Living the Word: In The Cool of God's Shade

THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER can make for a preaching desert without an oasis in sight. This can be a fine time to take a vacation from the lectionary. Huge swaths of scripture go untreated otherwise—the entire Samson cycle, most of the cursing psalms, most of the gospel of John. One friend spends a portion of every year preaching through blockbuster movies and how they intersect with the scriptures. Another devoted a preaching series to favorite children’s books.   

Here in August the lectionary itself seems to take a vacation, visiting the discourse about bread in John’s gospel, inviting us to see every bit of bread, every bite of food, as filled with Jesus. Texts about water invite us to see all water as a sign of the God who creates us in the water of a womb and gives water for our salvation in baptism (an especially apt teaching point for those still sandy-toed from the beach).

A friend’s pulpit has on it “tree of life,” written in Hebrew—inviting all to see trees as reminders of the tree from which our first parents ate fruit forbidden to them, the tree on which Jesus was crucified, and the tree in the City of God whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. (He even sees the pages of the hymnal as a glimpse of the leaves of that tree!) And perhaps most important, we are invited to glimpse the poor and mostly unseen in our world, those treasured by Christ, who for a few months are mercifully free from the ravages of winter. They are “the least of these” who will be most honored in the kingdom.

[ August 2 ]
The Bread of Truth

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35

The psalm marvels that Israel’s ancestors ate “the bread of angels” (verse 25), in a glimpse of God’s provision in times ancient and today. Ephesians marvels at the sinewy nature of the body of Christ, each part building the other up like so many ligaments (verse 16). And Jesus in his ordinary human body says that what we really all want for him to do is a trick. “Feed us, entertain us, and we will adore you” (see John 6:30). The only sign God will give is the only sign necessary: the flesh and blood of Jesus, who is God among us. Now, if that one Jew is God among us—then in his ministry, now in his gathered church and in broken bread and in the stranger in our midst—then we have quite a lot to chew on! How can our eating reverse the meal in Nathan’s parable and create the sort of truth-telling community where the poor are blessed instead of tread upon?

[ August 9 ]
Madness and Grief

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 34:1-8; Ephesians 4:25 - 5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

A FRIEND OF MINE was a music minister at an evangelical church when 9/11 happened. Suddenly his happy-clappy music seemed remarkably cheap in the face of horror. Long before such a crisis, the church should be prepared with a diet of scripture that includes such fibrous fare as the story of Absalom. David, Israel’s greatest king, is in pain that no tears can wash away. “O my son ... Absalom! Would I had died instead of you,” David wails (verse 33). Who tells stories on themselves like the people of God? That their greatest king is not only a murderer and adulterer, but his prized son rebelled against him and met so ignominious an end?

Speaking of ignominy, David once feigned madness to save his skin. But he did it before King Achish, not King Abimelech, as the superscription of Psalm 34 has it. This is a mere “mistake” on modernist grounds, but on ancient Jewish and Christian ones, it’s a sign from the Spirit to read more deeply.

A superficial reading also might say that Jesus is just a man—that’s what his opponents say (John 6:42, “Is not this Jesus ... whose father and mother we know?”). A more biblical way of speaking says that there is no one who is just a mere man, a mere woman. We are all radiant as a thousand suns. Those who “taste and see” (Psalm 34:8) the Lord’s radiance at table learn how to see deeply into those who are mad, those who feign madness, those who are stricken with grief, and those stricken with the grandeur of God.

[ August 16 ]
The Meal That Eats Us!

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

IF YOU COULD wish for anything, what would it be? Kids everywhere figure out the obvious answer to this question: Wish for more wishes! Israel’s God is surprised at the answer from Solomon, Israel’s newest king. He could have wished for long life, the death of his enemies, riches. Instead, Solomon wishes for wisdom. God grants the request so overwhelmingly that the books associated with wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures—Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon—are traditionally attributed to Solomon’s pen. Later Solomon will have troubles that seem, uh, not so wise: He sacrifices to foreign gods, marries foreign wives, and raises armies by the thousands. But for now he is celebrated. He wants the right thing.

The psalm and Ephesians readings have their own portions of wisdom literature—the way to a good life is to mind the tongue and depart from evil (Psalm 34:13-14); don’t be drunk with wine, but only with Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18).

Then Jesus injects wisdom of an altogether different sort: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). Wisdom literature is generally taken to be universal. But this is biblical teaching at its most unbearably specific: Eat the flesh of this man or you will die unendingly. St. Augustine spoke of the Eucharist this way: Normally we eat bread and digest it and it becomes part of our body. But with this meal it digests us and makes us part of the body of Christ. That’s a strange sort of wisdom, befitting a God strange enough to take flesh and say “eat me.”

[ August 23 ]
Anti-Growth Strategy

1 Kings 8: 1,6,10-11, 22-30, 41-43; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

JOHN 6  is a hedge against all overly zealous church growth strategies: “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (verse 66). He expects the others to leave too, but Peter says they have nothing better to do: “Lord, to whom can we go?” (verse 68). Presumably our church growth efforts should be no greater than those of Jesus.

This message stands in some contrast to the way Paul writes to the Ephesians in chapter 6, which can be read quite triumphantly in a context such as the church in America. To read “the whole armor of God” (verse 11), in a place as armed to the teeth as the U.S., can be a frightful thing indeed. But our Hebrew scripture guards against our worst instincts. Here we have King Solomon in finest array, all the priests and assembly of Israel gathered, Spirit thick as smoke, a temple befitting the King of the Universe, and yet: Our very best “cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27). Solomon reminds us of the promise made to his father David, that there will always be a king in Israel (verse 25). Yet before long, there is not a king in Israel at all because the kingdom has split in two. The psalm promises that not a single bone of the righteous one will be broken. Sure enough, Jesus’ bones are not broken—but the rest of him is. Both texts suggest God fulfills promises not with triumph but with failure. And on second glance, the letter to the Ephesians says the same: Its writer is an ambassador in chains (Ephesians 6:20), not in armor.

The church’s triumph, like Christ’s, comes only through failure, desertion, dissolution. Not many want to go around in this way—but those who do will find it full of life.

[ August 30 ]
Faithful Change

Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

DOES GOD CHANGE or is God ever the same? The texts this week suggest a bit of both. There is no “shadow of turning,” says James in his letter (1:17). The psalmist promises that those who act righteously—who do not slander or do evil or break oaths or lend at interest—“shall never be moved” (Psalm 15:5). In short, they shall be like God. On the other hand, there is a great deal of motion in these texts. The Canticle’s beloved is “leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills ... like a gazelle or a young stag” (Song of Solomon 2:8-9). That’s God, bounding after us. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus’ argument with his fellow religious leaders suggests a tradition much in motion or even turmoil. Jesus overturns the “tradition of the elders” (Mark 7:3) about eating and drinking, suggesting (also with much biblical support) that what is inside a person is vastly more important to God than what is outside (verse 15).

Well, which is it? Does God never change? Or is God leaping the mountains? Bringing a new revelation that upends the old?

With regard to God, who can say? Yet in our frail lives, everything changes. For our lives to remain somewhat the same, they have to evolve—hopefully they faithfully change rather than fruitlessly change. We cannot freeze a tradition in amber to keep it “the same.” That will kill it. We have to evolve for a new day in ways that are faithful to who we’ve been before.

One thing we can count on: God will be faithful. Whatever changes in our lives, God will not change, for all God can be is overflowing love.