What can we say February 6? 5th after the Epiphany

    Isaiah 6:1-13. Years ago, I heard a sermon where the preacher cleverly produced a 3-point sermon on the three aspects of holiness: being set apart, being pure, and then social holiness (a profoundly Wesleyan emphasis! – works of mercy, advocating for peace and justice, visiting the prisons, etc.). Tempting, and a helpful trellis on which to grow a sermon! – but not what the seraph was thinking. The preacher could paint some personal images of what holiness looks like – and I’d look for the non-traditional, not-so-pious examples from people I’ve known.

   Mind you, holiness in general isn’t talked about nearly enough. Ours – but really in the first place, God’s! A marvelous guide to the holiness of God is A.W. Tozer’s less well-known little book, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God, Their Meaning in the Christian Life.  Chapter by chapter (23 of them in just 117 pages) he explores some holy attribute of God, from God’s mercy to God’s incomprehensibility, from wisdom to justice, from self-existence to omniscience.  Like turning a precious diamond in your hand, holding it up to the light, awestruck: we ponder God’s holiness. That alone would make a terrific sermon.

   Two great hymns expound this text. “Holy, Holy, Holy” – my personal lifetime favorite (and a focus in my newest book, Unrevealed Until Its Season), and the newer “Here I Am, Lord,” written by a 31 year old Dan Schutte for a friend’s ordination. We worship – but then we’re not done with our worship. I have a pastor friend who ends each service by saying “The worship has ended, now the service begins.”

   It’s fun to say “Uzziah.” The opening reminds us God’s Word happens in history, to history, for history. Was it 742 BC? That had to be a year of upheaval, turmoil, jockeying for power, anxiety – maybe like 2020, or 2022. You have to love the way the architecture, the fixtures, the art of the sanctuary came to life. I wonder if I can tease that out for my own sanctuary, helping people imagine such a miracle that just might be the unseen reality. I love Amos Wilder’s thought on worship: “Going to church is like approaching an open volcano where the world is molten and hearts are sifted. The altar is like a third rail that spatters sparks. The sanctuary is like the chamber next to the atomic oven: there are invisible rays and you leave your watch outside.”

    Isaiah 6, like more texts than we realize, is about God, not us. My best advice in The Beauty of the Word is that sermons should be about God more than about us, our faith, our goodness, our doubt, our life and struggles. We “take time to be holy” when we get close to the holy God and then quite naturally mirror God’s heart, mind, being. It’s not struggling to be holy enough so God will draw near. We dare to draw near to God, or make space to notice God’s nearness. As we praise and soak up that glorious holiness, we become holy. Singing it is a good start.

   The preacher might notice the Bible’s repeated Call pattern, when the one called explains why he or she is insufficient, then God reassures – not that he or she is sufficient, but that God will use whom God will use. In Isaiah’s case, he senses his unholiness, rendering him unfit for holy use. When we interview candidates for ordination, they generally speak of their abilities, education and cool experience; not many speak of their unworthiness, their unholiness – which seems to be what this God is looking for, not ability but availability, and maybe even disability. These thoughts and others led me to write Weak Enough to Lead – which explores the Bible’s thoughts on leadership, which are vastly different from, and almost antithetical to ours.

   For us who preach, we may find ourselves properly humbled, discouraged, and then encouraged to find ourselves in great company. God says Go, tell them. Isaiah says (or sings?) “Here I am Lord.” God, not leaving well enough alone, clarifies that they won’t understand, their hearts are fat, their ears heavy, their eyes are shut. It will turn out that they won’t get your message – at least not for a very, very long time. Such is the preaching life. We preach, maybe, not to get results, not to grow the church, not to gauge my worth or their worth, but because God says Preach. It’s for God.

   For the preacher, maybe not for the sermon: verses 9-10 are so strange, yet what every preacher has in fact experienced. God calls us to utter a word that won’t be recognized, understood, or comprehended. How long? indeed. Do you hear and feel the prophet’s agony? Preaching is a marathon, with more failure than success. Isaiah’s regular message is “a remnant shall return” – which sounds lovely until you recall that if there’s only a remnant, much has been lost. Like Isaiah’s tree here. The hope is a mere stump. I think of Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree, where the tree loves the boy and gives up apples, branches, and his trunk until the boy is old and comes back just to sit on the stump. Or the way stumps aren’t really dead, but little green surprises pop up here and there.

   1 Corinthians 15:1  Into our DaVinci Code world of skepticism about who Christ really was and what really happened, Paul still speaks. More than 500 saw him – and most are still alive! Go ask them. How easy would it have been back then for cynics to debunk Christianity? And it’s worth pondering Paul’s claim that Jesus appeared to James – his brother! If anybody was in a position to say Jesus was just a guy, it would have been his brother, who shared a bedroom and household chores for years. 

   Hard to isolate this from the rest of chapter 15. Notice Paul offers no theory of the atonement, but simply recounts in summary fashion the story – echoed by Robert Jenson, who points out that what saves isn’t any theory of the atonement, but simply the narrative of what happened during Holy Week, on Good Friday, and of course Easter.

 

   Paul then, with bombastic humility, claims that he himself is the “least” – a point of pride, underlined by his next brag that he outworked those other apostles! Paul’s great character flaw – and part of what made him Paul, and saved the world, despite Paul.

   Luke 5:1-11. On the heels of the rejection at Nazareth, we have this! Luke shifts a somewhat earlier scene to this in his timeline. Jesus, of course, encountered hopeful responses and hostile rejections at every turn, so the timeline is less intriguing than the persistence of opposition – which every clergy person understands.

   You have to notice the “Put out into the deep water,” not the shallow waters! It’s deep with Jesus! The new church built at Magdala, commemorating the women of the Gospels, and at our newest, freshest archaeological site on the Galilee shore, is a lovely church (dedicated, uniquely and fabulously to the women in the Gospels) where the entry says Duc in Altum - cast out into the deep! which is what we do with Jesus, or not at all.

   The ship image is rich. My seminary, Duke, had has as its logo a ship, as if going with Jesus puts you out onto the water with those original sailors! Navis, a word meaning ship, is implies richly in the nave of any church, the ribbed vaults echoing a ship turned upside down!

   I read somewhere the incredible insight that, in the Gospels, the disciples never catch fish until Jesus is there – and then they catch plenty! In our text, partners in the “other boat” are signaled to come and help. Is this ecumenism? Or the challenge within a divided denomination to help one another, despite divisions, to help bring people to Christ?

   Again we find Zebedee and Sons, that great fishing industry from first century Galilee, leaving everything and following Jesus – and what intrigues is that it’s just at the moment when business was booming! – either giving them space to follow, or to radicalize their following!

What can we say November 7? 24th after Pentecost/All Saints

   If you’re observing All Saints day now, here's a link to my general reflections and illustrations on the great Fall feast of resurrection and hope. We have some terrific texts for November 7 proper though, which I’ll preach even though we’re doing All Saints now!

   Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17 has an Autumn feel to it, doesn’t it? Verse 3 provides (for me) a laugh-out-loud moment: Naomi instructs her daughter-in-law to put on your “best clothes,” wait until rich older relative Boaz has been drinking; when he lies down, “uncover his feet and lie down – and he will tell you what to do.” Oh my. How to assess such a vignette?

   Jack Sasson suggests that Naomi gave Ruth “reasons aimed at defeating any scruple and at quieting any anxiety which might, expectedly, have disturbed her daughter-in-law.” Disturbing scruples. Wilda Gafney, in her Womanist Midrash, explores the ways women are traditionally and even now thought to be sexually available to men, how therein lies their value; she even suggests that Ruth had earlier in the story been “taken” or even “abducted” (her rendering of Ruth 1:4) into marriage. Problematical gender undertones crying out for attention here.

   How vulnerable is Ruth in such a moment? Raymond Brown surveyed the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1) and the women who appear there. What do Ruth, Tamar, Rahab and Bathsheba have in common? They aren’t native/in-house Israelites, they are put into morally hazy situations, but with some pluck they seize what power is available and courageously find a way forward. Does this alter then how we think of Mary, the 5^th woman in Matthew’s male-dominated genealogy?

  The lectionary, pressed for time we can assume, skips from 3:5 to 4:13, skimming past all the property wrangling, and the getting acquainted of Ruth and Boaz! These scenes reveal how, in Bible times and perhaps today, “redemption” involves provision of land for the destitute!

   Psalm 127. Preaching Psalms always intrigues me, and the 127^th has rich possibilities, as it addressed 3 universal, mundane activities: building, security, and growing up / raising kids. Jesus, in the final minutes of his “Sermon on the Mount,” offered a picturesque image: “Whoever hears my words and does them will be like the wise man who built his house upon the rock; rain, floods and wind came, but it did not fall. Those who don’t do them are like the fool who built his house upon the sand. When rain, floods and wind came, the house was swept away” (Matthew 7:24-27).

   Jesus was a carpenter / stonemason, of all things! Can’t we conceive of him building a home? Did he think of our Psalm? “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” How could we conceive of him building our homes? I’ve performed a “blessing of a new home” many times as folks move in, and I know people who’ve scribbled Bible verses on the exposed beams of a house before the sheetrock is hung. It’s not about clever architecture, or massive size. The most modest abode can be the Lord’s house, while a mansion might fall into that “in vain” category.

   Maybe it’s in the foundations. What’s underneath, hidden, propping up our lives? Probably some mix of wisdom and love, fantasy and memory. Isabel Wilkerson (in Caste) points out that lingering moods on race are deep in the foundations of our lives as Americans. How do we poke around, repair, and make the home more of a place the Lord builds? Thomas Merton suggested we try to have “quiet homes,” places of peace with the possibility of prayer.

   “In vain you rise up and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives his beloved sleep.” I’ve slept more than 20 years! It’s a lot of life. It’s God’s good gift, and the Psalm invites us not to be so restless that we wind up rest-less. Financial advisors say you can make money while you sleep. God’s hand is on the farm while the fielder sleeps. God is God, even when we’re unaware, dreaming or snoring.

   Child-rearing sounds simple for this Psalmist. Raise them well, all will be well. The reality is way more complex. The truth is, we are all always raising children, if we’re single, old, done raising our kids, whatever. Our culture, which we’re responsible for, raises children. Our church, whether you’ve got a child in youth group or not, raises children.  

   Derek Kidner understands that, for this Psalmist, there are 2 and only 2 possibilities when it comes to these basic endeavors of life: “Either it will be the Lord’s doing, or it will be pointless; there is no third option.” Maybe Stephen Covey echoed this when he spoke of spending your life climbing the ladder, only to get to the top and realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. “O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you” (St. Augustine).

   Hebrews 9:24-28 is simply too difficult (for me) to read without anti-Semitic undertones that would take too long to explicate properly in a sermon.

   Mark 12:38-44 presents the unavoidable laugh-out-loud moment: “Beware the guys in long robes!” – which would, self-evidently, be us clergy standing up front. Be wary of us, indeed! How do we who preach ponder how we might hide beneath the robe, the office, ordination and position, even the pulpit, and the increasing cynicism people out there have for us? – not entirely undeserved…

   A haunting image: Jesus lingering around the treasury, watching people drop in their offerings. Cheap shot in preaching: Jesus is watching you guys and your offerings! True, and manipulative. Maybe I’ll say this, and acknowledge how it feels manipulative. We know the temple featured trumpet-shaped offering boxes that indeed made a musical ringing sound as the coins clattered in. Remember Reformation Church history? Luther was appalled by Tetzel and the other church charlatans who rolled their fundraising circus into town with the chant “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings / the soul from purgatory springs.”

   Jesus observes the big, showy givers, then the widow who shyly puts in 2 lepta – almost nothing. Is he impressed by this “destitute woman whose poverty is matched by her generosity” (Joel Marcus)? Or, as Ched Myers insists, is Jesus angered by a temple system that induces the poor to give what they can’t really manage while the religioso get rich and make the sanctuary resplendent with the glory that should be care for the poor? Does this story underline the old adage that it’s not how much you give, but from how much you give? How do we help our people understand the spirituality inherent in giving, or not giving? It’s not making the budget or reaping rewards.

   I like to tell a story: Mike King (Martin Luther King Jr.’s dad) arrived at Ebenezer Baptist to find the finances in total disarray. Claiming that “anonymous giving only produces anonymous non-giving,” he established an open book at the entry to the sanctuary, where anyone could view what others had given. Financing shot rapidly upward. Even the Jesus who shuddered at the rich givers and the poor widow would nod.

   And there’s the gold standard articulated by Mother Teresa: “You must give what will cost you something. This is giving not just what you can live without, but what you can’t live without or don’t want to live without. Something you really like. Then your gift becomes a sacrifice which will have value before God. This giving until it hurts, this sacrifice is what I call love in action.”

   I’d commend to you my chapter on “The Offering and the Rest of our Money” in my book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, which assesses this text and other 'giving' passages in some depth. Taking space in worship for the offering: is it effective? Does it further idolize money? Is it our best counter-cultural critique of our moneyed culture? Is “love of money” really the root of all evil? Or is the secret to discover a proper love for our money? What’s a “cheerful giver,” and how does one become such a giver?

What can we say October 31? 23rd after Pentecost

   Halloween! All Hallows’ Eve! If you’re observing All Saints day now, here’s a link to my general reflections and illustrations on the great Fall feast of resurrection and hope. More specifically, Psalm 24 has appeared a couple of times recently; here’s a sermon I preached a few weeks back. The nuance for All Saints’ has the wrinkle of Who ascends the hill of the Lord as going up to God eternally. John 11 shows up in year B; here’s my blog post for the multi-week run through the chapter back in the summer. Revelation 21 recapitulates Genesis 1. I’m struck by the command, idou! Not act, or believe, but see! For me, Isaiah 25:6-9 is the most delicious, titillating of the bunch. So much hope! And for life now, as death in Isaiah isn’t just when you stop breathing. It’s a force, as Hans Wildberger explains: “Death is all that circumscribes a life, that limits the life-space of humanity, that diminishes well-being and that prevents community with people or God.”

   And, of course, Reformation themes may find their way in (here's last year's blog post empasizing that theme) - although after presenting what Luther did on Oct. 31, 1517, to two Catholic parishes, I've sobered up a bit. Luther was vicious, and onto crucial things; he divided the church, and in some ways helped save it.

   On to the proper lections for Oct. 31: Ruth 1:1-18 sets the stage for a lovely, hopeful story of redemption – in the fullest meaning of the Old Testament word, which is about the securing of property and people left dangling by circumstance. Next Sunday narrates the startling turn in the story – with elements of divine orchestration but also some derring-do, with Naomi instructing her daughter-in-law to get dolled up and sneak into her rich kinsman’s bed! I love watching my people’s jaws drop: this is in the Bible? Rich conversations are opened up among those who are tickled, those who are appalled, and those who hear gender stereotypes and classic submission of women to men...

   The irony of the setting shouldn’t be missed: desolate Moab is more fertile than God’s promised land, including Bethlehem, the “house of bread” which has none. Rolling out of the period of the Judges, divine displeasure and abandonment feel very real - as the opening words about the milieu remind us it was a time of chaos, violence and injustice! Ellen Davis (in Preaching the Luminous Word) intrigues - as she sees this story as kin to Elijah on Mt. Horeb: in a season of chaos, he hears the "still small voice." For her, Ruth is just this voice in our biblical canon, quietly refuting the "great man theory" of history! It's ordinary people, home and hearth, not the armies or powerful who shift history. We love the ordinariness of this story, and this grace gives us hope.

   I might even engage in a little nostalgic reverie about a "town," with its customs, old signs, everybody knows everybody's business, where we "cling to our ways" (pondering the words of Mary Chapin Carpenter's great "I Am a Town" lyrics!) - and ask how a church might function like a small town, especially since so much of the Bible happens in some small town or another (Bethlehem, Nazareth, etc.).

  Sufferers identify with Naomi. Davis sees the whole book as a hopeful narrative for those discouraged by our inability to see our way out of tragic situations - and how ordinary people help each other through personal tragedy. More from Ellen below on the Gospel lection!

   Naomi battles the famine and then the untimely death of not one but both of her sons. She’d named them – but why? Mahlon and Chilion rhyme, and mean something like “sterile, weak, finished.” Were they sickly at birth?

   They marry foreign girls. Israelites can’t seem to decipher the divine mind on whether this is acceptable or not. Ezra would have frowned! – bringing foreign gods into the home… If you read slowly, you’ll feel the ache of three women, facing tragic death, famine, and perilous insecurity. Ellen Davis (in her lovely Who Are You, My Daughter?) explains the story using woodcuts by Margaret Adams Parker. Notice that Naomi and Orpah do the expected, appropriate thing for women left destitute: they go home. Ruth is the oddity! “Where you go, I will go” gets cross-stitched as a wedding gift. It’s not wrong but maybe lovelier that this is a daughter-in-law’s oath, a foreigner entering the fold of Israel, shedding her family, national deities and embracing Yahweh and a less-than-promising land.

   How to preach this? Naming the piling up of loss matters, as does the surprising hope of redemption – which is a divine surprise and yet requires action, courage, pluck and ingenuity. {2 fascinating items regarding Orpah: Oprah Winfrey says she was named for her, 2 letters mistakenly reversed – and according to tradition, Orpah became the ancestress of Goliath, not weak at all, but “finished” off by Ruth’s descendant, David, perhaps as death itself was crushed by David’s descendant Jesus!}

   Hebrews 9:11-14. By now, Hebrews has gotten repetitive, but certainly is preachable. I wonder how much people can resonate to Jesus’ “once for all”-ness, how unlike earthly priests who enter the temple day by day, year after year, Jesus labored once, and it was sufficient forever. Maybe there’s a sermon in how we think we need Jesus plus… well, plus various things, which he’s really plenty? I like Luke Timothy Johnson’s phrasing: “Christ has arrived as a high priest of the good things that have come into being.”

   Mark 12:28-34. This moment, as Jesus is nearing the end, is so important, and rendered so vapid, that we engaged in a full 3 month series on it a few years back. We printed little cards for people to carry in their pockets and stick on their desks and refrigerators – so that gradually, day by day, the feel of love for God would sink in. People might fear God, or use God; they get puzzled about God or run to God in moments of need. But love? Jesus doesn’t say obey God, or fear or question or drop in once in a while on God.

   And then love itself has been hollowed out and perverted into a feeling you feel or you don’t. It’s feeling but far more, as evidenced by the multiple words added: heart, soul, mind, strength. In our series, I tried to explicate each of these, which was fun, although I agree with Joel Marcus who reminds us these 4 are “roughly equivalent; they do not designate 4 different kinds of human capacity but the human mind and will, viewed from slightly different angles.” It’s all in, loving God with all that I am, brain, desires, body, time, habits… The list is endless.

   When I’ve preached on John 21, with Jesus’ thrice repeated question to Peter, “Do you love me?” I’ve rehearsed the funny, moving scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye surprises Golde one day by asking (singing!) Do you love me? She counters that for years she’s cooked, cleaned, given birth, etc etc etc, but he persists in asking But do you love me? Interestingly, he reminds her of the day he met her - which was the day of their arranged marriage! He admits he was nervous, shy, scared - but that his mother and father had assured him they would learn to love one another. Love for God is something we can learn - as is love for others.

   We’re blessed with St. Augustine’s helpful distinction between 2 Latin words for love, uti and frui. Uti is love of use. I love money – not to fondle it or to gaze upon it, but because I use it to get something else I want. Frui is love of enjoyment. I love chocolate, not because of what I get out of it, which is unwanted weight and acid reflux. I just adore it, and must have it. We tend to go at God with uti love, when God is yearning for frui. There’s a sermon!

   Mary Magdalene sings “I don’t know how to love him” in Jesus Christ Superstar. Worth lifting up in a sermon – but then asking How do we love anybody? How do we wish to be loved in life? God’s like us – the point of the incarnation! We want to love and to be loved fully, bodily, emotionally, with mind and action, constancy, attentiveness, yielding, sharing. The fact that we know love gets trivialized reveals there’s a real thing we know and crave desperately.

   Ellen Davis, whom we spoke of above, preached a lovely opening convocation sermon for div students that would be fair counsel for those of us long out of school, phrasing the intense learning of seminary (and beyond for us!) as "the sanctification of your intellect," "giving your intellect over to the things of God, learning as deeply and widely as you can, simply for the sake of giving God joy." The study you are doing in this moment isn't just getting a sermon together. You're loving God with your mind - and giving God great joy. Right now.

   A couple of little footnotes. In Mark’s version, once his conversation partner agrees that love of God and neighbor are truly the greatest, Jesus says “You are not far from the kingdom.” Not you’re arrived, but you’re pretty close, haven’t arrived just yet, plenty of work in the journey ahead. Also, don’t slip into drivel about how we must love ourselves before we can love others. There may be truth in this psychological tactic. Our people aren’t great at self-love. But the solution is the lucid vision and conviction of how we are loved by God.

   And love of neighbor – which for Jesus is in your house, in the mirror, but also the stranger, the difficult person, the Samaritan, the leper – is the way to fitting self-love. Maybe it is self-love. John Calvin: “We shall never love our neighbors well till we have corrected the love of ourselves.” Self-love is assumed. But it’s fallen, shackled to sin and the world, in need of correction, healing, redemption.

   Hard to beat Thomas Merton’s lovely prayer in Thoughts in Solitude: “Let this be my one consolation, that wherever I am, you, O Lord, are loved.”

***

 I put together a little book summarizing the greatest moments in the lives of various saints - official and unofficial ones! Check it out: Servants, Misfits & Martyrs: Saints & their Stories.

What can we say October 24? 22nd after Pentecost

   Job 42:1-6, 10-17. To preach chapter 42 you’d have to establish the context of the previous 41 chapters… Not impossible! Especially after Job’s extensive misery, met only by extended silence, and then the whirlwind tour of the wildness of creation, Job’s final words to the Lord, “I know you can do anything,” are a sober, hard-won affirmation of divine omnipotence, which was never doubted by Job or anybody else. The shape of that omnipotence, what God does with God’s unlimited power is always the question. Omnipotence is hard to love. God’s power is expended in creating life in the thick of death, relationship in the midst of loneliness, a dazzling dance of light and darkness. God “can do anything,” and so God is not imprisoned by human notions of right and wrong; God isn’t stuck rewarding the righteous or punishing the wicked. God quite freely reigns. Only when God is thus free can God be a God of mercy.

   Job quotes the Lord’s own opening volley: “Who is this darkening counsel without knowledge?” He realizes it’s not that he lacked knowledge or was wrong in his knowledge. He’s now been granted now a fuller, deeper knowledge. He’s learned plenty about frost and goats and lions, stars and alligators. But the great lesson for Job is there in 42:5: “My ears had heard about you, but now my eyes have seen you.” How often do churchgoers and Bible students know things about God, without knowing God? Job and his friends had been clinging to a god who was nothing but their notions of right and wrong, the great retributor. The true God is greater, better, more mystifying, and wonderful.

   Job humbly declares “Therefore I relent.” Not repent! but relent. Job doesn’t confess his sin; and God never asks him to. Job gives up his mistaken understandings of God. He is disillusioned – as in his illusions have been shattered, as now he sees the true God who isn’t the righteous judge but the profligate creator of life and mystery, the one who speaks, and is with us.

   Then God turns on Job’s fake friends. Had they overheard the whirlwind business? God is angry because in speaking glib half-truths about God, they spoke falsely. Stunning. This, coupled with Job’s intimate realization in 42:5, is very close to the point of the book. Job, railing relentlessly against God, accusing, blaming and demeaning God, has spoken correctly about God! – while the friends, with their holy, righteous, even biblical defense of God’s honor, have spoken falsely. In such a messy, complex world, God prefers outcries and blatant honesty to smug piety.

   God affectionately calls Job his “servant” twice in 42:8 – and then, with some amusing irony, says that he will ask Job to pray for them. They had, after all, urged Job to lift up his hands in prayer. It never dawned on them (until now) that those prayers needed to be for them, not Job himself.

   The prose ending to the tale, in 42:9-17, is dissonant, almost corny, virtually anticlimactic. Remove the poetry in chapters 3-41, and you get this dumb plot the larger book is designed to subvert: God brags on Job, the satan challenges God, then inflicts Job with horrors; but Job is resolutely pious – so God wins the bet, and restores Job’s vast possessions, even doubling them.

   Our listeners know their own fantasies are a lie. You’ve never met anyone who lost everything and suffered horrifically who then wound up richer and with ten more children. Speaking of whom: Elie Wiesel, chronicler of the Holocaust, was mortified by this hokey ending to the story; remembering Job’s ten murdered children, he imagines Job chillingly telling God, “I forgive you, but do my dead children forgive you?”

   Christian theologians would not be lying if they read into this conclusion things the author never intended. After all is restored, Job’s family gathers to break bread in his house – just as followers of Christ gather around a table, not to hear about God, but to see and taste God. And then 42:12: “Then the Lord blessed Job’s latter days more than his former ones.” The creator God who will try anything, the one who springs life on the earth in every place, is the good God who insures we will have our “latter days” of blessing, not as any sort of reward for good behavior or right belief, but because God just can’t stop making life happen. And then the very last word of the book is “satisfied,” which Job was. The satisfaction isn’t the doubling of his stuff or even the restoration of his health. Philip said to Jesus, “Show us God, and we shall be satisfied” (John 14:8 RSV). Job has seen God, no longer “in a mirror dimly,” but “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

   I wrote a short commentary (just 23 pages!) on the whole book of Job - and it is a whole, not just parts! - for the Wesley One Volume Commentary. Check it out!

   Hebrews 7:23-28. For me, Hebrews, by now, is getting repetitive. So I’ll focus on…

   Mark 10:46-52. Last stop before Holy Week – for Jesus, even if we’re in October. He has made his way from the far north, where he spoke ominously at Caesarea Philippi about being handed over and suffering, all the way down the Jordan River valley to Jericho, where even today you hang a right and wind your way up a steep incline to Jerusalem.

   Jericho: a rich oasis in the middle of barren desert. No wonder prehistoric people settled there – making it the oldest known occupied city in the world, some 10,000 years old! It was the first stop for the Israelites on entering the Promised Land, and King Herod had spied the springs and lush vegetation and fruits to build a personal resort there. Zaccheus legally ripped people off while accumulating a small fortune, climbed up that sycamore tree, had Jesus over for dinner, and then gave his fortune away.

   A blind man named Bartimaeus (which simply means “the son of Timaeus” – so he had a dad but we aren’t sure of his given name!) is begging by the road leading out of town. Beggars get pitied, or blamed, or shunned, or mostly ignored. Jesus doesn’t toss him a few shekels. The disciples try to shush him – the way they did children! But Jesus listens. Jesus sees. Jesus cares. Notice (reading slowly!) little details. To the shushers, Jesus says “Call him.” Not “Help him.” Call. Jesus is all about calling people. He’d called the shushers, and they had followed. Jesus’ dreams for Timaeus’s son are way beyond having enough funding, or even the recovery of sight.

   They call him by saying “Cheer up” (in the NIV, inferior to the RSV’s “Take heart”). And it’s not You’re about to see! But rather, Cheer up, take heart, he is calling you. Want good cause to be happy? Jesus calls you. That apparently is sufficient.

   Bartimaeus “threw off his cloak.” What do we have weighing us down that we probably need to cast off to rise up and get closer to Jesus? Then Jesus’ question to him! “What do you want me to do for you?” Duh, isn’t it obvious? But maybe Jesus is asking him, and us, to go deep, not merely to think What hankering, what desire do I wish Jesus would satisfy now? Is there some thing deeper I really want, I really need, that would genuinely bring profound, lasting satisfaction and even joy?

   Jesus gives him sight. A staggering moment. If you lost your sight you’d be tickled to get it back. If you’d never ever seen though? Back in Mark 8:24, Jesus healed such a blind man whose first words were “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” The first thing Bartimaeus saw? Certainly it was the face of Jesus, who hadn’t shushed him or dropped a few coins in his cloak.

   What does this last healed person in Mark’s story do once he’s healed? He didn’t go home, or throw a party, or even get a job. No. “He followed Jesus along the road.” He was called before and after he was healed. And he followed – and don’t forget what was next on that road! He traipsed off with Jesus and the crowd to Jerusalem and into Palm Sunday and Holy Week. In his first week of seeing, Bartimaeus saw Jesus crucified – the one who’d loved, healed, and called him. Let’s go with him. 

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

What can we say October 3? World Communion Sunday

    World Communion Sunday. Adjacent to our texts, there must be lots of themes the day awakens in us for preaching. Early in the pandemic, we learned that contaminants in the air around the world were greatly diminished. What a lovely lesson, revealing how human industry and progress have imperiled the world. We have become painfully cognizant, if we weren’t before, of severe and regrettable disparities between rich and poor – in the world that is America, but even more around God’s world. Covid’s slaughter in India and Africa, and then the rapid availability of vaccines in America, where the world’s supplies were greedily snapped up: Lord, have mercy.

   This Sunday is always close to the Feast Day of St. Francis, and this year we’re right on it. Francis died just outside Assisi on the night of October 3. His tender care for all God’s creatures, his joyful life of preaching and prayer, his daring to travel with the Crusaders to meet the dreaded Muslims – and making peace with them! All resound on a day like this day. Check out my brief biographical blog on him, with lots of illustrative items, and also my favorite book I’ve ever written, Conversations with St. Francis, based on my pilgrimages to his places in Italy. On to our texts.

   Job 1:1, 2:1-10 might surprise us with preaching possibilities. Job isn’t a local guy but a foreigner. His devotion to God exceeds that of the home folks. The evangelist E. Stanley Jones, while a missionary in India, kept observing how Gandhi seemed far more Christlike than the Christians he’d known. Jones asked Gandhi’s advice to the Church. His reply? “Begin to live more like Jesus Christ. Don’t adulterate or tone down your religion. Emphasize love and make it your working force” – pointing out how we have “inoculated the world with a mild form of Christianity so it is now proof against the real thing.”

   Unjust, un-understood suffering is Job’s plight, and that of the people of the world. Job’s friends aren’t very good friends, as they judge him, they have vapid theological explanations for why he’s suffering, they urge simplistic prayers as quick fixes, they blame. How do we learn from these bogus friends how to befriend others near us and in farflung locations? Even Job’s wife is sketchy as a friend! Job is also evidence that bad things do happen to good people and that’s no cause to quit talking with God – and that goodness, even in the face of horrors, is humanly possible.

   Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12. I still bump into people who believe all that DaVinci Code blather about Jesus being just a guy until Constantine and 4^th century theologians pasted divinity of him. Hebrews, written maybe 3 or 4 decades after the crucifixion (Luke Timothy Johnson would say only 2 decades!), when people were still walking around who knew him, spoke extravagantly and shamelessly about  Jesus in grander ways than we modern Christians might. He’ll inherit all things. He had agency in creation itself. “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.”

   Hebrews was written to be read aloud – the whole thing! – to an audience. That audience was full of Christians who’d lost property, business, status and even families due to their peculiar allegiance to Jesus. They were weary, burnt-out we might say, that existential weariness we may have felt during the pandemic of living in a strange world, isolated, uncertain.

    Trying to reclaim enthusiasm about Jesus, and to instill courage in those tempted to shrink back from him, Hebrews digs into the Scriptures, primarily the Psalms! Psalms 8 and 110 figure prominently here. That feeling small before the magnitude of the cosmos, and the powers, the small person is invited into the glory of that other Small Person, Jesus. Hard not to adore that Hebrews touches on Jesus’ weariness – or maybe just what you do when your tasks are done: after the intense, exhausting labor of “making purification for our sin,” Jesus “sat down.” A little Shabbat, a Sabbath rest. You sit. You take a load off – since Jesus has taken our load off!

   Mark 10:2-16. What a depressing – and pitch-perfect text for World Communion Sunday. Divorce. Various parties in my denomination are filing for divorce. Nothing news. Churches have been breaking up forever. Neil Sedaka sang “Breaking up is hard to do.” Seems easier than staying together. I think in preaching we name this. We grieve. We don’t strut that we’re right and those other guys are wrong so now we’re clean on them.

   It’s no accident that, just after Jesus converses about divorce, he does his child welcome thing. The impact of divorce is always most agonizing on the kids. In church divorces too! The impact there is most likely that younger people see the church expending all its energy on a single issue, a decades-long spat and inability to wage any peace – and they simply shrug and say Why bother being part of such a Body? I get enough acrimony in politics or in my life. Church is not an alternative but a vapid echo of divisiveness everywhere else.

   The children being brought to Jesus: they aren’t sick. They’re just children, whose parents sense his touch will bless. The disciples are in the old-timey “Children are to be seen, not heard” camp – a bit different from today, when children are seen, heard and virtually idolized. They shush them, and try to escort them away. But “when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said ‘Let the little children come to me, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.’”

   What to Jesus was special about children? He’d been one: God showed God’s self to us – as a child! Is it that they are vulnerable, dependent, easily amazed, the future not foreclosed? or that they don’t bother hiding their emotions? In our culture, children get politicized. The “right to life” folks have valid points theologically. They, and all of us, are invited to attend vigilantly also to life after birth, what happens to vulnerable children, immigrant children, all children. Jesus always has this preferential option for the youngest.

   Perhaps we should as well. Ask the young what to do with the church, what to do with the world. Is it any accident that Greta Thunberg rallied the whole world to care about the world – and simultaneously polarized others swift to demonize her?

What can we say September 26? 18th after Pentecost

    Esther 7 marks the denouement of one of the Bible’s great stories. You pretty much have to preach on the whole story… In this cartoon-like narrative that touches on early anti-Semitism and attempted genocide, God is unmentioned. Kind of thing a Bible book ought to do! Speaking about God. What to do with such a thing? I love it, as people actually experience the drama of their lives without God being visible or audible, seemingly not there.

   A little duel of commentators on this might be worth reporting on in the sermon. David Clines, noting all the coincidences in the story (the queen pouting, the king’s insomnia, happening to stumble on just the right spot in the royal annals, etc.), suggests that “the chance occurrences have a cumulative effect. Any one alone might appear to be chance. But taken together, chance disappears. The lack of explicitly religious language does not conceal the divine causality, not if the holes that are left are God-shaped. To the religious believer, ‘chance’ is a name for God.” Church people love this kind of thing…

   But then we have Sam Wells, noticing how the story happens shortly before Passover, the day of deliverance. “Had they waited, it would have been too late. If they were to survive, the Jews had to make their own story. … Faith does not lie in resignation to the divine will. Instead, faith consists in bold steps that evince confidence in the Jews’ place in history.” Church people might love this more than they realize. Which is it? 

   Maybe it’s both – to echo Forrest Gump, standing at his bride’s grave: “Jenny, I don’t know if Momma was right, or if it’s Lieutenant Dan. I don’t know if we have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze – but I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happenin’ at the same time.”

   James 5:13-20. One day when I was 30 years old, a church member asked me to lunch. He brought a Bible with him to McDonald’s. As we ate, he opened it to this text, read it, and asked me, Why don’t we visit the sick and anoint them with oil? I had no answer, and agreed with him it was a good idea. And so Al and some others began joining me for visits, oil and prayer. First guy we saw was in brutal agony with cancer in his spine, the pain unspeakable. I applied a dab of oil to his forehead. He looked up and asked, could you pour some on my back. I did. His pain eased – a little. And died, of course, a few days later.

   Jesus’ brother’s question, Is anyone among you suffering? Seriously? Anyone not suffering? Isaac Bashevis Singer shrewdly said “I only pray when I am in trouble. But I am in trouble all the time.” We all suffer, always, and if it’s not in me at this charmed moment, it’s out there in God’s world – as we live into Bob Pierce’s ask, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break God’s heart.”

   My church people probably want me and Stephen Ministers to materialize and do some anointing. Way more elusive is “Confess your sins to one another.” Early Methodist groups thrived because that was the thing. Have you sinned since we were last together? You could take a stab at saying No, not me! But the group could call you out. Vulnerability and accountability: scary for people joining groups, but the way to life, healing and joy. Why does AA work, when it works? It’s the communal love, belonging, accountability.

   Mark 9:38-50. Whoever isn’t against us is for us? That’s appealing to me, although I’m not so sure. Political ideologues would claim they aren’t against us, but their idolatry of politics is the ruin of church life and any dream of living into God’s grace and the Church’s unity.  

   The “cup of water,” such a simple act of compassion, reminds me of the bookend scenes in Ben Hur. Early on, Ben Hur is a captive, desperately thirsty, when a shadowy, unseen person (it’s Jesus, hint hint!) reaches down and gives him a drink of water (watch here!). At the end, it’s Jesus struggling with his cross along the road to Golgotha. Ben Hur is moved, thinks he recognizes him, breaks through the crowd and the soldiers and offers him water (watch here!). A little corny, but powerful.

   A real “veil of Veronica” moment; the 6^th Station of the Cross marks her (as one of the women wailing, mentioned in the Gospels) as one who took her veil, and wiped the face of the fallen Jesus along that Via Dolorosa. Her veil was permanently imprinted with his face – as Jesus’ face is imprinted on every simple act of kindness. The peril, of course, is churchgoers pretty quick feel they’ve done what God asks of them if they engage in some “random act of kindness,” like paying for the person behind you in the Chic-Fil-A drive up.

    The stumbling block business intrigues. Don’t make somebody stumble – and gosh, we Christians do this all the time, by acting like jerks or by being vapid and dull… but then Jesus himself, as Paul reminds us constantly, is a stumbling block! I wonder about putting a big rock or something around the altar, pacing as I preach and literally falling over the thing. Who put this here?!?! Jesus says you’d be better off with a millstone around your neck. Archaeologists have found loads of millstones from Jesus’ day. Not pleasant neckwear.

   On the “cutting off” of an offending limb, I recall a fabulous episode of Little House on the Prairie (called “A Matter of Faith”) in which Caroline might die from an infection in her leg. Pious, Bible-believing, she picks up a knife and you believe she may just lop her own leg off.

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