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 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.

What can we say January 14? 2nd after Epiphany

    1 Samuel 3:1-20. I’ve been trying to name out loud (out louder?) that children figure so prominently in Scripture – and when it happens, to dare to suggest God might be calling one of our children in our church, right now, today, into something amazing for God. When we gave Bibles to 3^rd graders in worship, I looked at them long and hard and asked this question. Some were being silly, some squirmed, but a handful looked me in the eye, deeply, as if wondering.

   The lovely vignette in 1 Samuel 3:1-20 must delight the naturally spiritual while baffling cynics. If someone says I heard God speak to me, I tend to think he’s hearing his own hunches or preferred stirrings. How does anyone hear God in 2024? We should recall that Samuel was in the temple – all the time. Prayers, sacrifices, the retelling of Israel’s old stories: these were constants for him. For us, the more deeply we are absorbed in liturgy, daily prayers, weighing Scripture, and conversation with wise people (Samuel did have Eli to test what he heard), the more we hear God, however indirectly.

   Israel was in a mess. Eli was getting too old to lead (his loss of vision is what happens to the elderly but also symbolic of the people’s inability to see the things of God), and his sons were wicked. How weirdly encouraging is it that the Bible so often narrates parents with children who have utterly lost their way?

   “The word was rare in those days” – because the Lord was quiet? Or because no one was listening? Does this sound like our days? But “the lamp had not gone out” – so clever, as it’s a lamp, but it’s also theological! God does speak: “I am about to do a thing at which the 2 ears of everyone that hears it will tingle.” The preacher has to play on this business - and even dare to dream that God will do a new ear-tingling thing even in our day.

   As Barbara Brown Taylor explains so eloquently in When God is Silent, prayer should be less “Lord, hear our prayers,” and more “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” Through all those disciplines the church offers, we may begin to hear – but the ears will tingle. God won’t speak conventional wisdom, and God won’t pander to our preferences. Thomas Merton was right about why we don’t hear or have a vibrant spiritual life: “Much of our coldness and dryness in prayer may well be a kind of unconscious defense against grace.”

   What does grace feel like? Marianne Williamson suggested that “When you ask God into your life, you think God is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see you just need a new floor or better furniture, that everything needs just a little cleaning – and so you go along thinking how nice life is that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and you see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out your foundation is shot, and that you’re going to have to start building it over from scratch.” For Israel, the building of the whole nation is collapsing and needs radical reconstruction – which may sound like our nation and world…

   1 Corinthians 6:12-20. What if everybody got a tattoo that said Temple of the Holy Spirit? What could be more counter-cultural, more redemptive, more hopeful than our learning to see our bodies, not as too fat, too skinny, too saggy, too ailing – and other bodies as too fit, too gorgeous, too healthy, and thus too shaming of us, or of others, and instead saw my body, yours, his, hers as the Temple God has built for God’s dwelling on earth?

   And this: what word could speak more directly into the sickness of the modern soul than his idea that “lawful thing” are not necessarily “helpful.” Without castigating hapless people, the preacher needs to expose the common ethic in which we don’t break laws, or if we stretch them we try not to get caught. I’m a pretty good person because I don’t steal or cheat on my spouse, I pay my bills, I’m nice sometimes to my neighbors.  

   Isn’t mere legality not only an exceedingly low bar, but might even be alien to God’s will? As it’s the Martin Luther King weekend, we have ready at hand examples of Christians acting quite legally and yet immorally and in unholy ways - which led to a holy, vigorously church-based civil disobedience.  I'll poke around and find a King story or two.

   How counter-cultural is all this?  “You are not your own, but the Lord’s.”  All political rhetoric makes you master of your body, your self, your life, telling you what you deserve, what’s in it for you; but Paul is all about that you belong to God – which isn’t a burden or threat, but the most liberating news imaginable! "Rights talk" dominates our chatter and Americanism - but in the Bible it's not the rights that you have but God's rights, although if you stick up for someone who's been denied their rights, that's theologically sound, although we might call it working for justice.

    “I will not be enslaved by anything.” We are enslaved by a great many things. Samples provided in your sermon! - but invite folks to fill in their own blanks. It is slavery. Nancy Reagan simplistically told potential drug users “Just say no” – but anything to which you can easily “just say no” isn’t something you crave or would undo you. Our freedom is an illusion. We are in bondage to sin, self, and habit until God liberates us, sets us free by the miracle only the Holy Spirit can work. And then, we aren’t “free” as in I’ll do what I wish now! but rather we are free for servanthood, dogged obedience to God. 

   John 1:43-51. Another lovely scene. Paint it vividly – including the height of the sun, the sharp shadows. Jesus finds Philip. Good find! Were you nosing out talent? Whoever looked underutilized or a bit bored? Jesus found Philip, then Philip found Nathanael. One of the ways God finds people is through God’s people – although notice Philip claims to have done the finding himself: “We have found him.”

   Jesus finds not one, not even two, but four, and eventually more. He doesn’t seem interested in solo spirituality. We believe to find ourselves in Jesus’ community, together. We need one another. We need friends. These men probably were friends prior to Jesus materializing. They certainly knew Zebedee and his sons, James and John. All from the same small hometown, Bethsaida.

   Archaeologists can’t quite agree on where it was, but it’s fascinating to visit Et-Tell, where some of the houses excavated have fishing looks lying on the floor. A real place, with real people. The uncertainty is cool, too. Bethsaida might be here, or there, or anywhere. Found disciples, too. When Caravaggio was painting “the Call of St. Matthew,” he went into the street and found some hapless guys not doing much and pressed them into duty. We see their faces even today – not seeking God or a place at the table, but boom: there they are. Bethsaida might just be where you are now.

   “Come and see.” That’s the witness, right? Not a sledgehammer of truth, but an experience that makes you sure that if somebody else simply saw, it would be enough. Our calling is always to Come and See. We don’t ponder anybody at a distance. I often say if you only hang around with people like yourself, you become arrogant and ignorant. We go to others, to those not really expecting us. And we find Jesus, and ourselves, there. This is the premise of my new book, Everywhere is Jerusalem, coming out soon. You get up, off the couch, out of the church building, and you go somewhere different, riskier, unfamiliar – and there you hear a very different and richer call.

   A rich donor was visiting Calcutta and met Mother Teresa. She pulled out her checkbook and said How can I help you in your work? Mother Teresa pressed the checkbook back into the woman’s purse, took her by the hand and said “Come and see.” She led the woman into an impoverished barrio, and found a hungry, frail child. “Care for her.” The woman took the child in her lap, wiped her brow, fed her. Transformative. Mother Teresa was right when she said When we care for a child, we are caring for Jesus. When we love the unloved, we are loving Jesus.

  I just adore the exchange: “How did you know me?” “I saw you under the fig tree.” Lots of fig business to come in Scripture… but for now: I saw you. I noticed. More than a glance. Really watching, perceiving. So much in John is about seeing, and being seen, not rushed, looking closely, beneath the surface.

   Jesus’ clinching words intrigue: “You will see heaven opened, and angels ascending and descending.” Can we sing “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” in worship? Check out what I wrote on this hymn, including on this text, in my Unrevealed Until Its Season! {which is designed as a Lenten study} In Genesis 28, Jacob wasn’t praying or seeking God. He was on the run, anxious, exhausted, trying to sleep with a rock for his pillow. He dreams of traffic between heaven and earth, and when he wakes up, stunned, he says “Surely the Lord was in this place but I did not know it.” Maybe Nathanael and Philip thought the same thing. This is the spiritual life: not eyes closed in prayer, Bible open, kneeling at the altar or singing a hymn. It’s being out and about – and God was and is there, although you might realize it only in retrospect.

What can we say January 7? 1st after Epiphany? Baptism of our Lord?

   If you are a lectionary preacher and a tracker of the Christian year, you wonder:  should we mark Sunday, January 7 as Epiphany (or first after…)? Or as the Baptism of the Lord?  Most likely, I will somewhere in my sermon mention that yesterday (Saturday the 6^th) was Epiphany…  but then my focus will be Mark 1:4-11, the Baptism of our Lord – and our congregation’s renewal of Baptism to kick off the year.  

  The Matthew 2:1-12 text: So many corny options – like “wise men still follow him.”  I’m fond of Amahl & the Night Visitors, and various other pageant settings… although nobody sees them in early January.  

   The 2^nd Sunday of Christmas text, John 1, adores the “light that shines in the darkness.” Isaiah envisions a great gathering of the nations (not just our neighborhood!) – and in my blog 2 years ago I suggested the feel might be (corny as it seems) kin to the dramatic ending to “Field of Dreams” – or visually, John August Swanson’s “Festival of Lights.”

   Of course, the magi arrive. Not as in “wise men still follow him,” but astrologers! – an art, an alchemy condemned in Judaism and Christianity! Yet, so eager is the Christchild to be found, and by everybody, that these deluded ones find their way to Bethlehem, and the Scripture, Bible-is-Clear! people miss out. He’s a Capricorn? 

   What astral phenomenon did the magi see? Halley’s comet? A supernova? Check out the great scene (view here! – trust me, 3 minutes well-spent!) in Pasolini’s Italian film, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” where the magi show up in the daytime, and have silent, tender interactions with Mary and her baby.

   It’s a tad irreverent, but the bawdy scene in The Life of Brian when the magi show up at the wrong house might help us see that there’s some sarcastic humor tucked inside this text. Or maybe Owen Meany’s remark while singing the gory 4^th stanza of “We Three Kings”: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying? Doesn’t sound very Christmasy to me.”

   There is a hilarity in Matthew 2 we easily miss: these guys are astrologers – a pseudo-science, a “fake religion” not just today but back in Bible times!  And yet God uses their bogus discernment to lead them to the Christ child, while Herod and his henchmen, well-versed in Scripture, are left clueless.  I think of that line in The Shack: Mack asks Jesus, “Do all roads lead to you?” He replies, “Not at all. Most roads don’t lead anywhere” – and then adds “I will travel any road to find you.”  Even bad, false religion?  You have to love Matthew’s (and God’s) good humor here.

   And just as The Shack begins with the murder of a young girl, the cutesy magi story segues into the brutal slaughter of innocent boys in and around Bethlehem.  From the outset, proximity to Jesus is perilous – light years from the kind of piety that presumes God’s job is to keep us safe.  It’s a cosmic battle that’s been launched, with the forces of evil already in knee-jerk, violent recoil to God’s incarnate invasion of what the evil one counted as his stronghold.  The preacher is wise to understand and dare to articulate the larger theological stakes in this story – and in the long history of violent reprisals to the good even into our own day.  Reni's "Slaughter of the Innocents" captures a bit of the horror that we continue to experience too regularly in our world. This is why the Baptism of our Lord matters.  

   Mark 1 depicts Jesus arriving on a hostile scene, being baptized, and then striding into a wilderness to do battle with beasts.  Baptism isn’t this nice rite of passage, featuring lovely gowns and photos for Facebook.  A line is drawn in the sand (or a massive wave is stirred up in the water), a taking of sides in a cosmic battle.  Alexander Schmemann reminds us of the historic act of exorcism in Baptism, and why it matters more than ever: “The exorcisms mean this: to face evil, to acknowledge its reality, to know its power, and to proclaim the power of God to destroy it… The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ’s until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often ‘sell’ Christianity today!”

    In one way, we are baptized like Jesus – but in another way, we merely watch and are awed by what we could never manage.  Karl Barth (in the skinny volume of Church Dogmatics, IV.4, published not long before he died) shrewdly suggested that “Jesus was not being theatrical.  When Jesus was baptized, he needed to be washed of sin -- not his sin, but our sin.  When faced by the sins of all others, he did not let these sins be theirs, but as the Son of His Father, ordained form all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He.”

    If you have a joyful, hopeful baptism story, it’s worth telling. I baptized a 45 year old man shortly before he died from pancreatic cancer – in his home, as he’d grown progressively fragile and unable to move about.  Three months earlier we’d started meeting, praying, sharing what Christianity was all about. When I reached out and applied water to his forehead, he bolted a bit and began to shake, and then weep.  After a couple of minutes, he looked at me, smiled, and said “I feel lighter.”  And I’ve been able to take quite a few people to the Jordan River for quite moving baptisms and renewals.

     I love the painting of Jesus’ baptism in the St. John’s Bible – which we might rent or buy for our bulletin cover on January 7.  Of course, we have the unforgettable scene in O Brother, Where Art Thou – which is kooky, but has the lovely “Down to the River to Pray,” sung by Alison Krauss, which I hope my choir or a soloist will reprise.  We have much water/Baptism music on the more classical side, including Aaron Copland’s “Shall We Gather at the River.”  I plan to re-read Flannery O’Connor’s great short story, “The River” – another ominous, hauntingly tragic read of what it means to go down to the waters of baptism.  A young boy, Harry, hears a preacher, named Bevel, who’s baptizing people in a stream, say “Leave your pain in the river.”  The boy has much pain indeed, and the story ends tragically.  Well worth the preacher’s time to ponder – even if it’s not used in the sermon!  We need to experience, know and feel more than we tell.

   If you want illustrative material, it would be hard to top that very sorrowful moment in The Secret Life of Bees, which tells us about twin sisters who were “like one soul sharing two bodies.  If April got a toothache, May’s gum would plump up red and swollen.”  After April’s death, “it seemed like the world itself became May’s twin sister.”  Any word of anyone suffering struck agony into May’s heart.  All her family could do was to build a “wailing wall” in the back yard; May would write down the hurts of the world and people she knew on scraps of paper and press them into the wall.  But over time she could bear it all no longer, and simply walked into the stream below their house and drowned – to the elegiac singing of “Song for Mia” by Lizz Wright.  Moves me every time.

     I’m not sure I would have preached on Mark 1 in such a way twenty years ago.  But I think these sad moments of solidarity with those who suffer cut to the heart of what Mark’s Gospel is trying to tell us about Jesus’ opening salvo in his mission to defeat evil.  The Old Testament for January 7 undergirds this line of thought.  In creation, in the teeth of chaos (“without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep”), God let light come to be – and the waters of the firmament as well.  There’s hope in the darkness, and in the pain.  The Gospel begins there – in the dark, when the earth and your soul are without form and void, in the brokenness, or not at all.

   On the somewhat lighter side, I do plan to explore potential connections between the water of Baptism and all the water we encounter in our daily lives – which occupies a whole chapter in my book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week.  One year on this very Sunday, we gave our people these shower tags (which originated with Adam Hamilton at the Church of the Resurrection) – so every shower or bath is a reminder of baptism and a prayer: “Lord, as I enter the water to bathe, I remember my baptism. Wash me by your grace, fill me with your Spirit, renew my soul. I pray that I might live as your child this day, and honor you in all that I do.”  Any time we drink, or rinse our hands, or see a stream, or clouds – can we think of the life-giving waters of Baptism?