What can we say April 17? Easter

    Preaching Easter is – easy? or hard? The message seems obvious – but is it? Surely it’s not as simplistic as We get to go to heaven! Or Mama’s in heaven and we’ll see her again! The biblical accounts just don’t talk about heaven, do they? Paul’s message seems to be that Jesus is risen, therefore forgiveness is real. There’s a heaven element in that for us. Nicholas Wolterstorff, writing about his grief over his son’s death, suggests there are “God-forgiven regrets.” God forgives, but there are things we wish we’d said or done, or not. What to do with such forgiven regrets? “I shall live with them, and I shall allow them to sharpen the vision and intensify the hope for that great day when we can all throw ourselves into each other’s arms and say ‘I’m sorry.’ The God of love will surely grant us such a day. Love needs that.”

   The logic of the Bible’s mystical, confusing and even conflicting accounts of Jesus’ resurrection is that he’s vindicated, he really is who people doubted he was. What’s the preacher’s task here? As is usually the case, the text isn’t about us. It’s about Jesus! Sermons would do well just to lavish attention on Jesus and how amazing he was and is and will be. The takeaway? The moral? No need for either, although takeaways and morals and such can unfold without the preacher inducing them or making them obvious.

   You have to decide if it’s “you” to try to address what actually happened. Easy, and maybe important, to say I really believe he physically rose! The pious will adore you, skeptics might lean in, or push back. Amy-Jill Levine probably is spot on in saying historical arguments are unhelpful: “It’s like trying to talk someone into or out of love.” The brilliant commentator Dale Allison has a new book out on the resurrection. He parses with exegetical care every text, and examines all kinds of hallucinations and visions through Christian history – and in other religions. His conclusion (spoiler alert?) is the tomb was found to be empty, cause unascertainable. Afterward, individuals and groups swore they experienced him. For Allison, it’s visionary – like Paul’s meeting with the risen Christ, or Julian of Norwich’s. Jesus, after all, sort of materializes and then vanishes. Did God do it this way? Or is it different because Jesus was different? Issues – for the preacher internally if not for the people. Is Easter a time to open up such quandaries??

   My previous blog from a previous Easter has good illustrative material. Some interesting details we find in Luke: it’s a “deep dawn” (orthrou batheos) that the discovery unfolds. Thomas Merton spoke of rising before dawn at the Gethsamani Abbey: “It is necessary for me to see the first point of light that begins to be dawn. It is necessary to be present alone a the resurrection of Day in solemn silence at which the sun appears, for at this moment all the affairs of cities, governments or war departments are seen to be the bickering of mice. I receive from the eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word DAY.”

   They “found” the tomb empty: the verb, eurisko, is like Eureka! Same verb as the one Luke employed describing what the shepherds found in Bethlehem. Luke alone notices that the women weren’t credible witnesses in the eyes of the male disciples. There’s a counter-cultural tone here – although we might wish Luke had gone further in Acts and noted the women might have been the best candidates to succeed Judas as among the twelve! Then eleven didn’t believe – the story? Or the women? Or both?

   My ambivalence about Easter, the bigness of it and yet the flowers and pretty dresses, the throngs appearing we’ve not seen since Christmas Eve, gets redeemed when the organist (and at our place, the brass and percussion) strike up the opening chords of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” Here are my reflections on this great hymn in my new book, Unrevealed Until Its Season:

   I know it’s coming, but my knees buckle a little, and I sense the tears welling up, which I try to choke back. Tears of joy, yes. Tears of some sorrow, thinking of those I’ve loved and lost who used to join us Easter Sunday morning but are no more.

   Just as at Christmas we invoke “Sing, choirs of angels… Sing, all ye citizens of heaven above,” we realize quite a multitude beyond the crowd in the room is joining us in praise: “Sons of men and angels say… Sing, ye heavens and earth reply.” Charles Wesley missed the inclusion of women, but he did fathom that Easter isn’t merely humanity gaining entrance into heaven. The whole earth is caught up in the redemption; “Love’s redeeming work” is about the restoration of the entirety of God’s creation.

   Yes, there are forces still at work battling against life. But “Death in vain forbids him rise,” reminding us not only of the seeming finality of our mortality but also the detail of soldiers posted by Pilate at Jesus’ tomb – to be sure he stayed in there! Futile, trying to box in the living God. Wesley’s hymn shares in Paul’s sarcastic mockery of death: “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” “Where’s thy victory, boasting grave?” We’re allowed this moment of cocky jubilation at the expense of what otherwise would be our most insidious foe.

   My favorite line in the hymn dawns when we sing the fourth and final stanza. I love the thought, and also that our sopranos punctuate the moment with a thrilling descant to unspeakably high notes. “Soar we now where Christ has led… Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” We plodding, earth-bound people just don’t think in such elevated ways all that often. Even in church. Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century Danish philosopher, devised a parable about church for geese. Imagining that they speak, and go to worship, Kierkegaard imagined that they would waddle into the sanctuary. A gander would preach on “the glorious destiny of geese, of the noble end for which their maker had created them,” namely “to use their wings to fly away to distant pastures.” The geese all clucked and curtsied with glee. But when the service ended, “they all waddled home, only to meet again next Sunday and waddle off home again.” Over time, of course, they “grew fat, plump and delicious” – and got eaten.

   Kierkegaard explained his self-evident parable: “We too have wings, we have imagination, intended to help us actually rise aloft. But we allow our imagination to amuse itself in an hour of Sunday daydreaming. In reality, however, we stay right where we are – and on Monday regard it as proof that God’s grace gets us plump, fat, delicate. That is, we accumulate money, get to be a somebody in the world, become successful and so forth.” Isn’t it our greatest plight, that we say we believe in the resurrection, we worship on Easter – and yet we waddle around as if nothing has changed? It’s not enough to wait to soar up from the grave after death. We sing “Soar we now.” Now.

   And the verb “soar” has a connotation of nobility. It’s not just going way up, but doing so in a majestic way. And there is another hint in the word that the bird that soars does so without flapping its wings, so high, so grand, so sublime is this soaring, almost effortless, as if resting loftily above it all. I wonder what Jesus felt in his body the morning of Easter. Did he feel… lighter?

   I wonder, after the exhaustion of Holy Week, the crowds from Palm Sunday, commuting the miles to and from Bethany each evening and morning, purging the temple, teaching, the Passover, praying in the garden, his arrest, being beaten and then gruesomely killed, if his mind drifted to words he would have learned from his mother and heard in synagogue: “Why do you say… O Israel, ‘My way is hid from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God’? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary… Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:27-31).    

What can we say Good Friday?

   I’ll preach on Good Friday, although “preach” is too strong a word. “Homily” is even too grandiose. I’ll simply meditate, and briefly – or like a docent in a museum, with just a few words I point to the wonder, the horror, the beauty and majesty. In my new Lenten study (Unrevealed Until Its Season:), I cobbled together a meditation on “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” – which I’ll share with you in a couple of minutes. Don’t miss the splendid rendition of our choir singing Gilbert Martin’s arrangement – in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. Amazing. As I ponder and prepare, I’ll listen to that moving crucifixion moment in Jesus Christ Superstar, and I’ll look carefully to an image or two of the crucifixion. Grünewald? Rouault?

   At our church, we always read the Isaiah 52:13-53:12 early. Haunting. Good Friday isn't the time to explicate this complex text and its background. We trust the words to do their thing. And Psalm 22: Jesus' heart-wrenching cry, himself forsaken, and joining his God-forsakenness forever to ours. I try to ponder the horror, the sorrow Mary felt as she watched her son cry out these words she had taught him as a little boy.

   Then we do the Gospel reading in stages, gradually extinguishing lights and then candles until we are immersed in total darkness. On Good Friday, more than any other day, we are humbled by our inability to say anything – just as Jesus was all but silent as he hung for hours. On this day, more than any other, we realize we do not need to make the Bible relevant, or to illustrate it.  We can and must simply trust the reading to do the work it has done for 2000 years.

   Okay. Here’s my reflection on “When I Survey,” from Unrevealed Until Its Season: No hymn captures so thrillingly the paradox of horror and hope that is the crucifixion as Isaac Watts’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” We “survey” the cross. We don't just glance at it. We measure it carefully, size it up, consider every angle.

   Too often, we sanitize the cross, preferring those of smooth wood or some shiny metal. The original cross would have been of olive wood, gnarled, hacked hurriedly, with human flesh gruesomely nailed into it. Back in 1968, archaeologists discovered an ankle bone from the time of Jesus – pierced by an iron nail. Crucifixion was a gruesome, horrifyingly painful, public humiliation of criminals. Having seen plenty of crosses, the soldiers at the foot of Jesus’ cross didn’t “survey” this one. They didn’t know to be attentive to this one, or didn’t have the surveying skills to see that this was God, this was the start of a revolution of redemption. Looked like any other dying, despised person – which was precisely what God was hoping to achieve.

   “See from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Just meditate on that for a minute, or an hour, or the rest of your life. Blood and perspiration were mingled all over his ravaged body, and then after the piercing by the soldier’s cruel lance, Rock of ages, cleft for us, blood and water flowed, mingled. But it wasn’t tragedy and justice mingled, although most observers then would have thought so. It was sorrow and love, God eternal, finally and fully manifested love for us, mingled with sorrow over our brokenness, our waywardness, our confusion, our mortality. Medieval paintings depicted little angels flying around the cross with cups to catch that sorrow and love flowing down. It’s precious. It’s medicine. It’s life for the world.

   Watts asks us, “Did ever thorns compose so rich a crown?” Museums all over Europe display sumptuous crowns. At Elizabeth II’s coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed St. Edward’s Crown on her head. It was heavy, forged of 22 karat gold, with 444 precious stones, aquamarines, topazes, rubies, amethysts, sapphires. She then knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord. Did she ponder his crown, bristling thorns gashing forehead, temples, and scalp? Or the sacrificial love that refused the derision of spectators: “Save yourself” (Luke 23:37).

   This cross isn’t just some religious artifact, or even the mechanism God uses to get you into heaven once you’ve died. It fundamentally alters our values, and how we live. If this is God, if the heart of God was fully manifest in this moment, if this is what God’s love actually looks like, then everything changes. “My richest gain I count but loss” (echoing Paul’s words in Philippians 3:8). “Pour contempt on all my pride.” “Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the death of Christ” (echoing Paul’s other words in Galatians 6:14). “All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them.”

   Indeed, the more we ponder the crucified Lord on the cross, the less attached we are to the gadgets and baubles of this world, and the less arrogant we become. There is no other reason to “give up” anything for Lent, but to make us ready to abandon what we were clinging to, as we realize in the face of our mortality, and God’s redeeming love, these formerly valued things are just nothing. It is as if someone at the foot of the cross were reading the book of Ecclesiastes aloud: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Indeed.

   Casting aside vain fantasies, we don’t walk away from our survey back to our old life. Instead, we get caught up in Christ’s causes, and become generous with our money and things. What is your offering to God? Watts’s hymn imagines “Were the whole realm of nature mine” (an absurd idea, that the richest of the rich could have so much!) “that were an offering far too small.” No gift I could muster would be enough to begin to match Christ's sacrificial gift to me, to us - so when then is my giving so measured, so chintzy?

   We get busy and deluded and forget what the life of faith is about. We water it down to a little add-on, something we indulge in when convenient, a place we turn when we're in a pickle. But the last words of the hymn get to the truth of things - and stand as a stirring, unavoidable challenge to us, if we sing with any sincerity at all: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” Not this compartment of my soul, or this segment of my life, or the part of me I don't mind parting with. My soul. My life. My all.

What can we say Maundy Thursday?

   Maundy Thursday, such a lovely night. I can't talk long, for they come, not for the sermon, but for the tangible experience, the bodily encounter. Just a little bread and wine – maybe, given Covid restrictions.

    I don't usually focus on the footwashing in John 13, although it's theologically provocative, especially in this season when hygiene, sanitizers, etc., are huge. But it’s way too easy to flatten it out: Jesus served humbly, so go and serve others humbly (although Pope Francis sure revolutionized how we'll forever think about footwashing after doing it to women, and Muslims!).  I’m not sure John would say that was his one-liner takeaway… and we have so much all year long about serving anyhow that Holy Week, for me, needs devotion to Jesus and his literally sacramental death. 

   I'm thinking I might share and linger on Sister Gee's words to Kevin Mullen in James McBride's great novel Deacon King Kong - as they've just met and she's flirting in a fascinating way, finding a bond in "We both clean dirt."  That’s my job, Officer. I’m a house cleaner, see. I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don’t like me. It don’t set there and say, ‘I’m hiding. Come get me.’ I got to go out and find it to clean it out. But I don’t hate dirt for being dirt. You can’t hate a thing for being what it is. Dirt makes me who I am. Same with you. The fellers you seek, crooks and all, ain’t saying ‘Here I am. Come get me.’ Me and you has got the same job, in a way. We clean dirt. We collects other people’s mess, though I reckon it’s not fair to call someone living a wrong life a problem, or a mess… or dirt.

   We hide - from ourselves, from God, from others. The "hidden places" aren't fond of Jesus! But he goes there - and there we discover we're just dirt, dust, mortal, even holy. And as who we are, we making Jesus who he is: some dirt, some dust, mortal, even holy.

   Jean Vanier: before I learned of his abusive relationships, I'd loved his thoughts (and can we still?) on the mystery of the footwashing. "Jesus loves us so much that he kneels in front of us so that we may begin to trust ourselves. As Jesus washes our feet, he is saying 'I trust you and I love you. You are important to me. I want you to trust yourself because you can do beautiful things for the kingdom. You can give life; you can bring peace. I want you to discover how important you are. All I am asking is that you believe in yourself because you are a beloved child of God.'"

   The Synoptics, of course, narrate what as celebrant I’ll narrate in the words of institution. Rote for us, but as Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington point out, Jesus’ words would have been “shocking, provocative, and ultimately obscure. Cannibalism? Blood out of the body made one impure.” How close does Jesus as God down here want to get to us? Not merely in the same room, or bumping up next to us. He wants to get inside us, so he lets himself be fed on by us.

    I don't usually re-envision biblical scenes at length, but on Maundy Thursday I invite my people to imagine that first Holy Thursday night. Maybe like Palm Sunday, the disciples were in a buoyant, expectant mood (it was Passover, after all, an evening of jubilation!), while Jesus was mired in a more somber apprehension of what was to come. They sang Psalms - any or all of 113-118. What did their voices sound like? Did Jesus or one of the others lead? Did they harmonize? How did "Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints” (in Psalm 116, our lection for the day!) or “This is the day the Lord has made” (from 118) resonate with Jesus and the rest of them? This is the preaching angle I often suggest: instead of asking about takeaways or relevance to me today, I just ask people to marvel over what happened then.

   Beyond any doubt, Jesus stared at that bread and caught a vision of what would happen to his own flesh the next day. And then he peered into the wine and glimpsed an image of the blood he would shed. How haunting, lovely, gripping, poignant.

   When they ate, what did they think?  We quiz candidates for ordination about their theology of the Eucharist; just to be clear, a struggling seminarian and even the frankly less than average churchgoer today understands more of what was going on that the disciples did.  Austin Farrer (in his unfortunately out of print Crown of the Year) put it beautifully:

   “Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples in bread and wine. Amazed at such a token, and little understanding what they did, Peter, John and the rest reached out their hands and took their master and their God. Whatever else they knew or did not know, they knew they were committed to him… and that they, somehow, should live it out.” I like that. We are mystified – but we know we receive Jesus himself, and we are thereby committed to him, come what may. As N.T. Wright rightly suggested, when we eat and drink at the Lord’s table, “we become walking shrines, living temples in whom the living triune God truly dwells.”

   What do our people think as they shuffle forward? I remind them regularly of what Martin Sheen said to Krista Tippett in an On Being episode, hoping the feeling will catch on: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

   While we include or exclude and feel noble about it, Jesus was utterly inclusive – and he makes that shrine thing happen for everybody, even those who don’t believe or have a clue. Jürgen Moltmann (in The Church in the Power of the Spirit):  “The Lord’s supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is as open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of ‘the world,’ the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper.”

   In my book which came out a year ago, Worshipful:Living Sunday Morning All Week, I quote these words and then turn to the lovely interview Krista Tippett (again!) had a while back with Father Greg Boyle, whose ministry with gang members in California is impressive and moving:  “We’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’ hand and we’ve replaced it with a chalice because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice?”  Then he told how he asked an abused orphan and former gang member in his program, “What did you do for Christmas?” The young man said he cooked a turkey “ghetto-style,” and invited six other guys to join him. When he named them, Boyle recognized them as members of warring gangs. As he pondered them cooking together on Christmas day, he wondered, “So what could be more sacred than seven orphans, enemies, rivals, sitting in a kitchen waiting for a turkey to be done? Jesus doesn't lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends.”

   A few years ago, it occurred to me that my reflections on something as stupendous and tender as Maundy Thursday were growing stale.  How to find a new wrinkle?  I tend to forget that Maundy Thursday includes Jesus bolting out into the dark to pray in Gethsemane – and being arrested.  On that prayer of agony, I am always moved by Jesus Christ Superstar’s “I Only Want to Say.”  I’ve made a point over the years of correcting a popular image of Gethsemane – that of Heinrich Hoffman’s “Christ in Gethsemane” (hanging in the Riverside Church, NY) – Jesus praying placidly, well-coiffed, almost as if saying his bedtime prayers.  Willem Dafoe captured that searing agony in Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” and I’d refer you also to the very interesting take in Mel Gibson’s gory “The Passion of the Christ.”

   And then, of course, the poignancy of Judas’s kiss, and the arrest – and I am continually mentioning the detail that I can’t and don’t even want to explain:  in John 18:6 Jesus says, “I am he.”  What happened next?  “The soldiers drew back and fell to the ground.”  Wow.

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   My book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, has a whole chapter on the Lord's Supper and all of our meals - with focused time on this Maundy Thursday.

What can we say March 13? Lent 2

   Genesis 15:1-18. Some preaching moral in this: Abraham is promised he’ll be the ancestor of a multitude. Having no children, he adopts Eliezer – taking the promise into his own hands. Understandable: doing what you can to fulfill God’s way. Is there some Bible principle of God’s will being beyond what we can achieve ourselves?

   This isn’t, let’s be sure to say, about having a child as one’s lifelong wish. It’s about God’s promise for how to save humanity. His questions directed to God are lovely – inviting ours! – and they aren’t unbelief. “Faith seeks to understand, and hope yearns to see the way toward fulfillment” – not visible or even possible just now. That’s Walter Brueggemann, who continues: “Trusting is not the cause of fulfillment. Yet it is clear that only those who hope will be given the gift. This is learned not as a theoretical matter for as an experience of God’s grace.”

   Fascinating: in God’s threefold promise to Abraham in Genesis 12, the land will need heirs, and the heirs will need land. How problematical this promise of the land has been! – given tensions over Israel/Palestine over many centuries. Abraham could never have guessed, as he’d have assumed coming up with some heirs was a nightmare, a dark future impossibility.

   God invites Abraham to count the stars. I love this moment, being a lifelong stargazer – and star-lamenter, as ambient light has crowded out the vast majority of stars earlier generations could see. Just imagine how many, quite literally uncountable stars Abraham could have glimpsed looking upward!!

   And then the bizarre, vivid, unforgettable scene of carved up animal carcasses, Abraham swooshing birds of prey away, the smoking fire and the torch! Commentators might speak of ancient rituals, but for me it’s just reporting on this, not in a go-thou-and-do-likewise mode, but just in awe of whatever it was Abraham did back in the Bronze Age. Some preaching is like this.

   Psalm 27. I love the way Ellen Charry (in her terrific Brazos commentary) notes that Psalm 25 pleads for forgiveness, Psalm 26 proclaims he has relocated himself, and then Psalm 27 takes his life a step further: “These 3 psalms provide snapshots of progress in the spiritual life.” If our people read through the Psalms, they might notice or benefit from such an astute observation!

   Our Psalmist here “fears nothing, now that he is thoroughly embedded in the Lord or, as Augustine puts it, that God is embedded in him” (Charry). Notice the shifts: the Psalmist talks to fellow worshippers, then to God, then to them. “One can almost see his human audience watching expectantly as he turns his body now toward them, now away toward God, and back to them again.”

   Our minds are drawn to the temple in Israel, where buildings weren’t functional, but theological. The very building, the way the windows let light against brass plates on the walls just as worshippers entered in awe, re-created the beauty that is God! St. Augustine suggested that the Lord’s dwelling place ultimate is the believer. I want to be God’s temple. I already am, if Paul was right (1 Corinthians 6:19). 

   Hans Urs von Balthasar suggested something similar: “Each of us is built like a tabernacle around a most sacred mystery… But this sanctuary is neglected and forgotten, like an overgrown tomb or an attic choked with rubbish, and it needs an effort to clean it up and make it habitable… But the room does not need to be built. It is already there.”

   Preachers would be wise in all their preaching to contemplate beauty. This Psalm explicitly seeks the beauty of the Lord, the beauty that is the Lord. Could Dostoevsky be right – that “the world will be saved by beauty”? What else might? It’s the best counter to fear. Wendy Farley, pondering environmental and racial questions that plague us, shrewdly suggested that “These are not political matters but spiritual ones. We cannot retain our humanity in dark times if we do not discover the inner resources to live with nobility, compassion and justice. If we reignite our ardor for the divine Beloved and fall in love with the beauty of all created beings, we will be inspired to act well.” Check out my great podcast with her on God and beauty!

   I’ve fixated on this particular Psalm for years, but am only now reading it slowly enough to pause over the word “inquire.” In the sacred place of worship, we are to “inquire,” not consume, not judge, not be entertained, not to feel better, but to inquire, to ask, to look deeply into things.

   Ten years ago, Lauren Winner (in Christian Century, excerpted from her book Still) reported on her obsessive worrying, and suggested giving up anxiety for Lent. Seems ridiculous, or impossible – but then she quotes Martin Luther’s thought on an anxious woman he knew: “Her illness is not for the apothecaries, but it requires the powerful plasters of the Scriptures.” So she recited regularly throughout the day things like “O God of peace, in returning and rest we shall be saved.” I printed this on a card, and on the flip side words from Psalm 27, “Set me on a rock higher than I.” It’s not that simple, of course, but baby steps, these scriptural plasters.

   Philippians 3:17-4:1. I love that Paul isn’t angry, but is in tears contemplating the “enemies of the cross.” What qualifies as such an enemy? Not one of the alternate political ideology, or of another religion. It is those for whom “their God is their belly, glory is their shame, mind set on earthly things.” What could be more preachable in our consumer culture?

   Notice how natural having your belly, your appetites, your desire as your god? And how easily this slide toward god-as-belly happens!

   Paul is writing, we may remember, to Christians in Philippi, the “Little Italy” of ancient times, where veterans of Roman wars were relocated in retirement! These guys vested much in their citizenship in Rome, even though they lived in Greece. But for Christians, it’s not a dual citizenship – which most Christians today fantasize they can fulfill, participating fully in American life and in the kingdom of God. Stephen Fowl put it well: “Paul does not call the Philippians to a dual citizenship. Rather, he calls them out of a false politics ruled by a false savior and directed by an earthbound practical reason into a new political body ruled by the Lord Jesus Christ, the true Savior.”

   Luke 13:31-35 is so insightful! Jesus is warned that “Herod wants to kill you.” We’d run and hide! Jesus isn’t done, he has healing and teaching – and being crucified! – to do. He’s warned here by “some Pharisees.” Startling really. Are these the rare friendly Pharisees? Or are they just taunting him? Gotta love Jesus’ cocky pluck: “Go tell that fox…” Not complimentary! Foxes: wily, and dangerous, yet not brilliant.

   Bruce Chilton's new book on The Herods is long, and helpful. Herod the Great, murderous and paranoid, is long dead. We're dealing now with Herod Antipas. He's not as "great," as after Herod the Great's death, Antipas failed to garner all his territory - so he's a little defensive, still proving himself? Eager for power, he married Herodias, a Maccabean heiress, hoping to impress Rome's new emperor Tiberius. But she was already married to his brother Philip. Maybe worse, he constructed a new capital city, Tiberias, named for the emperor (flattery!), but built on an old Jewish cemetery - doubly unclean! John the Baptist was critical, and Antipas eliminated him - and then went (logically) after Jesus, whose message echoed John's, and who was drawing to himself members of Herod Antipas's court (like the wife of Chuza, Herod's treasurer living in the palace! - see Luke 8).

   Jesus, more than once, laments over Jerusalem. Here, he’s not there – yet. And still he ponders the divine calling, the holy vocation of that city of cities – and he can only weep in regret, sorrow, grief over its failure, and how that very failure will be his own undoing! Jesus, almost like a modern person, riffs on a feminine image for God. A hen gathering her chicks under her wings. Sobering: a hen might be able to save a chick or two - but not all, if any against a raging fire! Jesus’ project isn’t about the comfort or safety of his people. It’s risky, dangerous, painful, costly.

   Does the preacher engage in a lament over her/his own city? How do we capture God’s, Jesus’, our grief over holy destiny squandered? Over divine vocation left unfulfilled?

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   Check out my book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week - my best stuff on worship and life connections, for you and your people.

What can we say February 27? Transfiguration Sunday

    Transfiguration is such a cool Sunday people don’t expect ever to happen. It’s about God, not us, our needs, our faith, our serving, our doubts, our goodness. It’s a Sunday to be obsessed with God – which probably should be the fare every Sunday. Three terrific texts present themselves.

  Exodus 34:29-35 – the day Moses’ face began shining. Today we speak of someone’s face “beaming” or “glowing.” But it’s not that Moses had a chipper disposition or a cheerful countenance. He had seen God, and the shining of God lingered, impressed itself upon him. Maybe like the veil of Veronica, one of the women who pressed past the soldiers, wiped Jesus’ brow as he carried his cross, his face permanently imprinted on her sacred cloth.

   I’m not sure there’s a “Go thou and do likewise” here (or in our Gospel text!). Maybe the writer simply wants us to be awed by Moses, a theological hero if there ever was one. Or if there’s a “go thou and do,” it’s captured in something the newly sainted Oscar Romero said: “When we leave worship, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt. Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong, to face the world’s difficulties.”

   I just love Zora Neale Hurston's vivid portrayal (in Moses, Man of the Mountain): "Moses lifted the freshly chiseled tablets of stone in his hands and gazed down the mountain to where Israel waited. He knew a great exultation. Now men could be free. They had something of the essence of divinity expressed. They had the chart and compass of behavior. They need not stumble into blind ways and injure themselves. This was bigger than Israel. It comprehended the world.  Israel could be a heaven for all men forever, by these sacred stones. With flakes of light still clinging to his face, Moses turned to where Joshua waited for him. 'Joshua, I have laws. Israel is going to know peace and justice.'”

    Context matters. Moses has just, in a holy rage, broken the tablets of the law. As the Jewish commentator Gunther Plaut put it, “The newly liberated people struggle to understand their God and God struggles to understand His people.” At least God and Moses ‘get’ one another. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, priests often wore a mask or veil when engaging in their sacred rituals. With Moses, it’s reversed: he wears the veil when he’s a civilian, with the people, and it comes off when he’s up close with God! It’s a kind of humility – maybe the way St. Francis hid his stigmata. Or he wants to shield the people from his excess of holiness; we pastors suffer the opposite in every church, those who are so very pious and flout it in your face!

   And Moses’ glowing isn’t a private experience for him to enjoy. He shines as the one God has chosen to lead, the one who is God’s earthly connection to the people. There’s also the peculiar way this shining entered into Western art. The Hebrew translated “shone” or “radiance,” qaran, is an inch away from qeren, meaning horn – and so it became, in the Vulgate, that Moses was “horned.” We see his horns all over, most famously in Michelangelo’s statue in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. In Bible times, horns symbolized power – but by the Middle Ages, horns represented the demonic. Moses became the epitome of anti-Semitic hostility…

    …and much of the fault lies with our dear friend, Paul. Our Epistle, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, exegetes why Moses hid his face, suspecting it was not humility but embarrassment, because the glory was fading (a notion unmentioned in our text)! The veil now cloaks them, the Jews, from seeing the truth. I can sympathize with Paul’s profound grief that his fellow-Jews, certainly including close friends and family, just didn’t see Jesus as the Messiah or Christianity as the way. It would be hard to preach this text now without lifting it up as one of the way we fail to ‘get’ others who believe in our God in a different way? Can we revel in the transformation, even the transfiguration, that is life with God without being dismissive of other faiths? Preaching this at all tiptoes to the edge of anti-Semitism.

    There is a fading of the glory. Is it the gradual demise of the church? Is it our heightening secularism? Is it our fallen inability to see God? We at best know what we know with veiled faces; “now we see through a glass darkly,” and only “then face to face.” Maybe the preacher doesn’t reach for a “Go thou and do likewise,” but simply notices and points, like a docent in a museum, to the greatness that was Moses, and the competitive zeal that was Paul – and then primarily, on Transfiguration Sunday, to the amazement that is Jesus.

    Luke 9:28-36. What a text! and how easy it is to preach it poorly. The Transfiguration texts are, for me, exemplary of what goes wrong in much preaching. We make texts about us, our faith, our doubts, our serving, etc., when many texts are quite simply about God, or about how amazing Jesus is. The Transfiguration texts are my prime example in The Beauty of the Word: clearly these passages seek to make us amazed at Jesus. He dazzled them, he was in the company of Moses and Elijah. The lunge to build booths is what we always do: what’s the takeaway? I’ve heard “After the mountaintop experience, you go back down into the valley and get to work.” But this text isn’t about us! It’s about God. We are to be awestruck. The takeaways is the disciples were awed, amazed, stunned, moved. Can you preach a sermon that simply says Wow! Jesus is amazing! How do I love Jesus? What is lovable about him? Let us count the ways.

  The sleepy-headed disciples? Clearly Luke is foreshadowing what will transpire in Gethsemane, when the key followers can’t stay awake during Jesus’ agonizing vigil of prayer.

   The details are sermons in waiting. Peter’s flabbergasted remark, “It is good that we are here” must be the greatest understatement in the Bible. Wish I’d been there. Then the voice says the only thing we ever need to hear: “Listen to him.” Indeed – and not just hearing him, but an active listening-into-action listening.

     Luke’s Transfiguration episode is peculiar in that “They were speaking of his departure.” The Greek for “departure” is exodon, reminding us of the Exodus! ” Amazingly (to me), Luke reports that those with him are “sleepy” (as in Gethsemane!). Verse 33: “Master, it is good that we are here” must be the great understatement in all of Scripture! As in the Baptism texts, God says “Listen to him!” (as if God knows we won’t listen to Jesus!).

   At best, the takeaway is that we who are awed by Jesus listen to him. Or maybe we just adore and worship him. “Jesus, I adore you, lay my life before you, how I love you.” Or maybe Dorothy Day got it right: Robert Coles was interviewing her late in her life and asked her to jot down some autobiographical remembrances. She responded with this: “I try to remember this life that the Lord gave me. The other day I wrote down the words ‘a life remembered,’ and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most – but I couldn’t do it. I just sat that there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!”

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

What can we say February 20? 7th after the Epiphany

    We could say our 3 texts work in reverse – although who’d dare to preach on all 3? The Gospel shares the words of the one who articulates a vision of reality almost as radical as he himself being, in our Epistle, the actual miraculous resurrection from the dead – and it is that miraculous reconciliation between God and humanity that assumes the earthly plane in the impossible, if anything more miraculous reconciliation between terribly estranged people.

   Genesis 45:3-11, 15. When I see this 3-11, 15, I wish I could travel back in time and space into the room where the lectionary devisers lopped off verses 1, 2 and 12-14 to ask Why??? The whole Joseph story matters, not merely its climax in chapter 45. But to pass over “He could no longer contain himself… He wept so loudly his sobs were heard throughout the house”? A puzzle. This text is, to me, the theological high watermark of the Old Testament and perhaps even the entire Bible. My comments from prior years aren’t sufficient to the depth of such a marvelous text, but these are the best I have. Such a preachable, emotional, profound story.

   1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50 contains what we United Methodists read at the graveside – fittingly so. Theologically, we might wonder how much we Christians acknowledge bodily death, and thus bodily resurrection, with cremations and inurnments often before the funeral service proper. Paul doesn’t blush over the idea of a deceased body – which for him isn’t just reality but the palpable precondition of resurrection! I’m not sure if the sermon is the best time to help our people understand that Christianity isn’t about the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body – not a resuscitation, but a resurrection, a transformation of the body, which is still and always a body, a “spiritual body,” not one or the other.

   Luke 6:27-38. When Jesus commands, it’s all love, all beauty, all hope. “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:8). Jesus dares to dream we might just become perfect in love in this life – a Methodist, if I’ve ever seen one!

   Jesus’ invitation to Love our Enemies could not be more shocking, radical, and unsought in our day. We are proud of our rage. We feel quite entitled to our anger – which weirdly feels like goodness, which reveals how very far we have strayed from the way of our Lord. Our rancor is rooted in idolatry: as I’ve said repeatedly for years now, today’s idolatry is our political ideology, which induces fear and anger, proving it is not of God. Love your enemies. Do not judge, or pity, or criticize, or demean, or avoid them. Love them. Preach this constantly.

   “Give to anyone who begs.” But how? Via donations to helping agencies? What do we give? Spare change? Or simple kindness? I’ve seen several saints in my lifetime who knew how to handle the random beggar on the street. You don’t avert your gaze. You don’t plunk down a dollar. You stop, ask What’s your name? How might I pray for/with you?

   The Golden Rule may be Jesus’ least Jesus-y and yet most popular, most American saying. But it’s not a tit for tat deal. Jesus invites us to dig deep into our need for kindness, for mercy, as the simplest motivation to be kind and merciful to others.

   “Expect nothing in return” (verse 35) is huge, and underrated. Christian blithely say You get so much out of helping others! As if it’s a deal for us, like the old Kingdom Assignment scheme of investing some money for God. What do we expect for the good we do? At least some gratitude, right? Or for the recipient to get it together? Can’t we understand how such giving isn’t really giving at all? Vaclav Havel, former president of Czechoslovakia, said “Hope is the ability to do something simply because it is good, whether it stands a chance of succeeding or not.” Or of giving us whatever we seek for ourselves, like gratitude, feeling good about ourselves or the difference we’re making in the world.

   Not judging: should be easy, since we’re no good at it, and it’s not our responsibility! In all of Jesus’ admonitions here, “It is not merely social reciprocity, but self-transcending gratitude for the mercy of God” (David Lyle Jeffrey). And that pithy proverb in v. 38, “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over”? My grandmother used to say that. I wonder what it meant, and how it felt to her? It’s okay for the preacher to leave this question dangling.

   A whole sermon or a lifetime of sermons could dwell on Mercy in Luke 6. Pausing over this is haunting, and hopeful. Name it, and every listener realizes I never get much mercy. I never give that much either. Let me close with an excerpt from my “Merciful” section in my book, The Beatitudes for Today: How distant is “mercy” from all the ad campaigns with which we are peppered?  They curiously pander to me, saying “You deserve only the best mattress,” “You deserve a new car,” “You deserve a week in the Bahamas.”  These billboards do not know me, but they drive me away from mercy, which has nothing to do with deserving.  We are so practiced at self-justification, at rationalizing and explaining.  We feel entitled.  I’m owed a good life, and if I don’t get it, I get busy blaming somebody.  And so mercy is a stranger.  Even when we talk about heaven:  Mr. Jones, an elderly do-gooder at the Church dies; and what do people say?  “If anybody gets into heaven it will be Mr. Jones.  Look at all he did!”  And we never find ourselves inside the circle, kneeling, embraced by the loving arms of the Father; we stay outside, spectating, looking in, never knowing mercy.

     What is mercy?  Think back over your life.  Mercy is not something we define so much as something for which we cry out in desperation.  A kid is about to pound the daylights out of me on the playground – and what was I required to say out loud?  “Mercy.”  A terrible, horrible mistake has been made, smashing a well-arranged life, and your regret is so intense, no strategy can extricate you from the mess, and the only cry left to make it “Mercy.”  You gaze at the crucifix, and you keep looking, letting it nestle jarringly down into the marrow of your self, and finally you get it, and the only plea you know you must make, but that you can make, is “Mercy.”

     Deep inside, don’t you crave mercy? to be loved despite your craziness, to be handled tenderly?  And don’t we need to be tender, merciful, forgiving to others?  We are such hard, tough, cool, smooth, crusty people – but how sad, how tragic.  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.  We are not very open to mercy, and so we are not so merciful, and so we receive no mercy.  Jesus anticipated this Beatitude would have to be reflexive – just as he did when he taught the disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Forgive as we forgive; the merciful shall receive mercy.

   How hard is it to be merciful?  Mercy is not doing nothing.  The Greek word eleos suggests the connotation of pouring out, the way we might pour out a flask of oil.  Mercy is a pouring out.  Mercy is when I unscrew the lid on what is precious to me and pour it out on you.  I may not think I have all that much to pour out, but the merciful pour anyway, thinking only of the wounded one who needs the healing balm of mercy.  Noting how beleaguered Jesus’ listeners were, Bonhoeffer adds, “As if their own needs and their own distress were not enough, they take upon themselves the distress and humiliation and sin of others.  They have an irresistible love for the downtrodden, the sick, the wretched, the wronged, the outcast, and all who are tortured with anxiety.  No distress is too great; no sin too appalling for their pity.  If any man falls into disgrace, the merciful will sacrifice their own honour to shield him, and take his shame upon themselves.  In order that they may be merciful, they cast away the most priceless treasure of human life, their personal dignity and honour.  For the only honour and dignity they know is their Lord’s own mercy, to which alone they owe their very lives.”

     This wisdom bears repetition, and much reflection.  The merciful are far less interested in their own honor than in mercy; their only honor is mercy.  The merciful do not get tangled in a thicket of who deserves what, or calculations of whether their mercy will be productive or not.  The merciful are merciful because they have received mercy from the same Jesus who said “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”  Bonhoeffer saw the heart of this thought:  “Only he who lives by the forgiveness of his sin in Jesus Christ will rightly think little of himself.  He will know that his own wisdom reached the end of its tether when Jesus forgave him.”

     Mercy eludes those who are shocked and mortified by sin or suffering.  The merciful get so absorbed in God’s mercy that they see sin and suffering differently.  The merciful are never offended by anything, for they have lost interest in sin, so fascinated are they by God’s mercy.  The Beatitudes truly are a ladder.  For it is only the poor in spirit who can be merciful.  Those who mourn know more keenly than anyone else how to be merciful.  The meek have no reason not to be merciful.  Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness understand that mercy is the food and drink.

     “Merciful” is not just an inner attitude, although it is an inner attitude.  “Merciful” is something you do.  You plan to get busy being merciful, but then you are prepared at a moment’s notice to let the schedule be shredded, for like that Good Samaritan, you see somebody beaten up by the side of the road, and instead of guessing why he’s in the pickle he’s in, instead of being so ultra-responsible as to be punctual for your next meeting, you are merciful.  Otherwise we live merely in earshot of Jesus, and never get close to the one who said, “Blessed are the merciful,” the one who was and is Mercy itself.

     How revolutionary!  How liberating!  Mercy frees me from self-centeredness.  Pouring myself out of my own ego trap is the way to joy.  Wendy Farley put it pointedly:  “Liberation from the tedious weight of one’s own miserable little ego is not necessarily self-sacrificing but can be profoundly fulfilling.”  Mercy frees me from the need to “fix” whatever is wrong.  Mercy is able quite simply to love, to be compassionate, whether the hurt is curable or not, whether the wrong can be righted or not.  Mercy can just stay with the one in need of mercy.

   And in mercy, I show respect, I shed dignity on the one whose self-respect and sense of dignity have been shredded.  Mercy does not spout forth all the answers.  Job’s friends are not very merciful friends, for they pontificate theologically about the presumed causes of his suffering, when really he needed friends to weep and sit in the dirt with him.  Mercy has no need to justify or explain.  Mercy never trivializes suffering with trite explanations of “why.”  Mercy listens, gets inside the other’s skin, letting the tears soak into your own shoulder.  For as we show mercy, and receive mercy, our hearts are purged and we are awestruck to glimpse some purity inside.

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