What can we say March 24? Palm Sunday

    For years in worship planning, my staff will ask “Are we doing Palm Sunday? Or Passion Sunday?” My reply is always “Yes.” Is there really a choice? There’s a tragic dimension to the Palms entry, no matter how cute or fun we try to make it. Jesus comes surrounded by great joy but into the teeth of mortal danger; he comes to tackle the powers, and to be killed by them. And there’s a joyful dimension, paradoxically enough, to the Passion. Gruesome, horrific, unjust suffering, transformed by the miraculous way of God into immense life, light, joy.

   For Palm Sunday, I am thinking of other big crowd demonstrations, marches - and seeing how Jesus' is different. George Floyd's death and people taking to the streets. Obviously the January 6/Capitol invasion situation... All processions to cemeteries. Gandhi's salt march. Allenby arrogantly walking into Jerusalem, thinking westerners knew what was best for the Middle East - and we still see catastrophic consequences. So many... so how was Jesus' unique? He welcomed angry, frustrated, hopeful, dreaming people - but was humble, compassionate, taking on the powers without deigning to crush them. 

   Psalm 118 could be preached upon. Even if not, its cadences are well worth mentioning, or even deploying as a call to worship. It’s about a royal victory in ancient times. “This is the day the Lord has made” doesn’t mean Oh, God made a pretty day for me to enjoy, but “This is the day the Lord has acted,” brought deliverance, re-established his people once peril was eluded. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Did Jesus or any of his friends ponder this as he rode right by the huge ashlars of Herod’s temple mount?

   And Philippians 2:5-11 fits the day marvelously as well. I love the little translation quandary that needn’t be resolved but simply pondered: is it “although he was in the form of God, he humbled himself to death on a cross”? or should it be “because he was in the form of God, he…” I lean “because.” Jesus wasn’t pretending to be what he wasn’t, or what God isn’t. Precisely in his humility, in his shattered heart and body do we see the truth about God.

   So Palm Sunday, Mark 11. Stanley Hauerwas is right: "Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem is an unmistakable political act." The crowd does not yet know, and may never understand, that "this king triumphs not through violent revolt, but by being for Israel the one able to show it that its worship of God is its freedom." His action is "a refusal to let Rome determine what counts and doesn't count as politics." Well-said, daunting to explicate in a sermon though, with hearers mired on old-timey Americanish notions about what politics is and what religion (to them, very different) is.

    Subversive, crazed politics though. A king on a little donkey, not a war stallion like Bucephalus (Alexander the Great’s mount) – a borrowed donkey at that. Those following weren’t armed or rich or influential. Dreamers. Martin Luther noticed Jesus road on “an animal of peace fit only for burden and labor. He indicates by this that he comes not to frighten anyone, nor to drive or crush anyone, but to help him and carry his burdens.”

  Pretty courageous, especially since Pilate had just marched his legions from Caesarea on the coast to Jerusalem to intimidate, to secure the city overcrowded at Passover. His stomping regiments, with arms clattering and banners waving high, heading east into the city could not have found a greater contrast that Jesus, donkey hooves clomping on the stone, children holding leafy branches in the air, heading west into the city. The perpetual clash of good and evil coming to its climax.

   Hard to beat the wisdom inside Jesus Christ Superstar's "Hosanna Heysanna..." with the crowd's escalating appeals to Jesus: Won't you smile for me? Won't you fight for me? Won't you die for me? I lucked into a podcast (my "Maybe I'm Amazed") conversation with Tim Rice, who wrote these and all the words for that splendid musical! Lots of insight in there for Holy Week! For Palm Sunday, we feel the jubilation, and yet the painful ironies, the dawning realization on them, and us, of impending doom and what's at stake.

   The shout “Hosanna!” isn’t cheering in church, but a prayer, a cry for help meaning “Save us now!” Mark alludes to the obscure Zechariah – who had given up on human rulers and prophesied that “On that day the Lord God will save them… Lo your king comes humble and riding on a donkey.” What foolish person would draw attention in such a meek, easily-mocked way? There is some mystery afoot here. And we begin to understand that Jesus never protects his own dignity, but is ready to fling it aside to love anybody.

    Imitating Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi strode directly into the jaws of danger. Joining the Crusaders in the battle of Damietta in 1219, he walked across No Man’s Land between the heavily armed Christians and the saber-rattling Muslims – unarmed, barefooted. He was so pitiful that, instead of butchering him, the soldiers hauled him to the sultan, Malik al-Kamil. Francis spent three days with him, befriending him, and bought peace in that region. Well, for a brief time.

   What is the homiletical takeaway? Go thou and so likewise? Hardly. We simply find ourselves in the crowd, excited yet with the hunch that a week of agony for this holy one is beginning. Just before Lent we observed the Transfiguration. No takeaway there. The disciples fell on their faces in awe. I dream of the sermon that has no moral, no lesson, but simply causes all of us to say Wow, Jesus is amazing, so courageous, so humble, so loving, so bold, so holy, so divine. That’s really enough, isn’t it?

   David Lyle Jeffrey reminds us that this colt is untrained, undomesticated, never ridden – and so we’d expect such a creature to be difficult to mount or to stay on task. Instead, he’s docile, cooperative – even amid all the clamor, racket, flapping cloaks and branches. He doesn’t buck, but carried his load beautifully. Luke does linger over the disciples securing this creature. “The Lord has need of it.” It’s thin, and a tad corny, but the preacher isn’t off target to ask “What do we have tied up that the Lord has need of, and could put to lovely use?”

   Who was in the crowd? Had formerly blind Bartimaeus followed him from Jericho? Mary Magdalene surely was there. What about James, Jesus’ brother – who could well have accompanied Jesus’ mother to the triumphant but hauntingly ominous scene. Howard Thurman thoughtfully includes Mary in his pondering on Palm Sunday:

   “I wonder what was at work in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey. Perhaps his mind was far away to the scenes of his childhood, feeling the sawdust between his toes in his father’s shop. He may have been remembering the high holy days in the synagogue with his whole body quickened by the echo of the ram’s horn. Or perhaps he was thinking of his mother, how deeply he loved her and how he wished that there had not been laid upon him this Great Necessity that sent him out on to the open road to proclaim the Truth, leaving her side forever. It may be that he lived all over again that high moment on the Sabbath when he was handed the scroll and he unrolled it to the great passage from Isaiah, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor.’ I wonder what was moving through the mind of the Master as he jogged along on the back of that faithful donkey.”

What can we say March 10? Lent 4

    Numbers 21:4-9 pokes its head into one of the most bizarre religious beliefs in ancient Israel, and then simultaneously provides a surprising, theologically suggestive and homiletically promising weirdness. Circling around Edom near the Red Sea, the people murmur – which had to be so old, so trite by now. This region was infamous for its lethal serpents. Verse 6 uses the adjective seraph, “to burn” – so were they fiery? Poisonous by extension? What a harsh penalty for murmuring! – finally, after God and Moses have borne it patiently and even graciously for years. Think Indiana Jones: “Why did it have to be snakes?” Or maybe Genesis 3 – not the wily tempter, but the curse, that fallen humanity will suffer enmity with snakes.

   And yet these venomous snakes are the healing; it did have to be snakes. Think superstition, magic – or Israelite religion, with such a homeopathic antidote. An object is controlled by its own image or effigy. To gaze on an uplifted snake, they believed, could cure ill effects of the snakes on the ground. Lest you think this is a one-off, a bronze snake stood in the temple until Hezekiah finally smashed it (2 Kings 18:4). Israel shared this with their neighbors: Egyptian religious featured serpentine amulets, cobras denoted royalty. A bronze bowl engraved with a winged snake was discovered in Nineveh – booty the Assyrians swiped from Israel’s King Ahaz! 

 And then archaeologists found copper mines near where Israel was meandering in Numbers 21 – and a 5 inch long copper snake affixed to a staff, dating to the time of Moses! (Think modern times also: Asclepius was symbolized by a snake and still is on that little medical symbol we pay no attention to.)

     You don’t have to tie this to John 3 (although John himself did!) – but it’s preachable. What is lethal is the way to life; the curse is the way to cure. Certainly the cross works this way: it’s a sign of horror, the killing of the Son, and yet it is itself the cure. Similarly, it is only in our dying that we come to life; it is the killing of our sin on the cross that frees us.

     So, before visiting Ephesians 2, which can also be woven into all this, let’s stick with John 3:14-21. Nicodemus has made his famous nocturnal visit to Jesus. His puzzlement over being “born again” is itself fascinating, and can’t be lopped off from our precise reading for today. Jesus speaks of a whole new life – and it’s not an emotional experience, this being born again (evangelical fantasies, and churchgoer confusion and guilt notwithstanding). It’s God’s work – and our verses explain how God pulled off regenerating us.

   I admire Jean Vanier’s phrasing (despite John Vanier turning out to be so problematical…), unwittingly linking John to Numbers: “This journey, our pilgrimage of love, begins and deepens as we hear God murmur within our hearts: ‘I love you just as you are. I so love you that I come to heal you and to give you life. Do not be afraid. Open your hearts. It is all right to be yourself. You do not have to be perfect or clever. You are loved just as you are. As you become more conscious that you are loved, you will want to respond to that love with love, and grow in love.’”

   We see John 3:16 on billboards, t-shirts, etc.; some terrific music, my favorite being “God So Loved the World” by John Stainer (or this one by Bob Chilcott!) drives the verse home. 

   The omnipresence is striking, and would have shocked most Christians through the centuries. John 3:16 was never the verse until the modern American revival movement – so chalk it up to Billy Graham I suppose. The verse isn’t a problem, although it diminishes the breadth of the Bible’s vision for us and creation. Or does it? If we read it slowly, we see it’s better than we dreamed. It doesn’t say “For God so loved you, you religious person, that he gave his son – that is, had him crucified in your place – so that whoever believes in him, that is, whoever confesses his sin and agrees Jesus saves him, will not perish but go to heaven.” Instead it says God so loved – the world, the kosmos, the whole thing!  He gave his son – but he gave him when the Word became flesh, at Christmas, and in his healing and teaching, and in his crucifixion and resurrection, which for John is way more about the glorification of God than me getting off for my sins. Belief, for John, is way more than mental assent or repentance and feeling forgiven. It’s following, it’s union with the living Christ, it’s being part of the Body.

     I’d say whether you preach on John or Ephesians, these two texts illuminate one another in lovely ways. Ephesians 2:1-10: the pivotal verse is 5, not 8 (which is cited so often). Paul (let’s give it to Paul and not confuse church people about authorship) begins by pronouncing us dead – as sensible, as we’re reading his words and hence very much alive, as Jesus’ counsel to Nicodemus to be born again. The word translated “dead” is nekros; I’ve gotten to walk around a few necropolises from Bible times. Eerie – including the catacombs where Christians worshipped.

   Sermons have to explain how we’re dead while we have a pulse; Walker Percy might help. His parents died while he was very young, and he barely survived tuberculosis. Deeply influenced by Kierkegaard (who had written wisely of our “sickness unto death”), Percy creates characters like Dr. Tom More (in The Moviegoer), who lives in Paradise Estates, but really it’s a living Hell. People “have it all” but they are hollow and miserable. Even the meek priest confesses, “I am surrounded by the corpses of souls. We live in a city of the dead.”

   His later novels, especially Thanatos Syndrome and Love in the Ruins, play on these same themes. I’m struck again by the moment when More refused to take Samantha to Lourdes – because he was afraid she would be healed! Our worst fear is not that God is dead but that God is alive, and it won’t do just to drink and soak up pleasure. Again, in Numbers and John, it only in the confrontation with death, it is only by dying, that life unfolds, especially this miraculous life in Christ.

    Some preachers might resort to the Walking Dead as an image, but that’s just too creepy even for me... although R.C. Sproul, in his tiny book What Does it Mean to Be Born Again?, does say that before being reborn, "We were spiritual zombies - the walking dead. We were biologically alive but spiritually dead."

    Clearly, Ephesians 2 exposes how our plight is our whole person, not this or that misdeed. It’s my mind, my flesh, my thoughts, actions and cravings. And yet God is merciful. No, God is rich in mercy (the Greek is polyeleos, very merciful, manifoldly merciful!). Paul’s hyperbolic language should be noted by the preacher – as if words fail Paul (and hence the preacher). It’s not just grace, of the wealth or grace, but the surpassing wealth of grace!

    And then a close reading of v. 8 is instructive. Notice the Greek word order. Grace comes early – to emphasize its centrality. “Gift of God” is really “God’s gift,” God coming first, unusually in the Greek, to fix our attention on whose grace this is. Notice there is an article (the, that) before grace. So it’s not “For by grace you are saved” but “For by that grace you are saved” – that is, the grace celebrated in verses 5 and 7. Faith is not a work, it is not a clever, even spiritual decision. Faith is God’s work; faith is all gift. “End of faith as its beginning,” Charles Wesley shrewdly wrote. Faith, St. Augustine helped us to see, isn’t the human contribution to salvation. Otherwise you get spiritual cockiness, no matter how grinningly spiritual. Markus Barth wrote, “The bragger is man in revolt against God, and a tyrant over his fellow man. But he who boasts of God and accepts his own weakness gives God the glory he is due.”

    Of course, it’s salutary that the lectionary didn’t clip things off after v. 8. Verses 9-10 debunk any overly simplistic notion of “We’re saved by grace not works” – as Paul then, as if to keep us off balance (or twisting in the wind!) explains that we are “created for good works.” Maybe it’s all in how we construe who we are, whose we are, what defines us, and what our doing emanates from.

What can we say March 3? Lent 3

    Exodus 20:1-17. I love simply reading these to those who know them – but realize they don’t, really. Preaching on the 10 Commandments is a privilege, a delight, and a weird challenge, given the politicization of them in our culture. I love the pairing with Psalm 19, which reminds us of the beauty and value of God’s law, correcting our foolish lunge toward ideas that the Law as oppressive, or as been tossed in the waste bin by Jesus – especially during Lent! I think of the fabulous moment in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses:

   “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.”

   Martin Luther noticed grace and a promise in each commandment. What better sermon could you preach that to narrate the way God in mercy relieves us of our burdens by declaring “You don’t have to covet.” These aren’t chiseled rules to be used in judging others or keeping our nation in good order. God has just delivered Israel from bondage – and now God explains what will be required in order to stay free. There is such a thing as holiness, as a deep desire to fulfill God’s will. Brevard Childs: "The intent of the commandments is to engender love of God and love of neighbor.”

   The preacher could pick one command and zero in – or you could do what I plan to do, just a quick, breezy touching on each one with an explanatory note or two. No other gods? Luther clarified that our god is whatever motivates us, changes your mood, embodies the good life… so who is your God? No images of God? We are made in God’s image, and Jesus is the flawless image of God – so other creature-like images (the Egyptian or the Wall Street golden bull, you name it…) mislead. Remember the Sabbath? Can we switch off our gadgets and actually rest?

   Don’t kill? Jesus went deep, explaining that anger is an interior kind of murder (and in our rancorous culture, where anger management is a big thing, aren’t we rabid killers?). No adultery (in a culture where sex as impulse, pleasure and self-fulfillment is all over the media)? Jesus said if you harbor lust in your heart, you are an adulterer. No condemnation there; just as in that moment in John’s Gospel, Jesus encounters an adulterer in order to set her free. No coveting? Coveting is the engine of capitalism! But God would liberate us from the stranglehold of always wanting more – or really, wanting what is new and different. I don’t want more iPhones. I want the latest iPhone…

   1 Corinthians 1:18-25 focuses us squarely within the movement that is the season of Lent. As a preacher, I worry that when I preach on “the Word of the Cross is folly,” it will turn out that my words about the Cross will be folly. The gravest risk for preachers who’ve grown up in our thin, vaguely revivalistic environment, is that we will minimize, individualize, trivialize and thus confuse and empty the Cross of its richer meaning. N.T. Wright: “When Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place…  The death of Jesus was the moment when the great gate of human history, bolted with iron bars and overgrown with toxic weeds, burst open so that the Creator’s project of reconciliation between heaven and earth could at last be set in powerful motion… Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross.” 

    We have pretty crosses adorning our churches, not to mention jewelry, posters, clothing… The cross in the first centuries was horrific, from which you would avert your gaze. Consider the first instance of a cross – in that laughable graffiti found near the Palatine Hill in Rome – depicting a man bowing down before a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, with the inscription, “Alexamenos worships his God,” clearly ridiculing a late second century convert to Christianity.

   We speak of “apologetics,” the intellectual defense of the faith.  Paul surrenders before beginning, making zero apologies for the absurd, unexpected and not prophesied idea that the Messiah would not crush his foes but be crushed by them; the Scriptures themselves indicated that being killed on a tree was an offense.  How can the preacher resuscitate the disgust, the offense, except just to name it?   Or maybe we show horrific images, maybe von Grünewald's Christ, pierced hundreds of times, or maybe that startling bronze crucifixion by Floriano Bodini… This is God? Looks entirely God-forsaken – which was God’s point. As Rick Lischer put it in his memoir about his son's death (Stations of the Heart), when battling the cancer, they looked into a church and saw a crucifix - prompting them to know this was the place for them, for such a church, and such a God, "is not freaked out by death."

   Before turning to the Gospel, I think it is worth passing along a word of encouragement to preachers (so not for your sermon, but for you who preach!) from Michael Knowles, and reminds me that we preachers need encouragement more than we need material: “The vast majority of preachers throughout the entire history of the Christian church have conducted their ministries in either relative or absolute obscurity.  And they, by virtue of such obscurity, best exemplify cruciform preaching as Paul intends it.  Wherever preachers stand before their congregations conscious of the folly of the Christian message, the weakness of their efforts, and the apparent impossibility of the entire exercise… there, Paul’s homiletic of cross and resurrection is at work.  The one resource that genuinely faithful preachers of the gospel have in abundance is a parade of daily reminders as to their own inadequacy, unworthiness and – dare we admit it? – lack of faithfulness.  Yet these are the preconditions for grace, the foundations for preaching that relies on God ‘who raises the dead.’”

   John 2:13-22 poses an odd chronological challenge. The Synoptics locate the cleansing of the temple early in Holy Week, while John sticks it in when Jesus is just getting started, shortly after attending a wedding with his mother. Jesus waltzed right into the temple, and in a rage that startled onlookers, drove the moneychangers out of the temple. Was he issuing a dramatic memo against Church fundraisers? Hardly. Like the wine at Cana, this was a sign. He was acting out, symbolically, God's judgment on the temple. The well-heeled priests, Annas and Caiaphas, had sold out to the Romans. Herod had expanded the temple into one of the wonders of the world - but he pledged his allegiance to Rome by placing a large golden eagle, symbol of Roman power, over its gate.

   The people were no better:  a superficial religiosity masqueraded as the real thing.  Within a generation of Jesus’ ministry, that seemingly indestructible temple was nothing but rubble. Tell your listeners about the massive Herodian stones in this wonder of the ancient world. Help them imagine the sights, sounds and smells of the moment. I once set up a bunch of little tables with coins on them and proceeded to turn them over as my sermon began. I’m not sure anybody heard anything after that, but you never know…..

  If we ask, Why did Jesus die? many might answer, For our sins.  But then ask, Why did they kill him?  Look no further than this moment: Jesus shut down operations in the temple and forecast its destruction.  No wonder the authorities wanted to kill Jesus!  In a way, Jesus would himself become a kind of substitute temple.  The temple was the place, the focal point of humanity's access to God.  Jesus, like the temple itself, was destroyed, killed - and his death, and then his resurrection on Easter Sunday, became our access to God. And Fred Craddock has helped us discern the connection to the wedding at Cana.  Both are on the “third day,” both are polemic against religion centered on ceremony.  But the difference: “In Galilee is the wedding; in Judea is the funeral.” 

What can we say February 25? Lent 2

    Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16. I wonder if we Christians overthink God’s grace, and don’t bother even trying for “blamelessness,” seeming impossible anyhow. I’m pretty sure God meant “Be blameless.” No surprise then that Abraham “fell on his face,” reminding us of the disciples at the Transfiguration (which weirdly is an alternate Gospel text for this day – but we were just there 2 weeks ago!). Our nobility, our true greatness, is that God bothers to ask for and even expect us to be blameless – or maybe as Wesley put it, “going on to perfection.” The old preacher joke is “If you’re not going on to perfection, where exactly are you going?”

   Abraham is 99… pretty old. Yet still looking for new promise fulfillment, still hearing loving and firm demands from God. What is God asking of the elderly in our churches? And of ourselves as we age – hopefully living into the “as we grow in age, we grow in grace, and in the knowledge of Christ.”

   On this text, Jonathan Sacks provides an eloquent summation: “Faith is the ability to live with delay without losing trust in the promise; to experience disappointment without losing hope, to know that the road between the real and the ideal is long and yet be willing to undertake the journey. That was Abraham’s and Sarah’s faith.”

   Romans 4:13-25 is Paul preaching a sermon on our Genesis text! Paul reiterates my age observation: at age 99, “Abraham grew strong in his faith.” Grew.

   Paul veers toward supersessionism, of course. Sometimes, to insure I’m not tumbling into unwitting anti-Semitism (which A.J. Levine is the master of warning us against), I’ll phone a rabbi friend, tell her/him what I’m thinking, and see what reaction I get.

   “Hoping against hope”: oh my, this origami of contradictory notions! C.E.B. Cranfield gets to the heart of things: “Abraham believed God at a time when it was no longer a human possibility for him to go on hoping. Human hope’s utmost limit had already been reached and passed.” And in a somewhat obscure hymn, Charles Wesley expressed something similar: “In hope, against all human hope, Self-desperate, I believe… Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees, and looks to that alone; laughs at impossibilities, and cries: It shall be done!”

   I wonder if there’s a sermon in “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body” (verse 19). What does the culture say to us about our bodies? Some sleek, fit, curvy ideal? Too fat? Too skinny? Too feeble? Fatigued? Ill? Paul presents us with a counter-cultural, hopeful vision of the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). The preacher can invite people to look down, like right now, at their bodies. Not much? How fantastic: when you consider your own body, your faith can and should be strengthened!

   If your setting allows it, you could reflect on what our society has done to black bodies. Or to women’s bodies. Secular culture might blaze the path for us. Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral – with this caption: “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.” Our Gospel story ultimately is about a broken, wounded, scarred body, as we see in our Gospel.

   Mark 8:31-38, the very heart of the story of Jesus, the axis on which the plot turns, this dramatic moment at Caesarea Philippi, far to the north, on the border, amidst a warren of temples honoring the fake god, Caesar. It is here that Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem. He’s been a powerful, impressive character, striding across the stage of history up to this point. From now on, he is passive, acted upon, handed over, walking meekly into the teeth of danger to be acted upon.

   W.H. Vanstone, in his lovely book, The Stature of Waiting, suggests that this matches the plot of our lives. We work, we are productive, but then we increasingly are acted upon, handed over to nursing homes or family or the seeming bondage of feeble older age. Jesus’ glory comes in the 2nd half of his story, and therefore he renders our seemingly bad years as our glory. And, we realize Jesus' mission wasn't to impress, heal everybody, and attract a big zealous following with divine razzle-dazzle. He came to save, to love, to lay down his life, to suffer for and with us and redeem us and all creation.

   Chris Green ponders and unwinds the sentence "Peter tries to take Jesus apart." Do it slowly... "I suspect it was earnest and sympathetic, born not of conceit but of misguided compassion. Perhaps, deep down in his bones, Peter sensed something of the weight of Gethsemane and Golgotha, and knew, in a flash, that it would crush them all. Perhaps he saw the shadow of the darkness of that mystery pass over Jesus' face and could not help but try to save his friend."

   No passive spectators allowed here. From the sidelines, we’ll just admire Jesus for suffering “in our place”? Jesus says “Take up your cross and follow me.” Not watch, but make the walk to death row and suffering with me. This “taking up your cross” might sound like bearing your burdens, but that’s not it at all. In the Roman world, if you picked up your cross, you were on death row, you were walking that “green mile” toward your execution.

   Joel Marcus, in his commentary on Mark, wisely refers us to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s thoughts on the gulag: “From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself. ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. . . I no longer have any property whatsoever. . . Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.’ Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.”

   The logic of the Gospel is illogical to the world, always paradox. Deny yourself to find yourself. Lose your life to save it. Clearly Jesus is utterly uninterested in our niceness, our goodness, our political ideologies or our smug judgments of others. We put our cozy life behind. My property isn’t mine. It’s not what I want to do, and not even what I want to do for God, but what God wants me to do. The preacher errs by saying It might be costly. No, it will be costly – because we follow in a world that is terribly out of sync with Jesus, a culture that does not love the Lord Jesus. The preacher urges this with a soft, plaintive voice and maybe even some tears, never wagging a finger or stridently insisting. We dream that they might actually follow, at least with a few baby steps, to discover that the only thing that is more grievous than the cost of discipleship is the cost of non-discipleship.

   I've preached over time that when Jesus says "Get behind me," that's exactly what a disciple is to do: follow - from behind. I like Green's thought: "Jesus" (by turning away) "moves so that Peter cannot fail to be where he should be! By turning away, Jesus not only prefigures the turn; he actually accomplishes it. And this is always the way of God's wrath. In spite of appearances, the divine judgment is always, always, always, at its heart, only ever mercy. Yes, God turns his back on us. But never to put us in our place. Only ever to help us find it." Boom.

What can we say February 18? Lent 1

    Genesis 9:8-17. You see a rainbow? Pull out your phone and post a photo to Facebook, quick! And then we have rainbows on flags, signs, bumper stickers and stoles now. We are to remember it’s a covenant, a two-way thing, an unbreakable deal with commitments on both sides – and the bow might just fire back at you.

   Jonathan Sacks forever altered my view of Noah when he wrote that medieval rabbis called Noah “the man in the fur coat.” If you wear a fur coat, you keep yourself warm; if you build a fire, you keep yourself and others warm.” Noah was righteous, but it was only for himself. The worst leader ever? No one at all followed him. Unlike Abraham (at Sodom), Noah didn’t voice one prayer for the people of his generation. God asks us to take responsibility, not merely to save ourselves, but for others.

   And then Marilynne Robinson, in her book (Reading Genesis) coming out in 2 weeks, belabors the contrasts she detects between Gilgamesh and other ancient flood stories, and the Genesis account of Noah. For them, the gods are surprised and angry a handful of human survived. Importantly, after God preserves Noah and his family, paired with the rainbow are a few essential laws – which we forget when we’re giddy over the band of colors. God expects righteousness – which ennobles us, doesn’t it? God, by offering a covenant, affirms “His forbearance and loyalty. The value of humankind is affirmed” by the covenant as well.

   Clearly, this covenant expresses “God’s passionate expectation of righteousness and also His loving faithfulness,” which are not at odds with one another! Nothing remotely like this appears in the Babylonian and other stories! Robinson rightly ties this deluge to that obvious truth that disasters which obliterate life happen – but by giving those laws, “humankind is a moral actor in the drama, not simply a victim.”

   Our text isolates a glorious moment – just moments before Noah gets drunk, and then gets mean by cursing one of his sons! Noah does what God refuses to do: curse a beloved human being. His vicious recoil ruins a crucial underlying theme Robinson reveals about those long genealogies: they “preclude the idea that differences between groups could ever be of a qualitative kind, deeper than the differences within a family.”

   God promises never again to flood the earth – but does a worldwide pandemic count, just a little? The flood itself, and the covenant God makes here, reminds us that God’s redemption isn’t merely human souls but all creatures, all of creation. St. Francis understood our kinship with his brothers and sisters the birds, fish, wolves, cattle, flowers and trees, and sang it in his Canticle and enacted it by preaching to creatures.

   The rainbow is an opening, I suspect, to talk about signs. Lots of religious people love signs – but they see signs that maybe are suspect as divine in origin – and then we miss the signs that really may be signs from God. Seeing a rainbow really is a lovely reminder of God’s ultimate mercy. So are the trees, flowers and birds, as Jesus pointed out in the Sermon on the Mount. Too many “signs” people claim to notice are a bit self-indulgent, or what Bruce Waltke calls “hunches.” You hear plenty of these from your people, a mere chance or coincidence that folks anoint as God’s doing. No need to chide or mock them for this. Society teaches this kind of bland theology.

   1 Peter 3:18-22. “Spirits in prison”? We see them all around us – and maybe in the mirror too! Fun to probe in a sermon… but let’s ask instead, Is this a clue regarding “He descended into Hell”? What was Jesus doing between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? This dogma makes so much sense of so many things, from pre-Jesus inhabitants of earth, to those in remote regions who’ve never heard of Jesus – or even those who reject Jesus for darn good reasons, like mean, abusive or simply boring representatives of Jesus. Robertson Davies wryly suggested in one of his novels that hell must have “visible branch establishments, and I have visited quite a few of them.” Jesus’ whole mission was to visit and make proclamation to spirits in prison. We are shackled by so many things. No wonder in the Eucharistic liturgy we say Jesus came “to release the captives.” That would be us, you, me, the people I cringe over as they are captive to bad thinking or crass ideologies – and frankly, everybody. Thank goodness.

   Mark 1:9-15. Most of us will fixate on the Gospel for Lent 1. In Mark, it’s direct, second person speech: not “this is my beloved,” but “You are my beloved.” I like that. Personal, giving the preacher the opportunity to invite people to be Jesus’ Body and hear God say “You – yes, You! – are my beloved.” This whole category of being Beloved: Henri Nouwen wrote a whole book on what this vision of your identity can do to relieve agonies and instill joy and hope. 

   Notice the vivid "the heavens were ripped apart" (which the Greek literally means). Donald Juel reflected on this and observes that "what is opened may be closed again; what is torn apart cannot easily return to its former state." Remember the roof being ripped open in Mark 2 when the paralytic was lowered from above!

   But not for long, and not so folks can relax into the easy chair of being the Beloved. The Spirit “immediately” (Mark’s Jesus is always in a big hurry, so urgent!) “drove him out into the wilderness.” We have our drivennesses… The wilderness could be parsed as the challenges we all face. But it’s a real place, a zone, a time of testing. The Wadi Qelt, with St. George’s monastery hanging perilously from the cliff above, is the theater for such high drama.

   This moment dawns right after the Baptism. Note how un-American the plot is. Instead of, after the Baptism, Jesus said Wow, what a neat spiritual experience! I can’t wait to get home to tell mom! Instead, a harrowing is to come. Probably, it was in that wilderness he heard or fully comprehended for the first time his calling.

   Jesus was driven, but he chose to let himself be driven. What would it mean for us, and our people, to see ourselves as driven into a time of testing, of purifying the self, of shedding other crutches and to rely for a time only on God? Fasting, yes. Shutting off gadgets, yes. I like, in preaching, to suggest “Could be this, could be that, could be another thing” – or all of the above. Let people pick up on what resonates, or scurry off to discover their own thing to jettison for Lent.

   Old Church hands might have their interest piqued in that Mark doesn’t do the three boxing rounds of temptation with the devil we find in Matthew and Luke. Here, he’s “with the wild beasts.” Sounds scary, maybe scarier than verbal jousting with the devil. Leap off the temple? Easy to say No to that one. But a couple of jackals growling and drooling behind me, or some predator bird swooping down and pressing its talons into the back of my head? I bet your hurting people who aren’t in denial totally get this scenario. The only way to survive such assaults of doubts or self-recrimination or anxiety or grief or a restless night is the recollection of the Baptism, being Beloved. Martin Luther, when attacked by the devil, calmly resisted by saying “I am baptized.”

   And then there’s this: “The angels waited on him.” The verb “wait” is always theologically suggestive. We “wait” on the Lord, as in its takes time, watching, expecting, not there yet, but coming. Did the angels wait on him in this way? We also “wait” on the Lord, as in the way a waiter waits on a table, serving, hosting, helping. What waiting service did the angels provide to Jesus? Not food: he was fasting! Wiping his brow? Words or even better (since they were angels) songs, choral anthems of encouragement and inspiration? American piety has way too much sentimentality around angels. But here they are, waiting on our Lord.

What can we say February 11? Transfiguration!

    I love Transfiguration Sunday – but it’s so early this year! Two great texts, or three if you dig the Epistle more than I do!

   2 Kings 2:1-12. I love Elisha’s dogged loyalty: not “I will not leave you,” but “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” The stuff of oaths, not just determination. The “company of prophets who were in Bethel” know Elijah is almost gone. Elisha knows too – but urges them to “keep silent,” as if by not talking about it, it just might be delayed, or not happen at all.

   A 2^nd oath from Elisha in verse 4. These 2 are travelling fair distances – and we get the feel Elijah is trying to shed himself of Elisha. A 3^rd oath, and more pleading for silence.

   Elijah parts the water with his mantle. What’s in that fabric?!? The exodus and the entry into the land reiterated; the magical miracle revived – just for such a small number this time! Is that how Bible power works? A grand miracle, then it manifests itself where two or three are gathered?

   Elisha, feeling meager, and understandably so, boldly asks for a “double share of your spirit.” And then the chariot of fire, horses of fire, too. And Elijah is swooped up into heaven on a mighty whirlwind. And then Elisha mourned.

   Hard for me not to think of Sam with Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. Frodo, at the end of the 1st movie, says, “Go back, Sam. I’m going to Mordor alone!” “Of course you are,” responds Sam, “and I’m coming with you!” He plunges into the river, gets in over his head and almost drowns before Frodo pulls him into the boat. Once Sam catches his breath, he explains: “I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee, and I don’t mean to.”

   The mantle is intriguing; Gandalf rather unwisely left the course of affairs in Middle-earth to the diminutive, fun-loving, timid Hobbits. “Despair, or folly?” said Gandalf. “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!”

   I think of Roland Murphy, the Carmelite Old Testament scholar who was my dissertation adviser and lifelong mentor. He shared a lot of wisdom with me; I never made an important decision without exploring things with him. But he did not, as he could not, vouchsafe to me what his dying moments were like, or what he saw when the door of this life closed and he took the first step of his journey into . . . we do not know. He died on the feast day of Elijah—fitting for a Carmelite, and a Hebrew Bible guy! Were there chariots or some dimly lit, beautiful silence? We trust, perhaps because we harbor in our souls some mysterious confidence that all must be well with someone who lived so well and loved us so well.

   Like the bush in Exodus 3, the fire of the horses and chariot here are not consumed – and do not consume Elijah! The film, Chariots of Fire, ruminates on the lives of Eric Liddell, a Christian who runs for God’s glory, and Harold Abrahams, a Jew running to defeat prejudice. With Liddell in particular, the clash of his simple, holy commitments to God with the world might seem old-fashioned, but sometimes it’s the old-timey story that awakens us to the craziness of our own world.

   2 Corinthians 4:3-6. Important for the anxious preacher, or the popular preacher: “We do not proclaim ourselves.” Church people don’t exist to render a positive verdict on my self worth. I won’t preach on this Epistle, but I will take it in my pocket on Sunday to recall it’s not about me.

   Mark 9:2-9. When I try to wave my magic wand over the world of homiletics, the Transfiguration is the first text I point to – as it is the prime example of the understandable but deeply flawed way even well-meaning preachers take a text that is most clearly about God, and try to turn it into something about us.  In my preaching book, The Beauty of the Word (my book, not about how to preach, but how to continue preaching!), I explain how so many texts are about how amazing God is – and it’s sufficient just to ponder the amazingness of God in the sermon! But we have to make it about us, our faith, our to-dos, our doubts, our serving… and then we struggle and wind up botching things. 

    With the Transfiguration, I’ve read and heard so many sermons like a few I tried when I was young – with some ridiculous attempt at “Okay, you have a mountaintop experience, and then you go back down into the real world…” All 3 Synoptic versions of this moment have as their “point” the simple fact that Jesus is amazing, someone to be worshipped, gawked at, and the only takeaway is to be lost in wonder, love and praise. Mark shows us the way the plodding disciples tried what preachers try: Lord, let us do something. Let us build three booths!  Mark’s comment reveals a kind of mercy on them, and on us: “For they did not know what to say.” Indeed. Like the preacher coping with this text, too marvelous for mere words.

   What the preacher knows to say is that Jesus quite shockingly started glowing, shining; the Greek means literally metamorphosized. He shimmered. No ordinary guy, this Jesus; we get a preliminary peek into his eternal glory. The only conceivable responses are recorded in Scripture. In Mark, Peter does offer the greatest understatement in religious history: “It is good that we are here.” Matthew 17:10 is even better: “And they fell on their faces in awe.” Praise. Awe. Studies show a mood of awe alleviates much anxiety. Maybe instead of fixating on me and my troubles, I train my soul to fixate upon the wonder that is God – and I’ll get better. And the Church might really be the Church.

   Jesus was on a mountain - where amazing Bible things happen. Mountains, especially huge, craggy, ice-capped ones, like in Switzerland, are what philosophers point to as distinguishing "beautiful" from "sublime." The "sublime" has a rougher, if impossible accessibility. It's beautiful, but scary, a bit - and you can't just clamber up to the top. There's some peril, risk - maybe like God...

   There's an echo in Jesus' transfiguration in Mark 9 of his even greater metamorphosis. The cloud "overshadowed" them (v. 7) - the same verb (episkiazousa) used of what happened to Mary when Jesus was conceived (Luke 1:35). This overshadowed one gave birth to God's "beloved Son," so announced at the opening of his ministry (at the Baptism), and now as we move into the final act of Mark's plot. All 3 moments embody what Paul wrote in Philippians 2: "Though in the form of God, he emptied himself." That is the metamorphosis - seen sort of in reverse in the Transfiguration! And then his risen body too, of course...

   I want to preach the sermon that simply causes me and my people to say “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place – and it is good that we are here,” or that would make me and them simply blush in awe. This sermon won’t attempt to resolve any personal or societal dilemmas, it won’t allow notes to be taken to put into practice on Tuesday morning, it doesn’t even try to get me to do anything but observe a bit of a sabbath from doing things like building booths or even being religious, and simply let my jaw drop over how cool, how very different and glorious this Jesus is. 

   I have attempted this myself a few times in sermons. Mind you, the material extolling the beauty and glory of Jesus is plentiful. The birth, the incarnation – God becoming small to show us God’s heart. Wow. Jesus’ words, his holiness, the people he touched, the marvel of his healing. The temptation narrative (another one we botch by making it about how we overcome temptation): we see Jesus achieving what you and I wouldn’t have a prayer of doing – resisting the devil’s seductive allure. His suffering in silence, his compassion on the soldiers who just nailed him up, his tenderness toward a thief, his love for his mother. “What wondrous love is this?” 

   Am I veering from Mark 9? I don’t mind if I do – but the timing of Mark 9 invites this very speculation: Jesus has just asked the disciples about his identity, and he has just explained his vocation to go to Jerusalem, suffer and die, despite the strenuous objections of those who knew him best. Jesus.  His resurrection, and ascension.  Gee, I’m going to need a heckuva lot of time to explore “Fairest Lord Jesus, Beautiful Savior.” 

   The only remote takeaways might be two: first, to try to do the awe thing every day… and then second, as the voice from heaven (which echoes the voice at Jesus’ baptism) quite sensible suggests, “Listen to him.” Yeah, the guy who glowed, the one who is God and who healed and touched the untouchables and gave his life? Listen to this guy and not all the other pretenders who’ve frankly never glowed for a nanosecond.

What can we say February 4? 5th after Epiphany

    Isaiah 40:21-31 is an early chorus in the theologically unsurpassed and poetically eloquent prophecies of Second Isaiah. Just astonishing, moving, and so very hopeful, addressed to supplanted exiles bereft of decent prospects, exhausted, surrendered largely to the possibility not just of God’s help but of God simply being God. You have to love the rhetorical Have you not known? Have you not heard?

   Like Job, the desolate, those who’ve suffered much are summoned to ponder creation in all its variegated wonder in the face of evil. The question, Why do you say My way is hidden? is almost insensitive. Of course they had good cause to ask! But to the weary, the prophet proclaims that God does not faint or grow weary – as we do, as we have, as we are right now! Even youths – so energetic! – get weary; even they faint. But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. Not those who sprint ahead or take things into their own hands.

   The eagles: J.R.R. Tolkien must have had this text in mind when Frodo and Sam fall exhausted after their arduous journey to Mount Doom – and eagles arrive, swoop them up and deliver them to Rivendell for the joyous reunion of the fellowship.

   1 Corinthians 9:16-23. Paul’s ego just rams itself into so many texts! His best moment is “To the weak, I became weak.” We just are weak. My book, Weak Enough to Lead, probes this theme and why weakness isn’t just the prerequisite to lead well (in a Christian context, that is), but it’s simply reality.

   Michael Knowles wrote these glorious words about Paul’s weakness, and that of the preacher – so not for sermon use, but for the edification of you, the preacher! – in dealing with criticism, a sense of irrelevance, and smallness in the life of ministry: “The vast majority of preachers throughout the entire history of the Christian church have conducted their ministries in either relative or absolute obscurity. And they, by virtue of such obscurity, best exemplify cruciform preaching as Paul intends it. Wherever preachers stand before their congregations conscious of the folly of the Christian message, the weakness of their efforts, and the apparent impossibility of the entire exercise… there, Paul’s homiletic of cross and resurrection is at work. The one resource that genuinely faithful preachers of the gospel have in abundance is a parade of daily reminders as to their own inadequacy, unworthiness and – dare we admit it? – lack of faithfulness. Yet these are the preconditions for grace, the foundations for preaching that relies on God who raises the dead.”

   Mark 1:29-39 continues to track the opening days of Jesus’ burst onto the scene, startling the crowds and sending demons scurrying away. There is a “Take Time to be Holy” moment here: Jesus, the Messiah, with the sick clamoring for him, with demons to cast out, with teachings to reveal, rose in the morning, while it was still dark, and went to a deserted place. How far did he go? Until it was quiet? Far enough off the road not to be noticed? To a vantage point with a view of the sunrise, or of the towns dotting the Galilean coastline so he might pray over them? I wonder if the preacher prepares to preach on this – or to live the rest of her life – by rising while it is still dark and literally going somewhere out of doors to pray.

   I like, during Black History Month, to allude to a story or event - without alienating anybody by making an issue of it... Countless examples present themselves. Given the weakness confessed in the Epistle, the need for strength in Isaiah, and Jesus praying alone, I might go to that dramatic moment in early 1956 when Martin Luther King, Jr., his home having been firebombed, his family receiving death threats, and realizing he was in for an arduous journey he'd not really signed up for, couldn't sleep, went to the kitchen (which I've visited in the Dexter parsonage in Montgomery!), bowed his head over a cup of coffee, and muttered a prayer of desperation: "I'm down here trying to do what's right. But I'm weak now, I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. I'm afraid. I can't let people see me like this because if they see me weak, they'll get weak. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left." And he heard a voice saying "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. I will be with you. I heard the voice of Jesus saying to fight on. He promised never to leave me. No never alone No never alone."

   Like our people, we are busy, we are rushed, and distracted by our gadgets like the one you’re reading this on right now. Jesus, lord of creation and savior of the world, needed, wanted, had to have time alone with God the Father. No wonder the disciples would soon come to him and ask how to get in on his intimate relationship with God: Lord, teach us to pray. I love the way Wendy Farley, in her terrific new book, Beguiled by Beauty, explicates the dimensions of the spiritual life, mercifully allowing for busy people, moms, businesspeople, etc., with little hints like lingering outside when you take out the garbage, or in the shower, whenever you can catch a moment to pray, meditate, reflect.

   No need in the sermon to scold or sound swimmingly pious. I remember learning that John Wesley rose for a couple of hours of prayer before daylight – and found that to be terribly demoralizing or just so remote as to seem irrelevant. {Doesn't he look really tired to you?} How do we invite people into the solitude – which isn’t loneliness at all? There’s fear of failure at spirituality, fear of my deepest self, fear that God isn’t really there, fear that God might be there and might ask something hard from me. Help people navigate why all this is tough.

   Peter had a mother-in-law - so he had a wife too. Notice the evocative line, “The fever left her, and she began to serve them.” Feel the ambiguity: as a woman, she resumed her role, she returned to her “place.” Can we shift the gender and offer the idea that anyone who is healed, or who is touched by Jesus, then quite naturally and even spontaneously begins to serve others? It was in person, face to face. She didn’t drop off the ancient equivalent of some canned goods. She worked with her own hands, and served and shared time with real people. “Better to deliver aid than to send it,” as Wesley the early riser pointed out. Share a story, even from your own parish?

    I’m also intrigued that “they hunted for him.” Poor Jesus, can’t catch a break and get some space! Feels like ministry. Jesus was the consummately “interruptible” one. He doesn’t shush them or tell them to pray like he’s praying. He says Let’s head on to the next town.