What can we say November 15? 25th after Pentecost

   The question about “talents,” the thief in the night, and the spectacular site of Hazor, visitable, so moving in the north of Israel! I am struck, on that text, once more, about the technological advance coming out of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age: not mere time markers, but wartime complications. You have your bronze shields and weapons – but then come the Philistines, who swing their big swords, not of bronze but of iron – and your shield splinters into silly pieces. No wonder the Philistines were so dreaded. And we might ask what technological innovations imperil the people of God today (a wide swath of answers suggest themselves!!).

   Sometimes, for fun, I’ll do a little quick romp through the lectionary texts, teasing folks with “I thought on Monday I’d talk with you about text #1… but by Tuesday I was pondering text #2…” (with little hints, a few details from each one as I go), “but then I settled on text #3.” This week is perfect for this – and the very method draws people’s attention to the variety and wonder of Scripture, and that Christians do what you’re doing in front of them, pondering, digging around for something.

   Judges 4:1-7 is the kind of text that could well induce people to read more Bible – although how would you squeeze a sermon out of it. Jabin rules in Hazor (which is a fabulous archaeological site!), illustrating that Israel clearly had not conquered all of the land. Back in the Bronze Age, Palestine was segmented, not a nation at all, with tribal chieftains defending and occasionally expanding their turf.

   The mighty Deborah – how we wish we knew more about her! Antiquity features the occasional woman of valor and fame – although each is the exception that proves the rule we still live with in much of the world. What a lovely detail: “She used to sit under ‘the palm of Deborah’ to judge.” This must have been a memorable visitable tree long after Deborah was no more.

   Here’s the vivid, movie-worthy moment: in v. 7 she says “I will draw out Sisera and give him into your hand.” In short order, he was not only drawn out, but wound up with a tent peg hammered into the temple of his head – only slightly less graphic than in the previous chapter when Ehud, pretending to bear a secret message, plunges a sword into the obese King Eglon’s belly – and the sword disappeared into the folds of flesh.

   Such stories might help people understand how the Bible isn’t a collection of sweet spiritual platitudes, but exposes real life at its most grim – and that somehow God is there too.

   1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 is similarly titillating, so I’ll touch quickly on the bizarre simile that the Lord will come “like a thief.” But not only are you not ready (unless you have some guns? - who would dare to preach "If you're armed to protect your home, you might kill Jesus coming to visit"?), but the thief comes to rip you off. “Keep awake, don’t get drowsy” is fair counsel to your people while you’re preaching (I love the old joke about the preacher who dreamed he was preaching, and when he woke up, he was). Paul speaks of a couple of armor items here, clearly not as fully developed as Ephesians 6. “Encourage one another” truly could stand as a 3 word sermon. I’ll tease them and say “I thought I’d preach this 3 word sermon and just sit down, for this could keep y’all busy all this week and the rest of your life.”

   Matthew 25:14-30. However, we will delve a bit more fully into the Gospel reading, so vapidly treated in so many sermons. I’m groaning or snoring already, hearing the grinning preacher ask “What talents has God given you? Use them for the Lord, don’t hide ‘this little light of mine’ but ‘let it shine.’” Gerhard Lohfink quite rightly points out that shortly after these words, they arrested Jesus and crucified him: “Nobody is executed for teaching nothing more than bourgeois morality.” I’d add that, while we think the kingdom will dawn if we get out people to fill out spiritual gifts inventories, those religious strengths-finders, the larger truth is that in Scripture God doesn’t seem to use people’s abilities so much as their frailties, their brokenness, their avail-ability. Moses can’t speak, Jeremiah is too young, Isaiah isn’t holy, Jonah bolts in the opposite direction, Gideon has too many soldiers. What are your weaknesses? Where are you broken? That’s where the Spirit will use you.

   Lohfink notices something I’d not noticed: the businessman is not just wealthy, but a “boaster.” To him, these huge sums are “a few things, or “a little.” His business practices are exploitative: “I reap where I did not sow.” Slaves 1 and 2 are worthy of him, matching his finagling, lightning-fast action, risk taking strategies. Lohfink muses: “What a bold move, to make a statement about the reign of God in terms of immoral material.”

   Here’s the other thing about these “talents.” The Greek talanta isn’t an ability. We should translate talanta as “a huge bucket full of solid gold” or “a bank CEO megabonus” or “winning the Ohio lottery.” Only the muscular could even pick up a talanton, as one might weigh fifty or seventy five pounds. Each would be worth around 6,000 denarii, which today (by some scholars’ reckoning) would be much more than I have earned in my twenty five years in the ministry, or twenty of those flasks of pure nard Mary wasted on the feet of Jesus that so mortified the disciples. Jesus’ stories always do this: outlandish hyperbole, mind-boggling, absurd in scope, to make his point about the unfathomable marvel of the kingdom. The kingdom is that valuable.

   Imagine the listeners, poor laborers: no one listening would have the slightest clue about how to invest a single talanton, much less 5, any more than you or I would know what to do with $74 million. You just let your jaw drop, lost in wonder, love and praise. What a far cry from the little The Kingdom Assignment book churches were snapping up a few years back. Pastor Denny Bellesi doled out $10,000 in $100 increments to church members, declaring that 1. The $100 belongs to God, 2. You must invest it in God’s work, and 3. Report your results in 90 days. Those reports were startling: people made money hand over fist to contribute to the Church, creative ministries were hatched, lives were transformed, people wept for joy – all covered by NBC’s Dateline.  So American. Why on earth would I give somebody $100 and say “This belongs to God,” implying that the other half million in his investment portfolio is his? Or to suggest God is the best “deal” ever?

   What about the dumb, wicked servant? In Jesus’ day, burying money was regarded as prudent, and he no doubt expects to be commended. But he gets a verbal thrashing from the master. If this parable is Jesus’ intimation that an astonishingly ravishing gift has been unloaded upon an unsuspecting Church that has not the faintest notion how to handle, then might it be that the parable solicits from us not the offering up of our individual abilities, but rather the frank, embarrassing admission of our corporate inability? We populate Church committees with the best people for the task at hand, and in meetings they confidently offer insights from their education and professional experience.

   But maybe what God needs is people who will huddle up, shake their heads and confess, “We just have no idea; the Treasure is too big, too heavy.” Maybe then, and only then, we can dare something for God. God gives the Gospel not to me so my ability can be put to good use, but to us so our inability might be exposed, and God thereby glorified.

   If it’s stewardship season, you have to ask if this thinking would ruin or prosper your campaign. But is your current campaign approach fruitful, or just numbingly dull and ineffective. I wheedle and cajole, we print and mail catchy material, I plead from the pulpit. How pathetic. Isn’t that the equivalent of the burial of the one talanton, and isn’t it the harbinger of the burial of the Church? The Gospel isn’t being unleashed if some percentage of Church members start to think of an extra $100 or so as belonging to God, or even if the most clever stewardship campaign in history magically seduced a majority of mainline Protestants into actually tithing. The Gospel is too big for such trifles. Surely it is only to the dumbfounded, to the clueless, to the overwhelmed, to those who are under no illusion they have ever known quite what to do because of Jesus and don’t pretend it could ever be otherwise – to those alone this crafter of Trojan horses says “Well-done, good and faithful servant.”  

What can we say November 22? Christ the King

   What an intriguing day, this 57th anniversary of the deaths of John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis! Peter Kreeft imagined a fascinating conversation between them - and Aldous Huxley, who also died on November 22, 1963! - in his quirky book, Between Heaven and Hell. 

   The liturgical day, "Christ the King," begs for a little poetic cadence contrasting him with earthly powers. Instead of being born in a palace, he was born in a cow stall. He rides a little donkey, not a war stallion. His throne is a cross, his crown is of thorns. His riches are the poor, his army a ragtag bunch of unarmed nobodies, etc.  And since it's the anniversary of Lewis's death, how better to honor him and mark the day than by reverting to The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe. Susan Pevensie, having just learned from the Beavers the identity of Aslan, says "Ooh, a lion? I thought he was a man. I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion. Is he quite safe?” Mr Beaver: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

   Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24. We don’t linger much over the line in Psalm 23, “He makes me lie down,” and this lying down is repeated and pivotal in Ezekiel 34. For sheep to lie down, for anybody to chill, you have to be safe. You don’t have to run. You’ve been fully bed. How many in our world flat out can never just “lie down”? But God’s goal for all people, not just the enfranchised, is that they be able to “lie down.”

   Israel, along with other Ancient Near Eastern cultures, often depicted their leaders as shepherds.  We overdo the Oh, poor, humble shepherds notion.  In that culture, flocks could number in the thousands, requiring immense administrative skill. 

   It is lovely to ponder the image that God, Israel’s ultimate shepherd, “will search for my lost sheep” – the basis of one of Jesus’ greatest parables.  The tenderness of this shepherd is evident: seeking good pasture, arranging for the sheep to lie down and rest, binding up the crippled sheep (instead of just leaving them) – all summarized by the homiletically pregnant “I will feed them in justice.”  Ah, justice, mishpat in Hebrew, the kind of biblical justice that says everybody will be cared for; that’s the just society.  This is the kind of realm where Christ is king; he is this kind of King.

   Sometimes I like, in preaching, to imagine things we don’t know about.  I try to picture the shepherds in Bethlehem, the ones who heard the angelic choir – but a month before Jesus was born.  One more dull night, then another, with no idea what was coming, or if anything was coming at all.  I wonder how much we live like them, bored, stuck, and yet there is something marvelous on the horizon we can’t predict or detect.

   Then Ezekiel takes a harsher turn, with sheep and goats (or fat and lean – even worse!) being differentiated, judged, treated shabbily even if fairly.  Of course, our Gospel reading portrays the very same scenario.  There is judgment.

   Ezekiel’s other unanticipated turn is questioned by Robert Jenson: “Does not Ezekiel contradict himself? He has made much of how great it will be when the Lord himself takes over from the earthly shepherds. But suddenly David is to be the shepherd.”  Theologically, “the Good Shepherd must be at once God and a descendent of David. And that is exactly what classical Christology says of Jesus the Christ.”  Lest you think he is imposing a later Christian reading on an Israelite text, he semi-snarky rejoinder: “Our reading is alien to the text only if the Christian doctrines adduced are not true.”  Vintage Jenson.  Preacher beware, though… Don’t rob the OT of its specificity – or from our friends the Jews, for whom this is their Scripture.  The text can stand on its own.

   Turning to Ephesians 1:15-23 (which I preached on in September during our Ephesians series). What a dense, stunning, rich marvel this is; you could preach a long series on this text.  Turns out in Greek it is one very, very long single sentence of 169 words!  The NRSV sticks 3 periods in, but it’s just one sentence.  I dare you to diagram that sentence! Gratitude is a dominant theme, fitting for this week of Thanksgiving.  Again, what is the Christian to be grateful for?  A boatload of food and a comfy den?

   Paul is reporting on his praying. Do we have a gimme-list, a health update as our praying?  Paul prays for “wisdom and revelation” – and that “the eyes of your heart will be enlightened.”  You might turn to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:  “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” 

 I am more drawn to this: St. Francis of Assisi came to be St. Francis because he prayed a single prayer, over and over, day after day, while kneeling before a crucifix in the small, crumbling church San Damiano: “Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart, and give me, Lord, correct faith, firm hope, perfect charity, wisdom and perception, that I may do what is truly your most holy will.”

   We need enlightenment, and wisdom; and Francis’s dream in this prayer was that he might not just know but actually do God’s most holy will.  In Eph. 1, Paul’s purpose is “that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.”  Three things about hope.  (1) It is not a shriveled up thing, but something too grand for the mind to comprehend.  Allen Verhey and Joseph Harvard (in that Belief theological commentary series), noting the primal theme of hope in this overwhelming spillage of verbiage, suggest “This hope is immeasurable – and almost unspeakable. But Paul speaks it anyway.”

   (2) Hope, for Paul, isn’t a spiritual attitude.  Markus Barth, in his massive and rich Anchor Bible commentary, explains: “When Ephesians speaks of hope, the emphasis lies not so much on the mood of the person hoping as on the substance or subject matter of expectation.  Hope is equated with the thing hoped for.” 

   I love Christopher Lasch’s impeccable distinction between hope and optimism.  “Hope doesn’t demand progress; it demands justice, a conviction that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.  Hope appears absurd to those who lack it.  We can see why hope serves us better than optimism.  Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst; the worst is what the hopeful are prepared for.  A blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

   (3) And notice how Paul deftly hinges hope to calling – almost as if calling comes first.  The called are those who have hope.  Because you’re called, you have hope.  Getting it backwards leaves people trying to figure God and their personal future out before listening to anything vocational.  That’s inverted, from Paul’s point of view.

   All preachers would be wise to spend time with Walter Wink (Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, and Engaging the Powers), or others who have probed this notion of “principalities and powers.”  We read the world too thinly if we just see politicians and armies and social trends.  There are cosmic powers behind it all, in it all, and tugging on you, me and the church at every moment. I admire, for instance, the genius and soul of Chanequa Walker-Barnes, in her wonderful I Bring the Voices of My People: "The primary goal of truth-telling in racial reconciliation is not to build bridges; it is to reveal the powers and principalities so that we can tear them down."

   Speaking of the church:  clearly Paul has little interest in personal salvation.  We have hope and are called as members of Christ’s church.  What a beautiful, fitting and compelling image of our life together!  Paul explicates this more fully in 1 Corinthians, of course.  But the Body is right here in Ephesians – and we may humbly recall Martin Luther King’s eloquent assessment in his letter from the Birmingham jail:  “I see the church as the body of Christ. But oh, how we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and fear of being nonconformist.”

   Matthew 25:31-46. I used to love this text – a weird thing to say, I know. Before I get to why I did, let me share my hesitancy nowadays. The whole idea of separating sheep from goats appeals to way too many people. I love the wheat and tares story: we are better together! I don’t want my people for a nanosecond to drool over feeling sheep-like in distinction from those goats over there.

   But it’s Jesus, right – and his very last sermon before facing crucifixion. Salvation, for Jesus, evidently is way more or even far different from responding emotionally at a revival, or saying Yes at Confirmation, or declaring I was born again on June 18. There is doing, action, a whole lifestyle – not of “goodness,” but the harder yet more joyful work of God’s kingdom.

   Mother Teresa made a life out of taking this passage seriously, and actually doing it. The whole vision of What we do for those in need we do for Jesus is huge, and could transform everything we do as a church in outreach. Food? Do you drop it off or share it with a real person, befriending them? Clothing: do you drop off old, worn-out jackets or pants you don’t care for anymore? Or buy something new, or shop with someone? Visiting the sick. During coronavirus, I could not visit my dad. What is it to visit those who are hurting? Those in prison? We typically blame prisoners for being at fault, or a huge problem to society. But Jesus says Meet them, know them, love them.

   I recall a minister I met when I was young: Gordon Weekley, once a prominent Baptist pastor in Charlotte who succumbed to prescription medication abuse, then amphetamines, wound up on the streets – but then was miraculously cured and engaged in stunningly transformative ministry to the addicted and homeless. He handed me a copy of an anonymous piece I’ve seen many times since – but somehow, coming from him, I was transfixed, and determined to lead churches that are different:

   “I was hungry, and you formed a humanities group to discuss my hunger; I was imprisoned, and you crept off quietly to your chapel and prayed for my release; I was naked, and in your mind you debated the morality of my appearance; I was sick, and you knelt and thanked God for your health; I was homeless, and you preached to me of spiritual shelter and the love of God; I was lonely, and you left me alone to pray for me. You seem so holy, so close to God – but I am still very hungry, and lonely, and cold.” Jesus says Bring me, in the person of the poor, food.

   I wonder, in preaching, if I could find somebody near me who is doing each thing Jesus suggests. Whom do I know who visits the prison, and does he have a story? Whom do I know who welcomes strangers? People need to see these things in reality. I wonder if we have a set of signups, real live opportunities: this week, come with us to the local prison Tuesday at 4; this week, we are delivering food to the women at the shelter; this week, we are carpooling to the mosque for a hummus-making class with new Muslim friends.  Something…..

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  My book, Birth: The Mystery of Being Born (in the Pastoring for Life series) is still out - and as we're heading toward Advent, my book on carols and their theology might be of use in preaching or in groups: Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections.

What can we say November 29? Advent 1

   I always count it as some good fortune when Advent 1 falls before December 1. No pressure to make things Christmasy - yet. All month I may ponder Madeleine L’Engle’s great poem about Jesus’ coming: "That was no time for a child to be born, with the earth betrayed by war and hate... In a land in the crushing grip of Rome; honor and truth were trampled by scorn - yet here did the Savior make his home. When is the time for love to be born? The inn is full on planet earth, and by a comet the sky is torn - Yet Love still takes the risk of birth."

  {Check out my blog "God Became Small: Preaching Advent," with general observations on what it is to preach during Advent - with loads of illustrative material for the season}

 

   Isaiah 64:1-9, before it was a preaching text in the lectionary, was a communal lament. Biblical people knew how to come together, as a nation, not to cheer or fight but to lament, to confess, to plead together for God’s help and redemption. I don’t expect us to be able to do the same, but naming that they did and we can’t opens a window.

   The text about God as potter, us as the clay? Find a potter. Chat about making pottery. Report on Sunday. Here's a video of me with a potter from a couple of years ago. I used all this in my last sermon on this text. It's super interesting theologically, as pottery is dirty work, but the dirt really becomes beauty, centering is required, as is "opening up," not to mention trimming, firing, etc. Amazing way to connect with the arts, and with things people treasure and might then connect with their spiritual lives.

   Verses 10-12 shouldn’t have been lopped off the lectionary reading, as they clarify the devastation in question that is lamented: Jerusalem reduced to rubble, cities burned, but then God’s thundering “silence” when some word is so desperately required. This notion of God hiding from us: not only does it feel this way to our people. Scott Bader-Saye reminds us that this image “disabuses Israel of any notion that God belongs to them or can be contained or controlled by them.”

   The very plea to “tear open the heavens and come down” implies there is a thick veil (in how we feel but even in reality!) between us and God. It required an almost violent act, a wounding, a cutting open. What we wish God would do, and what God will do, are not identical anyhow: v. 3, “You did awesome deeds we did not expect.” Can I think of a time in my life or in history when God did something that wasn’t what I wanted or thought I needed? I think of my church member giving me, as a parting gift after 12 years in his parish, his old pocket knife. I’d never wanted one – but it was the best gift ever, because it was his precious thing, and also that when he handed it to me he said “Carry this in your pocket, and when you’re having a bad day, feel it down there and remember somebody loves you.”

   St. Augustine must have loved v. 6: even our righteous deeds are like a dirty garment. We’re proud of what good we do. But it’s not only not enough. It’s not what God is seeking – our goodness. Bonhoeffer shrewdly exposed the way our goodness can be a dreadful substitute to doing God’s will. When we are good, we keep our hands clean. But God asks us to get our hands dirty for God. How to disabuse people, not only that God belongs to us, but that our goodness isn’t what God is looking for?

   Our text asks us to weep and lament. Not very Christmasy – but very Advent-ish. I wonder if this is the year we invite our people to sorrow, repentance, fasting, humility? 

   1 Corinthians 1:3-9 won’t make my sermon – although as a preacher I should not diss Paul’s rhetorical strategy. He flatters his readers – as a prelude to diving into deep waters of trouble and summons to change! Can you feel his searing sarcasm in “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift,” given the rest of his letter?

   Mark 13:24-37. Oh my. I’m no good at preaching these apocalyptic texts, mostly because I’ve heard it done so badly, and have never quite recovered from my days of being badgered by friends who’d read Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth or the Left Behind series and, like clever gnostics, knew Jesus was about to come and I was toast. The hints and clues, like the fig, recur, don’t they, which doesn’t make this or that expectation wrong – but that the world is always in a heap of trouble, and we live on that “eager tiptoe of expectation,” or readiness. Hopefully. A sober realization of the mess, creation’s dire need for redemption to dawn, and soon, is light years from the arrogant Gnosticism that prides itself on its insider knowledge of heavenly timetables. I love the old idea from some medieval rabbi responding to the question, If you’re heading out to plant a tree, and you learn the Messiah is coming later that day, what do you do? Answer: plant the tree.

   On the “staying awake,” I admire Lillian Daniel’s wisdom (in Feasting on the Word) that our people are “already operating in a state of sleep deprivation.” Given how busy we are, especially during a month like December, this just may be “the season to pass out the sleeping pills or the chamomile tea, to a revved-up, overcaffeinated culture of busy-ness.” I might sit next to Jesus on the Mount of Olives and say “in 2020 though, don’t stay awake, but take a nap, rest, learn Sabbath, the solitude that isn’t loneliness.”

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 Check out my little book on the theology embedded in Christmas carols - including some secular favorites! Why This Jubilee? Advent Reflections on the Songs of the Season.

What can we say December 6? Advent 2

  The first two weeks of Advent always intrigue, puzzle, buffalo and challenge me. I want to observe and invite my people into the realities of Advent. They aren’t entirely in a Christmasy mood just yet, so there’s hope. I sure want me preaching on the texts to help them angle themselves toward the coming of the Lord.

 {Check out my blog "God Became Small: Preaching Advent," with general observations on what it is to preach during Advent - with loads of illustrative material for the season}

   Psalm 85 is one of my favorite texts in any season. Verse 10 alone, to me, offers the most hopeful alternative to the hostile, angry, cynical world in which we find ourselves. A kiss: nothing tawdry or illicit here, but a tender kiss. The kiss: the gentlest affection. A mother kisses her newborn. I kissed my father’s forehead on my last visit before he died. It’s your mouth that kisses, the part of you that speaks, smiles, eats and drinks, takes in the body and blood of our Lord, the part of your body that sighs (think Romans 8!).

   This particular kiss is so counter-cultural, in its tenderness, in its compassion, in its hopefulness – but also in a world where ideology and spin will clobber one another in a nanosecond. Facts and biases fling mud at one another. But Scripture, here in Advent, suggest not winners and loser, or thumping foes, but a gentle kiss – after the meeting of the virtues and theological dreams we all harbor underneath all the rancor: it’s steadfast love (hesed) and faithfulness (’emet) that in this lovely Psalm’s vision simply meet, not fighting, but looking, listening, open, anxious but hopeful. And then: it is righteousness (zedek) and peace (shalom) will kiss one another.

   What genius. What inspiration – and in a Psalm! The love, the commencement of a tender, ongoing relationship, between realities estranged from all of us, weirded out in our world, yet enduring, godly, holy, the dream of the ages. Steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness and peace, gathering, not distancing, but embracing, even kissing. If I see, witness, contemplate, and get absorbed into what this is all about, I am transformed. So are the people to whom I preach.

   Mark 1:1-8. Astonishing that the lectionary’s Mark simply skips over the birth. As if Christmas was nothing! Perhaps Mark alone can reveal to us what Christmas really is about. It is good news – and news!!! The word “news” – in our world where we barely endure a torrent of bad news, not to mention issues of trust and spin over what is news, what is “fake news.” Jesus is good news. How does the preacher capture the surprise, the unexpected, in all this?

   Mark sees Jesus’ advent as the “beginning,” the arche, the Genesis, the creation. Something unprecedented is afoot, not a percentage improvement on what we’ve managed for ourselves, but something radically different, shocking, enlightening, hopeful.

   It begins in “repentance.” The Greek metanoia, is not feeling guilty, repentance as remorse, but as a change of mind – and one that entails forgiveness. The Greek aphesis derives from aphiemi, which doesn’t mean having warm fuzzy feelings about the other who’s wounded you terribly, but rather simply letting to, dropping the whole affair. You forgive, because of this Jesus. You let old stuff go. You drop it to the floor and don’t look back. How is Advent a season of letting go, of letting old hurts and wound go?

   Back to the Old Testament then: Isaiah 40:1-11. We’ll have some tenor sing Handel’s “Comfort Ye.” And I’ll speak of the great highways of victory the Babylonians paved and marched along in triumph – and how in this case God’s way for Israel was a very real road back home. The glory of God is God’s people returning home. I’ll ponder this in my sermon: “No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us” (Frederick Buechner). During December, we’ll sing and hear “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” and “Through the Years We All Will Be Together” – which I reflect on in my little Advent book on the theology of Christmas carols, Why This Jubilee? – which I’d commend to you and your people, as a group study but also for preaching.

   So thinking about these texts, and the whole idea of “home,” especially “home for Christmas,” I’d refer preachers to a fabulous podcast, “Dolly Parton’s America,” which is just stunningly good and entertaining. A couple of its best episodes explore this feel of “home” in light of her song, “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” She built a huge theme park around a replica of her actual childhood home. She calls this the “golden thread that keeps me tied to Eternity.” Tourists flock to it by the thousands. They’re having fun, but many report being touched by some deep memory and yearning. What’s downright shocking is how popular her song is in countries like Kenya, England and Lebanon, where southern hillbilly culture could not be more alien. It’s that home-shaped hole in the heart of every person, God calling to us “softly and tenderly,” “Come home.”

   Yesteryear. For me, the home in my heart wasn’t a house where my nuclear family lived. We were a transient Air Force family that moved a lot, and my parents were at war with one another. So for me, it was my grandparents’ home in a sleepy middle of nowhere town called Oakboro. My memory of it is expansive, as if it were a huge mansion. When I went back to visit decades after my grandparents had died, I was a bit stunned by its actual size, just a small bungalow of no architectural distinction. Nostalgia, or my God-given ache for home, grew the place, the space in my soul. I wanted to go back still, and be welcomed home as I’d been as a wee one. I did stand in the yard for a few minutes, and wondered what it was like when my dad returned there from World War II, back in the days of no communication, so many young boys killed in action – but then my dad, in his early twenties, being embraced with shouts and tears, probably a lot like the homecoming Jesus pictured when that prodigal finally found his way down the road to home.

   What did St. Augustine tantalize us with? “You made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” We know this restless sense of yearning for home but never quite settling in. Carl Sandburg wrote that Abraham Lincoln never felt at home in any one of the 31 rooms of the White House. Anne Tyler’s novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant tells the story of Ezra Tull inheriting Mrs. Scarlatti’s restaurant, where he’d worked. He renamed it the Homesick Restaurant; instead of a menu, you’d share what food you were homesick for, and they’d cook it for you. God seems to have fashioned us with this hankering for home, and yet with the same weird wiring of reality that stirs the sensation that you’re never quite there. It might feel like some nostalgia for some hazy yesteryear that maybe wasn’t as marvelous as you recall it being. But what is nostalgia anyhow? The word derives from Greek roots meaning an ache for home. Maybe there’s no memory of such a place. But you want it, you crave it, you’re driven by the quest to figure out just where and what it is. Isn’t Advent precisely this search for home?

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 My book on Birth (in the Pastoring for Life: Theological Wisdom for Ministering Well series) has a chapter with preaching ideas about Mary and Jesus' Birth - in time for Advent 3 and Christmas!

What can we say December 13? Advent 3

   Advent 3, during such a weird Christmas season. Check out my blog, "God Became Small," with reflections on the peculiarities of preaching during Advent in general, with lots of illustrative stuff. And you'll enjoy this conversation I had with Matt Rawle on "Christmas and..." the stuff he's written on, Scrooge, Nutcracker, the Grinch and more.

   Our texts are difficult, distant prophetic texts (doesn’t John the Baptist feel more like an Old Testament prophet than a New Testament character?), as we’re drawing a beat on Christmas. I am leaning toward Isaiah, maybe John 1, or I might fiddle with both briefly before shifting my attention to Mary. The pink candle, her Sunday. Here is a blog from a prior year on the kinds of things I like to say about her and why she matters so much for us Protestants (along with a big stash of illustrative stuff for Advent and Christmas preaching in general!). And I’d commend my chapter on her as a real pregnant young woman and someone who endured brutal labor in my book on Birth: the Mystery of Being Born (in Baker’s Pastoring for Life: Theological Wisdom for Ministering Well series).

   Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11. My mind quickens a little when we have a text that occurs in our common liturgy. You have to admire the prophet’s “instead of”s, which are polar opposites, reminding us that Christianity isn’t being or getting 7% or even 12% better or healthier or calmer. It’s an “instead of.” The Psalm for the day (126) echoes this.

   I wonder, since God’s people will be called “the Oaks of Righteousness,” if we try to pair that idea with the presence of chopped down trees (cedars probably, not oaks!) in our homes. Isaiah’s oaks “display God’s glory.” Can we see our Christmas trees as such displays of that glory? Thomas Merton memorable said “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree” – and then asks if God isn’t asking us simply to be ourselves, to be what God made us to be, instead of lunging for something else, something determined out there instead of within.

   God’s plan has to do with “repairing ruined cities,” and so we have to ask where the ruin is in our city, in our town, and what repairing needs to be done. Examples abound, and are local. And essential since “I the Lord love justice,” the Hebrew being mishpat, which isn’t fairness or the good being rewarded and the wicked punished. Biblical mishpat justice is when everyone has enough, when the neediest are cared for. So a little spasm of sentimental charity, since it’s Christmas, won’t do will it? A needy child gets an abandoned worn out coat or a plastic shovel? Ruined cities require repair, not bandaids. Justice isn’t a quickie handout but a fundamentally different way of being.

   The secret lies in the verses the lectionary weirdly lopped off. Verse 5 is about the inclusion of strangers. In our lives, in our homes, at our tables. If Christmas is anything, it is a season that invites us (albeit with Covid precautions) into new relationships with people we’ve not met. Mary and Joseph found no room in the inn. We leave room. We after all are, in another lopped off verse, “priests.” It is ours to bless, to pray with, to share relationships and life with others. How to invite our people into this during a distancing season of coronavirus but then also during Christmas, which has as its norm frivolity with family and friends?

   1 Thessalonians 5:16-24’s counsel is for the preacher, and all of us, always: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances – but of special importance during December, “Test everything” (verse 21), especially all that goes on in the name of Jesus in December! How to engage in this daunting battle without scolding or judging our people? How do we lovingly invite them into something higher, nobler, more satisfying?

   John 1:6-8, 19-28. There he is, hairy, hollering John the Baptist. I heard a sermon years ago pointing out that you can’t get to the Christchild without going through John – and how he’s in the Christmas stories but never ever on a Christmas card. I mentioned this in a sermon, and someone listening created – just for me! – history’s first John the Baptist Christmas card. It is indeed, and always has been, a season of repentance, which isn’t groveling or guilt but a metanoia, a change of mind. Maybe, as 2020 has been quite the year, this is the year we will come to changed minds and hearts, not “getting back to normal,” but stepping forward into God’s new day.

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  Check out my book, Worshipful (on the back cover, Adam Hamilton says it's "the best book on worship I've ever read"). It explores the theology of various moments in worship, and how Christians might embody those moments out in real life. The pandemic is a time we've tried to use to educate a little around worship, why we do what we do, why it matters.

What can we say December 20 - Advent 4

   Advent 4. "For lo, the days are hastening on..." {If you're prepping for Christmas Eve, check out my Preaching Christmas blog}. 2 Samuel 7 is a pivotal text in deciphering the origins and validation of the Davidic monarchy, but I’m not sure this is so preachable so close before Christmas - unless you're clever to see Mary's womb, or Jesus' body as the temple? You could play with the portability of God, the you-can’t-box-me-in character of this God, who is content enough to live in a tent even though David has built a sumptuous house for himself (revealing David’s typical character). Once grown, Jesus will say that Foxes have holes, birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. This God in the flesh might show up just anywhere. Gosh, even in our people, in a divided world, perhaps in our churches!

   Lovely that the Psalter isn’t a Psalm but Mary’s song – the one she sang when she visited Elizabeth in Ein-Karem (Luke 1:46-55). I sure wouldn’t over-explain things. I’ll invite my people to imagine Mary singing. What was her voice like. I tend to imagine it as sweet, lacking that big soprano vibrato – but maybe I picture it as sweet because I’ve been lulled into classic portrayals of Mary as sweet, lily white, a bit fragile. Maybe her voice was on the raspy side. And why not? The content of her song is the antithesis of sweet. Here she is, quite pregnant with God, and she’s singing about political upheaval and the overthrow of all the world holds dear, and the elevation of all the world despises. Good thing Herod didn’t hear what she had in mind. He’d have had an armed regiment waiting for her to show up in Bethlehem.

   The Gospel, Luke 1:26-38, the Annunciation, which I like to treat earlier in Advent, as December 20 doesn’t leave her much time from conception to birth! This fact might itself be worth pondering. When you’re pregnant, the baby doesn’t show up 5 days later. Thankfully. You have to wait. It matters what you eat and drink. You become uncomfortable. Your old clothes don’t work any more. You’re awakened, your balance is askew. And it takes so much time. God coming to us, into us is like this.

   So much about Mary intrigues. I love the sermon that simply looks on Mary with awe. No big takeaways, no moral points, no missional directives – except that in the Annunciation, God asked to take on flesh, to become real in her, which is precisely what God asks of each of us. In my new book Birth: The Mystery of Being Born, I devised a little chapter about her, lingering on how she “pondered,” and items like Amy Grant’s “Breath of Heaven.” I’ll simply excerpt parts of that for you now:

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     If we want to make theological sense of our own birth, if we want to begin to understand God’s intimate connection with us as far back as conception, and then continuing through this moment, we can do no better than to ponder the marvelous, elusive and alluring story of Mary, the mother of our Lord.  “Ponder” is just what she, so understandably, did after those mystical and perilous nine months from the first stirrings in her inner being to the arrival of her son, God’s son. As she tried to rest, exhausted and yet jubilant after delivering this most wanted, unexpected and desperately needed child in all of history, “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). 

     She “kept.” Luke’s Greek implies “treasuring.” And which “all these things” did Luke have in mind? I suspect that she treasured more than just the shepherd’s crazed report of an angelic choir, or the agony of birth, or the months of uncertainty during her pregnancy, the arduous journey to visit Elizabeth, Joseph’s tender mercy, and even Gabriel’s unasked for visit. Hadn’t she treasured the simplicity of her old life in Nazareth? Was it hard to treasure her interrupted dreams – not to mention what Rowan Williams called “the dangerous difference that God’s Word would make”?

     All these things she “pondered” – a word derived from pondus, meaning “weighty.”  We ponder what is substantial, maybe a burden; to ponder what is heavy, strength is required. The Greek suggests something even more picturesque behind “pondered”: sumballousa, meaning literally “tossing around together” or “debating.” Have you ever had so much substantive stuff in you at once that it seemed to churn incessantly? and then bat it around with yourself, you almost can’t help opening yourself to God? Richard Rohr sees Mary “in that liminal space between fascination and attraction on the one side, and fear and awe on the other.”

    Luke tells us that Mary “pondered” again when twelve year old Jesus got lost (but not really lost) in the temple (Luke 2:51). We can be sure she pondered much as Jesus grew up, left home, gathered a passionate following, and then conflicted with the authorities. We shudder over what she must have pondered on that dark night after his crucifixion. And in the long years to come after his resurrection and ascension: who pondered (and missed) him more than Mary?

     Luke’s telling observation of how Mary treasured and pondered all these things invites us to do the same, gifting us with considerable liberty to do so creatively. Mary: what woman’s name has been repeated more times in human history? Who has been the subject of more paintings, statues, jewelry and carvings? How many have fingered rosary beads, mindlessly or in desperation?

   Amy Grant intoned her catchy “Breath of heaven,” getting inside Mary’s mood: “I am frightened by the load I bear… Do you wonder as you watch my face if a wiser one should have had my place” – and then she pleads, “Hold me together… Help me be strong. Help me be. Help me.”

   Heaping attention on Mary would make her blush, and she would gently insist that we stop. Martin Luther was right: “Mary does not desire to be an idol; she does nothing, God does all.” Her loveliness, her holiness, and her appeal reside in her unawareness. A simple young woman saying Yes to the life of God already growing in her: without realizing it, she was now the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies, the open space where the infinite, uncontainable God became finite, contained in her womb.

An Illiterate Reader of the Word

     So much we’ve spoken of here is the result of imagination, and pondering – so skeptics will argue that we cannot know such things. Here’s what we do know. Mary lived in Nazareth, a small, backwater village of no account, population in the dozens, her family and neighbors eking out a hardscrabble existence. We would say that she married young – but so did most women back then. Even cynics will grant that she had a son, and probably other children, and a husband, Joseph, a carpenter or stone mason.

     We yearn to see her face. Much of Christian art depicting her is kitschy. I have always been fond of the serene, lovely paintings of her by Sassoferrato – although her skin is terribly white, while the real Mary would have been, like middle easterners of her race and place, more darkly complected. To visualize the feel of Mary’s face, we might veer toward something like Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother,” her 1936 photograph of a mother exhausted and yet courageous. Herbert O’Driscoll’s wise devotional book about Mary, Portrait of a Woman, features Garibaldi Melchers’ “Woman and Child” on the cover. Her more weathered complexion suggests strength and gentleness, maybe endangered, with a ferocious kind of love, shielding her child from danger.

     We are pretty sure Mary was illiterate. Certainly as a poor young woman from the middle of nowhere, she didn’t own a book; her family didn’t have their own Scripture scrolls. But she had seen the scrolls unfurled in the synagogue; she had listened attentively to the regular readings. Like most devout Jews, she had committed the Psalms and much more in the Bible to memory. She was, as her son was, an Israelite, the people of God’s promises. Thomas Torrance put it elegantly: “And then at last in the fullness of time, when God had prepared in the heart and soul of Israel a womb for the birth of Jesus, a cradle for the child of Bethlehem, the savior of the world was born, the very Son of God.”

     Through the centuries, artists have tried to figure out how to paint or sculpt that shimmering moment when the angel came to Mary and asked her to let Jesus take on flesh in her. Almost always, as the artists have reckoned it, she is holding an open book: God’s Word, the Bible. The angel didn’t flit into her life in a vacuum. Mary was a student of God’s Word; when asked to become the mother of God, she replied, “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

     Martin Luther called the Bible “the swaddling clothes in which Jesus is laid.” To ponder Mary’s pregnancy, we ponder the Scriptures that were very much alive in her mind and heart during those days of anticipation, anxiety, discomfort, probably nausea, something going on inside her she could not entirely fathom – in a unique way, and yet like all mothers in waiting. The Psalms resonated, with their dark cries for help and comfort. I wonder if she was deeply moved to reconsider the story of Hannah, barren and then surprised with a son? Once Samuel, her dream, her loveliest ever gift from God arrived, she didn’t cling to him but gave him back to the Lord, to serve with Eli in the temple at Shiloh. That boy in turn heard a voice in the night, and after some confusion responded, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:9). Did that moment shape her reply to Gabriel? “Let it be to me according to your Word.”

     Which texts spoke most deeply to her? Did she have favorites? Surely the stories of Hannah’s pregnancy and the stirrings in Rebekah’s womb moved her. The blessing in Numbers 6 (“The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you”) must have resonated encouragingly. When the birth pangs were intense, did her mind drift to Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), as her son’s did in his hour of agony? After he was gone, what pulsated in her heart when she heard 1 Corinthians 13 (“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”), which would have been circulated and read where she lived out her years? What if pregnant women, or young mothers read the Scripture during their days of wonder and struggle, picturing Mary pondering the words in her heart?

The Echo of Her Calling

     Mary perceived the new life dawning in her belly as a call, as her divinely ordained vocation. Having a child wasn’t her pursuit of fulfillment or security in old age. She was responding to God’s calling. Or we could say the nascent life in her became her calling. How do mothers, when the news sinks in that, Yes, I am pregnant, begin with Mary to discern what God is asking of them, and how the nurturing of the child in the womb, and then after birth, can be the embodiment of a life of service to God, of a determination to follow the one Mary nurtured in her womb?

     Tradition suggests that Mary was about to draw water from a well when she was interrupted by the angel. A well in Nazareth supposedly marks the place, housed in a massive basilica that fields more visitors every day than the entire population of the Nazareth Mary knew. There is something mystical about water, our thirst for it, the beauty, the shimmering ripples eliciting a kind of simple awe. Water will matter for her, and for all mothers. They need to stay hydrated. Their fetuses live in a numinous, aquatic realm until the water breaks. And then the bath, a lifetime of drinking, and Baptism, and the delight in rivers, lakes, ocean waves and the gentle rain.

     The appearance of the angel must have been terrifying. Gabriel was, in Jewish lore, the mighty warrior among God’s heavenly host. And yet, if God’s plan was to make God’s mind and heart accessible, and for people not to be terrified, perhaps Gabriel toned it down, or came in a more humble guise. Luther suggests that “Gabriel did not resent being used as an errand boy to carry word to a lowly maiden. His glory was laid aside, and he appeared to her simply in the guise of a comely youth.” Even if he showed up in the most inviting form imaginable, Mary still had good cause to shiver. Elie Wiesel was right: “If an angel ever says, ‘Be not afraid,’ you’d better watch out: a big assignment is on the way.”

     Whose assignment was ever bigger than Mary’s? And yet, isn’t ours similar? Herbert O’Driscoll captured our inevitable kinship with Mary: “She had felt the divine visitation which in some way comes to us all. What had been asked of her was unique, and yet an echo of it reaches all of us if only we have ears to hear. She had been asked to offer herself to the divine will, to become a servant. She had made her choice, as we all must. Fully and freely she had said Yes. For those who say Yes nothing is ever the same again.” God’s calling is always like hers: God asks to become real in us, to take on flesh in our lives.

     In the Bible, those who are called have their reasons not to say Yes. Moses has his speech issues, Jeremiah’s too young, Isaiah is unholy – and now Mary, who knew their stories: she has not been with any man. God always counters, and uses the unusable. We might ask, Why Mary, of all people? We presume she was of immense holiness; Wordsworth called her “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” She calls to us out of her holiness; Richard Rohr suggests that “somehow she is calling all of us to our absolute best.” She was a virgin. But in those days, as a matter of both holiness and family honor, most newly betrothed women were – hence, not the shock this sadly would be today. Luther pinpoints her humility – a humility that did not even know it was being humble: “She gloried neither in her virginity nor in her humility, but solely in God’s gracious regard… True humility does not know that it is humble.”

     Her ordinariness, and in such an ordinary place, makes her the sort of person God would choose for this extraordinary mission. Ultimately, what we realize about Mary is not that she had this or that ability; what she had was simply an availability. “Let it be to me.” As with all of us, God is looking for a readiness, an availability, or what Maggie Ross called “a willingness for whatever.” She heard the angel speak of what was impossible. With considerable courage, naivete, and trust, she went with it, she let it be in her. And I feel sure that over time she came to realize what was dawning in her was not for her or even her people but for the whole world.

     People who have gotten born, when they fix their attention on Mary, eventually begin to realize the wisdom of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century German mystic: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”

     St. Augustine, overly enraptured by Mary, wrote “In conceiving you were all pure, in giving birth you were without pain.” He should have consulted Monica, his own mother, on this. Rachel Marie Stone fills in the blanks of the biblical story more fittingly: “A girl was in labor with God. She groaned and sweated and arched her back, crying out for her deliverance and finally delivering God, God’s head pressing on her cervix, emerging from her vagina, perhaps tearing her flesh a little; God the Son, her Son, covered in vernix and blood, the infant God’s first breath the close air of crowded quarters… God the Son, her Son, pressed to her bare breast… God the Son, her Son, drank deeply from his mother. Drink, my beloved. This is my body, broken for you.”

   I admire an Ethiopian prayer to Mary from the ninth century that doesn’t overstate things at all: “Your hands touched him who is untouchable and the divine fire within him. Your fingers are like the incandescent tongs with which the prophet received the coal of the heavenly offering. You are the basket bearing this burning bread and you are the cup of this wine. O Mary, we earnestly pray to you that, just as water is not divided from wine, so we may not separate ourselves from your son, the lamb of salvation.”