Back with My Heart

THIS IS WEIRD, I know, but I miss Lent when it’s over. There is something to what Otis Moss III calls the “blue note preaching” that feels human and humanizing. So much of life is sorrowful. At Lent we can name that sadness explicitly. Don’t get me wrong—Easter is awesome. But as soon as it’s done and the lilies are put away and the crowds diminish, I miss the strong scrubbing brush on our corroded hearts and the promise of God’s unending mercy.

There is a clarity in Lent. Repent! Turn around! Now! This is not at all a negative message. When we repent, we empty ourselves, pour ourselves out, open ourselves up. We are normally so full of self-regard. As a friend of mine says, “I’m always right.” What? “I mean, if I knew something was a lie, I’d stop thinking it.” Donald Trump couldn’t have said it better. The thing is, we all think we’re right all the time. Lent says, “No you’re not. Whoever you are.” Sarah Coakley’s work brilliantly has shown the good news of what scripture calls “kenosis,” self-emptying. This is a dangerous teaching. Women and minorities and people out of power are often abused by being told to make themselves less. Coakley argues that self-emptying in forms such as silent prayer is actually the most empowering thing we can do. Because then God’s Holy Spirit fills us up. Grants us a power we can’t imagine. Makes us fully human.

So repent away, preachers and friends. There is no better piece of good news around.

[ March 5 ]

God Tumbles After Us

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 ; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19, 13-17; Matthew 4:1-11

THERE'S ENOUGH here for a lifetime of sermons. Let’s start with what not to say. Adam and Eve did not fall because of sex, or feminine frailty, or because God is vindictive. And nothing that’s offered as a temptation here is a bad thing in and of itself (knowledge, wisdom, fruit, or in Matthew, bread, preservation from harm, or power). The mistake is in how those things are sought: by asking “Did God say ... ?” or by taking the devil’s shortcuts. The fall was no Promethean grab for power that God had to whack down. It was a stumbling into ruin that God looks on with pity, to paraphrase Julian of Norwich. Then God plunges into the ditch with us.

The rabbis have long noticed a curious addition to the list of prohibitions that Eve gives the serpent: “Nor shall you touch it.” God didn’t say not to touch the tree in Genesis 2:16-17. The rabbis filled in the gap: Adam must have added this prohibition. The serpent, knowing this, after his invitation in 3:5 grabbed the tree ... and shook it hard. In other words, don’t add to God’s gracious law, or make faith harder than it has to be. In Gary Anderson’s The Genesis of Perfection, he gives the example of Michelangelo, who demonstrates this with his Sistine Chapel ceiling—where Eve majestically reaches for the fruit while Adam lustily grabs for it.

Paul’s is the most important point. If Adam’s fall had such widespread consequences for humanity, Christ’s grace must have wider consequences still. Paul says it four different ways in four short verses (Romans 5:15-19). Christian theology has often spoken as though Adam’s disaster were universal and Christ’s grace repairs things only somewhat. Hogwash, Paul says. Sin and brokenness are meager. Our rebellion against God is only temporary, partially successful, and pathetic rather than victorious. Christ’s grace is wider reaching, deeper impacting, and more expansive in its effects by far.

Adam and Eve and all of us have fallen into a ditch indeed. But Jesus comes and claws us out of the graves we have dug for ourselves. Listen. You can hear digging getting closer.

[ March 12 ]

Hell And Back?

Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

JOHN BARCLAY'S BOOK Paul and the Gift makes a novel argument. We’re not surprised to learn that God is the one who creates and raises the dead (Romans 4:17). We are surprised to learn that Paul ranks the presence of holiness even among us gentiles as an equally great miracle. Paul’s missionary practice has seen even those furthest from God come to faith. Paul reasons from that experience: Wow! Apparently, God can do anything.

This sort of counter-conventional calling is what God is always up to. In Genesis 12, Abram is a nomad far from home minding his business when God says “You! I’m going to make a nation from you so beautiful that all nations will be blessed through you.” Abram points out he has no children. Perfect! God replies. Everyone will recognize then that this is all my goodness and not yours (Romans 4:4-5).

As gentiles, we don’t belong to the God of Israel inherently. The gospel is not our good news. It all belongs to the Jews (John 4:22). And then, astoundingly, God makes good on promises to Israel through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And now even we stumble into divine favor. Who among us could have planned this convention-shattering salvation? We lift up our eyes to the hills of how we think religion is supposed to work. And we’re surprised that our help comes from elsewhere—from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth (Psalm 121:1-2).

Elaine Heath, the dean at Duke Divinity School, says that Christians’ responsibility is to go to hell. Because that’s what God does. Not content to take flesh with us and die for us, God descends all the way to Hades for us. From now on, those who want to find God have to go to hell—to where people are suffering, because there is Jesus, bringing grace, relief, mercy. Careful if you go. You’ll leave as confused as Nicodemus (what’d that Jesus dude say?!). The crazy way that God calls invites old people to get born anew and all of us to notice where the unpredictable Spirit is blowing. God always does the unexpected. So get ready to be surprised again.

[ March 19 ]

Grumble Less

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

MONKS AND NUNS start every day by chanting Psalm 95. It says everything that needs saying: Open our lips to praise, God made us and not the reverse, let us listen, and harden not our hearts as at Meribah. Like at Massah in the wilderness.

Wait, what? The first few lines could work in any contemporary praise chorus. But those songs are not known for their attention to the particular, like geography and proper names. What happened at Massah (test) and Meribah (quarrel)?

As every pastor knows, God’s people grumble. We know this because we grumble loudest. Where is this provision we were promised? Did God call us just to kill us? In Exodus 17, God tells Moses to strike the rock, there’s water, and everyone drinks and lives (see here 1 Corinthians 10:4—and imagine Jesus shambling in the desert with the people as a great rock!). In the Numbers 20 version of the story, which Psalm 95 more closely reflects, the people are more strongly rebuked for their grumbling (Numbers 20:12).

Faith is serious. So is life. There are no do-overs. We’re not to grumble. We’re to love.

Jesus shows us how. Elaine Heath preaches John 4 as a story about Jesus healing someone who has been sexually abused (see her We Were the Least of These). The Samaritan woman who meets Jesus has been with many men, who use her up and send her away (4:18). She comes to the well at the heat of the day, presumably to avoid being seen (4:6). After she trusts Jesus, she runs back and proclaims that she’s met someone who knows everything she’s ever done (4:29, 39). You can almost hear them thinking: “Sister, everyone knows everything you’ve ever done.” But Jesus has uncovered her pain and gazed on it not with judgment, but with life-restoring love. She’s an honored evangelist now (4:39). A whole community is blessed through her work forever, as her wound is transfigured into joy for her and many (4:40-41).

She did what Psalm 95 asked. She didn’t test or quarrel (and if anyone had any right to, it was her). Jesus enabled her, instead, to love.

[ March 26 ]

Heart Scan

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

WHAT IF I told you Psalm 23 wasn’t always the most beloved psalm of all? William Holladay argues that it became cherished because of the carnage of the U.S. Civil War. It took that scale of destruction for folks to find the deep comfort in the shepherding Lord—his staff, his comfort, his table of enemy-love.

The heart is a sacred place. It’s not easy to get in there. Once in, it’s hard to get out. As preachers, someone said, we’re like open-heart surgeons. We hold that heavy, squishy, life-giving thing in our hands each week. Take care. You can do a lot of good. Or harm.

The story from Samuel suggests the Lord sees the heart better than any MRI sees inside us (16:7). Samuel knows a king will come from the house of Jesse, but seven of his sons pass by and Samuel says, “No, not him either.” By the end he asks, “Is that all you got?!” “Well, there is one more, of so little account he’s minding the animals.” “That one!” God says. The one no one else regards or wants—that one is king, right now.

I think it’s comforting that God can see our hearts. David had a mighty one. What about our feeble ones? Will God take care inside our fragile rib cage (Jeremiah 31:33)?

J. Louis Martyn’s great book History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel is a long, luxurious reading of John 9. He argues (some disagree) that Jesus’ opponents putting the healed blind man out of the synagogue (9:22, 34) reflects not Jesus’ own day but that of Jewish Christians in John’s day. That is, John reads his own situation and Jesus’ ministry in light of each other. This is precisely what we preachers do in every word we speak. We see double. We read our church’s life and God’s life in light of one another. The blind man longs to see. His poor parents are dragged in. Religious authorities, like we do, mistrust the upstart and the new. But here’s what finally matters: opened eyes (9:30) and seeing Jesus (9:37).

That—and a renewed heart—is what Lent is all about.

"Preaching the Word," Sojourners' online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.