Living word by word

Easter lectionary 3A -- Acts 2

 It’s unfortunate that the Acts pericopes for this week (Acts 2:36-41)  and next (Acts 2:42-47) disconnect the repentance and baptism of 3000 on Pentecost and what follows – the entry of this new community into a pattern of breaking bread (v. 41) and sharing all things in common (v. 44). These two things – repentance, turning around and the breaking of bread with a forgiving Savior – are core elements of Luke-Acts, and with this Sunday’s Gospel.

We tend to bracket the incredible number of converts at the end of Peter’s sermon into the category of "Biblical statements that can't possibly translate into today's context". But which is more incredible in today’s context– that 3000 were added in one day, or that they shared all things in common? Or that more were added to their number daily (47), even though people knew that this was a community in which people sold their possessions in order to share them with the poor?

Sara Miles (who I’m very happy to announce will be preaching and speaking at ECLC next February) has written powerfully in her memoir Eat This Bread: A Radical Conversion about this connection between conversion and communion, and between Jesus’ feeding us with himself and our call to feed others. At her church, St. Gregory of Nyssa, the communion table is cleared at the end of the Eucharist and quite literally becomes the table of fellowship with coffee and treats. And the gifts of the community to others are gathered there as well.

The experience of being fed at Jesus’ table converted Miles to Christianity, and in that feeding she also found her own call within St. Gregory’s – starting a food pantry where, weekly, anyone who came to the church doors was offered a bag of groceries, no questions asked.

 Miles has said in a PBS interview that after years of thinking that Christianity was about rules and strict creeds and unlikely beliefs in creationism, she discovered that “faith is about hunger -- a hunger I had always had --  and a willingness to be fed by something you don’t understand.”

 

In this week’s Gospel, and in the Emmaus text, Jesus comes as an unfamiliar figure to the disciples. They still don’t know what his presence means, but as they eat with him their eyes are opened. As they are willing to be fed by this stranger among them, they find their Lord.

favorite clips on John 20

    John 20 must be one of the most-preached Gospel texts in the lectionary. Why Thomas gets to appear each and every lectionary year, I don't know. Fortunately, it is a rich text.

    My favorite clips from the surfing so far:

• See Dan Deffenbaugh's (another Vandy-ite) lovely reflection on the Spirit at Seeds of Shalom
• Mary Hinkle Shore's old but powerful piece about Thomas at Pilgrim Preaching
• And, for everyone burnt out on theological treatises about the meaning of the passion and resurrection, don't miss the Ironic Catholic

More of my own thoughts to come.

deep church, occasional church

    Make no mistake, I'm a church geek. Long before I was ordained I went to every Holy Week service available. Easter Vigil was not part of my childhood church life, but once I discovered it as an adult, it became indispensable.
    Vigil is wonderful for a lot of reasons. It engages all the senses and both the sacraments. It moves one physically from a womb-like darkness to the bright loudness of resurrection joy. It rehearses some of the most dramatic stories of the Old Testament, including  my all-time favorite, the farcical tale of Shadrach Meschach and Abednego. (Try reading it some time with the rhythms of Dr. Seuss.)
    I've wished for years that we could get more people engaged in this service, but, of course, it's usually just church geeks like myself who show up. This year, however, Easter's early arrival gave us an opportunity to draw in our Sunday School families in a new way. Hardly anyone was on spring break yet, so every class was given a story to tell, and no one was exempt since it was just part of the Sunday School time during Lent. And, in deference to small children, we started at 6 and kept the service short. We had 133 people there on Saturday night -- easily three times our average.
    A good Easter Vigil is really all the Easter I need. (I made a point of telling families that Saturday night "counted" as Easter church). I have long admired the Holy Week practice of  St. Gregory of Nyssa in  San Francisco. Easter Vigil is unquestionably the year's highlight, and the next morning there is no liturgy -- only a community picnic. (They also make the eminently practical move of having "Maundy Tuesday," partly to spread out the liturgical commitments of the week.)
    After gathering with the most involved members of the community around the most central part of our faith for a few hours at Vigil, Easter morning often feels almost a letdown to me. Sure, there are 500 people through the doors, but many of them are people I don't see very often the rest of the year. It's hard not to be cynical about the ratio of energy put out to community return. I'd much rather have a picnic with the folks who just helped make Holy Week happen.
    But, of course, the hospitality of Easter morning is undeniably a resurrection practice -- maybe an indispensable one. All those people who only show up two or three times a year are not going to come to Easter Vigil. They come Easter morning, and the Gospel is for them, even if they do see it as an obligation to be done before brunch. In fact, one could argue that Jesus' resurrection appearances focus on those whose faith is most at risk -- Thomas and his doubts, Peter after his denials, and the two leaving  the disciples in Jerusalem and heading to Emmaus. Jesus spends his limited post-resurrection time on them.  It makes sense for the church to do the same.

Zen cross

One of our favorite picture books, Zen Shorts, offers a zen master in the form of a panda bear named Stillwater. He befriends three children and tells each one an appropriate Zen tale as they deal with questions of fate and forgiveness. Jon Muth’s watercolors and ink drawings are a delight.

The story of the “Farmer’s Luck” has been running through my head as I contemplate Good Friday coming up. In this tale, a series of events befall a farmer, and after each one, his neighbors respond with sympathy or joy.

 “What good luck!” they say when wild horses appear on his land.

“Maybe,” he replies.

“What horrible luck!” they murmur when his son breaks his leg trying to ride one of said horses.

“Maybe” the farmer replies.

“What good luck!” they say, as the army shows up to conscript young men into war, and the son with the broken leg remains free.

“Maybe,” the farmer replies, and Muth’s lovely ink illustration shows the son ensconced in a La-Z-Boy in front of the TV.

 The story captures for me the uncertainty that the cross casts across all our assessments of what is really going on in the world. As far as I know, the English language is the only one that calls this Friday “Good.” In German, French and Spanish it is simply called "holy."

To me, “holy” seems a better fit with the mystery that is the cross. Is it “good” that Jesus died? Maybe. Yes, we can say, God accomplished our salvation on the cross. But no, to call such torture and injustice ‘good’ is a bit of a stretch.

 As a lens for looking at our own suffering, the cross puts a great big “maybe” on all those things we simply declare bad, unfortunate, outside the pale. If God can be at work on the cross, then maybe even those moments when God seems most distant to us are not what they appear.  Maybe – maybe – they are where God is at work most profoundly, most powerfully.

Lent 5A

    Because I split preaching pretty much evenly with my colleague here at ECLC, I often don't repeat the same texts every three years. But for some reason every time the Lazarus story has come around here, it's been my turn to preach, it seems. And so it is again this year.
    The sermon I won't be preaching, because I'm getting tired of it: Lazarus dies twice, and so do we. It's one of those sadly ironic pieces in John that no sooner has Lazarus been raised from the dead, people are ready to kill Jesus, and Lazarus again too. Of course, as far as we know Lazarus isn't killed off, but we have to assume that, at some point, he does die again.
    What would it be like to die twice? We have to hope that Lazarus' first experience with dying and being called again to new life would give him confidence as he faces his second death. He's done it once. He knows that's not the end of the story. He knows that Jesus will call him forth.
    And so it is for us. We are baptized into Jesus' death. We've already died once in those waters, so we can face our second death with more confidence. Yes, we will die, but we know that is not the end of the story. Christ will call us forth again.

speaking of being born again-- Lent 2A

    The Rake this month has an article about the Barna study in which self-professed "born again Christians" were found to have worldviews that  many of their fellow evangelicals deem insufficiently "biblical." So now James Dobson and friends are on a new campaign to bring these folks up to speed on what it really means to believe in Jesus.
    Isn't it ironic that Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus, which seems to be all about double meanings and highly metaphorical language for the mystery of God's love, is the origin of this litmus-test phrase for being a "real" Christian? Nicodemus doesn't get it with Jesus there in the room with him. Are we really surprised to find that contemporary Christians have vastly different takes on what the faith is all about?
    Maybe it's a cop out to avoid longer conversations, but when strangers ask me if I'm born again, I just say yes. My baptism is valid, thank you very much.

Lent 2A -- what is a gift anyway?

A couple weeks ago we heard David Rhoads of the Lutheran Seminary in Chicago "perform” the book of Galatians. It was enlivening to hear that familiar book with new ears, all at once, but what grabbed me most were his concluding remarks, in which he spoke about the power of the Gospel to free us. So often in the church we have defined the “problem” as guilt, a category that made sense, perhaps, to first-century Jews and our immigrant forebears. But increasingly our culture has lost a sense of guilt -- or pathologized it where it exists. Shame, on the other hand, is alive and well for people across the cultural and religious spectrum. And the Gospel, Paul makes clear, frees us from shame as well.

This came to mind reading the second lesson from Romans for this Sunday, where Paul in his later letter details how Abraham was reckoned as “righteous” through faith. This is a dense enough passage as it is – a daunting one to preach, especially since one has to exegete Genesis at the same time. But I'm considering it. In our Lutheran framework, the focus on being “righteous through faith” has so often turned faith into just another – if more vaguely defined – work. It wasn’t Abraham’s circumcision that saved him, the argument goes. It was that he believed God. For a modern person struggling with faith defined as believing the Creed, that’s not good news. It only leaves us feeling unable to spiritually measure up, not good enough – in other words, ashamed.

But what if this righteousness that God gives truly is something given? What if, as Paul writes, God “justifies the ungodly”? Not the believing, repentant ungodly, just the plain old, mixed-up, not even sure I want to believe ungodly?

If that is so, then we, like Abraham are living into a whole new reality, one that doesn’t fully exist yet, like the child and country still longed for. And living into that reality, created by God and held in God’s hands, is all the righteousness we need.

Transfiguration

I'm actually taking this Transfiguration Sunday off, in order to participate in the City of Lakes Loppet on Sunday. For me it's an annual glimpse of the kingdom, being able to SKI from the suburbs into Uptown! This year we might have a kid skiing with us instead of being hauled behind us. . .another milestone.

Those of you looking for a preaching image or two, I'll refer you back to my essay from last year  at Journey with Jesus. Matthew's account is a little different, yes, but the larger image of the lights going on still holds true.

At ECLC, we're going to have a surprise transfiguration of a different kind. You'll just have to show up to see what it is.

Epiphany 3A

The makers of the lectionary must have chuckled to themselves, knowing that their choices for this Sunday would usually fall around the time of many congregational annual meetings.

Here's Isaiah promising that the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light (just in case we've forgotten all those warm feelings we had back at Christmas time).

Here's Paul, writing with astonishment, "What's this that I hear? Divisions among you!!"

And Matthew's gospel, reminding us again that the disciples didn't get a job description or an estimate of volunteer hours or even, apparently, a lot of "time to pray about it," when they were called to follow. We'd like to fill in the gaps of the story with some very modern tale of existential angst and dissatisfaction with fishing, but Matthew doesn't care about that at all.

Maybe the question we should ask ourselves at annual meetings is, "What do we have to leave behind in order to follow?"

Second Sunday after Epiphany - lectionary 2

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6

There’s a nice moment in Rob Gifford’s China Road where he recounts a moment “in the first flush of youth and the first flush of faith” when he read the biography of James Hudson Taylor, one of the first western missionaries in China to promote respect for the indigenous culture. Taylor encouraged his associates to adopt Chinese dress and elements of Chinese lifestyle as they preached the Gospel, started schools and hospitals. Gifford, inspired by Taylor’s faith as well as his progressive views, considered entering mission work himself, but his priest in his home church in England advised him, “that sort of canvas might prove a little small for you.”  Gifford’s journalism, in its compassion, insight and accessibility, is evidence, I think, that his priest was right.

How often do we church professionals paint our own work as the true “big canvas” of the Gospel, while dismissing the large ways the laity in their own vocations spread God’s light? How often do we work within our own “tribe” as if that is all there is to God’s work, while in fact our members are being lights to the nations; perhaps they are not preaching from their cubicles, but they are feeding the hungry, educating the young, healing the sick, cleaning the environment, defending the weak. OK, maybe they are also using precious creativity and resources to name a new low-fat snack or advertise the latest techno-gizmo. . .but even in the midst of that they are talking to people with whom most clergy can never dream of having a candid conversation.

God’s healing, God’s salvation, is promised to reach the ends of the earth. Maybe we who work within the tribe have the lightest of all loads; we just give the rest of God’s servants some really great colors to paint on that big canvas of God’s creation.