplets are at their most colorful and beautiful – when? – at the end of the day, as the sun is setting. We have lost great ones, and we have tears – but those tears are gathered up into a cloud, and the refraction of light is stunning, lovely.

   It’s all about sticking close to Jesus, who shed his weights of glory to be one of us, one with us. Notice the text doesn’t refer to Jesus as the one “who endured the cross” but “for the sake of joy endured…” Whose joy? Ours? Really his! Jesus did what he did – for his own joy. It gives Jesus immense joy when we enter into this dispensation of weakness, travelling light, gawking a bit over the heroes of yesteryear and striving to be one with them.

   Luke 12:49-56. No sweet, gentle, friendly Jesus here. He’s calling down “Fire!” He brings not peace, not the “comfort” people want so much from church, but “division.” And it’s a most peculiar kind of division, a particular kind of division, not just any old division, and certainly not the political division we suffer from nowadays. Jesus is big enough, serious enough, and radical enough that he’s not a balm to families, but actually divides households, parents against children. So many stories abound. Maybe you have your own. I do. And we have someone like St. Francis of Assisi (who could be an addendum to the Hebrews 11 list!) winding up cut off from his father Pietro because of his following Christ (as depicted so powerfully in Giotto's fresco). Certainly Christian faith doesn’t make families chipper or hold them together. It might, but often does not. Idolatry of the family is one of the naggingly pernicious blockers to people following Jesus – again, growing out of our nasty tendency to think that the Christian life is about being nice, or my goodness, or as a prop to our prearranged, preferred lives. Serious adherence to Jesus inevitably breaks down human relationships.

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  Check out my book, not on how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching.

What can we say August 24? 11th after Pentecost

    Jeremiah 1:4-10. I love this text dawning just as school is coming back into session! Last I preached on this (view here) we used a child as our Scripture reader – and he was sensational. Something to help people be wary of, and maybe thus even to name, is the way church people trivialize children and youth, delighting in their cuteness, or deciding about some missional activity “Oh, that would be good for our youth” or “How neat our youth go on a mission trip.” And then they can be coolly dismissive of youthful idealism, chuckling over teenage dreams for the church. I at least like to ask our children and youth what they’d want from church, and announce this to the grownups with the caution that we debunk their notions at the risk of losing our souls as followers of Jesus who did say we should become like children. I love it that Pope John Paul II, at his inauguration on October 22, 1978, chose to speak to the youth of the world, telling them “You are the future of the world, you are the hope of the Church, you are my hope.”

    But Jeremiah’s call came way before is teenage years. God called him in his mother’s womb – or earlier! A sermon could dwell profitably on how we all came to be in our mother’s womb. Hans Urs von Balthasar spoke of “the terrible accidentalness of sexual causation” – how you came to be in some weird mix of intentionality or the proverbial back seat. The act itself, described unforgettably by geneticist Adam Rutherford: “On contact, that winning sperm released a chemical that dissolved the egg’s reluctant membrane, left its whiplash tail behind, and burrowed in.” {All this and more in my book Birth: The Mystery of Being Born in the Pastoring for Life series.}

   What is God’s calling from, in, even before your arrival in the womb? We think of calling as something you hear, dodge or refuse now as a grownup. But way back then, when you were a microscopic next to nothing, God was already calling you. What if parents, on learning of a pregnancy, instead of the dramatic, showy gender reveal, pondered questions like “What is God calling this new life within to be?” St. Dominic’s mother dreamed, while pregnant, that she gave birth to a dog with a torch in his mouth.

   If God is fully present in utero, if God somehow knit us together, if God understands better than we the complex realities of life in the womb and the daunting challenges of the journey ahead, then can we make sense of God’s will, of God’s desire for this fragile, latent person in the making? Is God merely rooting for survival? If mom and dad are already harboring dreams for this child, then how much more will God already be envisioning a holy, faithful life for this disciple-to-be? We think of God’s calling coming to attentive seekers, to young adults or to those in mid-life crisis. But in utero? Isaiah 49:5 teases out the idea that the prophet had been formed in the womb by God “to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him.” Jeremiah countered God’s call by saying “I am only a youth”; but then on further reflection, he began to intuit that God had actually begun calling him from his mother’s womb (Jer. 1:4-10).

   A fetus can detect sound at twenty six weeks. Can it hear God? Does God call particular people, or all people, even in their mothers’ wombs? What is calling anyhow? Is the divine call a voice out of nowhere? Isn’t each person’s sense of divine vocation a symphony of voices that call? Messages overheard from mom and dad, attributes and skills fostered in the womb and later, chance encounters, some church chatter and personal musing mixed in there: we process it all and infer God is asking something of us. Frederick Buechner (who just died, making us all sad, and immensely grateful) famously wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

   Fascinating: the world’s deep hunger is out there, waiting for you to be born and notice; and your deep hunger is already there, festooned in your DNA, destined by the parents you happen to have and the place you’ll happen to live. What if mom and dad began, during pregnancy, to ponder that this unseen child is already being called by God? And what if you and I reminisce a bit and puzzle over what we probably missed back then, and since – that God was calling us, even in utero?

     After all, the infant, in utero, is already worshipping. I’ve handed the Eucharistic bread to many a pregnant woman and wanted to say “The Body of Christ, given for y’all.” As a teenager, Jeremiah engaged in the usual ducking and weaving, dodging God’s longstanding call. Like Moses (can’t speak), Isaiah (not holy enough), Jonah (the Assyrians are unworthy) or Mary (I’ve never slept with a man), Jeremiah is too young. He may just be chicken, as God’s call is for him to upset the status quo, questioning the politics of his day.

   I'm thinking to focus some on "courage," that rarest of commodities. Courage isn't not being scared, but doing the right thing even when you're scared? I love Marilynne Robinson's verbiage: "I think there must be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. Therefore this courage allows us to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying the same thing."

   God’s call here is a famous “chiasm” – the crossing, a downright crucifix of language: “to pluck up, to break down, to build, to plant.” See the criss-cross? We’d rather God just build and plant without the plucking up and breaking down! Marianne Williamson memorably said that when we invite God into our lives, we expect a decorator to appear to spruce up the place a little. But instead, you look out the window, and there’s a wrecking ball about to tear it all down and start over.

   Hebrews 12:18-29 would be tough for me to preach, requiring too much mansplaining… The author wishes that worshippers wouldn’t feel so much terror, so much trembling – but aren’t we too familiar and cozy, even a little picky in worship, in need of a little mystery and trembling? Some of what he is called “reverence and awe”?

    Luke 13:10-17. The woman is sometimes misunderstood as being unwelcome due to gender, or for ritual impurity – but as Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington remind us, this is one more instance of anti-Semitic reading. Women were welcome. The crippled bore no ritual impurity. We could though ask if her physical disability – 18 years of, what, osteoporosis? severe curvature of the spine? worked then as it does in our world. Is the church finally waking up to issues of disability, which really is a social construct? Can we welcome all people? Can we not even in welcoming disenfranchise or stigmatize the so-called physically disabled?

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   Check out my book on preaching - not how to preach, but how to continue preaching: The Beauty of the Word: the Challenge and Wonder of Preaching. 

What can we say August 31? 12th after Pentecost

   Three great, preachable texts. I go Gospel, then OT, then Epistle.  

   Luke 14:1, 7-14. I allude to this passage constantly, as it unveils how thin our alleged attachments to Scripture can be. The Bible is clear! Or We stand with Scripture! melts away (or should) when we notice how utterly uninterested we are in Jesus’ very simple and doable Scripture admonitions like Luke 14. I’m less sure how to preach on this. Here's what I did preaching on this in our recent series reading through Luke.

   What to do with Jesus' very clear words? Just let them linger? Give people a few minutes to jot down whom they’ve eaten with lately? Or had over to their home?

    Certainly Jesus flunked Miss Manners’s course in etiquette. Dinner with him is one faux pas after another! Jesus helps us see how we discern honor and shame at table – of all places! And it’s even more humbling to notice Jesus doesn’t say Don’t only invite those who can invite you in return – but flat out, Don’t invite them! Sheesh.

    Where’s the Good News? Jesus would liberate us from narrow social interactions – and from patronizing versions of mission in his name. For years, my churches have collected food to be sent off somewhere for the hungry. Or I think of people who have with some grandiosity walked into my office with a ham, asking me to get it to some poor person. On bad days I’d say Thanks! On better days I’d say Find someone and deliver it to them yourself. On my best days I’d say Take it home, and invite the people you have in mind into your home and share it with them. That’s a Jesus-y meal, right?

    It’s also Jesus’ intense love for the fullness of our souls that is evident in his dinner commandment. I’ve often said If you only hang around with people who are like you, you become arrogant and ignorant. I know of no exceptions. What better way to shed some arrogance and ignorance than to share a meal, at your own place, with someone very different?

    Jeremiah 2:4-13. God sounds like a wounded lover or fractured parent here: “What wrong did they find in me?” Do we do this – finding fault with God? Or is it exasperation that the God of Scripture isn’t quite the God we’re looking for, or that God is inadequate somehow to the tasks we place on God’s shoulders.

   From God’s perspective, they “went after worthless things, and thus became worthless.” The Hebrew is hebel, featured so provocatively in Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”): hebel is a wisp, a breeze, nothing really, just dust settling. Can I show hebel somehow? Dropping a little shred of paper or some dried up leaves?

     When we as people pursue what is worthless, we ourselves become what our pursuits are. If we pursue God and substantive holiness, we become just that. Fascinating: our searching, our quest defines who we become! The preacher is wise to ask, Who are the vain recipients of our devotion? – and it’s such a long list. Political ideology, for sure. Things. Others. Self. Institutions. I wonder if the church itself, as an institution, might be a curious kind of vain recipient of devotion.

   Jeremiah suggests that we ask the wrong questions, or we fail to ask the right questions, like “Where is the Lord” (which any random person might ask) – and yet it’s not just any Lord, but “the one who brought us up out of Egypt.” Jeremiah wonders if the priests (that’s us, the preachers!) ask “Where is the Lord?” The preacher should ask this question now, later today, tomorrow, every day.

     “Do people change their gods?” Well of course they do, have, and will! A sermon could explore the bogus gods we fixate on, and dream upon – but with Jeremiah’s nuance that “Mine have changed their glory for what does not profit.” Wow. Romans 1 echoes! God’s glory (kabod) is swapped for the unprofitable (yō‘īl).

     Jeremiah explicates, wonderfully, the double fix we are in. Not only has God been forsaken, but the new fake deities exasperate. Jeremiah’s image is that they forsake the living water, the font, the spring of fresh water – did he have one in mind? – for “cracked cisterns that hold no water.” What a vivid image! Can you, the preacher, locate modern parallels for cisterns that hold no water?

    I love Elizabeth Achtemeier’s language: “Given a garden, we choose a desert (Gen. 3), and thirst and heat and fainting, as frantically we look for water from the useless deities of our own making.” Sounds like a mirage to me.

     I recall my dad driving to the beach when I was a child. I’d see the mirage of what I thought was the ocean – but it was merely heat, rippling across the hollow road. But the water was still to come! We were headed to the beach! I wonder if there’s a sermon there: the mirage is deceptive – but we really can anticipate something astonishing and life-giving.

     Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 is a rich, astonishing text!  Our unknown author says “Let mutual love (philadelphia!) continue” – but this makes me wonder if he should have said “Let mutual love begin!” It’s not like we see it all that much. The Greek, philadelphia, reminds me of the Tom Hanks film by that name – about a man suffering from HIV and AIDS, simply asking, in those early days, for fairness, acceptance, justice and love. The goal of philadelphia isn’t merely enjoying people like us, but philoxenia, love for strangers. Why love them? Hebrews, like Genesis 18 (Abraham and Sarah welcoming the strangers b the Oaks of Mamre), reveals that God has this quirky way of using the stranger to test us, to let God’s self be made known to us, for new life to come through them, the them who should be we/us. 

    You have to love the vision of Hebrews here. Remember those in prison – as if you were in there with them. A bold act of imagination, abetted if we heed Jesus’ thought from his last sermon (Matt. 25:31-46) – that when we show up in the prison to visit, we are in the company of Jesus himself!

    What is an “undefiled marriage bed”? Two lie down: is the defilement lust (even then)? Dominance? Judgment? Iciness? Welcoming a stranger in this place is defilement. Listeners will suspect homosexuality might be in play here – and it must be the case that even those who totally embrace same gender relationships and marriage have to recognize that those beds too can be defiled in the same way straight beds are.

   The counsel to “Be content” is almost as numbing as the Bible’s frequent admonition, “Be not anxious.” It’s like piling on! But the preacher has to do what no one else will: expose Madison Avenue and all advertising for what it is – a constant clamor digging into everyone’s soul, shouting Do not be content! You need more, newer, different gadgets, stuff, clothes, experiences. Contentment isn’t even Okay, now I possess enough of those things. The Greek arkoumenoi means enough, sufficient – and then clarifies resides in God’s promise never to forsake us. Flannery O’Connor once spoke of the Eucharist, noting how it’s not much yet it’s more than enough: “It is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

    And finally this formulaic “Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever” – a glorious truth, not to be confused with crazed notions that Church rules or Bible interpretations are the same yesterday, today and forever!

     Luke 14:1, 7-14. I allude to this passage constantly, as it unveils how thin our alleged attachments to Scripture can be. The Bible is clear! Or We stand with Scripture! melts away (or should) when we notice how utterly uninterested we are in Jesus’ very simple and doable Scripture admonitions like Luke 14. I’m less sure how to preach on this. Here's what I did preaching on this in our recent series reading through Luke.

   What to do with Jesus' very clear words? Just let them linger? Give people a few minutes to jot down whom they’ve eaten with lately? Or had over to their home?

    Certainly Jesus flunked Miss Manners’s course in etiquette. Dinner with him is one faux pas after another! Jesus helps us see how we discern honor and shame at table – of all places! And it’s even more humbling to notice Jesus doesn’t say Don’t only invite those who can invite you in return – but flat out, Don’t invite them! Sheesh.

    Where’s the Good News? Jesus would liberate us from narrow social interactions – and from patronizing versions of mission in his name. For years, my churches have collected food to be sent off somewhere for the hungry. Or I think of people who have with some grandiosity walked into my office with a ham, asking me to get it to some poor person. On bad days I’d say Thanks! On better days I’d say Find someone and deliver it to them yourself. On my best days I’d say Take it home, and invite the people you have in mind into your home and share it with them. That’s a Jesus-y meal, right?

    It’s also Jesus’ intense love for the fullness of our souls that is evident in his dinner commandment. I’ve often said If you only hang around with people who are like you, you become arrogant and ignorant. I know of no exceptions. What better way to shed some arrogance and ignorance than to share a meal, at your own place, with someone very different?