What can we say January 31? 4th after Epiphany

    Hard not to pick the Gospel this week. Deuteronomy 18:15-20 expresses a promise of a great prophet to come – not a prediction of Jesus but most certainly a promise Jesus lives into thoroughly. And 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 may work well as an illustration of the kind of evil spirit Jesus silences in Mark 1 (we’ll get back to this idea later) – not to mention that Paul spent time around the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (one of the Wonders of the World), which has gone the way of Ozymandias: a mere one column base left! The temple, with the food Paul mentions, was the bank, the stock market, the trading floor – so there was business costs to commitment to Christ.

   So the Gospel now. Mark 1:21-28. I am drawn to Joel Marcus’s clever way of framing his insight that the demons in Mark’s Gospel “seem to experience a fatal attraction to Jesus,” and St. John Chrysostom’s familiar but compelling appeal on how to win over skeptics: “Let us astound them by our way of life.”

   Tourists flock to the synagogue in Capernaum. Photogenic as it is, what we see is a later synagogue of gleaming white limestone built right on top of the floor of the black basalt synagogue of New Testament times. What a great image: the preacher guides the people in looking beneath the surface of things, and it’s a little bit darker, but more real under there. Jesus is a young man in a hurry in Mark. Everything happens “immediately.” It’s urgent – although in this case, to say Jesus “immediately” entered the synagogue is simple fact. Archaeologists discovered Peter’s house, where Jesus stayed, and it’s literally about a dozen steps from the house to the synagogue! 

   They were “astounded” by his teaching. Not “they nodded in agreement,” but they were astounded. I’ve never astounded people much. If I try to be astounding, they wag a finger in my face and tell me I’m mixing politics and religion – which is easily decipherable code for You said something that doesn’t suit my political ideology! At the Festival of Homiletics a couple of years ago, I preached a sermon on this text – for clergy: “How to be Amazing in the Pulpit.” It’s actually more about us being amazed, as if we’re amazed, astonished, astounded, onlookers might be too. If we aren’t, they won’t be. 

   Hugh Anderson wisely reminds us that “Mark wanted to show that when Jesus taught, things did not stay as they were, but God himself was on the move against all evil forces of the world.” The reason can only be that talk uncovers the hidden reality of spiritual forces, good vs. evil, God vs. the devil. There are ways to speak of this today without implying the devil is a red guy with a pitchfork breathing fire. People are puzzled by politics and society and other people; can’t we see this through the biblical lens that it’s not just one bad decision and then another, or stupidity, but actual vile forces that would undo us all. I used to worry people would think I was crazy if I mention evil forces; but nowadays people nod. It’s really the only thing that makes sense – and gives us hope, since God is steadfastly laboring against those forces, and they surely will be defeated. 

   Almost comically (and Mark is poking gentle fun at the demons), the demons in the guy recognize Jesus – when the pious can’t figure it out! Joel Marcus cleverly points out that it would be smart for the demons to keep a low profile. But they have that “fatal attraction” to Jesus. Jesus must have been attractive, for why else would the fishermen simply drop everything and traipse off after a near total stranger? The demons too find him alluring. 

   Jesus, never as sweet and gentle as we fantasize him being, says to those invisible forces of evil, “Hush!” The Greek, phimotheti, is slang, coarse, sort of cursing, more like “Shut up!” or as Marcus suggests, “Shut your trap!” God always wants silence, right? Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46), Jesus stilling the storm, the quiet Elijah heard after the storm on Mt. Horeb (1 Kings 19). The racket of the world is racket. The noisy rancor of political ideology, the clamor of marketers to get you to buy something, anything. The hollering in your head that you’re no good. Name plenty of loud evil spirits, and in your sermon, embody Jesus saying to them phimotheti! Hush! Shut the hell up! Maybe omit hell.

   I have no real clue how to be an amazing preacher like Jesus. I am amazed by Jesus. And I do wonder how we might be an amazing church. If Jesus was amazing, maybe Jesus now, the body of Christ, Jesus on earth in ecclesiastical form (his only form now), can be amazing, astounding – which is where Chrysostom comes in. Instead of a church where nice people do nice things, or we drop off a few canned goods, which even the pagans do, maybe we astound them. Unsure how that would happen or what it would look like where you are. But raising the question might be astounding enough to open the window. Here’s Chrysostom’s full quote: “Let us astound them by our way of life. This is the unanswerable argument. Though we give 10,000 precepts in words, if we do not exhibit a far better life, we gain nothing. Let us win them by our life.”

   Kathryn Greene-McCreight addresses this well (and from the viewpoint of someone who’s experienced it) in her thoughtful Darkness is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness.  My church has engaged in several series on mental illness/mental health, addictions, etc. – so crucial to end the shame and stigma, so challenging to the Body to embrace people and not expect sunny, simple fixes.

     The whole business of Jesus’ healings in general:  how do we speak of his healings when we don’t see them so often – or ever?  When Jesus healed, was it so the person could get better, or to make some larger point?  Who wasn’t healed back then?  I’d commend this brief video Idid to you as one way to process the healing stories.

    Jesus’ teaching astonished everyone – and why?  “He taught as one who had authority.”  I can’t preach on this without observing how, in postmodern culture, authority isn’t permitted to anybody, unless we listen to the loudest, most shrill, most ideologically extreme voices.  How do we preach with authority? Or better, how do we lift up the authority of the Scriptural story?  My best guess is this thought, via an early sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr., featuring an illustration from mythology (hot again as it happens in the Odyssey movie!!!), which I related in my book on preaching, TheBeauty of the Word:

    The sirens sang seductive songs that lured sailors into shipwreck. Two, though, managed to navigate those treacherous waters successfully, and King contrasted their techniques. Ulysses stuffed wax into the ears of his rowers and strapped himself to the mast of the ship, and by dint of will managed to steer clear of the shoals. But Orpheus, as his ship drew near, simply pulled out his lyre and played a song more beautiful than that of the sirens, so his sailors listened to him instead of to them. Every preacher knows how to declare resolutely that the Bible is inspired, that truth is revealed only in Scripture, and so we strap ourselves to that mast, and try to cram that Word into their ears. But think about Orpheus.  Calmly, deploying some simple artistry, Orpheus trusts the beauty of the song, and he plays. Frankly, if the preacher wants to be “effective,” we have to reckon with the harrowing truth that most Church people nowadays won’t let you stuff anything in their ears. They could care less if you are tied to the mast of all those slogans we fall back on, like “The Bible is the Word of God,” or “The Church is of God,” or whatever we say Baptism or Scriptural Christianity requires. If we are to persuade, if we are to give voice to the mysteries of God, then we must take quite seriously the task of picking up the lyre and playing the song in ways that are lovely, although perhaps in the way a young semi-talented guitar player might woo his lover, the sincerity and courage of the attempt compensating for lack of talent. St. Augustine urged preachers to marshal their rhetoric, “to teach, to delight, and to persuade… When he does this properly he can justly be called eloquent, even though he fails to win the assent of his audience,” although Augustine clearly believed all preachers could teach, delight and persuade. {end of excerpt}

What can we say February 7? The Transfiguration of our Lord

   2 Kings 2:1-12. To me, like so many biblical stories, there’s not a “go thou and do likewise” moment. Just be dazzled by the biblical story, its characters, our spiritual ancestors. Thank God for them. Elisha, although Elijah seems to be trying to get rid of him, won’t leave him alone – maybe like Sam with Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. Frodo, at the end of the 1^st 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!”

   As dogged as Sam, Elisha would not leave Elijah alone, although Elijah tried to shed Elisha like a pesky gnat. Why? Biblical narrative habitually refrains from reporting motivations and feelings. Was he sparing Elisha? Did Elijah simply prefer to die alone? When Jesus, who like Elijah had miraculously fed the hungry and healed dozens and gotten cheeky with the powers that be, said, “I go to prepare a place for you,” did the disciples think of Elijah trudging off to die alone?

   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. The Gospel really is veiled – and that’s not all bad. Paul’s exclamation that “We do not proclaim ourselves” is probably important for clergy to ponder privately and deeply – but do you do this in a sermon?

   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.”

   And he 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... Since we show little videos compiled to make up an online worship service, my wife and I climbed a nearby mountain and shot video of this Scripture reading.

   And speaking of mountains: Lisa Deam, in her wonderful book, 3000 Miles to Jesus, looks at medieval pilgrims and their arduous pilgrimages to Jerusalem as a lens through which to view the spiritual life. She points out that they had to cross the Alps; each one "came face to face with a wall of ice and rock." They made their way to St. Bernard's Pass - which my son and I did, aided by a train and then a bus most of the way... That was daunting, wonderful, exhausting. I can't fathom a lonely mystic like Margery Kempe even attempting this, carrying all her things and terrifyingly isolated, in 1413, having already walked 700 miles.

Imagine the pilgrim battling the elements. No wonder St. Bernard built a hospice at the top (and yes, the dogs are bred there!). Growing in prayer is like surmounting such a mountain pass. As Deam reminds us, "Medieval mystics remark on the challenges of prayer so frequently that it is a wonder any of us attempt this inner journey." 

   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 on Ash Wednesday?

  Ash Wednesday. I always tell myself and fellow clergy that they don’t come for the homily. They come for the ashes. I still love the great reflection Martin Sheen offered when interviewed by Krista Tippett: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m just overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

   I continue to commend some sort of Lenten fast, although it gets watered down into dieting or substituting beer for wine or whatever you gave up. Jesus fasted for his 40 days, and the saints we adore did the same. The location of his fasting: simply harrowing. Lisa and I visited the St. George's monastery that hangs perilously from a cliff overlooking the Wadi Qelt. It's hot, it's steep, and even today they warn you of brigands and carnivorous creatures in the area. 2 hours almost wore us out. Jesus did 2 hours 12 times daily for 40 days.

The "dust" begs for comment, pondering, even brief sermonizing. We're made from it. We'll return to it. On and on... Unsure how it works musically, or if it's sufficiently penitential, but "You Make Beautiful Things" might be worth leaning into.

   I am enjoying and admiring Chris Green's Being Transfigured. He confesses, as we all can, that "my sense of sin is warped / There is nothing more sinful than what we’ve said about sin, and what we’ve done in the name of our hatred of sin." How very "Self-absorbed – and self-negating" our sense of sin can be. "We’re nice but not kind, indulgent not compassionate, permissive not forgiving." Our need isn't to try harder, but a miracle; we need to be released by a divine intervention. 

   I think of my first adult life dog, Abigail, who loved to run in the woods of my rural parish. After she didn't come home one day, I finally found her - enmeshed in some old barbed wire somebody had used as a fence back in the day. The harder she struggled to get out, the more the barbs gashed her skin. I had to urge her to be very, very still, to trust me, so I could extricate her  - and then her wounds required some healing. That's what Lent, and the whole Christian life is like.

  William Placher's terrific Mark commentary cites Alexander Schmemann ("Fasting makes us light, concentrated, sober, joyful, pure"), Macrina Wiederkehr ("Fasting is cleansing. It lays bare our souls. In the Divine Arms we become less demanding and more like the One who holds us. We hunger and thirst for justice, and holiness. We hunger for what is right. What hunger to be saints"), and St. Basil ("Fasting is to refrain from vice"). I'll ponder those for me, whether they worm their way into a sermon or not.

   Isaiah 58 is a great text, although there's this temptation (ha! - it's Lent now!! Even the texts are tempting us!) to say Hey, we do good for the needy, so no need to fast, no need to do without - or even the lame Let's take things on for Lent. So American. 

   Our Psalm, the 51st, one of the church's historic "penitential Psalms," bears the weight of this day and season - although we might quibble with the unforeseen implication that David, having seized Bathsheba (the patron saint of #MeToo?), simply repents and expects cleansing - and we conclude all is well. What's the lesson in the ripple effects and lingering impact of our sin - even forgiven (by God) sin?

   Matthew 6 is perfect yet terribly odd for Ash Wednesday. Jesus tells us not to practice our piety visibly (v. 1), and not to disfigure our faces but to wash them (v. 16) – on the very day we disfigure our faces publicly. Nobody at my place though is showing off, sporting ashes for the rest of the day. If anything, they’ll get some strange stares at the store on the way home.

  When I get home, I try to take some time to linger before a mirror – to ponder that I have just been marked with the horror and hope of Jesus’ cross. No hymn captures so thrillingly the paradox of this horror and hope as Isaac Watts’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” We “survey” the cross. We don’t just glance at it. The soldiers didn’t survey this one. They’d seen plenty of crosses, and had no reason to think this was God. All they saw was a dying, despised person – which was precisely what God was hoping to achieve. More lines in that hymn bear reflection: “Sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Onlookers saw tragedy, maybe justice mingled.

   “Did e’er… thorns compose so rich a crown?” At Elizabeth II’s coronation so long ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury placed St. Edward’s Crown on her head. It was heavy, forged of 22 karat gold, with 444 precious stones, aquamarines, topazes, rubies, amethysts, sapphires. She then knelt to receive the body and blood of our Lord. Did she ponder Jesus’ very different crown, its only ornaments those harsh thorns gashing his forehead, scalp and temples?

   “My richest gain I count but loss.” Lent is the season to reassess what has value, what doesn’t, how much we offer up to God. Do we urge our people to embark on a fast? It’s not dieting. It’s not being glum and feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s solidarity with those who aren’t choosing to fast. It’s weaning ourselves from dependencies on things. It’s an awakening to where our treasure is.

   Where are the “Take the Bible literally!” people when it comes to “Do not lay up treasure on earth”? We prudently save, we check our retirement portfolios, we pay off the house. No use castigating the people, or ourselves. It’s a mark of our brokenness, our desperate need for the true God. The ashes are lie that mark on Cain’s forehead. It’s guilt, and grace.

  And so we invite people into (hopefully) a growing devotion, a loosening of our grip on our treasures, an expansion of God and grace into daily life. Here’s something we did a few years back. At the Baptism of the Lord, we handed out shower tags (we got the idea, and even purchased the tags from Adam Hamilton!), which you hang in the bath: “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 today, and honor you in all that I do.”

   On Ash Wednesday, we picked up on Matthew 6 and handed out closet tags. Jesus said “Go into your closet to pray.” The Greek tameion is an inner room of the house, a storeroom, small, private – reminding us of the need for a dedicated holy space at home. I love this – that if you go into your closet and pray, you are doing God’s will! Picking up on other clothing images in Scripture, here’s how that tag reads: “Jesus said, ‘Go into your closet and pray in secret; and your Father will reward you.’ So pray. Prepare for your day with God. As you dress, remember Romans 14:8, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and Colossians 3:12, ‘Put on compassion, patience, forgiveness, love – and be thankful. Whatever you do, do it in the name of the Lord Jesus.’”

   Two more items while we’re on Matthew 6. Jesus says “When you pray,” not “If you pray” – and he was assuming 3 set times of prayer as was common Jewish practice then and now. When Will Willimon was Dean of Duke Chapel, he told about a Muslim student who asked him, “Why don’t the Christian students ever pray?” He obviously observed the 5 set daily times for prayer in Islam, and was puzzled that he never ever saw Christians stopping to pray. It’s a judgment call whether you can mention this to your people. I think it’s compelling, and inviting – but some folks have such potent, irrational anti-Muslim feelings that they’ll shut down on you.

   And then Jesus talks about “reward,” shunning earthly reward, but implying quite clearly there are rewards, ultimate rewards to the life of faith. I for one downplay this, remembering a very smart college student who asked me if he could become a Christian if he didn’t believe in eternal life. His angle was he wanted to follow Jesus just because it was good, right, noble and true, not to secure any prize for himself. I admire that – but quite clearly the Gospels and Epistles lay out for us fabulous, unspeakably fantastic rewards, or ultimate realities, for those who believe.

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   Check out my newest book, The Heart of the Psalms - which (as we head toward Lent!) would be good preacher reading, good preach-ee reading, and also good for groups; Abingdon has a leader guide and a video accompaniment to this! It has a whole chapter devoted to Psalm 51 - pretty important for Ash Wednesday!!

 ** Check out my new podcast, Maybe I'm Amazed - amazing conversations with amazing people who've done amazing things! Recent guests: Kate Bowler, David Wilkinson, Lillian Daniel, Chris Green - and earlier in the series, Civil Rights hero Dorothy Counts Scoggins, UNC basketball coach Roy Williams, 7 time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson, Walter Brueggemann, Amy-Jill Levine, and more!

What can we say February 14? Lent 1

Lent 1 is Valentine's Day! So romantic. Not hard thought to play on how God's love is given and received, and how it grows through the seasons. There's pain, promise, sacrifice, forgiveness, mercy, sin, daunting challenges.

    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 21? 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 28? 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…

   You have to judge if you have enough earned capital with your people to speak of the politicization of the commandments in our culture. I'm baffled that people really think if they're posted in classrooms or in public places, would-be killers would think Oh, wait, that poster in my 4th grade class told me not to kill! I'll just go home now. Then there's this funny but telling episode: When Roy Moore was elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he paid a gravestone company to produce a stone monument with the Ten Commandments, and had it placed in the lobby of the Judicial Building in Montgomery. The courts ruled this to be unconstitutional. As it was being removed, a protester screamed “Get your hands off my God!” Randall Balmer’s wry comment? “Unless I miss my guess, one of the commandments etched into the side of that monument said something about graven images.”

   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.”