Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

  • John the Baptist–the holy homemaker

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 40

    John the Baptist – The Holy Homemaker

    Mark 1:1-8

    Shannon Johnson Kershner

    Black Mountain Presbyterian Church, Black Mountain, NC

    As you know, I am not a preacher who enjoys putting titles with my sermons. I have, of course, several reasons as to my distaste for sermon titles. First, I don’t like cutesy little things that make the powerfully good and often challenging message of the Gospel sound all cuddly and saccharine. Second, I don’t like to tell you what you are supposed to hear as the sermon is preached. When you and I are in the preaching moment and open to God’s Spirit, then only God knows what you might hear. Even though I am the only one talking, you and I are collaborating with the Spirit as to what will happen with these words between my mouth and our ears. And, finally, I must admit that the last reason is that I usually don’t know on Tuesday, the bulletin deadline, exactly what I am going to write on Friday morning when the sermon takes shape. “John the Baptist—the Holy Homemaker.” I know! It breaks all of my rules. It is kind of cutesy. It tells you what you are to listen for. And, it definitely makes me focus on one particular aspect of a very rich and theologically complex text. And yet, I also suspect that none of you has ever attached those words – the Holy Homemaker – to John the Baptist before. I mean, really. Look at him! He is standing right over here on the mantle behind our Lord’s Table.1 Okay – so it is really our Joseph figure that we dress like John the Baptist—but you still get my point. He does not look like one who would do a good job of making a house feel like a home, does he. He does not appear to have hospitality as one of his spiritual gifts. Listen again to Mark’s description. “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” John the Baptist is dressed in the clothing of Elijah the prophet, not June Cleaver. Fred Buechner describes John this way: “John the Baptist didn’t fool around. He lived in the wilderness around the Dead Sea. He subsisted on a starvation diet, and so did his disciples. He wore clothes that even the rummage sale people wouldn’t have handled. When he preached, it was fire and brimstone every time.”2 The image of John the Baptist that Mark paints, as well as Luke, and on which Buechner reflects, is an image of a stark, wild-man street preacher, bellowing out messages to be baptized. Bellowing out calls for repentance. Bellowing out that the powerful one— the one wearing the sandals John was not even fit to untie— that one was on the way, so you better be ready. John the Baptist has been called the Rottweiler for the Gospel because he sinks his teeth into us, shakes our souls around, and will not let us go. Again – the title “homemaker” does NOT seem to fit very well with this John the Baptist character. And yet, John is calling us to prepare our home in order to be ready for the arrival of our Messiah. Allow me to clarify a bit: John is not calling on us to prepare our literal homes, of course; but rather, John is calling us to prepare the homes of our hearts. The ancient theologian Tertullian stated it this way: “John called us to

    Page 41

    purge our minds of whatever impurity error had imparted, whatever contamination ignorance had engendered, which repentance would sweep and scour away, and cast out. So prepare the home of your heart by making it clean for the Holy Spirit.”3 With his startling dress of camel’s hair, his desolate landscape of wilderness, and his bareboned sermons of baptism and repentance, John the Baptist, the holy homemaker, is calling us to prepare the homes of our hearts so we might be ready when our Savior looks for a place to be born and to lodge. Many of us have already started getting our literal homes ready for the arrival of Christmas. We’ve cleaned up the Thanksgiving decorations and put them away. We’ve maybe rearranged and done a little organizing so we could make room for all of the Christmas things that we needed to pull down out of the attic or retrieve from the top of closets. Perhaps we’ve moved furniture and set up the tree, taking several hours as we tried to get the lights to work, hanging all the ornaments that hold such memories. We ‘ ve put the wreaths on the door, placed the nativity scene on the mantle, and inflated the Santa on the lawn. Some of us have spent hours trying to set up our outdoor lights, wondering why, once again, we waited until it was cold and windy to begin this task. We know how to do this—to get things ready to celebrate Jesus’ birth. Every single year many of us, if not most of us, spend a lot of time cleaning, rearranging, and setting things up, even if we are not hosting a Christmas party. Thanksgiving passes, the Christmas CDs start to play, and we thank God for Advent time and the occasion to get our homes ready for the celebration of Christmas. And there is nothing wrong with any of that. My family began the process this past Friday evening. But John is asking us another question of preparation this day. He is challenging us to spend that same kind of time preparing the home of our hearts for the celebration of Christmas. Can you imagine what might happen if we spent even a fraction of that same kind of preparation time on our hearts? Just imagine daily using the spiritual discipline of confession to sweep your heart clean of the cobwebs of hate or gossip. Imagine engaging in regular Christian service to scrub into its deep crevices of greed and envy. Imagine reading Scripture in the morning, at the noon hour, and right before sleep so you could take down the pictures of fear and apathy in order to make some new space on your heart’s walls. Just imagine what might happen if we spent the same kind of time on our hearts as we do on our homes. Just imagine what might happen if we took seriously John’s call to prepare the home of our hearts for the celebration of Christmas, to get our soul all ready as our Savior looks once again for a place to be born and to lodge. And those are just a few household cleaning tips we could employ. Of course John, as the Holy Homemaker, has his own cleaning suggestions for our Advent cleaning spree. He strongly suggests we use the powerful tool of repentance in order to sweep, scour, and cast out all that keeps us from being ready for Jesus’ arrival. “Repent,” John preaches. “Turn around. Change direction. Do it now.” That is John’s bare-bones Advent sermon. Now, I fully realize that just as “John the Baptist” and “Homemaker” make awkward cohorts, so too do the phrases “Christmas cheer” and “Repent!” Gary Charles, pastor of Central Presbyterian in Atlanta, claims that the English word repent is a crippled word. It is a tired, old church word that limps around most churches today, handicapped by misuse and overuse. It has been pushed out to the church’s theologi-

    Page 42

    cal edge where it still retains its traditional hard and severe sound, posing its ominous threat at impending judgmental doom. And yet, Charles claims, in the gospel of Mark, in these words from wild-man, street-preacher John, “metanoeite (the Greek word for repent) is actually an imperative invitation. It is an invitation to turn from your past ways of being and living to a future made possible by the grace of God. It is an invitation that means that we are not stuck forever living in ways that knock the breath out of us. With God on the loose in the person of Jesus, we can find a new way to live that is literally a breath of fresh air.”4 When wild-man John preaches for us to repent, he does so as one who trusts that new life in God is not only possible, but is imminently on its way in Jesus our Christ. “Repent,” John preaches. Look at where you have been. Look at who you have been. And be honest about it. But, as you do so, beware of making even your act of repentance an idol. Don’t make your sinfulness some kind of strange spiritual badge of honor by getting stuck back in the grime of regret or guilt or brokenness. Look back, be honest, confess, but then, do something about it. Repent. Turn around. Change direction. Trust in a future made possible not by who you are, but by who God is, shown most clearly in the one for whom we are getting ready. Trust that God’s goodness is much more powerful than your badness. Repent, turn, prepare the home of your heart, so that you might be ready for the new thing that God is already doing in this world through Jesus. For that is the whole point, isn’t it? The whole reason we are cleaning out and preparing our hearts is to make some space for God’s audacious arrival into our history, into our world, as Jesus, baby Emmanuel, God-with-us, God-for-us. To make some space in our lives so we might once again be grasped by those baby Savior hands, so we might once again look into that manger on Christmas Eve and be absolutely overwhelmed by awe and by humility that our God loves this world so much that God chose to come among us as one of the least of these—a poor, peasant, Jewish baby. God chose to empty God’s self of power. God chose to empty God’s self of might. God chose to empty God’s self of grandeur. God chose to empty God’s self of distance. God chose to show us in flesh and in blood God’s love for us, as well as God’s desire for our lives, for the life of this world, a desire that we might follow in Jesus’ footsteps and learn how to fully live and how to fully love as children of God. This Advent season, we are invited to take the cleaning tools of prayer, of confession , of service, of study, and of continual repentance, and use them to sweep out the mess of all that keeps us from living the good news of God’s claim on our lives, the good news of God’s claim on our world. This Advent season, we are invited to spend time not just preparing our homes for the celebration of Christ’s birth, but even more importantly, to spend serious time preparing our hearts for that celebration, as well. To get our soul ready as Christ once again looks for a place to be born and to lodge. John the Baptist—the Holy Homemaker. Perhaps it isn’t such an odd title.

    Notes 1. It was my congregation’s tradition to bring out the nativity characters one by one and slowly build the scene throughout the season of Advent. On this particular day, since we did not have a John the Baptist character, we dressed up Joseph in some burlap and had him stand in for the prophet.

    Page 43

    2. Fred Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who, (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 69. 3. Shared in a paper by Rev. Chris Tuttle, “Member of The Well,” pastor of Westminsster Presbyterian in Durham, NC. 4. Gary Charles and Brian Blount, Preaching Mark in Two Voices, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 37.

  • Preaching through Eastertide, year A

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 3

    Preaching Through Eastertide, Year A

    Marilyn Turner Hedgpeth

    First Presbyterian Church, Durham, North Carolina

    The texts for Eastertide break the lengthy darkness of Lent with piercing brightness and a breath of approaching Pentecost. They include a conflation of the Gospels of Matthew and John; narratives from the early church in Acts, and early sermons by first-up preachers, Peter and Paul; letter fragments from 1 Peter; and a weekly Psalm. The earliest kerygmatic proclamations are found in numerous places throughout Eastertide, beginning with the shortest, “My Lord, and my God,” uttered by Thomas on Easter evening (John 20: 28), followed by the lengthier affirmations attributed to Peter in Acts 2 and Paul in Acts 17. A study of these might make an interesting series, as would, perhaps, a highlighting of the Pentecost leanings of all the Easter texts, beginning with Jesus imparting the gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples as early as resurrection evening. But what I want to focus on in this article are the bold images that jump out of some of the texts and beg for notice. As the Apostle Paul cites poetry in his speech to the citizens of Aeropagus, “As some of your own poets have said…”(Acts 17: 31), I also will cite some modern poetic phrases in connection to these biblical images, in hopes of sparking imaginations and opening eyes in new ways to the revelation of the risen Lord. The texts for Easter 1 begin with the empty tomb narratives from Matthew 28: 1-10 and from John 20:1-18. In Matthew, the account is cosmic and dramatic, with intimations of worlds colliding as heaven breaks into and upsets earth’s order of life and death, beginning with a violent Haitian-like or Chilean-like earthquake. And the angel of the Lord sits perched upon the stone of death in brilliant luminosity as dawn rolls in, and the women grope their way towards the tomb. I’m drawn to the image of the angel sitting on that tombstone and the victory implied by his posture. The stone blocking the tomb was meant to signify the end, death, the snuffing out of yet another prophetic witness. But the stone rolled back with the angel sitting on it now becomes a visible sign of an invisible grace: the story is not over, Jesus is risen, death is not final, God has triumphed. The mention of the stone will repeat again in Psalm 118: 22, where the rejected stone becomes the exalted stone; the death stone, the victory stone; the plugging-in stone, the topping-out stone. John Updike in his poem “Seven Stanzas At Easter” says,

    The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day. And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.”1

    Page 4

    Likewise, the image of the two women clasping the feet of the risen Jesus in a posture of worship (Matthew 28:9) is equally powerful and suggestive of Jesus’ true physicality or of our human tendency to cling to old ways, even in the face of brilliant transformation. Of course we have no witness as to how Jesus was transformed from his Good Friday body to his Easter body, but Mary Karr paints an interesting picture in a poem called “Descending Theology: The Resurrection,” where she supposes,

    From the far star points of his pinned extremities, cold inched in – black ice and squid ink – until the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet, the human stare buried in his face. He ached for two hands made of meat he could reach to the end of. In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chest door, and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, revering every way.”2

    Acts 10: 34-43, Peter’s interpretation of the Jesus event, is a great segue to the Lord’s Table with his statement, “He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen – by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10: 41). To be chosen by God to see the risen Jesus as we partake of bread and cup is a true Easter blessing. On Easter 2, it is still Easter Sunday, with a narrative from evening of that same third day where John’s Gospel peers in on the disciples fearfully huddled behind locked doors (John 20:19). Shel Silverstein in Where The Sidewalk Ends uses a children’s poem to speak of this primal fear that can paralyze even the most faithful believer, called “I Won’t Hatch”:

    “Oh I am a chickie who lives in an egg, But I will not hatch, I will not hatch. The hens they all cackle, the roosters all beg, But I will not hatch, I will not hatch. For I hear all the talk of pollution and war As the people all shout and the airplanes roar, So I’m staying in here where it’s safe and it’s warm, And I WILL NOT HATCH!”3

    Even with the presence of Jesus himself, even with the gift of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus breathes upon them/us, sometimes the church is reluctant to hatch. Have we hatched yet? The statement that “he breathed on them” (John 20:22) is a sneak preview of Pentecost, six weeks before the main event. The imagery of the fearful disciples huddled together can be linked to Psalm 16, a psalm of security, where Robert

    Page 5

    Alter translates v. 1 to read, “Guard me, O God, for I shelter in You.”4 To go from sheltering in fear to fearlessly sheltering in God is a bold affirmation of trust. Other phrases in the psalm convey comfort to the fearful: “Always before me” (v.8), “my whole body abides secure” (v.9), You will not forsake my life”(v.lO), “joy overflows in Your presence” (v. 11 ). The passage from Acts is another kerygmatic proclamation by Peter, interpreting the Jesus event as a fulfillment of Psalm 16. It further links the gift of the Holy Spirit breathed upon the disciples to the “pouring out” of the Holy Spirit upon all believers at Pentecost. Peter speaks again in 1 Peter 1:3-9, and the interesting thought there comes from v. 8, “Though you have not seen him.” Peter was blessed to have seen Jesus both before and after the resurrection. Others, not so blessed, still believe and are filled with faith, love, and inexpressible and glorious joy. Easter 3 is yet another third-day event from Luke 24:13-35. The journey motif, prominent throughout Luke, is strongly conveyed here in vv. 15,17,28,29,32, and 33. The two disciples are journeying away from Jerusalem and the events thereof, when “Jesus himself comes and journeys along with them. Does “Jesus himself,” refer to Jesus’ physical presence, in the flesh, the real thing in resurrected form? A sermon could be about discipleship as a journey away from Jesus, alongside Jesus, and for Jesus, as the story suggests. An interesting turning point in the journey for Cleopas and companion occurs at table, where their eyes are opened and their hearts burn within (v. 30-32). In showing hospitality to a stranger, practicing philoxenia, their journey of discipleship out from Jerusalem makes a u-turn and is transformed with a renewed sense of purpose. Poet Wendell Berry says, “We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see/Ahead, but looking back the very light/That blinded us shows us the way we came/Along which blessings now appear, risen/As if from sightlessness to sight, and we /By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward/That blessed light that yet to us is dark” (Sabbaths 1999, VI). Psalm 116 reiterates the journey motif with another u-turn, this time with the supplicant heading for the straits of Sheol (v. 3), plunging down (v. 6), but making an about-face after calling upon the name of the Lord. The Lord inclines his ear, hears, and responds in mercy, and rescues in triplicate by freeing the supplicant from death, his/her eyes from tears, and his/her foot from slipping (v. 8). Thus the journey can take a new turn as the psalmist lifts the “cup of rescue” (v. 13) as if toasting God, with a re-dedication of life to the Lord (v. 14 and 18), with a re-commitment to faithfulness, even if it results in loss of life (v. 15), and with thanksgiving and praise. Peter speaks in the passages from 1 Peter and from Acts, encouraging disciples to live their lives as strangers and sojourners, as people socially dislocated because of their reverent fear of the Lord. (1 Peter 1: 17). My husband and I often have chastised ourselves for raising our children to be gentle beings in a not so gentle world, thinking that we have failed, perhaps, to prepare them adequately for life. But this sense of dislocation could be further stretched in Peter’s account of the journey of discipleship to include living as redeemed people in a not-yet redeemed world; as fulfilled people in an empty-way-of-living world; as precious blood people in a silver and gold world; as grateful people in an ungrateful world where the sacrifice of the innocent Christ-Lamb means little. Even so, Peter calls for believers to extend themselves in “Philadelphia” (brotherly love) that is unfeigned, heartfelt, and earnest. The Acts 2 passage is a continuation of Peter’s Pentecost proclamation, culminating

    Page 6

    in the terse kerygma of Jesus as “both Lord and Christ” (v. 36). Upon hearing his entire profession of faith, the listeners are “cut to the heart” (v. 37), or their hearts were stung, as the Greek suggests, making a link to the other Lucan passage from the Emmaus narrative where the disciples’ hearts burn within them as Jesus talks and opens Scripture to them (Luke 24: 32). Truth hurts, it seems, and cuts straight to the heart; and even good news, the best news, brings an awareness of sin and prompts a call to repentance. But the promise of the Holy Spirit is just a call away, for all strangers. Easter 4-7 bring speeches from Jesus from John’s Gospel about his identity and purpose. “I am the door (or gate),” Jesus claims twice in John 10: 1-10, the access for anyone (v. 9) to salvation and to abundant life. It would be interesting to preach about Jesus as the door, especially if you live in an urban culture where gates and pastures are not so prevalent and where many of our churches now must lock our doors to keep out “thieves and robbers.” What does Jesus, the door, say about our sense of hospitality? What happened on that church door in Wittenburg, Germany in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses there? What about immigration issues? I am reminded of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus,” engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, claiming that America is “the golden door” of “world-wide welcome.”5 It might be interesting to compare what lies behind Door #1 and Door #2, as Christian culture clashes with popular culture. Psalm 23, of course, employs the shepherd/sheep imagery, where The Lord leads the sheep to green meadows, grass and water, food and drink, sleep and safety: the essentials from Maslow’s heirarchy of human needs. But the Lord also provides for higher needs, such as righteousness, forgiveness, love, and belonging. The terse statement of v. 4, “I fear no harm,” after a lengthy rationale as to why fear might well be in order, is a climatic affirmation of trust. Can you hear that same terse affirmation in the Martin Luther King, Jr. speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the day before his assassination, where he also recited a lengthy rationale as to why fear might well be in order? But instead, he boldly says, “I’m not fearing any man Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” The passage from Acts 2:42-47 depicts the norms of early church life in an ideal scenario. The bar has been set high for this inner shepherding of believers who share a bond of responsibility for one another by their common assent to the Gospel. Life is positive and joyful, as they are “continuing steadfastly” to be of one mind, to share food and possessions, to be glad, to live simply, to praise God, and to attract positive attention from all. These are the happy sheep, until the Stephen (Acts 7) incident shatters their shalom. What if the Christian life does not attract favor and positive attention from all? The reading from 1 Peter 2: 19-25 ventures into the territory of victimization by discrimination and persecution, reminding believers that public favor is not their goal, but rather God’s favor. And God’s favor is earned by suffering for God, as Christ once suffered, leaving behind an example for all of his followers. Wendell Berry gives us this insight: “I dream of a quiet man/who explains nothing and defends/nothing, but only knows/where the rarest wildflowers are in bloom, and who goes /and finds that he is smiling/not by his own will.” (Sabbaths 1999, II). Peter breaks into song, perhaps an ancient hymn based upon the servant song of Isaiah 53: 4-12, where the Shepherd Lord of their souls is bruised for their cure and dies for their sins.

    Page 7

    John 14: 1-14, the Gospel reading for Easter 5, conveys Jesus’ words of comfort to believers in preparation for his absence from them. The “I am” language is strong, and we could almost add “I am the place” to Jesus’ other “I am” statements from John, including “I am the way, the truth and the life” in v. 6. Twice Jesus states, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me/’leaving little room to doubt that Jesus and God are one, as are their words and the works of their believers. If I wanted to preach a pastoral sermon, this might be the Sunday to do it, using Jesus’ affirmations to assure those who have lost a loved one recently, or who are doubtful about the future. Jesus uses three commands and a series of promises to bolster the faithful and to give firm guidance to the Thomas-like, “Believe in God” (v. 1); “Believe me (Jesus)” (v. 11); and “Continue believing in me” (v.l). Moreover, twice as many promises abound for the trusting: for Jesus’ return, for Jesus to take believers with him, for knowing the Father, for seeing the Father, for doing works like Jesus – but greater, and for answering any prayer made in Jesus’ name. “Whatever happens/those who have learned to love another/have made their way/to the lasting world/and will not leave/whatever happens” (Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1998,1). The bow breaks and the cradle falls for the early church with the Stephen episode from Acts 7: 55-60. It is painful that the ideal “favor of all people” towards the earliest church in the Acts 2: 42-47 passage has devolved into a murderous lynch mob so quickly. But Stephen, whose Greek name means “wreath, crown, honor, or reward,” is full of the Holy Spirit and is gifted with a vision, a Theophany/Christophany, seeing Jesus “standing” at the right hand of God. This image of Jesus standing (v. 55,56) is quite unusual in depictions of the ascended Christ, who is usually seated. What could this mean: that Jesus is standing in anticipation, in welcome, in alarm, in intercession, in judgment of others, or in distress for Stephen? Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,” Psalm 116:15 says. Precious to Jesus, not so precious to Saul, introduced here for the first time as a witness to the persecution. Comfort is hard to find in a lynching, but the presence of Holy Spirit, God, and Jesus certainly reminds us that believers are never alone, and the example of Jesus embodied by Stephen throughout his suffering and death leads us to believe that his/our resurrection will certainly follow. The wreath, crown, honor, reward of Stephen, the first martyr, and the faithful who follow, will be their standing reception by Jesus Christ himself. Psalm 31: 1-5,15-16 is a petition for rescue, addressed to God, rock of refuge, fortress, crag, stronghold, hiding place. The victory stone imagery of Easter Day is recalled, as the psalmist places his spirit and his times into Yahweh’s hands, and not in the hands of those out to do harm. The God who hears, responds, and rescues is the God who has chosen to show favor to believers. Once more, comfort to those who suffer is provided. 1 Peter 2:2-10 uses the stone imagery again, portraying Jesus as “the living stone” and his followers also as living stones. Like the sorting hat in the Harry Potter series, these living stones seem to separate God’s chosen, royal, holy people from others. These living stones build some into a household, but cause others to stumble. Either way, living stones do not escape notice. Easter 6 entices me to sing “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” especially the verse about preaching like Peter and praying like Paul, because both figure prominently here. In 1 Peter 3: 13-22, Peter is preaching to those being persecuted, encouraging them to maintain faith and hope, and to defend their stance with gentleness, respect,

    Page 8

    and a clear conscience because Christ has died for them and has saved them by his resurrection and ascension. In an age where bullying and cyber-bullying abound, it might be interesting to address that issue, listening to Peter speaking across the ages. Paul is not praying in Acts 17: 22-31, but giving his famous address to Greeks who worshiped an”unknown God” as a way of making the leap of faith between agnosticism and Christianity. Paul, the persecutor from last Sunday is now Paul the proselytizer, the apologist, the evangelist extraordinaire. People are being transformed by “God’s appointed,” Paul being the prime example, and “all” are invited now to likewise be transformed. The Gospel text from John 14: 15-21 is Jesus’ assurance to believers that they will not be left alone in his absence, but will be gifted with the indwelling Spirit of truth. There will be no separation between believers and God/Jesus/Spirit, because Jesus’ presence will dwell within them as Comfort or Advocate. The only real separation will be between believers and the world which does not know or accept Jesus. Paraclete is mentioned in only five sayings in John: 14: 16-17,26; 15: 26; 16: 7b-l 1, 13-15. For those with abandonment issues or those being objectified or singled-out by a bully, these words bring comfort and companionship. Psalm 66: 8-20 speaks of the nature of Yah weh God, who listens, responds, and rescues, and to the nature of people who have been the recipient of such grace – blessing, praising, effusively recounting God’s goodness, loved and loving. Easter 7 has two options, primarily: Ascension or promise. Acts 1: 6-14 is the Ascension narrative reinforced by Psalm 68: 1-10, 32-35. Here a unifying image is “the cloud” (Acts 1: 9) which obscures the disciples’ view of Jesus as he ascends and prefigures his return which the two men in white proclaim, reinforced in Psalm 68 by the nomenclature for God in v. 4 as “Rider of Clouds.” Wendell Berry has a line from A Timbered Chorus, 1994, #2: “You will remember, watching/the clouds, the future of love.”6 I commend the whole poem to you. Or a preacher could lean towards Pentecost and focus upon the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, imparted at Jesus’ ascension, inferred in Peter’s exhortations where disciples’ suffering will be offset by the blessed Spirit of glory (1 Peter 4:14). Jesus, in his impassioned prayer for his disciples in John 17, looks cloudward and prays for mutual glorification, as God’s work on earth is completed by the Son and by those believers given to the Son to participate in God’s work and word. Unity and protection of the faithful is the prayer on Jesus’ lips as he prepares to depart from them. Perhaps this is the future of love.

    Notes 1 John Updike, Telephone Poles and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). 2 Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 61. 3 Shel Silverstein, Where The Sidewalk Ends (New York: Harper Collins, 1974), 127. 4 Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 45. 5 Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus ,” 1883. 6 Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (New York: Counterpoint, 2008), 177. Other references to Wendell Berry can be found in Given Poems (Berkley: Counterpoint, 2005), 74, 70,55.

  • Preaching after Easter

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 38

    Preaching after Easter

    William H.Willimon North Alabama Conference, United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

    Here we are, just a few weeks into our annual attempt to get over the jolt of the resurrection. Some of the best intellectual defenses have been enlisted to cope with the outrage of Easter. And yet, in spite of ourselves, Christ keeps rising to us. As he began work on Romans, Karl Barth wrote his friend Thurneyson, “Don’t things get dangerous because God is?” A decade into preaching, Barth rediscovered the fresh, disarming availability of God, that is, the reality of resurrection. In resurrection, God vividly reiterates God’s self. No preacher has ever been able to persevere in the weekly task of bringing the gospel to speech without the dangerous, intimidating, homiletically invigorating awareness: God is. Stanley Hauerwas reflected upon preaching in a cross shattered church1 (a book he graciously dedicated to me); I wish here, in this Easter issue of The Journal for Preachers, to focus upon an even greater offense: preaching after Easter, speech that is shattered by the weekly recognition God is. “In fact (m/ra), Christ has been raised from the dead, first fruits of those who have died,” says Paul. “So we preach and so you have come to believe.”2 Barth’s great homiletic rediscovery was that the risen Christ is not just preaching’s subject but preaching’s agent. The message to the Easter women (“Go! Tell! He is risen!”) is the birth of preaching not only as content, but the engine that drives preaching. The angel did not say, “Go! Form an intentional faith community!” or “Go! Take up a set of cruciform practices!” The angel said, “Go! Talk!” Christ rose into preaching , provoking a post-Easter explosion of uppity Jewish, world changing speech. (Sometimes, in my work, I think that if preaching is the effect of Easter, church is defense against Easter!) In the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, it wasn’t just that Jesus was raised from the dead; it was that he returned to us. As Robert Jenson notes, the scriptures don’t report early Jesus sightings; they describe Jesus’ appearances .3 It’s an important difference. Resurrection, revelation is entirely in God’s hands, something God does. In resurrection God not only defeats death, but also overcomes the limits of human perception of and relationship to God. The first result of resurrection was not eternal life for us, but rather appearance to us, revelation. Furthermore, Jesus was not only raised, but he was raised to the wrong people. How odd of the risen Christ to spend the first day of his resurrection in a sorry dump like Galilee! Christ didn’t appear to Pontius Pilate up at the Whitehouse? No, he was raised to powerless, marginalized Mary, Peter, Thomas in Galilee. Thus W.D. Davies once criticized my Easter preaching in Duke Chapel because, in five Easters, I never preached on forgiveness. Davies was right. Forgiveness and reconciliation are linked to resurrection because Jesus wasn’t just raised, he didn’t just reappear – any old god could have done that. He appeared to the very ones who so betrayed and disappointed him in the first place – the same losers with whom he shared his last meal before execution. Surely this is what Wesley was pointing to when, in argument with Calvinists, Wesley said, in effect, that God could have been

    Page 39

    supreme, could have been sovereign ~ as Calvinists love to assert. But God in Christ chose rather to be love. To be encountered by crucified Jesus as resurrected and present to sinners like us is to discover God as forgiving love. He did not simply rise from the dead; he rose from the dead to us. Resurrection is not only the basis of the Christian faith, but the engine that drives preaching: Talk begins when God shows up. I love that the risen Christ sometimes appeared to a large group; this thing is more than merely personal, subjective, or individual. When it comes to speaking about Easter, we must speak in a way that preserves the objectivity of the event and defeats our modern tendency to collapse everything into subjectivity. Paul, of course, wouldn’t know an inner experience if he had one, so Paul never describes his being commandeered by the risen Christ as inner. He speaks of it as revealing (apokalypsai ), something that was actually there,4 and as revelation (apokalypsis), something God did in public. Pace Schliermacher’s contemporary West Coast imitators. Paul’s characterization of the appearances of Christ as apokalypsis makes one mindful of the connection between Paul’s apocalyptic talk and that of Daniel and Zechariah. In the risen Christ showing up, everything in this dying world is being set on its head, boring Greek time disrupted, continuities, probabilities, and predictabilities (so beloved in the modern world) are shattered; there really is something new. (Which is why I prefer Douglas Campbell’s apocalyptic Paul to N.T. Wright’s more orderly and English fulfillment-of-the-covenant Paul.5) As I read him, Paul is a man attempting to recover after being hit by a bus. After his resurrection, the peripatetic, itinerate nature of Jesus is heightened. He appears, but quickly disappears. He is a body-in motion, remarkably available to us, but as night falls, he does not abide, reside with us (Luke 24). The gifted, God-controlled quality of his presence is thus intensified. Jesus before resurrection never stayed anywhere long; after his resurrection he is even more itinerate, never again telling his disciples “Come!” but rather, “Go!” (Matthew 28). As Barth says, revelation cannot be taken into our hands. There is with Jesus no proud having, only humble receiving. In my experience, control freaks do poorly with Jesus. Aquinas notes the peculiarity of Jesus’ post-resurrection presence is that Jesus “did not choose constantly to associate with [his disciples] as he had done before… .”6 He “vanished from their sight,”7 he “withdrew from them.”8 If the tomb of Jesus is empty, it is empty as Duke Chapel is now empty-Christ is present, present to the wrong people, in the wrong places, ever revealing, but always as gift, not sedate, never as possession. It is not that he is evasive; it is rather that he is apocalyptic, appearing from God’s promised future, a visitation by a resident of the age to come whose appearance blows our age to bits. His presence is future present. As Luther noted, Christ’s absence from us, his distance from our conceptions of God, is most apparent precisely when he is to us most present. The closer to us he comes, the more we realize our distance. He is most veiled from us in those moments when he is most revealingly unveiled. Furthermore, his comings and goings have nothing to do with the faith or the expectation of those to whom he appears-Paul was decidedly an enemy when Christ most vividly showed up to him. The only thing fixed, settled, about Jesus after his death is his identity: after his cross, we can’t make God into anything we like. His resurrection not only confirms

    Page 40

    his identity, but also extends it. It makes all the difference to know that God raised only the humiliated, rejected, tortured-to-death by the government Jesus. (As Jenson says, “God” is whoever raised crucified Jesus from the dead.) Preaching is interesting only when it talks about whoever raised crucified Jesus from the dead. Jenson also says that the major difference between a dead person and one who is alive is that a live person is able to surprise. Nothing about Socrates surprises. Socrates can powerfully influence, but he cannot surprise. In Easter, Jesus as free agent is able to surprise. Of this, as a forty year preacher, I am a witness. To think how long I’ve been at it, how many Sundays I venture forth again with Jesus, only to be shocked, rocked by him into befuddlement. It’s for me a proof of resurrection, sort of. Well, if these propositions be true, allow me to tag some implications of resurrection for the practice of preaching in the name of resurrected Jesus: 1. As Bonhoeffer said, there is only one preacher—the resurrected Christ. As Barth said, only God can speak to us of God. And as Will Willimon has said, many of my homiletic failures are due to Jesus and cannot be blamed on me. I don’t know why the Risen Christ chose not to appear through some of my very best homiletical products. Grace isn’t grace if it’s predictable, programmable. I’m not troubled that Jesus performed many miracles; I’m troubled that he performed so few. Even one so talented as Richard Lischer has not been able to come up with a knock down, one hundred per cent successful homiletical method. Preaching works not for reasons rhetorical, but rather for reasons theological. As Lischer famously said, “Preaching works before it is understood.” After forty years of working with Jesus, I still don’t understand why he insists on talking to losers with whom I would never strike up a conversation and why sometimes, though he chooses to speak through me, he refuses to speak to me. All preaching is externally authorized. If anything is ever heard anywhere by anyone in one of my sermons, it’s a miracle. 2. While it is aggravating for those of us who talk about Jesus to have Jesus come and go as he pleases, preaching keeps generating faith in me because of the wonder that Jesus shows up at all. In my experience, the last people to believe that preaching actually works are preachers—perhaps this is a defense mechanism against the reality of Easter. It is so tough to relinquish your life to a discipline over which you have so little control. How many Sundays (not as many Sundays as I wanted, but enough to keep me nervous) would some besotted, smart young thing emerge from Duke Chapel after service and report that she had actually heard something. I would respond, “So? The women were right? He is risen and returned to the same losers who disappointed him the first time.” When one considers all of the artful, governmentally subsidized defenses against the word of God —the Duke curriculum, alcohol, promiscuity, the Department of Religion—it restores my belief in miracles. You don’t need a me to tell you why preaching often doesn’t work; only the Risen Christ explains why preaching sometimes works. 3. Preaching is the purpose of the church and its ministry, the most important thing that pastors do. All your theological training is for the purpose of giving you the guts to make an apocalyptic announcement: God has won a great victory. The bloody, crucified Lamb rules. Join up, or else stay stupidly out of step. There are powerful forces working against the utterance of this liberating announcement. All I ask is for a Sunday congregation of fifteen or fifteen hundred, with their chests stuck out,

    Page 41

    saying, “Hit me!” I fully understand why pastors allow so many things to crowd out their preparation for and investment in preaching – look, I’m as big a coward as the rest of them. Only Easter explains why so many persevere in this vocation. But faith, as Paul says, is an auditory, acoustical phenomenon. In an unguarded moment Jesus said, “He who hears you hears me.” I didn’t say it was the most effective way to get a New Heaven and a New Earth. In all this, I have just meant to say… it is true.

    Notes 1 Stanley M. Hauerwas, A Cross Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Heart of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009). 2 1 Corinthians 15:20,11. 3 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Vol. 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). I am particularly indebted to Chapter 12, “Resurrection,” of Jenson’s book for this article. 4 Galatians 1:16. 5 Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An apocalyptic reading of deliverance in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) , 2009. 6 Summa Theologiae, iii, 55.3. 7 Luke 24:31. 8 Luke 24:51.

  • Healing as the invasion of God’s reign: setting the captives free

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 55

    Healing as the Invasion of God’s Reign:

    Setting Captives Free

    Mark 1:21-28

    Robert R. Howard

    Gilbert, Arizona

    My sisters, my brothers, Once upon a time there was a church office whose copier absolutely refused to work right. Didn’t matter what anyone did, it wouldn’t work. It was as if the darned thing was possessed! Well, the smart-aleck minister came up, laid his hands upon that rebellious machine, and cried out, “Heyalll-ah!” It was a light moment, poking gentle fun at some of the more outlandish faith-healers. But, really, many of us know someone who is desperate for a healing touch from our Creator. Some of us here today, truth be told, have indeed experienced God’s healing in some way. And maybe others sort of secretly wish we could have been in that room long ago, lining up to meet Jesus the healer. Yeah, make fun of it if you will, but there still remains a deep human longing for healing. The heart whispers, “Heal us, O God.” Well, too many times folks flat get it wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices that swirl around the miracle of healing. “It won’t work,” some say. You just cannot break the rules of nature, the laws of physics. Modern science leaves no room for miracles. Thomas Jefferson, whose brilliant mind kept up with the latest in science, politics, philosophy, mathematics, actually snipped out all miracle stories of his New Testament. He produced his own cut-and-paste story of Jesus.1 Anything that conflicted with the laws of physics simply was not possible. Therefore, no miracles, no healing. Q.E.D. Others take a gentler tone: “Well, I really don’t want to set you up for a fall. I’ll go through the motions if it will help you feel better, but please don’t expect much.” Not as stern as Jefferson, but playing the same game. Others avoid the whole issue like a hot rock: “Oh, no. No way am I touching this one! Please find somebody else. Have a nice day.” On the other hand, there are those who plunge in with both feet: “Of course God can heal! God can, God must! Anytime, anywhere. Just ask, and results are guaranteed. Says so right here in the Book.” Folks like this bank on an on-demand magic, a God who jumps to it whenever we pull God’s string. The Bible promises it, I demand it, that settles it. And if the healing doesn’t “work”? Takes too long? Incomplete? Or total silence? Oh, that’s easy: you didn’t have enough faith! It’s all your fault. Pass the trowel so we can spread on the guilt. This move puts more faith in the healmg than the Healer. And, of course, there are plenty of faith-healers who will seduce the good folks desperate for healing, raking in the bucks and giving them a good show. Just send in your cash, and you can have a healing cloth autographed by Jesus. Okay, if I sound a bit harsh right now, let me offer a challenge. Yes, divine healing is possible. Certainly. And if any faith-healer truly believes that he or she has been given the gift of divine healing, fine. Wonderful. Go where it will do some good: go to Walter Reed Army Hospital and get to work on some damaged young men and women who really need healing. And do it for free. Otherwise please get off the stage. Put up or shut up.

    Page 56

    And if the guaranteed results don’t come off as promised, well, somebody messed up: the poor sap seeking healing, the fraud promising the healing, or – and here’s the real danger – God just let us down. God really doesn ‘t care. Do you see the problem? If you are counting on healing as a. proof of God’s existence, a demonstration that God really does care, you’ve misplaced your faith. As Jesus himself said, God is just not going to play that game (Luke 11:16,29-32). Yup, too many times we just get it wrong. We don’t get what healing is really about. Well, then, let’s take another look at today’s story. Let’s listen for what Mark might want us to hear. Jesus is in Capernaum, his hometown, in the synagogue, the place of learning and prayer on the sabbath, the day of rest, the day of worship. Please notice what storyteller Mark is setting up for us here. Synagogue: the place focused on God. Sabbath: the time focused on God. The place and time ripe for an invasion of divine holiness, transcendent cleansing, the very presence of God barging into this world. Get ready. And what is Jesus doing in the synagogue on that sabbath? Teaching. What is he teaching? Alas, Mark doesn’t tell. But-aha!-he taught with authority! Ah, yes, that’s our Jesus! Authority. Yessir! Oh, and authority better than the scribes. Yes, it just keeps getting better and better. Good stuff! Teaching, and with authority. Maybe even teaching those scribes with their framed diplomas on the wall. That’ll show ’em. Good ol’ Jesus. But what is this? A man suddenly appears, screaming at Jesus: “What are you doing with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” “Us?” What, is he crazy? But he screams even louder: “I know who you are: you are the Holy One of God!” Shocked silence. Now, some teachers might nod their heads knowingly. “Oh, yeah, my students might not be brave enough to shout it out, but they’re thinking it….” But you just don’t do that in the synagogue. You don’t do that in church. Get up, shout at the teacher? No way. And what does teacher-of-the-day Jesus do? Call in the principal to expel this troublemaker? No – he shouts back (now, I’m not recommending this as a pedagogical practice, mind you), he shouts back: “Shut up!” (Okay, fine, I’m with you so far, good response.) “and come out of him!” And – boom! – the poor fellow screams, convulses, and collapses. Total silence. Then wild applause. “Wow! Did you see that? He can teach, he can yank unclean spirits out of folks – what authority this guy has!” What a Super Bowl moment! Let’s see that one on instant replay. But slow down. Mark is looking us straight in the eye, daring us. Challenging us: what will you do about this? I gave you all the clues. Now put it together. What we have in today’s story is Mark’s show-and-tell about Jesus. Here is what Jesus was all about. In Mark’s vision, Jesus was walking, talking, power-of-God roaming this earth. He was the living embodiment of God’s will, the raging energies of the kingdom of God invading the sphere of Planet Earth. And this was his comingout party. In the holy space of the synagogue, during the holy time of the sabbath, he was holiness itself come into town to clean up the place. In this story, Mark is saying, “Look out, folks, the invasion of God has started.” Heck, the unclean spirits knew: “Have you come to destroy us?” You bet! That’s exactly what Jesus was here to do. Jesus came to declare war on any power that tries to shut down any beloved child of God. Any illness, any infirmity, any sickness of mind, body, or spirit. “Shut up, and come out of her!” That’s what Mark’s vision of divine healing is: an assault on whatever holds you in bondage – mind, body, or spirit.

    Page 57

    Jesus came to set the captives free. He came to liberate, to bring folks back to themselves, to emancipate from the prisons of illness, to re-integrate what was disintegrated , to re-orient all who were ¿fe-oriented. Why? Any healing that happens is not just nicey-nice, God-feels-sorry for you poor slobs. No – every healing is a revelation – if we have the smarts to catch it. Any healing says, “This is God’s intention for you: not to trudge through this world, but to thrive! ” That’s why Mark’s story links healing-by-Jesus with teaching-by-Jesus: know God’s intention, and live God’s intention for you. God wills you to flourish! To thrive, whatever your situation. Nothing need defeat you. That’s what Jesus was all about, says Mark. To free you from whatever is holding you down. The very power of God setting you free. And if we stop there, we’ve missed the point. Dig deeper, says Mark. If all we do is applaud, like the crowd, we’re just enjoying the show and no more. If we are healed and walk away unchanged, we’ve just wasted Jesus’ time. Look, in Mark’s world, healers were a dime a dozen. Everybody believed in healing. Physical cure is nice, sure, we want it, yes – but Mark is luring us to search for more. What happens to that noisy guy that was healed? Who knows? He just drops out of the story. No, Mark is aiming for bigger things. Dig down deep enough, and every illness, every infirmity, threatens the meaningfull -ness of life. Every disability raises a host of disturbing questions: what good am I anymore? What future do I have? Society thinks I’m worthless, and sometimes I wonder myself…. People treat me like I’m unclean, like I’m contagious, like I’m no longer a real person. Every amputee asks, in the silence of the heart, “Will you still love me, mutilated as I am?” Every chronic illness poses the agonizing question, “Am I still a fully human person?” These are “unclean-spirit” questions that try to lock us up into a tight little jail cell, to imprison our souls, to cut off our future, to squash us flat. And every band-aid, soul-less, wowee-look-at-that “healing” simply treats people as things. The healer is just an auto-mechanic replacing a malfunctioning part. Superficial “healing” turns the pitied recipient of our momentary attention into a mere machine. The act of healing becomes a mere transaction. And success just wows the crowd. Jesus came for more. He came to give us more. Physical healing is just one part of a larger process. And maybe it isn’t even the most important part, if you can forgive a fairly healthy, fairly able-bodied white male that claim. When I pondered what healing is all about, I thought of Debbie, who now teaches in a seminary. When I knew her at Vanderbilt, she was in her twenties, walking with a cane. I remember seeing her in the hallway once, having a walkingcane sword fight with a professoi: who also walked with a cane. She told me once, “We are all temporarily abled.” And I thought of the apostle Paul, who beat on God’s door three times, asking for God to whisk away his “thorn in the flesh,” whatever that was. And each time, God cpne back, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12: 8-9). “My grace is sufficient” – what the heck does that mean, God? Thanks a lot. I thought of Jesus himself: one day I was just bowled over when it struck me – wait just a minute! He kept the nail-cuts and spear-slash in his resurrected body. No, there’s something more profound going on here. Maybe, maybe we focus too exclusively on what we are healedyrom and lose track of what we are healed toward. Maybe part of true healing is not forgetting what it was like before, for the sake of somebody else. Maybe true healing doesn’t always involve cure of the ailment, not every time.2 Maybe part of healing means remembering your wounds, remembering

    Page 58

    your infirmities. Maybe part of healing means realizing that God’s presence can use those very wounds, those exact infirmities. God can use everything we are, just as we are. “My grace is sufficient.” But that’s just words. Whoa! Words? What did Jesus use in his teaching? Words! But get this: what did he use to evict the unclean spirit? Words! Words with authority, words of power: “shut up! Come out of him!” Words which invoked the presence of God in that man, kicking out the unclean spirit that held him trapped, chained down, locked up. Maybe the truth is this: whether you are “cured” or not, you have to decide what to do next. Words can open up a new future for you. “I’m only a cripple.” “Shut up! Come out of him!” “I’m worthless like this.” “Shut up! Come out of her!” “Cured” or not, am I any good? God says, yes, absolutely! “Cured” or not, can I still make a difference ? God says, “Yes! Oh, yes, just you wait and see!” Words. Words! “Cured” or not, words can set us free. Sooner or later, all of us come to a “T” in the road. You can’t go straight ahead. You’ve got to turn either right or left. Turn one way, and you give up on God. God broke God’s own promise. Oh, you might continue to go to church, even become a leader. But deep down, you are convinced that God does not exist. God does not heal. God really doesn’t care. Churches are sprinkled with steady tithers who have given up on God. They are just going through the motions. Their tiny jail cell is locked up tight. Or … you can turn the other direction. You can look through the heal-mg to the Heal-er. “My grace is sufficient”? Well… okay. If you say so. Do I trust You enough to take You at Your word? I’ll try. I’m working on it. Can Jesus heal with a word? Oh, God, I hope so. Can I live with God deciding how to heal me? Or when? If you help me, God, maybe I can. Sign me up. Healed with a word. Set free from all that is trying to hold us down, hold us back. But be assured, God will hold us up. With a word, Jesus will heal all who are trapped in bondage. But he will do it his way. And us? We stand at that “T” in the road. Which way to turn? Which way?

    Notes 1 Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth: Extracted Textually from the Gospels, Together with a Comparison of His Doctrines with Those of Others (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publishing Co., 1902). 2 I am indebted for this distinction to Kathy Black, A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disablility (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 51-53, ma passim.

  • The first great commandment

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 9

    The First Great Commandment

    Matthew 22:37-38

    Walter Brueggemann

    Cincinnati, Ohio

    Jesus’ teaching of the “First Great Commandment” is embedded in a series of disputes about the nature of faith and Jesus’ capacity to articulate and enact that faith.

    I. The longer text of Matthew 22:15-45 features four questions that constitute Jesus’ “oral examination.” The exchange is perhaps to test to see whether Jesus has a grasp of the tradition and can function as a reliable rabbi. But of course, in the hands of the Evangelist, the question of being a reliable rabbi is transposed into the question of his being the Messiah. (See Matthew 16:16-20; 26:63; 27:17,22.) The first three questions are put to him variously by his opponents, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians. It may be that the disputes were characteristic rabbinic conversations; in context, however, there is an adversarial edge to the questions. The first question concerns paying taxes to the empire (vv. 15-22). Here the issue is clearly adversarial because eventually he will be “no friend of Caesar” (John 19:12). They “plot to entrap him.” He offers, in response, his well-known enigmatic answer. And “they were amazed” (v. 22). The second question is put to him by the Sadducees who were the imperial rationalists and concerned the resurrection that they were eager to deny (vv. 23-32). Again it is a trick question; again, Jesus will not be drawn. He delivers a theological maxim that voids the question (v. 32). Our “great commandment” comes in the third exchange, this time again the Pharisees (vv. 34-40). Though there is, in these verses, no hint of an adversarial tone, we may assume that the “plotted to entrap” in verse 15 still pertains. They ask him to pick out, from the array of Torah commandments, the most important one. He does not hesitate. He answers promptly, as if he had anticipated the question. We do not know what his interrogators expected. Maybe there was a broad consensus among them on this commandment from Deuteronomy, and they wanted to find out if he knew the answer and shared the consensus. But maybe not. Maybe there were diverse opinions. Maybe there were social conservatives among the Pharisees who wanted him to focus on sexuality. Or maybe there were some Pharisees who were fiscal conservatives and thought that the right answer was, “Tighten the money supply.” Or perhaps there were social liberals who wanted him to respond with some word about government relief. Or perhaps there were rational liberals who wanted him to say, “God has no hands but our hands.” So they asked him. They held their breaths to find out which side he would take. As in the previous questions, however, he refused the temptation. He blew away the question with the quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5. How could he do better than Deuteronomy! He aligns himself with the most dynamic of interpretive traditions. He appeals back to the great shema’ text that the scribes would eventually mark as “WITNESS.” He placed himself amid the first commandment of Sinai concerning

    Page 10

    the “God-monopoly” of the creator who freed the slaves (Exodus 20:2-3). They must have leaned back stunned, because he had outflanked all their trickery. Except, of course, he must add an edge to it by following Deuteronomy with Leviticus on the neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). In Mark’s memory, moreover, Jesus’ teaching evokes a scribal endorsement, and Jesus responds with a commendation for the scribe (Mark 12:32-34). In Luke 10:25-28, it is Jesus who asks the question, and the lawyer answers with “the two great commandments.” In Mark 12:32, the scribe responds to Jesus’ teaching, “You are right, teacher.” In Luke 10:28, it is Jesus who answers, “You have given the right answer.” But in Matthew, there is no such answer, no agreement, no affirmation, no response. His opponents are reduced to silence, no doubt avoiding eye contact! When the stunned silence had gone on long enough and it was time to terminate the exchange, Jesus confronts his adversaries by asking them a question (vv. 41-45). He inverts the relationship, and now he is in charge. Foolish candidate, not to let it rest! But of course Jesus had been challenging the old teachers for a very long time (See Luke 2:46-47)! Here he riddles them a question about the Messiah; and “no one was able to give him an answer” (v.46). No wonder there were no more questions. It turned out, of course, that not only did he get a “pass” from his examining committee. He overwhelmed them with his mastery of the tradition and his uncommon authority. It is no wonder that in Matthew 23 that follows, there is an assault on the scribes, the Pharisees, and hypocrites who had failed to probe or understand the tradition in all its radical contemporeneity. So now we know. Now we know that Jesus understood, beyond his opponents, about the seductive possibilities about taxes (22:15-22), about the enigma of after-life (vv. 23-33), about Torah accents (vv. 34-40), and about kingship, divine and human (vv. 41-45). Now we know that his authority makes him master of all the traditions and institutions of his cultural religious world. He has evaded nothing. We know from him about the old city (Matthew 23:37-39), the old temple (Matthew 24:1-2), and the old tradition (23:1-36). All are in jeopardy! Now we know that in the person of Jesus there are “birth pangs” that twist and turn against what was old (Matthew 24:8). And we know, further, that what carries over from the old tradition is the core commandment that defines everything in the new age of the coming rule of God, as it has defined everything in the old age of Sinai. Jesus is a rabbinic conservative who enacts revolutionary Messianic dimensions of the Torah.

    II. We are of course pushed by the answer of Jesus in v. 37 back to the old tradition. He is not making this stuff up! Rather he invites his listeners to stand in the Book of Deuteronomy at the brink of newness, at the edge of the Jordan River, ready to enter, yet again, the land of promise. That fraught moment of entry evokes Moses’ most magisterial teaching. Israel is about to begin a new life in a new luxurious place, without manna (see Joshua 5:12).The new land is permeated with temptation. At a surface level, it is the temptation of the Canaanites, as we used to talk about “Canaanite fertility religion.” In fact “Canaanite” is a metaphor for the seduction of self-sufficiency that will come with the new land. The luxury to come will be extravagant: “a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you

    Page 11

    did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant” (Deut. 6:10-11). The temptation to come is self-made affluence that will invite Israel to think, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). Such affluence, in time, will breed amnesia:

    Take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (Deut. 6:12) Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statues. (Deut. 8:11) But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If y ou forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. (Deut. 8:18-19)

    The risk of the new affluence to come in the land of promise is that you will forget where you came from. You will forget who you are. You will forget the giver of gifts. You will forget the conditionality of commandments. You will imagine autonomy that can be readily engraved in self-indulgent religious prattle about “chosenness.” Indeed, Hosea, a close child of Deuteronomy, sees that such amnesia is the primal seduction of Israel:

    She offered incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord. (Hosea 2:13) And since you have forgotten the Torah of your God, I also will forget your children. (Hosea 4:6) Israel has forgotten his Maker, and built palaces; and Judah has multiplied fortified cities; but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour his strongholds. (Hosea 8:14) When I fed them, they were satisfied; They were satisfied, and their heart was proud; Therefore they forgot me. (Hosea 13:6)

    And Deuteronomy, mindful of the indictments of Hosea, adds urgency to the commandments with the imperative to remember:

    Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; for this reason I lay this command upon you. (Deut. 15:15) Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and diligently observe these statues. (Deut. 16:12) Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this. (Deut. 24:18)

    Page 12

    Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this. (Deut. 24:22)

    The summons of Deuteronomy turns on the issue of remembering and forgetting. Israel can remain rooted in the deep tradition of the God of the Exodus; or Israel can sign on for a less demanding, more readily embraced identity as a complacent, selfsufficient people whose horizon is one of control, management, and manipulation of the systems of life and death.

    III. All of that is inscribed in the “first great commandment.” The commandment is dominated by the two big verbs, followed by provision for sacramental-educational reiteration. The first verb, the first verb of all biblical faith, is “listen.” Israel has been addressed. Israel has been called by name. Israel has been summoned. Israel is on the receiving end of the purposes of God. The “Canaanite” temptation of the book of Deuteronomy is to imagine that “we” (Israel) hold the initiative, that we act first, that we define and decide and determine. “Shema”‘ places Israel in a receiving posture to accept what is given “from the other side,” far out beyond our conjuring or knowing or controlling. It is clear, as in Exodus 24:7 where “hear” has the force of “obey,” that Israel is summoned to obey. To “listen” means, as we regularly communicate by tone to our children, to obey; “You don’t listen” means you do not do what I say. Israel is identified as a listener! The second great verb of the commandment is “love,” a term that has of course been trivialized and cheapened in self-indulgent romanticism. We may identify two dimensions of “love” that are present in the commandment. It is beyond doubt that “love” is a covenant word that means to acknowledge the covenant Lord (covenant partner) and so to honor obligations that belong to the covenant.1 Thus there is a solemn, juridical aspect to the term, a promise to obey. Thus in the book of Deuteronomy , both the ten commandments of 5:6-21 and the derivative corpus of Deut. 1225 summon Israel to obey YHWH in every sphere of life. But second, as Jacqueline Lapsley has shown, “love” in this tradition is not exhausted by the juridical notion of covenant obligation.2 There is also an affective element of emotional attachment and commitment. Thus Moses can twice use the powerful word hsq (passionate desire) for YHWH’s disposition toward Israel (Deut. 7:7; 10:15), and surely Israel’s love back to YHWH is with the same passionate affection, as in Psalm 91:14. Thus Israel is not only commanded to love; Israel is bound to YHWH in compelling ways that are more elemental than mere obedience:

    The Lord your God you shall follow, him alone you shall fear, his commandment you shall keep, his voice you shall obey, him you shall serve, and to him you shall hold fast. (Deut. 13:4)

    Israel is to be gladly preoccupied with the things that delight YHWH. The piling up of the imperative verbs attests to the emotional force of the covenantal expectation. Or in the imagery of Jeremiah who lines out the honeymoon of covenantal faith:

    I remember the devotion of your youth,

    Page 13

    your love as bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. (Jer. 2:2) With such passionate devotion, Israel trailed after YHWH with glad eagerness, to do all that may please YHWH in the performance of fidelity.4 Of this responding fidelity done with passion, Eberhard Busch concludes:

    [The first commandment] allows us and bids us to choose the God who graciously chooses us. We cannot do this on our own, but only in response to God’s electing grace. And I give the response in that I “trust in God alone, humbly and patiently expect all good from God alone, and love, fear, and honor God with all my heart” (art. 94 of the Heidelberg Catechism). Love always also means choosing. Love means saying with all the passion of love in the action of my life: this one and no other! In this way we may and should on our side reflect the self-differentiation of God from the idols and take part in this differentiation. This means of one thing that we need to keep ourselves open to the fact that God—because God is not that motionless One behind and apart from all historical phenomena—deals with us and meets us in ever-new ways and changes, in bright and dark hours, as helper and as judge, as supporter and as challenger.5

    The two great verbs, “hear” and “love,” do not constitute a one-time utterance or a one-time embrace on the honeymoon of Israel. Moses provides for liturgical, didactic reiteration in what I have called “saturation education” (Deut. 6:6-9). The children are to be daily, visually, regularly reminded of the miracle and the obligation and the passion that belong to being YHWH’s covenant partner and lover. The antidote to the threat of amnesia is the endless active reiteration of covenantal memory and obligation. The outcome of such “hearing,” “loving,” and “reciting” is a conscious, intentional community of oddness, an oddness that touches all of life. Thus the triad of “heart, life, might” in 6:5 intends to claim every part of Israel’s life for a countercultural existence in the land of “Canaan.” That counter-cultural existence is focused on the God of the Exodus with two concerns in this tradition. On the one hand, it warns, negatively, to resist the temptation of “Canaanite” religion and “Canaanite” economics that are anti-neighborly. Moses knows that the “Canaanite” regime of self-sufficiency is powerful and attractive, and Israel is to have none of it. On the other hand, the great commandment aims, positively, at transformative energy. The Book of Deuteronomy clearly attests that the “land of Canaan” can be transformed into a neighborly community so that the institutions, policies, and practices of Israel in the land continue with the force of the Exodus; that is, they continue the work of neighborly emancipation. Israel’s seduction is to be “like all the nations” (I Sam. 8:5,19). But clearly Israel is otherwise. The first great commandment has the effect of de-absolutizing all other claims and goals and desires, and drawing Israel always back to the emancipatory force of the God of Exodus-Sinai. The “decrees, statutes, and ordinances” of YHWH are designed so that the children will ask and learn about the Exodus and the “lasting good” that comes from life with YHWH (Deut. 6:24).7

    Page 14

    IV. Of the entire Torah that Jesus knew like the back of his hand, Jesus focuses—in his oral examination—on this one verse from the mouth of Moses. He intends, of course, that the urgency of Deuteronomy should pertain to his own contemporaries, for the pressure against the oddness of covenantal obedience is persistent and pervasive, then as now. In his context, the defining seductions away from covenantal obedience were the absolutizing of the commandments in a positivistic way without the agility of on-going interpretation and assimilation to the empire of Rome. Indeed, the two temptations of absolutizing and assimilation work very well together, for the empire never objects to positivistic religious law. Perhaps the four-fold set of questions in Matthew 22 (three addressed to Jesus, one asked by Jesus) indicates the seductions against which the great commandment gives standing ground. The first question about “taxes to Caesar” concerns the empire. The second question on the resurrection suggests a Gnostic narcissism that always has an appeal. And the fourth question concerning the Messiah suggests a convergence of theological issue and political possibility among Jews. The cruciality of verse 37 relativizes all the questions and moves to the Holy Addressor who gives Judaism its grounding and reson d’être. “Heart, life, and mind” all belong to the Lord of the covenant. They do not belong to the empire of Rome or to the positivistic religious law. The response of the scribe in Mark 12:32-33 (with a probable allusion to Hosea 6:6) agrees about the sacrificial practices of the temple cult. The temple cult along with imperial authority and positivistic religious law all may become instruments of self-serving and self-securing. The commandment is a summons away from self-securing. As the commandment calls away from self-securing to the covenant with YHWH, so the second great commandment calls toward the neighbor.

    V. Of course the hard part is how the great commandment can be contemporary to our time and place and circumstance. Insofar as the great commandment has a critical function, it serves to destabilize our favorite loyalties: “From each idol that would keep us, /Saying Christian, “Love me more than these.”8 The “more than these” requires that we identify, as best we can, the seductive alternatives that seek to talk us out of our oddness in covenantal obedience. You, dear reader, might give different nuance to the idols that talk us out of our covenantal obedience, but the inventory has some constants that are pertinent in our time and place:

    —The covenant anticipates that society—and the economy—are transformable to neighborliness. The temptation is whatever talks us out of hope and the energy to enact that transformative hope; dominant ideology specializes in the production of despair. —The tradition of Deuteronomy warns about the seductions of “Canaanite religion and Canaanite economics” that turn our heads and our affections away from the neighborhood and toward the self. The covenant summons us to remember, and the seduction is whatever infects us with amnesia, so that we lose our grounding and our identity. Dominant ideology prefers that we not remember. —After recalling Pharaoh (in the Book of Deuteronomy) and after “taxes

    Page 15

    to Caesar” (in the narrative of Jesus), the commandment witnesses against the absolutizing of the state, the empire, and in our own context, the ideology of militarism that passes for patriotism. The reach of empire in our society extends to the control of markets, the mastery of “natural sources” (oil, water), and the “unnatural” sense of entitlement that comes with the thrill of the flag. —On the list, according to the question of resurrection, is the “cult of the dead,” and the cultural practice of denial, the desperate effort to prolong life, and the deep individualism that leads to issues of personal survival and away from the rule of God.9 The popular notion of “immortality” translates into a pursuit of youth (endless exercise) and beauty (cosmetic surgery) and power, as though to fend off death. —The amnesia prized in our society, given iconic force in the “delete button,” makes erasure easy and credible. It is enough to erase the bad stuff of violence, oppression, and exploitation that has defined much of the church and much of our culture. But the more elemental erasure is the erasure of the gifts and miracles by which we live, so that the capacity for gratitude evaporates into an ocean of self-congratulations. It is this erasure that Moses warned against.

    Michael Fishbane, in his exquisite little essay on Deuteronomy 6, suggests that the question of the child in verse 21 and the recitation for the child in verse 7 evidences a deep tension between generations in ancient Israel, “two generations’ memories, sets of experiences, and commitments.”10 He judges that the fathers wanted to “transform their uninvolved sons from ‘distemporaries’ to contemporaries, i.e., time-life sharers ” in the tradition.11 That does not suggest for us, I judge, that the older generation among us remembers and that the younger does not. Matters do not divide that way. Rather what we face in the new world of forgetting amnesia is a fresh “modern” way of being in the world that appeals to all, of every generation. The older generation is as vulnerable as the younger. Nor is it a matter of tradition vis a vis Enlightenment rationality , though that contest is worth pondering. I judge that the issue is more particular, namely, the specificity of an emancipatory narrative and a set of obligations that arise inescapably from that narrative and the seduction of the generic. The bid of the great commandment is to remember the miracles and the agent of the miracles, nameable miracles and namable agent, while our society wants to reduce everything—miracle and agent and memory—to the generic, because the generic neither offends nor demands . Thus the interpretive task is to move from that nameable agent and namable miracles to our practices of “heart, soul, and mind.” With this triad one can easily line out the comprehensiveness of the claim of YHWH. If we focus on the triad, we may notice that the triad in the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:5 is somewhat different from the Greek of Matthew 22:37. In the latter case the triad of “heart, soul, and mind” stays with the mental, emotional apparatus, thus a bid for a complete commitment. But in the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:5, the second element is nephseh (all of life, not psyche), and the third element is me’od, force, might, wealth, stuff. Perhaps it is not useful to parse the differences too closely because, in the end, both triads have in purview the totality of one’s existence.12 (In passing I may note my conviction that a sermon that walks through the triad (either one) and tries to identity the “zones of

    Page 16

    life” that are addressed is both boring and unhelpful. The triad, either way, is about “everything”:

    Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.13

    It is the “all” that is required by the great commandment. Finally the great commandment will draw the preacher and the congregation into the deep contradiction that is palpable between covenantal obedience done with a glad heart and the self-serving of the modern Enlightenment individualized economy that receives its religious cover in a preoccupation with personal morality and private salvation. Of course the commandment has not only a critical function against our dominant ideologies. It is also an affirmative call to an emancipated life with the God of the covenant. It invites us to see how our “heart soul, and mind” (or in the variant triad of Deuteronomy) may embrace God’s liberating action. It is the deep claim of Sinai, transmitted by Deuteronomy, that life with YHWH is a life of unencumbered freedom, freedom from the demands of the state or of the corporate economy, freedom from endless production and consumption, freedom for an emancipated community that, unlike the scribes and Pharisees, can focus on “the weightier matters of the Torah, justice, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23). In The Evangelical Catechism, the handbook of my pietistic tradition, the great commandment is taken up in questions 27-29:14

    How should you summarize the Ten Commandments? What does God declare concerning these Commandments? What does God mean by this declaration?

    The answer to the second of these questions is: “God declares: You shall keep my statutes and my ordinances; by doing so you shall live.” The supportive citation references the narrative of Luke 10:25-28 wherein Jesus says to the lawyer, “Do this and you will live.” Clearly that assurance from Jesus, the citation of it in the Catechism, and the tradition behind it have in mind a very different notion of life. It is not the onerous life of aggressive politics. It is not the life of fatiguing consumerism. It is not the life of acute personal preoccupation. It is rather a life in sync with the creator God who gives gifts that preclude devouring anxiety (see Matt.6:25-33). But it is the response to the third of these questions that strikes me as urgent and compelling for us:

    By this declaration God means that we trust the Commandments and seek to live in accord with then. The Commandments are not given to us in order to put us down or to keep us from enjoying our lives, but rather to guide and help us make our way through life with faith, a sense of purpose, meaning, and joy. The Commandments offer us the freedom to live out the purposes of our creation.

    Page 17

    This tradition knows that it is life lived in imagined but idolatrous autonomy that eventually “puts us down” and robs us of joy. Thus the commandment frontally contradicts the assumptions of modernist autonomy and insists that covenantal fidelity is the only way to freedom and joy. The outcome is freedom that is given only in a life of covenantal obedience. It is not surprising that in the narrative of Matthew, his opponents do not speak after he enunciated the great commandments. They do not speak because his teaching made no sense to them. They did not know what he meant, so inured were they to their several ideologies. But along with his utterance, he showed them what he intended! He showed them by act, by gesture, and by word. From that utterance the tradition keeps inviting to another way in the world, a way of freedom. With the emancipation of the first great commandment, his teaching rushes on to the neighbor. There is, however, plenty to chew on with the first great commandment, even before we get to the second.

    Notes

    1 See William L. Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Dt,” CBQ 25 (1963): 77-87. 2 Jacqueline E. Lapsley, “Feeling Our Way: Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 65 (2003): 350369 . 3 The final verb, “hold fast,” is used in Genesis 2:24 to characterize the man-woman relationship where it is often rendered as “cleave to.” The same intent is in our usage in Deuteronomy 13, thus casting the intensity of the covenant as like a marriage relationship. 4 In Jeremiah 2:2 the honeymoon is said to be one of hesed; the same term is used in Hosea 6:6 where hesed is said to be YHWH’s “desire.” 5 Eberhard Busch, Drawn to Freedom: Christian Faith Today in Conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 299-300. 6 Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993),103-109. 7 The phrase in Deuteronomy 6:24 reminds me of the mantra from Andrew Carnegie now used by the Carnegie Foundation to describe its work as doing “real and permanent good.” The move from Deuteronomy to Carnegie surely requires some sense of irony. 8 The lines are from the well known hymn, “Jesus Calls Us, o’er the Tumult” by Cecil Alexander. 9 See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). 10 Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 81. 11 Ibid., 82. 12 Dean S. McBride, “The Yoke of the Kingdom,” Interpretation 27 (1973) 303, has provided a compelling summary of the triad: Heart: with an undivided loyalty, both good and evil impulses; Soul/life: commitment even to the point of death or martyrdom; Might: substance, wealth, property given in the service of God. 13 The lines are from the hymn of Isaac Watts, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” 14 The Evangelical Catechism: A New Translation for the 21st Century (translated by Frederick R. Trost; Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2010), 51-52.

  • Exegeting Blockbuster

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 40

    Exegeting Blockbuster Jeremiah 29:1-14; Peter 1:1-2,13-17, 22, 2:1-5, 9,11-12, 5:12-14

    Brent A. Strawn Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    The prophet Jeremiah’s remarkable letter to the exiles in Babylon is found in Jeremiah 29:1-14. That letter suggests that sometimes our life with God involves living in exile, suffering at the hand of God because of our own disobedience and sin. I’ll refer to Jeremiah’s letter here and there, but mostly what I want to do in this sermon is reflect further on the notion of living in exile—our living in exile. I want to lift up a few points and wonder about them, wonder if they are true, and wonder what they might mean if we really are living in exile. 1. Here’s the first point: Will Willimon, former dean of the chapel at Duke University and presently Bishop of the North Alabama conference of the United Methodist Church, is one of many people who have argued that the church in North America is in exile, far from God’s favor and blessing, suffering God’s judgment in a culture that is openly set against God’s ways and God’s people. He’s written quite extensively on the subject, at times with his Duke colleague, the theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, and, as I said, there are others who concur with this judgment. In one of his recent books, Willimon states that Christians here in the United States are “those who are forced, by the nature of American society, to live in circumstances of exile without the conceptual means to resist.”1 Let me repeat that: Christians are those who are forced, by the nature of American society, to live in circumstances of exile without the conceptual means to resist. Ponder that for a moment. Without the conceptual means to resist. The absence of resistance strategies means that there is no real option for North American Christians but to abdicate our faith and to assimilate to the surrounding culture—in Jeremiah’s terms, the Babylonian Empire; in our terms, the American one. Either culture is not our true home. That’s point one. 2. Here’s the second point, seemingly far removed from Willimon. When I was a kid I took private art lessons. I was a decent artist back then (no longer) and I was little. I thought the art resided in my hand. I told my teacher so one day. ” Oh no,” she told me. “It isn’t in your hand at all. It is in your eyes. It is in how (and what) you see and how you transfer what you see to what you draw.” This is, of course, right and true, though I still think a bit of dexterity doesn’t hurt. Regardless, art is a way of seeing. So is reading. Good artists and readers see things that the rest of us miss. And this isn’t true only for artists or literature professors . It’s also true for doctors and lawyers and psychologists and so on and so forth. The art of interpretation—or, to use fancier terms, hermeneutics and exegesis—is one of paying attention. Seeing. Noticing. Noticing the symptoms a patient or client manifests; seeing the gaps in the one law that make the other case pertinent; paying attention to the fine details of a literary text, whether it is Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or the Gospel according to St. Mark. So, what do you see when you look around? Be interpreters of culture for a

    * This sermon was preached on July 16,2009, at the Kinfolk Camp Meeting in Brownsville, TN.

    Page 41

    minute. Be “hermeneuts” of society for a moment. Pay attention to what you see and hear and encounter and take in. Linguists say that we hear as many as 100,000 words per day.2 Interpret those. What are they about, do you think? Or consider the images we see: on the web, on TV, on the movie screen, in the video store. Exegete the local video store. Ponder that for a moment. Here’s one interpretation: my own. Here’s what I see when I go to the video store. I see two things, mostly—two things, equal in importance, equal in vividness, equally vying for my attention, equally trying to capture my imagination—so much so that I’m not sure which to mention first. They are perfectly tied in a dead heat (both appropriate words as we will see!). So, for want of a preference, I’ll put them in alphabetical order. Here they are: first, I see Sex. Everywhere Sex. Sexiness, eroticism, enticing suggestiveness. And, to be quite frank, sexuality of a certain type: one from a male perspective that objectifies women as sexual objects of male fantasy. (That’s why you see so many more scantily clad females than scantily clad males in the video store.) And I’m not talking about the porno section of the video store. No, I’m talking about something more mundane and insidious than that. I’m talking about the “pornographication” of our society, of the video store, of motion pictures, of music, etc. That’s the first thing I see when I walk into the local video store. The second thing I see is Violence. Violence, horror, evil. And not just in the horror section. No, I see it everywhere, often combined in disturbing ways with the sexuality: a scantily clad female covered in blood, for instance, or holding a semiautomatic assault rifle, or some other such thing I wish I had not seen, especially as I’m in the store with my small children, looking for a video that they might like to watch. And all this sex and violence is everywhere in the store, from front to back, so you can’t miss it. I can’t miss it. They can’t miss it. And if the sexuality piece objectifies women, the violence piece objectifies victims. Both women and victims are denigrated and dehumanized in the process. That’s what I see in the video store. And I could be wrong, but I think that is what an alien would see if one were to visit the video store and try to identify our primary cultural values: “Sex,” they would say, “of the objectifying-of-females kind, and then, in alphabetical order, Violence, especially murder—those are the values of North America’s entertainment media society .” That’s what I see and how I exegete the video store. Now, maybe I’m wrong about all that; maybe you see things very differently. And I do not want to give the impression that absolutely everything in the video store, let alone our culture, is wrong and evil, or that it is irredeemable, or that the Spirit isn’t at work or possibly at work in all of this, or at least in parts of it. This is just one interpretation, my own, of my latest visit to the video store. 3. In light of Jeremiah 29,1 really shouldn’t be surprised by Sex and Violence living at the video store and on my TV set and in the movies and on the radio waves. Let me correct that: not just living there, but ruling there. I shouldn’t be surprised by that for two reasons: For one, I shouldn’t be surprised because, according to Jeremiah 29, I’m in exile and this Empire is not the Lord’s. Number two, I shouldn’t be surprised because, though this Empire is not the Lord’s, it is nevertheless one where gods rule. Other gods. There are always gods of one sort or the other, our God or other gods, who are ruling, demanding our thanks and praise, dictating our service. And these two, Sex and Violence, are among the most important of the gods. There is a third god, however, maybe the most important one of all: Almighty Dollar. These

    Page 42

    three together form what you might call the Unholy Trinity: Money, Sex, and Power (violence is one manifestation of the latter).3 This is the Unholy Trinity of this empire , and, if Willimon is right, this is our Trinity, as Christians, because, according to Willimon, we lack the conceptual means to resist. Now, if we have an Unholy Trinity, we should perhaps look for an unholy place of worship—an Unholy Temple. How about the shopping mall? That seems to be the temple of modern society. It isn’t just the mall, of course. It is the consumeristic capitalism of our culture where we are what we buy, where our worth is measured by our buying power and consumptive practices, where style is always thought to be more important than substance, where, in fact, people in our society worship. They congregate there, they spend their time there, they spend their money there, they bring their best there to offer up on the altar of goods and commodities and stuff. So, we have an Unholy Trinity, the gods of Money, Sex, and Power; and an Unholy Temple, consumeristic capitalism symbolized by the mall; all we need now is an Unholy Scripture. Happily (or rather, sadly), we have one. It is mass media culture, isn’t it? How many of those 100,000 words per day that we take in are from Holy Scripture? A fraction of a fraction of one percent? If that. The vast, vast, vast majority—99.99 percent in a conservative estimate—are from mass media culture: television, radio, music, videos, movies, web, etc. That is our Scripture, that is our authoritative literature, that is what we live our lives by, that is our rule of faith and life. And what is that about? What messages does it preach? Well, many different things, of course, and sometimes, sure, good things, but much of the message, you have to admit, is about the gods—Money, Sex, and Power—and about their worship: consumption and purchase and stuff, and more and more and more and more stuff, which means more and more and more Money, Sex, and Power. 4. Now, personally, I don’t like alarmism or alarmists. I’m not trying to be an alarmist about all this. I’m just trying to be a realist about it. You can be alarmed by it if you’d like. It is disturbing. It is alarming. But it also just is. This is the world, the Empire where we live in exile. And yes, of course, it isn’t anything new; it has always been so. And yes, of course, it is likely to be so for a long time to come no matter what: Jeremiah promises that exile will last a full and complete lifetime—the schematic seventy years of exile (29:10). But, as Jeremiah’s letter also says, if this Empire is not our ultimate home, what then should we do about all this? Do we, to go back to Willimon, have conceptual means, conceptual tools by which to resist this exile? I think so. Let me mention three. Instead of an Unholy Trinity populated by Money, Sex, and Power, we have the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. These Three are One, according to Christian theology. That means that there is a diversity to the Godhead that is not at odds with and comes at no expense to its unity. And there is also a unity that is not at odds with and comes at no expense to its diversity. These Three are One. That means that there is no unhealthy rule of one over the other two, no domination marked by power or violence. These Three are One. They set us an example of life together marked by equality, mutuality, and self-giving love.4 That model permits no sex that comes at the expense of someone else’s humanity; even if you don’t know his or her name, they’re just on the screen or a click away. That model will permit no power that comes at the expense of someone else’s personhood; even if you don’t know them, they’re just

    Page 43

    on the screen or a click away. It will permit no “bottom line” that cares for “dead presidents” more than the real life person staring into your eyes or who lives on the other side of your decision-making. Instead of Money, Sex, and Power, we have the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And these Three are One. Instead of the Unholy Temple of the shopping mall, we have places of Christian worship—churches, chapels, Bible studies, camp meetings even!—places that do not (and ought not) traffic in the ways of modern American consumeristic capitalism. We have places that come away from all that, places where we ought to seek truth and justice, beauty and peace.5 No more and no less. We have places where we pray for truth and justice, beauty and peace, and where we lament and complain with anger and rage to God when they are not present or experienced, and where we praise God when they are. Places where people are valued not for what they drive or what they wear or how they look or their purchasing power or their productivity, but because they are beloved, truly and deeply beloved, by God and by the family of God. That last part means that they are truly beloved by us; and we can do that, love like that, because we are enabled to do so by the Holy Trinity who loves in that same mutual self-giving way. Instead of the shopping mall, we have Christian worship. And instead of an Unholy Scripture—mass media culture—we have Holy Scripture . A book. Just a book. Just one book. Not that long, readily available to us in bookstores, in hotel rooms, in our mother tongue, easily portable, even memorizable. Imagine that! A book full of words and stories and poems and songs about our true Lord, about worship, and about our life with God, even about our life with God when we are in exile, far from God’s favor and God’s blessing, suffering God’s judgment. Instead of all the words on the radio, TV, web, etc., we have our book, our one book: Holy Scripture, the Holy Bible. Oh, I know these three means of resistance aren’t very sexy, certainly not like Sex. And, I know they aren’t powerful, not like Power. They definitely won’t get you rich, not like Money. But if that’s what you want: Money, Sex, and Power.. .well, you’re probably in the wrong place. This place, right now, is a Holy temple. This place, right now, is a place of Christian worship, and we are gathered here to worship the Holy Trinity, to listen to Holy Scripture, to wait and listen and learn how we can live lives of faith in a world that is quite literally dead set against (suicidally so) God’s purposes of love, grace, and mercy. So, if you want Money, Sex, and Power—and let’s face it: who doesn’t?—I suspect you can make it to the nearest mall before it closes. But if it’s closed, don’t worry: you can get anything you want, and I mean anything and everything you want 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year online—it’s just a click away. But if you happen to be in the right place, then maybe we ought to take a clue from Jeremiah and exiled Israel and think about how we can be faithful, not in denial of exile, but in the midst of it. I don’t know exactly what such faithfulness might look like. It’s very important to point out, though, that for Jeremiah at least, it is not a complete withdrawal from society. No, Jeremiah says pray for Babylon (29:7), don’t try to destroy it or think you can outrun it. Jeremiah advocates building houses and planting gardens (29:5) and that is going to take some money. And he says you’re supposed to get married and have children (29:6), and the last time I checked, that included sex. And I’m sure power is involved in the whole spiel somehow. But it is a matter of degree, isn’t it? What is your ultimate allegiance? Who is your true

    Page 44

    God? And how do you show that? For exiled Israel, you could just tell. You could tell in what they ate and what they didn’t eat, what they read and studied, and what they didn’t read and didn’t study, where they went on the Sabbath and what they did on the Sabbath, and where they didn’t go and what they didn’t do on the Sabbath. In these ways and in many others, they resisted the Babylonian empire. In these ways they remained Israel, God’s covenant people. In these ways they remained faithful. What about us? I worry about that. I worry about that quite a lot. 5. Here’s the fifth and final point to ponder: Jeremiah 29 suggests that life with God sometimes involves living in exile as the result of our own disobedience and sin. That’s true, but it is also true, according to some passages of Scripture, that we could be living in exile because of the sins of our parents or grandparents—previous generations, that is, who came before us.6 That’s a sobering thought for a number of reasons, one of which is that it makes us second generation immigrants to the Empire of exile. If you know some immigrant families, you know how that goes, don’t you? First-generation immigrants—the parents, born and raised in another land—remember everything: they remember their home, they keep speaking their original language, they keep practicing the traditions and rituals of their homeland. The second generation, well, they go off to school with the Babylonians; they have to speak the local language while they’re there and their parents don’t like it. They stop speaking their parents’ native tongue even at home, and they’re always walking around the house using Babylonian slang words that the parents don’t understand. And then they want the latest Babylonian sneakers and jeans, and the Babylonian boys and girls start looking attractive to them—why shouldn’t they date a Babylonian ? What’s the big deal? And they start desiring the latest in Babylonian styles and fashions and traditions.. .and religion. And why not? They’re watching Babylonian TV all the time, and they see the ads. “I mean, come on, Mom, for Marduk’s sake! Uh, er, um, I mean, for the LORD’S sake, Mom—for the LORD’S sake. Sorry.” And, in a generation, or maybe two or three, it’s over. It’s all over. Total assimilation. No more Israel, just Babylon. Other gods. Other temples. Other scripture. What if we are second-generation exiles, second-generation immigrants to the Empire of exile? I worry about that. I worry about that quite a lot. It could be over in a generation or maybe two, maybe three. Maybe sooner because, as Willimon says, it appears that we lack the conceptual means to resist our exile. Or do we? Hear these words from 1 Peter, from a letter in Holy Scripture, another letter to some later exiles:

    Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood: May grace and peace be yours in abundance. (1:1-2)

    [PJrepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” If

    Page 45

    you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile (13-17).

    Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. (22)

    Rid yourselves…of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation – if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (2:1-5)

    [Y]ou are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light….Belo ved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge. ((11-12)

    I have written this short letter to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it. Your sister church in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you greetings… .Peace to all of you who are in Christ. (12-14)

    Notes 1 William H. Willimon, Pastor : The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), 205. 2 Jean Aitchinson, Teach Yourself Linguistics (6th ed.; Chicago: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 4. 3 Among others, see Richard J. Foster, Money, Sex, and Power: The Challenge of the Disciplined Life (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). Later reissued as The Challenge of the Disciplined Life: Christian Reflections on Money, Sex, and Power (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1989). 4 See, e.g., Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Sacra Doctrina; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) for an argument that analogies between the Trinity and human capacities ; not all theologians would agree. 5 See Patrick R. Keifert, “The Bible and Theological Education: A Report and Reflections on a Journey,” in The Ending of Mark and the Ends of God: Essays in Memory of Donald Harrisville Juel, eds. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Patrick D. Miller (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 165-82.

  • It’s working

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 36

    Ifs Working

    Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:2-11

    Sam Wells

    Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

    Around ten years ago, when I was the pastor of a neighborhood church in England , I got a call from a woman in distress. She said, “Pastor, my house is haunted. Can you come and do an exorcism?” Now, you may be aware that one thing I don’t possess is adrenalin. I’m not the kind of pastor who gets a crisis call, jumps through the window of a waiting patrol car, starts up the siren and tosses a flashing light on the roof, and then heads into danger while a screech of the tires announces “Lights, camera, ministry.” But I try to take people seriously, maybe more seriously than they take themselves, especially when they’re in distress. So a day or two later I visited the woman, and we sat together on her sofa as I explained that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, had overcome the power of evil and that the way we embody Jesus’ victory is through baptism. But baptism doesn’t always give us freedom from fear. So I was inviting her to join me as I visited each room in the house, sprinkled the waters of baptism, and prayed for deliverance from fear. And that’s exactly what we did. 15 minutes later, when we’d entered and prayed and sprinkled in each room, we returned to the sofa in the sitting room. The woman looked at me with disappointment in her face. “Is that it?” she said. “I could have done that.” She was a bit more honest and direct than most of us, but my guess is, almost everyone here will have felt like that about Christianity at some stage or other. What does it all amount to? A mysterious man long ago, who did and said interesting things and got buried for it. A whole bunch of people trying to follow him or somehow use him as a route to immortality, and as often as not falling out with each other or turning it all into a power grab or a form of imperialism or patriarchy or division. A story of aspiration, illusion, fragility and failure. Maybe that’s how you feel right now. “Is that Christianity? Is that it? That’s no big deal. I could have done that. I could make that up, easy.” And the feeling’s multiplied and focused when you’ve actually given your life to it and put yourself in personal danger because of it. We all know the cynic is the failed romantic. You don’t hate if you haven’t first loved. You don’t feel let down if you weren’t first built up. That’s where John the Baptist got to. He’d proclaimed Jesus. He’d done the whole camel’s hair coat and locusts and wild honey diet and call to repent thing. He’d thrown his entire life into preparing the way for Jesus. And now he’d been tossed into prison. And he finds himself thinking, “Jesus, are you for real? Is this it, or are we going to see some action? When do we get the baptizing with the Holy Spirit and unquenchable fire routine? Hey? Bring it on! I don’t want to be pushy, but, really, now would be a great time.” To put John’s question into contemporary language, we might say, “Hey, Jesus, why’re you hanging out with the people who don’t matter and not being more strategic ? It seems Pilate’s still running Jerusalem, Herod’s still in charge in his palace, and the Jewish authorities have still got the temple and the practice of the Law all

    Page 37

    buttoned up. It feels like you haven’t got the head or the heart for tackling the systemic issues. You’ve not even set foot in Jerusalem yet. Are you the one who is to come, or is it time we were looking for someone else?” It’s important to feel the force of John’s question. He’s basically right, and most of us for most of the centuries that have followed have wondered about the same things. When it comes to constructing a messiah, Jesus just doesn’t look the part. You can imagine John, in the loneliness of his prison cell, pondering the shortcomings of Jesus. Jesus was from Nazareth – that’s another name for nowhere. Jesus lived a humble life, and his disciples were a mixture of common people and formerly notorious sinners. Hardly movers and shakers. Jesus was constantly in controversy and was destined for rejection and suffering. This isn’t exactly baptizing with the Holy Spirit and unquenchable fire. Jesus looks and sounds too much like the ordinary, the mundane, the downright failure to be a messiah. Are you John? Are you in a physical or mental or emotional place where the kingdom is very hard to see? Are you in prison right now? Do you feel duped, let down, disillusioned by Jesus? Have you lost the joy? Are you privately furious with Jesus because you believed he changed everything, but everything seems too much like it always was? Have you given your heart and soul to Jesus, and now find yourself asking, “Are you the one who is to come or should we be looking for someone else?” Listen to Jesus’ answer. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” At first reading it sounds like a catalogue of the kind of things we read in the Bible and grabs our attention no more than a table attendant reeling off a list of the specials in a diner when we’ve been to the diner before and we know the specials are always the same. But we need to look closely at each of these six statements. Jesus is announcing salvation in three dimensions. First, he’s saying the salvation he’s bringing reaches every aspect of human experience . It overcomes disability, by addressing blindness and deafness; it overcomes sickness, by cleansing leprosy; it overcomes alienation, by bringing hope and joy to the poor; and it overcomes death, by the power of resurrection. Jesus is gently saying to John that this may not be lightning and fire and revolution and judgment, but it’s a comprehensive wave of healing on every level of existence. And healing is the heart of the kingdom. Second, Jesus offers a succinct summary of everything that has already taken place in the first 10 chapters of Matthew’s gospel. The blind received their sight when Jesus touched the eyes of two blind men in chapter 9. The lame walked when Jesus both forgave the sins of the paralyzed man and told him to stand up, earlier in chapter 9. The leper was cleansed when Jesus stretched out his hand and touched a kneeling leper in chapter 8. The deaf man was healed when Jesus cast out a demon again in chapter 9. The dead were raised when Jesus took the hand of the daughter of the leader of the synagogue, again in chapter 9. The poor had good news brought to them repeatedly, but most of all when Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount with the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus is gently saying to John, these are not just words; they are things I’ve already done. And third, Jesus refers John to the promises and hopes of Israel. His words echo several places in Isaiah, including chapters 26,29,42 and 61, but especially chapter

    Page 38

    35, our Old Testament reading for today, made familiar by its role in Handel’s Messiah , “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” Jesus is gently saying to John, “All the promises of the scriptures are finding their yes in me.” And more than that, because added to Isaiah’s hope are two new dimensions, the curing of the incurable illness of leprosy and the overcoming of the final enemy of death. Jesus’ salvation is no let-down, no betrayal, no disillusioning anti-climax: it is comprehensive, already fully under way, and beyond hopes and expectations. But the trouble is, for John the Baptist, it still doesn’t feel like it. Like the woman who asked me for a dramatic exorcism and said, “I could’ve done that,” John’s not impressed. In the satirical Monty Python film, Life of Brian, set in first-century Judaea, the opposition to the Romans is hopelessly split. The People’s Front of Judaea is at loggerheads with the Judaean People’s Front, the Judaean Popular People’s Front, the Campaign for a Free Galilee, and the Popular Front of Judaea. One of these splinter groups has a secret meeting where a vigilante soldier asks, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” One by one his fellow freedom-fighters grudgingly acknowledge a host of benefits the Romans have indeed brought. But Reg, their leader, remains unconvinced. He finally demands, “All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for usT To which the reply comes, “Brought peace.” Reg has no answer to that. And John the Baptist has no answer when Jesus describes what salvation means and how it has come with him. Around 15 years ago I attended a conference about the renewal of the Christian faith. All the speakers came from big churches with famous ministries. Every one of them was miserable. They were full of complaints about what was wrong with the church and the world. All the speakers were cross with the world because it had strayed so far from the church. But when they spoke about the church, they seemed just as cross with that too, so the argument about the world needing to be more like the church didn’t sound quite so convincing. And then, after four or five of these dismal addresses, one pastor got up and simply said, “I don’t know about you guys, but at my church, we’re having a great time. Strangers are finding faith, relationships are being healed, people are dying in such a way that fills everyone with gratitude and the glory of God, beautiful new friendships are being made, the Holy Spirit is surprising us, and Jesus just keeps showing up.” And I thought, “I want to be in his church. In fact I want to believe in his God. He seems to be having all the fun. He doesn’t seem to be anxiously counting numbers of members or size of endowment or targets for diversity. He seems to be enjoying the kingdom, whatever the outcomes. The other guys seem to be so caught up in believing exactly the right things and living totally unimpeachable lives and being righteously furious with all the bad people that they seem to have lost the joy altogether.” I still want to be in that pastor’s church. I want Duke Chapel to be like that. Sure, we all have wilderness times of heart or head. We all have John the Baptist times in prisons of our own or others’ making that make us wonder if Jesus is for real or if he was just a well-intentioned guy who got misunderstood. But those are the times we desperately need to look at our church, not to see perfect doctrine or squeaky-clean

    Page 39

    ethics, but to see what Jesus described and what that pastor was enjoying. Strangers finding faith, relationships being healed, people dying in such a way that fills everyone with gratitude and the glory of God, beautiful new friendships being made, the Holy Spirit surprising us, and Jesus just keeping on showing up. Several years ago, about 9 months after I came to Duke Chapel, a worshiper who comes about once a month greeted me in the narthex. There are always a lot of people around after the Sunday worship service, and there’s never time to say very much to each other. I often wonder if I’ve fully understood what someone’s just told me and whether they’ve actually had a chuckle in their cheek or a tear in their eye. This person simply took my hand, looked at me seriously, and said, “It’s working.” What did it mean? It was such an enigmatic remark. I pondered it for a long time. But then I thought about John’s question to Jesus. “Are you for real, or should we be expecting a different kind of kingdom?” And I remembered that pastor years ago who was enjoying himself. I reflected on the life of Duke Chapel and thought, “People are finding their voice in faith. People are forging unusual and brave friendships. People are facing their own powerlessness and being filled with the Holy Spirit to take risks of patience, courage, and hope. People are feeling their hearts on fire as the good news is sung and spoken and lived. People are meeting Christ in the stranger and entertaining angels unawares. Relationships are being healed, and people are discovering ways to be with the poor and those of other faiths. It’s working. This is for real. This is beautiful. This is joy.” Jesus and John both knew they were going to be executed pretty soon. Neither was interested in an escapist, cotton-wool gospel. But one of them saw through his circumstances to the vision of God. This sense of peace and beauty and joy isn’t about material comfort or tangible success. It’s about being in the groove of the Spirit. It’s about being with the grain of the saints. It’s about consistently finding yourself where Jesus shows up. It’s about knowing that wherever you are may not be classy, may not be prestigious, may not be noticed by the great and the good, may have no relation to paid employment of career prospects or a sense of achievement; but it’s something much deeper, much more important, much more permanent. And that’s dancing in the rhythm of the kingdom, singing the song in God’s heart, glimpsing the dawn of salvation, breathing in the glory of God’s art. Can you see that beauty? Can you feel the peace and purpose of Christ’s coming kingdom? If you can, then others will see you, as I saw that pastor all those years ago, and rediscover the joy. They’ll feel their heart lighter than before and sense their lungs filling with hope. And they’ll turn to one another, and whisper, quietly but confidently, “It’s working.”

  • The second great commandment

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 18

    The Second Great Commandment

    Matthew 22:39-40

    Nancy J. Duff

    J

    Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

    Having been asked to identify which of all the commandments is the greatest, Jesus responded by saying that the first and greatest is that we should love God with our whole being. One can’t help thinking that this could have been enough; it seems that distilling all commandments to one that requires us to love God would have been sufficient. But there is hardly a pause before Jesus establishes the second great com­ mandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. The two commandments (love God and love neighbor) are separated by no more than a brief claim: “The second is like it.” They are, therefore, to be understood as distinct from one another and inseparable. On the one hand, when we love the neighbor we are not, in fact, loving God; on the other hand, loving God cannot occur in isolation, but demands love of neighbor as well. The two commandments cannot be understood as interchangeable, but neither can they be severed. This close connection between the commandments to love God and neighbor is parallel to the two tables of the Decalogue, where the first table specifies obligations to God (have no other gods, make no graven images, don’t live as if God’s name is useless, and observe the Sabbath), and the second table describes our relationship to the neighbor (honor father and mother, and do not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, or covet). Here again, the message is that love of God and love of neighbor are distinct, but inseparable. To emphasize this biblical truth, one could also invoke Jesus’ claim that in serving the least of the brothers and sisters, we serve Christ (Mt 25), not because our brothers and sisters are Christ to us, but because serving Christ by definition means serving the neighbor as well. The notion that love of God and love of neighbor are connected is echoed again in I John 4:20: “Those who say, Ί love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” In spite of this close connection between the first and second greatest command­ ments, the second commandment is sometimes presented as if it stands alone. Some people claim that the commandment to love the neighbor as the self, which is often associated with the “golden rule” (Mt 7:12; Luke 6:31), not only provides the foun­ dation of Christian ethics, but also presents a universally binding claim that applies to all societies and all people everywhere. To say that Christian ethics stands on the commandment to love the neighbor is, however, only partially true, and in this case a partial truth actually provides no truth at all. Jesus’ reply to the lawyer does indeed establish a foundation for Christian ethics, but it is only when the first and second great commandments are taken together that this foundation is laid. Jesus did not simply say that we are to love the neighbor, but that we are to love God with our whole being and love the neighbor. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” These two commandments, taken together, are like the hinges on which a door hangs. If the door is understood to represent all other commandments, then those

    Page 19

    commandments stand or fall only to the extent that the command to love God and neighbor has been fulfilled. Jesus’ identification of these two commandments as the greatest challenges the law-based ethic of the Pharisees. The lawyer’s question is the third in a series of questions posed to “test” Jesus. The lawyer would have been familiar with Jesus’ reference to the Shema for the first greatest commandment and then to Leviticus 19:18 for the second. The familiarity invoked by Jesus’ response is, however, not friendly. Jesus’ answer is intended to challenge strict adherence to the 613 laws set down in Hebrew Scriptures and suggests that love of God and neighbor not only summarizes all of them, but actually replaces them. The writer of Matthew clearly intends to pit what is sometimes described as “Pharisaic legalism” against Jesus’ ethic of love for God and neighbor. Make no mistake; the claim that all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments is a radical one. Jesus is insisting that fulfilling the laws of Torah is no longer necessary for those who seek to serve God. Love of God and neighbor trump them all. Preachers, however, need to be careful not to caricature the Pharisees or Judaism of the first century as if they represent the height of a cruel and legalistic approach to the law. Nor should preachers in any way use Judaism as a foil for Christianity today. Loving God and neighbor are undeniable affirmations in Hebrew Scriptures; both of the commandments come straight from the sacred texts of Judaism . No suggestion that the people of Israel loved rules above God is appropriate here. While Jesus challenges the Pharisees’ understanding of how to express love for God (by following the law), the distinction between Christianity and Judaism then or now should not be the aim of the sermon. How would it nurture the faith of the congregation or challenge them to consider the nature of Christian responsibility if the preacher sets up Christian faith and ethics as superior to the Pharisees and by implication to Judaism today? Preaching on this text should aim to help Christians understand who they are. If combating legalism forms any part of a sermon based on this text, Christian legalism should be the target. A sermon could, however, challenge Christian tendencies toward legalism. The message to Christians is that if we follow the moral law (even those that are presented as divine commandments in Scripture) in a way that dishonors God, does harm to the neighbor, or shows hatred for the self (see below), we are on the wrong track. If our singular goal is to leave a moral situation being able to say, “I did the right thing; at least my conscience is clear,” with no concern for the suffering that may have been caused by our need to have a clear conscience, we have placed following the law above loving the neighbor and, according to the two-fold nature of Jesus’ response, we have placed following the law above love for God. Keeping in mind the connection between love of God and love of neighbor, the remainder of this essay will focus on the latter commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. Even though listeners will be very familiar with the text, the preacher will need to untangle the complexities that arise when defining the neighbor whom we are called to love and proclaiming what it means to love those neighbors as ourselves. “Who is the neighbor?” and “Does the text affirm self love?” need to be considered carefully as one composes a sermon.

    Love of Neighbor “Love your neighbor” presents us with three words that combine to make one

    Page 20

    seemingly simple command. When considered more closely, however, what sense does it make to say there is a commandment to love the neighbor? The neighbor must be understood to include near neighbors and far, the stranger as well as those familiar to us, and the enemy as well as friends and family. Since we usually consider love to have an emotional component (love is something we feel for another), how can we possibly love those neighbors whom we do not know or love those neighbors whom we know, but do not like? And what could it mean to love the neighbor who is our enemy? Without diminishing the importance of human emotions or the fact that love usually invokes feelings in us, the preacher can help hearers understand that love in this context is not defined as an emotion. While some church traditions are notorious for denigrating the value of feelings, and others too readily try to manipulate emotions , preaching this text means insisting that loving the neighbor does not require feelings of affection. If the command to love the neighbor doesn’t require feelings of affection for all people, what does it mean? One response to this question is to interpret loving the neighbor to mean that we are to seek the good of all to the extent that we can and to try to do harm to no one. This interpretation, which should not be understood as a utilitarian calculus, goes a long way in opening the path to loving neighbor apart from any expectation of emotional love. Concern for the common good is, in fact, not found in abundance in civil society in our present time. Winning a political debate and destroying one’s opponent are with ever increasing frequency placed above concern for the common welfare. Sarcasm, caricature, and vitriol fuel a meanness that can be found in conservatives and liberals alike in public debate. Isn’t it time for Christians, who seek to follow Jesus’ commandment to love the neighbor as the self, to lead the way in saying “No” to all attempts to feed people’s frenzied desire to destroy their political opponents? For instance, shouldn’t Christians evaluate the options for healthcare from the perspective of the common good? Shouldn’t Christians be seeking to find a healthcare system that will realistically address the needs of the weaker brothers and sisters? And shouldn’t Christians seek to enter political debate about healthcare seriously and even passionately without seeking to do harm to their opponents? The first commandment and the second one that is “like it” tell us that we cannot be indifferent to neighbors when deciding how to cast our votes and when we enter debates about critical issues in the public realm. The same holds true within the church. Debates over critical theological beliefs or controversial issues such as homosexuality or abortion or end of life concerns should not bring out the worst instincts we have for protecting what we hold dear. When we seek to diminish the neighbor who, according to us, holds the wrong position, we are not demonstrating the combined love of God and neighbor that Jesus says is required of us. Jesus’ commandment to love the neighbor does not say that we have to like each other. It does not say that we have to like the position held by our opponents or even that we must hold back expressions of anger. Jesus, after all, drove the money changers out of the temple. But the command to love insists that we be concerned for the welfare of all—and that includes political allies as well as opponents in the public realm and in the church. When the neighbor is our enemy. How we are to follow this commandment to love the neighbor when the neighbor is not only our political opponent, but our enemy as

    Page 21

    a person who has done us physical harm? Matthew has stated prior to this text that love for the neighbor includes loving the enemy (5:21-48, esp. 23-48). The preacher needs to be mindful that members of the congregation who are victims or survivors of violent crime will be listening carefully for any indication, however subtle, of what is expected of them in relation to the one who has caused them harm. Even if the sermon does not directly address love for enemies, victims or survivors of physical and emotional abuse will relate everything the preacher says to this question of how to love the one who hurt them. Great harm can be caused by suggesting, even indirectly or unintentionally, that the victim is commanded to love and forgive the perpetrator regardless of the harm done or justice denied. To suggest, for instance, that a victim of rape must love the rapist as the neighbor should be unthinkable; in such a case the commandment to love the neighbor becomes not a word of grace, but a cruel and legalistic requirement. Divine love is, of course, unconditional and undeserved, but, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned, even divine love should not be understood as “cheap grace.” I once heard someone claim that our command to love the neighbor should lead Christians to caution victims of rape against filing charges in civil court against the perpetrator. “How do you know,” the person demanded of me, “that God will not use that woman’s forgiveness to change the heart of the one who attacked her?” My reply came without hesitation: “How do you know that God will not use the justice system to hold the attacker accountable for what he did and perhaps to bring about a change of heart?” Whether the preacher focuses on love of enemy, when proclaiming “love your neighbor,” concern for the victim and survivor, known or unknown to the pastor, should instruct the making of the sermon. When the neighbor is a stranger. Even as we cannot force ourselves to feel emotional love toward our enemy (nor do we have to), we cannot force emotional love for those we do not know. How does the preacher generate genuine concern and good will toward those whose identifies are objectified and lost in being described as “the hungry” or “the needy”? Referring to faceless strangers and admonishing people to love them will generate very little power. No amount of scolding will motivate people to be the neighbor Jesus intends us to be. Preaching, however, provides an opportunity to put a face on the stranger. Telling a story where ordinary people have helped a particular person and then referring to that person as a way to put a face on the stranger who needs us to love the person as the neighbor can prove to be effective. Such stories are numerous, but one in particular comes to mind. Years ago in Midland, Texas, a toddler who came to be known as “Baby Jessica” fell down an old well in her backyard. The whole world, it seemed, watched the tireless efforts of rescuers, fearful that they wouldn’t get to her in time. I was among the many thousands of people who stood before a TV set and cried for joy when they brought her up alive. After her rescue, people from around the world sent a considerable amount of money to that little girl. Some people were understandably critical of all the attention given to one child and all the monetary gifts showered on one rescued little girl, when thousands upon thousands of children need our help. Instead of criticizing those actions, however, the preacher can capitalize on the generosity of strangers in that story and use the story of one little girl who’s plight was made known around the world to remind people that there are children who fall down holes every day, holes of poverty and hunger, of neglect and abuse. Invite the congregation to

    Page 22

    put the faces of children they know on the faces of those children who are in danger of being lost. And then remind them that these children are our neighbors whom we are called to love just as strangers loved that little girl in Texas.

    Love of Self In addition to addressing what it means to love the neighbor, the preacher cannot overlook the significant observation that the second great commandment does not simply say: “Love your neighbor.” It says instead, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The preacher needs to consider what force is carried by the “as yourself.” Does the text in any way command us to love ourselves? Given the church’s long standing tradition of defining self love as sin, I expected to find a near universal condemnation of self love in the history of the church. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there has at least been a debate over the matter. Theological heavyweights such as Augustine,Tertullian, Chrysostom, and Kierkegaard all believed that the Bible allows for, or even commands, love of self. Karl Barth says, “No,” as do Martin Luther and John Calvin. Grammatically, there is no imperative in the second commandment that involves self love; the commandment does not say, “Love yourself.” Self love is, however, at least assumed and may even set the standard for how we are to love others. Obviously Jesus’ commandment to love the neighbor as the self cannot refer positively to selfcentered affection that places one’s own needs above that of others. Neither can the reference to self love mean that we are not sinful or that we are worthy of God’s love and have, indeed, earned God’s grace by our goodness. Nevertheless, the opposite of that kind of self love that is readily identified as sin cannot be self hatred and loathing. If there is no direct commandment to love the self, neither is there a commandment to hate the very person God created us to be and now redeems us to be. While arrogance and self-aggrandizement may be the sins of some members of the congregation, self loathing most surely haunts others. By taking time to focus some attention on “the self in the command to love the neighbor, the preacher could address those people in the congregation who have been told all their lives that they are insignificant and useless by proclaiming that self respect and self confidence do not stand against the will of God. If we are going to give ourselves to others, as Christians are called to do, there must actually be a self to give. One can even hold to Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I do) and still proclaim that God’s grace, which redeems us from sin through no merit of our own, calls us to accept with gratitude the life that is ours in Jesus Christ. Without cultivating the sin of pride, the preacher can proclaim:

    —Because we are loved by God, no one has the right to diminish the life that God has given to each of us. —Because God calls us into the world for a divinely appointed purpose, no one has the right to tell us we are worthless. —Because we have been redeemed as children of God, no one has the right to tell us we aren’t smart enough or good enough or pretty enough to make our way in God’s world.

    In 1971 The Rev. Jesse Jackson recited a poem on the children’s television show,

    Page 23

    Sesame Street, which was intended to give children a sense of pride in who they are. The poem was presented in a call/response format with children from different races together repeating and answering Jackson’s call. Jackson made claims such as, “I may be poor… J may be on welfare…, I may be small,” and the children responded, “But I am somebody.”1 The poem concludes with Jackson and the children insisting that they must be “respected,” “protected,” and “never rejected.” Because they are children of God, each of them is somebody. Jackson’s purpose was to instill self-confidence and pride in children who, because of race or poverty, were told they were useless. He was most certainly seeking to give children a sense of self that the world around them sought to destroy. He was, I believe, teaching children to love themselves. Is the self love he sought to instill in children prohibited by the Gospel? Is this the self love that has often been prohibited by the church throughout the centuries? I believe that one can argue that this kind of self love is included in the great commandments to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, and to love the neighbor as the self. This kind of self love is not saying that we are deserving of God’s love; it is affirming that because God loves us, no one else can tell us we are useless, unloved, or unworthy of respect. The law and the prophets. After Jesus has indentified the greatest commandment as loving God and the second greatest as loving the neighbor as the self, he proclaims that on these two commandments hang all the laws and the prophets. The lawyer asked only about the law; Jesus’ claims that his answer is necessary for understanding the law and the prophets. This reference to the prophets broadens the two great commandments so that they refer to every aspect of Christian life: the way we worship through prayer, confession, proclamation, and song, the way we greet each other, the way we welcome the stranger, and the way we live when we walk out of the church. All of these things fall under the expectation that we will seek to love and glorify God and to love the neighbor as the self in all that we do.

    Note 1. The poem “I Am Somebody” and the video from the 1971 airing of Sesame Street can sometimes be found online. The best way to find it is through Google.

  • The poem: subversion and summons

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 32

    The Poem: Subversion and Summons

    Isaiah 11:1-9; Matthew 3:1-12

    Walter Brueggemann

    Cincinnati, Ohio

    Adults have always known that critical thinking is the best way to manage our life. Adults, since Plato, have learned to trust reason and proceed reasonably with their lives. Adults, since Aristotle, have preferred syllogistic logic that makes things certain. Adults, since the ancient Greeks have, by reason, logic, and critical thinking, been able to reduce reality to a memo, a syllogism, a syllabus, a brief. The Romans took over this Geek way to adulthood and combined it with ruthless power to accomplish control and wealth and security. In latter days, we in the United States have replicated Rome with our practice of memo, syllogism, syllabus, and brief.. .together with raw power. We have found our way to wealth, security, and control. And to sustain that way in the world, we have founded great universities to champion critical thinking, reason, and logic. How is that for a quick summary of Western civilization?!

    I. Except this! Mostly unnoticed and not taken seriously, mostly under the radar in this adult world of control and order, there have been Jews. For the most part Jews have not committed to reason and logic and memo and syllogism and brief. Because the Jews came with their peculiar stories of odd moments of transformation, all about emancipation and healing and feeding and newness, all under the rubric of “miracle.” And behind the stories there were poems…lyrical, elusive, eruptive, defiant. Jews have known from the outset that a commitment to memo and syllogism will not make things new. Jews have known all along that in poetry we can do things not permitted by logic or reason, because poems never try to sound like memos. Poetry will break the claims of the memo. Poetry will open the world beyond reason. Poetry will give access to contradictions and tensions that logic must deny. Poetry will not only remember ; it will propose and conjure and wonder and imagine and foretell. So Jews, in their covenantal fidelity, did poems. Miriam did poetry when they crossed out of Egyptian slavery. Deborah did poetry when it dawned on them that the Canaanites were not so formidable. Hannah did poetry when little Samuel was born. Eventually Mary did poetry when she found out she was pregnant. All these mothers in Israel celebrated the impossible that was right before their eyes, even though they could explain none of it. They did poetry while the hard men were still parsing logic and writing memos to each other and drafting briefs. I propose that Advent is a time of struggle between the poem that opens the future that God will work and the memo that keeps control. Advent is a time for relinquishing some of the control in order to receive the impossible from God.

    II. Well, not just any poem. After the mothers in Israel there came the other poets, the ones we call “prophets.” They turned the poetry toward the future, never doubting that God would give new futures out beyond our memos. The book of Isaiah,

    Page 33

    complex as it is, is framed by poetry. The poems of Isaiah are about the future God will yet give. At the beginning of Isaiah, in chapter 2, there is this poem:

    In days tocóme… They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)

    It is an imaging out beyond our posturing in power through which we will never prevail. At the end of Isaiah, in chapter 65, there is this poem:

    For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight, (vv. 17-18)

    The poet anticipates, against all the data, that there will be no more infant mortality and no more economic displacement:

    No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days…. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat. (vv. 20,22)

    And finally, a peaceable creation with no oil spills:

    The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, The lion shall eat straw like the ox;… They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord. (v. 25)

    It is promised! It is imagined! It is proposed! Surely the memo writers did not pause; but the poem lingered. The book of Isaiah moves from “not learn war any more” in chapter 2 to “not hurt or destroy” in chapter 65, a sweep of well-being that contradicts the facts on the ground.

    III. And right in the middle of this poetry, in chapter 11, is the poem entrusted to us on this Advent Sunday. It is a poem that refuses the facts on the ground and invites us listeners to watch for newness outside our constricted, frightened logic. It begins with this that takes our breath away: “Out of the stump of Jesse…,” Jesse being David’s father. David’s family and dynasty run out in failure, no king, no future, no royal possibility, only a stump. But, says the poet, the stump will produce a shoot, a shoot of new life that was not expected. The memo writers no doubt were at work thinking how to honor the stump and close down that history. But the poet said, “Watch for the shoot,” the new David, the new possibility of shalom. The poem that follows is

    Page 34

    about that shoot that cannot be explained by our reason. What a shoot it will be, conjured by the poet ! This new ruler to come, only imagined here, will have qualifications like you have never seen, wisdom (not mere knowledge ), understanding (not just data), wisdom and understanding from the Lord, fear of the Lord, recognition of the holy mystery that is at the core of the power process. This new shoot will be glad to sign on for God’s promises. Like every ruler, he must sort things out and make economic decisions. He will decide with righteousness on behalf of the poor. He will break the monopoly of the power elite and will notice that other neglected public. He will rule for the meek, the ones who have no voice and no political clout and no smart lawyers. He will be all dressed up in robes of covenantal fidelity, and he will not forget what his vocation is. The poem requires us to take a deep breath, because it is reality defining. What we usually have is authority with knowledge but no wisdom, with data but no understanding , the kind of power that governs on behalf of the billionaire club, so that the rich get richer. And now comes a poem of the new incursion of God’s spirit that will break open the cabal of the critical control. But there is more. The poet takes a long pause. Since we are already into God’s impossibilities, the big impossibility is lined out:

    The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. (vv. 6-7)

    The old enmities, the old appetites of the food chain, the old assumptions of the survival of the meanest, all ofthat is subverted. The wild will not stay vicious, because the coming one, marked by righteousness and justice, will overrule raw power in the interest of new possibility. Finally, the young child will toy with the asp and the adder ; nobody will get hurt, because the poison will be removed from the world. The poison will be gone because the shoot will override all business as usual. All will be well, and all manner of thing will be well:

    They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (v. 9)

    The poem is about advent, about the coming one. And we dare to say, we confessing Christians, that the poem concerns the Christmas baby who refuses Rome’s rule of force and religion’s rule of code, opening the world to healing, freedom, forgiveness, and joy. So try this in advent. Depart from logic and memo and syllogism, and host the poem.

    IV. But there is an important caveat about the poem. Those who listened to John the

    Page 35

    Baptist, the big advent guy, loved the poem. They thought they owned the poem. They thought they had the poem as a special promise just to them. It is the temptation of entitled people to think we have privilege about the poem. So John addresses them, calls them seething, slippery, creepy reptiles, low-lifes. And he says to them: Don’t just enjoy the poem. Do the poem. Sign on!

    Bear fruit worthy of repentance… .Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:8,10)

    This is the bite of advent. It is not just marveling at newness God will give. It is not about cozy, comfortable hope. It turns out, as always among Jews, that the poem is a summons to action. In these days of advent, then, imagine if the poem is true. Imagine if the poem is the true text of our life. What then?

    Well, be a carrier of wisdom and not just knowledge; be an agent of understanding, and not just data. Take on “the fear of the Lord,” a sense that there is an “out beyond us” who finally governs. Watch for the poor and make a difference with them; watch for the meek and be a voice for the voiceless. Embrace the lamb and summon the wolf to newness; enfold the kid and deal with the leopard; watch for the hissing snake and notice the end of the poison. And watch for the child:

    The little child will lead them… wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, calf and lion, cow and bear, lion and ox. The nursing child will play over the hole of the asp.

    The poem anticipates the child. And when he is born, we should not be preoccupied with memos and logic and brief and critical thought. Because the child.. .and the poem.. .evoke a leap beyond our control. It is a leap to another world that requires daily obedience. And it ends.. .the poem ends.. .this way:

    They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (v. 9)

    That end of the poem is our beginning, beginning beyond memo and brief and syllogism. It is a world that began in the Jerusalem temple, ran through Bethlehem, and breaks open among us. Watch for the little child!

  • Jesus’ health care plan

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 50

    Jesus ‘ Health Care Pian

    Luke 8:26-39

    William H. Willimon North Alabama Conference, United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

    Now today’s assigned gospel lesson is about somebody who is sick. Nobody likes to be sick — the pain, the inconvenience, the isolation, the whiff of mortality that comes with every illness. And yet, even sickness has its benefits. You learn when you are a kid in school that the one way, the only way, you can get out of school is to be sick. Nobody expects you to go to school when you are sick. For instance, the H INI Flu scare that we had last winter. A scary thing. And yet, even the bogus H INI scare had its advantages. They called me from the office and said, “Where are you? Why aren’t you at work?” And I answered, “When I got up this morning, I had a little sniffle, also a slight cough. I was feeling kind of down about the state of the church. And the President of the United States ordered me to call in sick. The President himself said, ‘Don’t you let me catch you going to work when you think you’ve got the flu! They don’t want you at work. Stay home!” When you are sick, people cut you a lot of slack. All my foibles and shortcomings that people normally hammer me for are never brought up to me when I’m ailing. People don’t expect things of sick people that they expect of healthy people. Well, here is a story about a man who was sick, And then he came to Jesus. It’s tough to be sick. When you are sick, the sickness has a way of just taking over your whole life. All your projects and all your plans, everything is put on hold because you are sick It is hard to be half sick. Sickness is imperialistic. There is nothing in your life that’s more important than getting well when you are sick. Today we have got a gospel story about a man who is sick. And look at what his illness has done to him: He’s got no job. He has no friends. He doesn’t even have any clothes. There he is living out among the dead. He is naked, as good as dead. Sickness makes you feel that way-vulnerable, exposed, naked, sick unto death. This man has been suffering in body and in mind for many years. And Jesus asks him, “What is your name?” This is interesting because generally when you are sick it is so easy to loose your name. You become, in hospital, a number – case 2422. HIPA A won’t allow them to say your name in public. Or you say, “I’m a cancer survivor.” Or you answer, “Legion.” You don’t really have this illness, it has you, it defines you. The illness entombs you, imprisons you, strips you of any name other than “sick.” Then Jesus looks upon this tormented man and has compassion. (Jesus is noted for his compassion for the suffering.) Jesus, Mr. Compassion, reaches out to this horribly suffering sick, naked, imprisoned, good-as-dead man and he heals him. Of course that doesn’t surprise you. You’ve seen Jesus in action before. Of course Jesus miraculously heals. This is what you expect from a nice, compassionate Savior like Jesus. And so you now expect Jesus to say to the man, “Look, you have suffered your whole life, poor thing. Here you are with no family, no friends, no job, no clothes out here living with the dead. I want you now to go back home, and I want you to

    Page 51

    start living. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. And get some clothes! You have suffered enough in your lifetime. You go home and take it easy. You deserve it, you….” No, this is Jesus, not Dr. Phil. Jesus says to the man, “You go back home, and you preach, you declare (same Greek word for what I’m trying to do to you right now!), you proclaim what God has done for you.” Wow. A man comes to Jesus to be healed and walks away ordained to preach. During the recent health care debate, I was upset that it seemed like everybody was debating health care on Fox News. Everybody was talking (or, on Fox News shouting) about health care except the church. So I said, “Hey, we follow a compassionate , healing savior; the church ought to get into the health debate.” Maybe this morning’s scripture is an explanation for why we didn’t get into the debate. If Christians get into anything, we’ve got to get into it with Jesus. This man, suffering in body and in spirit, comes to Jesus for a cure. And Jesus cures him. And the next thing Jesus does is call him. He comes to Jesus for therapy, and Jesus gives him an assignment. Now that’s a different way to treat sick people. I know there are some of you out there who say, “I wish my pastor would visit me. My pastor has not been in our house in 10 years.” Well, I can fix that. Just get real sick. If you get terminally ill — I don’t mean just become one of these bogus “shut-ins,” but really sick — you will get a visit from your pastor. That is the only reason you will get a visit from your pastor because we pastors generally don’t kick into action until people are sick. Sickness has become the most important thing that can happen to you in life. Watch the 6:30 News. All the advertisements during the 6:30 News are for drugs, medicine. That is all we care about. As a young pastor in my first week at my first church, I was going down the membership roll with the lay leader. We came to this woman’s name. “She doesn’t attend church,” said the lay leader. “She enjoys poor health. Son, you will log a lot of hours with her, let me tell you.” As bishop I go around to Methodist churches, and when I am in worship in a small Methodist church, they often come to something they call the “prayer requests.” The pastor asks, “Are there any prayer requests?” And then the sick list begins. There never are any prayer requests for anything except for matters related to the physical deterioration of older adults. Now I am an older adult suffering from physical deterioration , so I can say this: Show me in scripture where Jesus appears to give a rip about the physical problems of older adults! In the Lord’s Prayer, where is the sick list? Jesus appears to have a very different definition of prayer. Oh my goodness! You are in your late 60’s and you appear to be returning to dust. That is a horrible injustice! That is just terrible, unexpected news! Let’s all hold hands and pray for you. And I hear God saying, “Look, I got that out of the way by the second chapter of Genesis. You are dirt, and you are returning to dirt and its okay. That is the way I set things up. Health has become our national obsession, our greatest need and our fondest desire. And I am saying that one of the few virtues of being sick is that sickness gives us a kind moral free pass. Nobody expects sick people to be polite. Nobody expects sick people to be good. Get sick and all moral responsibilities are off. The only thing you have to do when you are sick is focus entirely upon your self. “Don’t worry about anything,” they say softly to us, “Look after yourself. You just get well.”

    Page 52

    I did a book on clergy burnout some years ago, and after interviews with clergy who had called it quits, found that a major reason why some pastors quit is because they are forced to spend so much time listening to sick people. Sickness, in our culture , has a way of making self-consumed narcissists of us all. No wonder few people except clergy visit the sick. About a year ago I had an accident with a chainsaw. I badly cut my hand. Patsy raced me down to the emergency room. When I got there it turns out that in Sylva, North Carolina, a chainsaw accident is just another day at the office. I was grateful for that. I got in there and the nurse said, “We are going to have to clean this thing up. Ever had morphine?” I responded, “No. I’ve always wanted some but….” So I got this shot of morphine . She came back a few minutes later and asked how I was, and I said that it still hurts, it still really hurts. “Let me give you another shot of morphine,” she said. She came back a little later and asked, “How are you feeling now?” And I replied, in a stupor, “You know, I’m thinking that Dick Chaney may be a great leader after all. I am starting to feel good about the whole Bush Administration,” Just then the Doctor entered, and she said to him, “Sorry. I may have overdone it on the morphine. Don’t dare give him any more.” I saw that afternoon why the government makes it illegal for you to just shoot up anytime you are displeased with life. Well, any sickness has a way of de-moralizing you. “You are sick? What you need is therapy.” But today’s gospel suggests that, in Jesus, we got more than a therapist, a doctor. What we got was a Savior: Return home, return home, and you declare what God Almighty has done for you. Jesus makes this formally sick deranged man a disciple. One can imagine years later, “Mr. Legion, how did you get called into the ministry ?” And he said, “Well, I was suffering from mental illness for thirty-five years and then Jesus healed me and he made me a preacher that same day. It wanted to see Paris, but no, I was forced to go back home and preach.” Jesus doesn’t just fix us. That is what we want when we get sick; we want to be fixed, we want to be put right – with minimal effort on our part – no life style changes or anything. Jesus doesn’t just heal people. He is in the business of calling, assigning, commissioning, and sending people. I remember being asked by a college student, “Aren’t you troubled that the Bible says that Jesus performs miraculous healings? How could a modern person believe in miraculous healing?” I responded, “You know I am not troubled that Jesus heals some people. That’s beautiful. I am troubled that he didn’t heal more people.” And because you are Presbyterian, you probably know lots of scripture. Therefore you know that healing is a decidedly ambiguous phenomenon in the gospels. When anybody starts calling Jesus a healer, he appears to get nervous. “Don’t you tell anybody I healed you!” he often commands. Jesus is about more important work even than healing, even than assuaging our pain. A former church member of mine was unmarried much of her adult life. She met a man at church. Actually, they met at the Arthur Murray Dance Club. They both loved ballroom dancing. They were at midlife. Got married. We said it was “a marriage made in heaven and on the dance floor.” One year into their marriage she was struck down by a rare, debilitating nerve disorder. Within one month she moved from this vivacious, lively person to someone who was totally confined to bed, unable to

    Page 53

    walk or even to move her legs. In my pastoral care for her in the days afterwards, it seemed to me one of the saddest tragedies I had witnessed. One day she said to me, “You know I’ve been praying this morning, and I thought about what am I doing for God and what am I doing for the church. And preacher, I want you to help me think about what job I could have at the church. Give me some­ thing to do for the church. God expects it of me.” And I looked at her lying there in that bed paralyzed, and I thought, “You are fortunate just to be here. What on earth could you do? You are paralyzed!” But I asked her, “Have you thought about what you would like to do for the church?” She said, “Well, you know we are a small church, and we have only a part-time secretary. I can’t do much, but I can punch numbers in that telephone. How about you giving me any phone calls that I could make for you? Just give me a list of people to call related to meetings and people to check up on. I could do that.” A couple of times of week I would go by and give her a list of people to call about meetings or to check up on. She was amazing. I wouldn’t have thought it up on my own. One evening one of the Trustees said to me, “I want to ask you what kind of preacher, what kind of low, conniving preacher, would ask a man like me – who has a very demanding job, 10 hours a day, to come home dead tired, pick up the phone and have a paralyzed woman ask, Ήϋ You’re going to be at the Trustees Meeting tonight. Right? We are counting on you, and you know it is important, some very important business.’ Preacher, that is low. That is so wrong.” Jesus does that sort of thing all the time. I have a number of churches that are doing Celebrate Recovery. I think Rick Warren has this big program – Celebrate Recovery. Fine. Wonderful ministry for a church. But let’s not wait for them to get cured of their addiction, their illness, before we ask them to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t heal all that many people. And many of the sick people with whom we work are going to be just as messed up when we leave as when we arrived. Jesus was about things even more important than healing. Many times I’ve asked a pastor and congregation, “What are you doing out here? I can’t tell that anything is going on.” A predominate response to my question is, “We are healing. This congregation has been divided, in crisis. Now we are healing.” Please don’t wait for Jesus to heal you before you obey him! I have a friend from college who came back from Vietnam with a bad back injury. He is never away from pain. He even got addicted to drugs and alcohol because of the pain. Some years ago he told me, “Before I get out of bed every morning, I pray to Jesus, ‘Please take away some of the pain. I think I can serve you better. Just take away^ome of the pain.’” I saw him just a few months back and he looked better. He looked physically better and I said, “Hey, have the doctors found out what was wrong with your back?” He said, “No, no they are just as clueless as ever. You know, since you are in the business, you might be interested in this: every morning I would pray to Jesus, ‘Please Lord, just take away a little of the pain.’ I was praying the prayer that I pray eVery morning. It was as if for the first time God spoke to me and gave me an answer. You know what he said? ‘Where in the Bible does it say I’ve got some objection to ^pepple being in pain? Hey, I love to put people in pain they wouldn’t be in until they met me.’” Wow! That’s not á Methodist Jesus; that’s some kind of biblical Jesus. Jesus

    Page 54

    loves us enough not to let our pain keep us from being responsible to him. Hear the good news: Jesus doesn’t wait till you get your life together to commandeer your life. He is not going to wait until you are delivered of your aches and pains and your debilitating illness and even your craziness before he calls you to be a disciple. Jesus is much more into assignment and commissioning than he is in to healing. “Go home! Tell the folks back home how much God has done for you.” And sometimes the greatest thing that God does for us is not to heal us but to call us. God preserve the church from presenting Jesus as the great cosmic therapist, the solution to all your problems, aches, and pains. From what I have seen as a pastor, Jesus complicates people’s lives in ways they didn’t have before they met Jesus. When I was a campus minister at Duke, a favorite student of mine was struck down with a brain tumor. I went over to Duke Hospital the night before his brain surgery. There were his parents and his young wife. (They had been married only a year.) They all stood around his bedside, trying to be cheerful, but, like me, deeply fearful. Eventually the neurosurgeon came by. He explained what he planned to do the next morning. “We’ll slice open your brain here and open this up, and we’ll work here and then we’ll send it to pathology.” When he finished describing the gruesome surgery, he asked if there were any questions. We had none. The neurosurgeon then said, “Look before I leave would you like to have prayer?” And we said, “Sure. In fact you have two Methodist preachers right here.” The surgeon said he would lead the prayer. He asked that we all join hands around the bedside. Then he led one of the most power prayers I had ever heard in the hospital. “First I am going to pray for Clark, as we go into the surgery, that God’s presence be with us. Then I am going to pray for me, that God will use my skills tomorrow, and then I will pray for you.” When he finished there was not a dry eye around the bedside. It was powerful! “Well” he said, “I’ve got to go.” I shot out of the door and went down the hall, calling after him. I told him I was a chaplain here, and I said, “Wow, that was one of the most wonderful power prayers that I’ve ever heard. Do you offer that to everyone? I just think that was wonderful .” “Do you?” he asked. “I just don’t know.” “Well, I know what you mean. This is a secular university with government regulations and everything. And you don’t want to offend anyone,” I said. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “You are a preacher. You know what it is like. You get into these situations in life, you invite Jesus in, you turn it over to the Lord. You just never know what Jesus is going to ask you to do. Do you?”

    Note This sermon was preached at Montreat, North Carolina, on June 20,2010.