THESE WEEKS ARE THE high point of the Christian year. They are also taxing for those who are preachers. The Sundays seem to come around every few minutes, while liturgies fly at you even faster during Holy Week. All the more important, then, to dine on the Word ourselves, before we feed others from what we’re cooking. Thankfully, the church has set aside the richest texts we have to describe the mystery that is beyond describing—that God is in Christ reconciling the entire world. Often we can’t even reconcile—piece together—our own lives! Let alone our families, churches, communities. Thankfully, we don’t have to. God already has. Our work is announcing what’s been completed and enjoying its fruits.
The liturgies of Lent, the Passion, and Holy Week are what seep deep into people’s bones. Our words bring to light what God is already doing. Make use of these. Have worship on Wednesday to wash feet and on Maundy Thursday to join in Jesus’ inauguration of the Lord’s Supper. Do like the African-American church has done and invite people to gather for three hours on Good Friday to hear seven sermons. Gather like the Orthodox and the Catholics at dawn on Easter, light a fire, and have folks process into church carrying the light of Christ and singing. It’s a week of revival, as evangelicals put it. God isn’t just resurrecting Jesus. God’s stitching the church back together—and the universe too.
[March 6]
Dereliction and Duty
Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
YOU COULD LIVE with each of these texts every moment left in your life and never exhaust them. They have an accent on forgiveness, grace, and celebration. This is already odd in Lent—a season in which, traditionally, we train ourselves not to say “hallelujah” so that it will ring out all the sweeter on Easter when our lips curl around its contours for the first time in weeks. Israel’s disgrace is “rolled away,” as the word “Gilgal” announces (Joshua 5:9). Happy are we when our “sin is covered” (Psalm 32:1), when God is our hiding place. And Christ is reconciling every atom in the universe—and more miraculously still—entrusting us (us!) with God’s ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5).
Luke 15 is more staggering still. It is often misnamed “the prodigal son.” But as Tim Keller and others have pointed out, it is the father who is most extravagant here. The father, as if he dies to himself, gives the younger son his inheritance. Then, when the younger son returns, the father celebrates with what is left (presumably cutting into the elder’s share). The younger son’s depth of dissolution would have drawn a reflexive shudder from the story’s first readers (Pigs! Akin to, say, roaches for us). And the elder son is just as lost as the younger—he just has a better strategy for getting the father’s stuff by dutifully waiting for dad’s death. Better, that is, until he runs headlong into his father’s rule-transcending generosity.
How do we read it? Original readers might have heard the Jews’ longtime faithfulness contrasted with gentiles’ self-absorbed paganism, both overwhelmed in the father’s grace. Sam Wells has read it with regard to Catholics’ adherence to the church’s creedal oneness and Protestants’ dissolution into ever smaller groups who will get the Bible right this time. Karl Barth saw here Christ’s journey into the far country of our Adam-like abandonment of God in order to restore us to grace. The frame of the story is so strong you can hang on it nearly any account of dereliction and resurrection. Do you know anything about those two realities?
[ March 13 ]
Memory of Joy
Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
RELIGIOUS PEOPLE are, by definition, those who remember. So when Isaiah tells you not to remember, don’t believe him. What he means is that what God is about to do is so fantastic that even the Exodus will fade in its light.
When Paul tells you not to remember, don’t believe him. Especially as he lays out his impressive résumé. None of it matters compared to God’s résumé—that is, to what God has done for us undeserving people in Christ.
Better to listen when the psalmist says, indeed begs, that we remember. Remember what laughter was like? Now, all we have is tears. God, will you make us laugh again? That’s as Lenten a prayer as we have. A memory of joy behind oceans of sadness, and a frail trust that God can make us smile again.
John’s story is the one that most requires a careful memory. But first it requires a sensitive sense of smell. Pay close attention whenever the Bible engages a specific sense—in this case our nose. “The house was filled with the fragrance,” John says, as Mary dumps a year’s wages in oil on her friend’s feet. Feet! If we were planning the most appropriate way for Christ, “the anointed one,” to be anointed, we probably wouldn’t imagine a private dinner, on his feet, in front of only a few friends. Emperors are anointed in public, by some worthy figure, with maximum public effect. This Christ is anointed among a few friends, a few detractors, in a gesture that seems awkward, budget-breakingly extravagant, and really, really smelly.
Judas’ objection is what requires our memory. Deuteronomy makes clear that the poor’s omnipresence demands our constant, creative self-giving to them (15:11). Those with no memory have made this an excuse for being closed-fisted.
God is anything but close-fisted. As Robert Jenson wrote, God raised Israel from Egypt and Christ from the dead. And God has a future so remarkable we won’t even remember Exodus, we won’t even remember resurrection. We’ll only remember God and all God’s beloved children. Doesn’t that smell good?
[ March 20 ]
Cross-Shaped Cosmos
Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 23:1-49
I TOLD MY church in North Carolina once about friends in Sudan who said Jesus had forever marked the back of the donkey. I thought this would be an obscure reference that affirms the worldwide church. Instead, my farming parishioners smiled. Their donkeys also have crosses in the fur on their backs. Jesus is always closer than we think. The next year one of those cross-marked donkeys paraded in on Palm Sunday with the kids and the dancers and the Lord of the universe.
These texts are chock-full of signs. Philippians insists that the pattern of the cosmos is cross-shaped: We descend-to-ascend. God does not stay safe from the messes we’ve made. God comes unbearably close. Ever after Jesus, God has skin and eyelashes and a spleen and a Jewish mom. And God becomes a slave and dies. Not even hell is safe from the sound of praise. Down, down, down. So God super-exalts him, and every knee bows.
The Passion text from Luke should be read in its glorious entirety. And we should take time to point out the signs: Jesus is condemned so that unworthy Barabbas can go free. Simon of Cyrene carries a cross he hadn’t planned on carrying for a Christ he hadn’t planned on meeting. “He saved others; let him save himself,” they say in mockery while the world is being saved by the one who won’t save himself. And a man dying beside him, and a Roman centurion, recognize what the world’s greatest legal system (Rome) and God’s own chosen people mostly cannot see—that this one can save from death.
There is a saying attributed to St. Augustine: “Do not despair; one thief was saved. Do not presume; one thief was lost.” This is a lot for the preacher—and parish—to hold in her hands, like Joseph of Arimathea once held the dead body of Christ in his. But in the economy of this God, dead things are constantly springing forth with life.
[ March 27 ]
When Death Trembled
Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Luke 24:1-12
“THESE WORDS seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” If there’s a day designed for our words not to fall on the ground, it’s this day. On Easter, even normally empty churches are full—of people and lilies and hope. Musicians have brought their best. People who are not normally there to hear the good news are there, and might even hear!
But can we hear? That God raised Jesus and appointed him judge of all, both the living and the dead (Acts 10:42)? That the stone the builders rejected is now the cornerstone—and by implication, that God has gathered up all that is rejected and given it the place of honor (Psalm 118)? That Jesus’ resurrection is so “bodily” that all those in bodies have reason to hope they will prosper and flourish (1 Corinthians 15:22)? That no tomb is safe (Luke 24) from the Lord of life whose resurrecting light irradiates every tomb and fills the world with light? There is enough here that we can understand why its first hearers turned away, cautioned against “idle tales.” Our ears can’t take this much light.
Preachers sometimes feel obligated to conjure up the best sermon of the year on this day when others are bringing their highest expectations. But the baseball player who swings for the fences usually misses; the player who just tries to make contact often gets a base hit. We shouldn’t try to do too much. These texts can do plenty without us. They bear witness to a God whose life is not broken by death, but rather whose life breaks death.
Much of our life is absorbed with fear of death. We expensively defend ourselves from it with military, police, security. We work frantically to keep the wolves away. All of this is understandable—we live in a dangerous, fallen world. Yet these texts suggest it’s really death that should tremble. Life is more nimble, more alive, more disruptive than death. After Jesus’ resurrection, no tomb is safe. No domain is marked only by death. Life reigns. And nothing will be the same.
This is an excerpt from "Preaching the Word," Sojourners' exclusive resource for sermon preparation, which is 40% off during Lent. Get a subscription here.
Jason Byassee is pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, N.C., and a fellow in theology and leadership at Duke Divinity School. He holds the Butler chair in homiletics and biblical hermeneutics at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!