Sit Down, Shut Up, Advent

It's that season again! My favorite time of the year; when advertisers convince us with ever louder and more important-sounding soundbites to spend, spend, spend like the future of our children depends on it; when consumerism runs amok. It's the time of the year for light displays and blaring Christmas music. It's the time of the year for busy malls, busier malls and malls so insanely busy no sane person would ever enter. All in the name of the holidays.

Give me a break.

No, seriously, I need a break. I am desperate for reprieve--a retreat from all that is hectic.

Recently, I've been going up to Winnipeg every Tuesday night to play in a chess tournament. Six Tuesday nights... three hours driving in all. Well worth it. At first I thought I was heading up because I missed the competition. There is some truth in that; I do like challenging myself; but lately I've realized it's more complicated than that. There is something about playing chess--and even the drive--that has centered me during a time in the year when everything else is moving far too fast. I realized, finally, that it's the silence.

There may be no state of being so consistently undervalued as silence. I used to think that there were people who enjoyed moving slow, for whom silence was a virtue, and people who had to be doing things, and I was the latter. However, I now realize that there are people who are able to contemplate in the stillness, and people, like myself, who have to find more innovative ways to exist in silence but who need it just the same. In fact, those of us who are, by our nature, moving from thing to thing as fast as humanly possible seem to need it more.

I never realized before why chess has been so important to me. It's meditative. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm purging my mind of thoughts while playing chess. Rather, I am concentrating fully on one thing and embracing the silence around me. It's prayer of a rather primitive sort and it satisfies a need. A chess tournament hall is silent. There is a reason that cell phones ringing carry a near death sentence to the serious chess player; silence is a virtue and causing noise is sin.

We have few of these chess tournament halls in our daily lives. Most of what we do is consumed with noise. Today, my office has been more or less obliterated as some dedicated workers put in new windows. I appreciate what they are doing--they are, after all, providing me with a tremendous service--but it means I am stuck out in the open in the midst of chaos and constant, punctuated noise. It's no place to work, and I dare say that if this were the only situation in which I ever worked my stress level would never recede. I miss silence.

My phone rings. Workers talk with me. A face pops in my office. The printers whir. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Advent is rough. It's rough because it is so countercultural. It's rough because it's not very convenient to our busy lives. It's rough because we think we know what to expect so how can we live in a time of waiting?

It's easier to skip it. It's easier to live out loud. That's the credo of my generation. Avoid silence at all costs. Silence is awkward. Sitting should be combined with television or video games. Silence is the enemy.

And so it goes. The stress levels rise. We find ourselves unable to contemplate, unable to relieve the immense burdens in our lives, and we begin to think that the world is going down the tubes. We enter negative feedback cycles. Soon the world out there is evil and out to get us. We are trapped by our own devices. There's never enough stuff or time or noise. The noise just gets louder even as it makes less and less sense.

But...

Maybe Advent isn't really so rough. Maybe it's that we never knew what Advent was in the first place. We gave up silence for noise, fellowship for goods, peace for the next big thing, and along the way we lost everything that made this season good and true. This is the season of quiet and stillness. It is the season to rest in wait. It is the season to turn off the computer and the television, extinguish the bright lights and leave the store-fronts behind. It's the time to sit still and watch the stars.

That's what the shepherds did.

Turning the "Do you know the Lord?" question upside-down.

Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34

            “I wish he knew the Lord.”

            Have you ever heard somebody say that? Or some variation on that? It usually comes with a hint of disdain. She doesn’t know the Lord… tsk-tsk. Often this is the kind of thing mourned at funerals: “It’s just too bad he didn’t know the Lord.” And OK, I get it. We are reassured when others believe as strongly as us in the same God as us, and that reassurance has a lot to do with our assurance about their salvation, but let’s not go crazy here. Do any of us really know the Lord?

            Well… no… and yes. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that we know the Lord. All of Israel knew the Lord, because they were His people and HHe was their God. This is the new covenant that God speaks through Jeremiah. Earlier in the Bible God gave Moses a covenant, but it had a teensy-weensy little problem which was that it required Israel to obey, and Israel was really awful at obeying. Seriously, it was about ten minutes after they were freed from Egypt when they started worshiping golden calves and asking to go back into slavery. The new covenant that Jeremiah brings, however, had nothing to do with the capability of the people to obey. God says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me.” (Jer 31:33b).

            In the New Testament this covenant is expanded in Paul’s writings to include not just Jews but we-Gentiles as well, and so the promise for each and every one of you is that you will know the Lord. We are all a chosen people—not a choosing people. Maybe the most insidious evil in the Christian Church—and believe me, there are a few—is this whole dividing of in and out, deciding who is worthy of God’s kingdom and who is not. Guess what? You’re not worthy. Jeremiah makes the fretting over whether a person knows the Lord moot, because what matters is not that we know the Lord but that God knows us. Only in God knowing us will we know God in return, and that will have nothing to do with our faithfulness or godliness.

            Martin Luther got this. Some of you had to memorize the explanations to the Apostles’ Creed when you went through Confirmation—and for those of you who did, you might want to remind our Confirmation kids how lucky they are to not have to do that—but for those of you who did, you might even remember the explanation to the 3^rd article. OK, it might be expecting a bit much to remember something from thirty or forty or sixty years ago when you often don’t remember where you left your car keys, so I’ll refresh you. Martin Luther explains that the 3^rd Article of the Apostles’ Creed (the one that begins “I believe in the Holy Spirit”) means this: “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him…” He goes on to say that belief comes from the Holy Spirit; you cannot believe on your own. You cannot know the Lord and follow the law of your own will-power and strength. The nay-sayers who grumble about so-and-so not knowing the Lord are not only judging their neighbors; they are putting themselves in a place where only God can be.

            This is about more than judgment. There’s that little proverb we all know—“Judge not lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1). (You can tell it’s good because we still quote it in Old English) But Jeremiah’s message and Martin Luther’s explanation provoke a deeper question than whether we should judge; they ask us: Why should we not judge? Not only because God is the only judge that counts, but also because nobody comes to know the Lord by their own wisdom. Jeremiah wants to make this perfectly clear: this is not about you.

            This thread can be traced throughout the whole book of Jeremiah. In today’s other readings King Jehoiakim is burning the letters of the scroll from Jeremiah’s prophecy, which is a little surreal because we can only assume that he is burning the very book of Jeremiah from which we are reading, and if it is the book of Jeremiah that the king is burning then we can understand why he doesn’t care for the prophecy, because so much of it is judgment. Of the fifty-two chapters in the book of Jeremiah only four (ch. 30-33) talk primarily about hope for the future. Jeremiah’s primary message is judgment against the kingdom that has abandoned God’s laws.

            So, this is a strange juxtaposition. Jeremiah brought a message of judgment because the people forgot God, but he also came with this fantastic message of a new covenant that does not depend on our godliness. Either Jeremiah is schizophrenic, which you realize--if you read all of Jeremiah--may be a possibility, or God’s rules simply do not look like human rules.

            Personally, I think Jeremiah is a pretty darn good prophet for our era in history, because our world is obsessed with knowing God. In religious circles, we have people who want to know when you were saved—like literally the moment—as if we convert from sinfulness to sainthood in a blink. There is this train of thought among some Christians that if you cannot give an exact date and time of your salvation then how will you know that it happened at all? They parse who knows God and who doesn’t as if the effort is ours to make rather than God’s to give. On the other side of the coin we have people in anti-religious circles who write off Christians—and peoples of all faiths—until they meet academic criteria; until, for example, they publish a peer reviewed scientific article proving God’s existence. They, too, set guidelines for what is in and what is out.

            Friends, this world needs Jeremiah. We need someone to tell us that God knows us, warts and all, and so, we know God. It doesn’t need to be in a moment of conversion. It certainly isn’t because of our intense study of God. It is that Holy Spirit and it is Jesus Christ who are the reason for our knowledge of God, and that is what we celebrate this Christ the King Sunday.

Yeah, but prove it, says the world. Prove it! says Newsweek and the scientific journals. Prove it! say Christians to one another, because apparently in God’s eyes it matters more whether you are Lutheran or Catholic or Covenant or Pentecostal than it does whether you are sharing the good news. Prove it! we say. And God says, “OK, you really don’t get it, do you? This is not a true/false test. You will be my people. I will be your God. End of story. The rest of your lives are simply responses to that reality.” You see, part of the reason why judgment is such a big deal for Jeremiah is because we inevitably ignore the truth that is in us, and when we ignore that truth we ask the question behind all our misgivings: “Prove it!”

            We become like Pontius Pilate, who represents the powers of this world, when he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) in that iconic passage from the Gospel of John.

            The irony of the question is staring Pilate in the face. John’s Gospel doesn’t even do the courtesy of giving Pilate an answer because it is so obvious. Truth is Jesus. Not a concept, as Pilate believes, but a person—the very person standing in front of him. He cannot recognize truth when it is staring him in the face. Moreover, truth is not knowing Christ, as people today would have you believe; it is Christ. All we can ever do is respond, like the centurion in Mark’s Gospel who points to the cross and says, “Surely this man is the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). He knew the truth. It wasn’t because he accepted Jesus into his heart; it was because he experienced truth in the flesh. He knew God because God knew him. So we know God—the God who has chosen us to be his people—because God has written it on our hearts. Your acceptance of that promise is almost irrelevant.

Our job, then, starts with not judging, but not just because it is something that fits on a bumper sticker. Our task is to move from judgment to proclamation. Stop parsing who is in or out. Stop looking at our neighbor and wondering, “Does she know God?” Instead, talk to that person and say, “God knows you.” Our task is to get off of our thrones and admit that it’s not because we are so smart or so brilliant or so worthy or so perfect that we know God; we know God because in spite of our unworthiness, in spite of the pain we often cause, and in spite of our lack of knowledge, God knows us.

There is no in and out. There is only Christ the King.

Thanks be to God.

Do Not Worry- Thanksgiving Ecumenical Sermon

A sermon preached for Hallock's ecumenical Thanksgiving service.

Text: Matthew 6:25-33

There may be no reading in all of scripture that holds together multiple viewpoints better than today’s Gospel from Matthew. So it is particularly appropriate for Matthew 6 to be our Gospel reading today; not only because it is a word of thanksgiving but also because it is the kind of text that can bring together Presbyterians and Pentecostals and Catholics and Lutherans, because it is about something very near the core of all of our faiths, by which, of course, I’m referring to food. But food is also only the starting point. This has to do with the birds and the lilies and the grass; it has to do with ecology and the land, and it has to do with who is over the land and who shepherds its resources.

Human beings are worriers. We have in our heads this command—maybe you know the one; it’s very early on in the Bible, when Adam and Eve are still in the Garden of Eden—God tells them to “subdue” the earth (Genesis 1:28). It’s one of the few Old Testament commands that Christians have done a spectacular job of following; in fact, we have often been a bit overzealous in our subduing. In focusing so much on how we can force nature to do our will we have vilified the world and made it into something out to get us—something to worry about. So, in order to make the world out there less scary we domesticated it. We assigned value only to those things that have immediate use for us. Everything became about eating and drinking and clothing. The problem is that in simplifying things we became selfish.

At the root of our worry about life and not having enough is our, often subconscious, understanding that we cannot control the world. We are not God, even if we act as if we are. The more we inflate our egos, the greater our fall when the world turns against us. When that happens “the world” becomes a bad place—not us, but some imagined evil out there. “Do not worry,” says Jesus, because worry isn’t so much about doubt as it is about ego; it is about putting our needs before the needs of our neighbors.

“Do not worry,” says Jesus, because we do not deserve what we have been given, and yet, it is promised to us. God has promised to take care of us—not because we are the best of all possible peoples and certainly not because we never put ourselves before God. God has given us a promise because God is about radical, incredible grace. However, God also sets before us examples of how we should treat the gifts we have been given. In fact, because we are so clearly unworthy of the gifts of land and resources—food and clothing—our thanksgiving must not be hollow. We have to demonstrate that God’s promise is actually lived out in our words and actions.

My Lutheran friends are now thinking I’ve flown the coop. The big joke in the Lutheran church is that we are so allergic to justification by works that what we believe is not so much justification by grace as it is justification by coma. But here’s the thing—and this is why I think this works great for an ecumenical service—whatever your views are about eternal salvation this is a text about salvation in the present. The Latin root of salvation is the word “salve” which is actually the way of greeting one another in Latin; it’s like the Roman “Hello” or “Aloha,” but what it really means is “Health.” In Latin, you greet one another: “Salve”… To your health! And so, salvation is about not just something that happens out in eternity; it is also about what happens here and now. To be saved is to be in right relationship—with God, yes, but also with the world and your neighbors.

So, how do we show our worthiness of these gifts God has given us? Wendell Berry says that there are three ways we demonstrate our worthiness: the first is to be faithful, grateful and humble; the second is to be neighborly, and the third is to practice good husbandry—by which he means to treat what we are given with respect and careful management.[1] This applies to the land and our resources, but it also applies to all of our lives broadly. It’s all well and good for Jesus to tell us not to worry, but most of you won’t hear that, or you might hear it now but you’ll forget it later. Christmas shopping will come along, an unexpected expense will appear out of nowhere; you will feel as if you don’t have enough and you will worry. Some of you will have a perfectly great holiday season and still figure out ways to worry. Worry is the great Scandinavian gift that keeps on giving.

So, you of all people, need this promise. You will be OK. But honestly, the best cure for worry isn’t to hear that. The best cure for worry is to practice being worthy. Be faithful, grateful, humble; be a good neighbor, and care for what God has given you; and guess what? You won’t worry. Not because you will have become more worthy of God’s grace, but because you will have been living out salvation in your daily lives. Salvation is eternal, but you know that. What you don’t remember is that it’s also here and now; and when you are ungrateful or a braggart, when you treat your neighbor with disdain, when you treat the resources God has given you as yours to waste, then you will find a world filled with not-enoughs and worries, and you will seek to escape this world in order to find salvation. That’s not the life God has called us to live; it’s not how to be a steward of God’s gifts; it’s not how to be a Christian—no matter your denomination or spiritual gifts.

We are, each of us, called to these simple tasks: faithfulness, gratefulness, humility, neighborliness, and husbandry. You see, worry isn’t about letting things go; it’s not a Buddhist-sounding philosophy of doing nothing in order to let Christ purge us of our self-doubt. Instead, as Wendell Berry writes, “The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing…It is the ability to do something well.”[2] To be free from worry is to fill our lives with the things that matter.

May your lives be filled this Thanksgiving with all the things that matter, and may God’s gift to you be humility, service, and care for all that you have been given.

---

[1] Berry, Wendell. “The Gift of Good Land,” 1979.

[2] ibid

The Beginning of Wisdom: A sermon on fear and the harvest

Text: Isaiah 6:1-13

            I have to admit something today that may or may not make me a horrible sinner. I’m leaning toward not, but I could be convinced otherwise. As many of you know, we have been following a narrative lectionary put out by Working Preacher throughout the fall, which means that instead of reading scripture that centers on a theme for the day we have been following story-lines. I think so far it has been a modest success—at least nobody has threatened to burn down the church unless we return to the good ol’ Revised Common Lectionary. But partly because I have been freed from the constraints of preaching on the same things as every other mainline church in the world I have also felt a little freer to edit the readings as I see fit, and today I am guilty of doing that. Here’s my rationale: I think the tendency among people who create lectionaries—or reading lists—is to skip over the parts that sound harsh, even though some of these are really important parts of the story. I think, being the Scandinavian Lutherans that most of you are, you can take a little verbal abuse from time to time, so I decided today to put it back in—in the case, the prophetic message that Isaiah receives in verses 9-13.

            As far as I can tell, the only reason that the powers on high didn’t include this reading in the reading in the first place is that it is a little lacking in the hope department. How long should Isaiah preach? Verse 11: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.”

That’s not exactly your classic Harvest Festival good news.

            However, I wonder if our attempts to censor the Bible don’t keep us from gaining a more complete understanding of God. I think most of us are probably at least a little scared of what the Bible actually says. But what this jaunt through the narrative lectionary has taught me, even in only a couple of months, is that scripture is so rich we only really ever dip our toes in the water; we never dive in. We all pick and choose our focus. We do this with every biblical story or issue that stems for it—contentious or not. Even though we might have a sense of the trajectory of the whole Bible, it is so much easier to cite a verse or two than it is to craft an argument using the whole Bible. One of challenges with honestly talking about what scripture says is that it holds together multiple viewpoints. Is God wrathful or loving? Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, or quick to judge, mighty and powerful? Or is God somehow both?

            The God who comes to Isaiah in a vision is that classic, Old Testament model who teaches us that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This is not a cuddly God. The message God gives to Isaiah is not something anybody wants to preach. Tell the people: “‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ Make the mind of this people dull, stop their ears, and shut their eyes.” Now, some of you might be thinking that’s what I do—make the mind of the people dull, stop their ears and shut their eyes—but that’s another matter.[1]

It’s verses like this that make faith in God seem unfair. We are given these senses—sight, hearing, touch—and then we’re told that they are completely unhelpful in knowing God. Seeing God will kill you. Listening won’t help. Touch is a sign of a lack of faith—ask the disciple Thomas. Our senses enable sin. All of this makes us fear a God who is not only unapproachable but who demands unreasonably from us. You’re beginning to see, I can imagine, why we don’t read these verses.

This God—our God—commands fear.

Our problem—and the reason we cut off readings when they get harsh—is that we have come to think that this is a bad thing. Fearing God is not high on our list of religious priorities.

But maybe it should be.

I mean, if God is the most fearful of all things… then what more do we have to fear? And if God could be understood simply with our senses… then what more could we hope for? So, even though we have this Bible with so many prophets, like Isaiah, to condemn us and to induce fear, we also have these threads of tremendous promise woven through these stories. The Bible is interested in showing us a God who is both far away and near, a God who is frightful and loving, a God who puts to death and a God who resurrects. When we focus only on one side of God we actually lose the ability to cope with the darker side of life.

Isaiah’s call is to preach judgment, and the fact that this call exists in the Bible means that God cares enough to set us straight. These are not godless moments. God realizes that, on our own, human beings will always believe that what we create is a product of our own genius. We will forget God as quickly as Peter denies Christ on his way to crucifixion. Without fear, we make ourselves into gods. It’s the same story in 785 BC as it is today. God uses Isaiah to remind us that nothing is so sacred that it is left standing before God. Our idols will be razed to the ground, because only when everything is put in its place can it be resurrected.

*****

There is this thread of metaphors that run from the beginning of Genesis, through the entirety of the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, through Jesus and the Gospel witness, through Paul’s writings and through Revelation to the end of our Bible—beginning to end. It is the thread of agricultural metaphors that appears here in Isaiah. Whenever agriculture turns up in the Bible it is to teach us something about the nature of death and life. What happens when fields or forests burn? The same thing that always happens: new life.

Isaiah is called to tell the people that the land has been emptied and God has burned the last remnants of the fields. Everything will die. This is God’s slash and burn philosophy to farming. But then there’s this line about the holy seed and the stump. It is a strange turn at the end of the reading—and the Hebrew is incredibly difficult to translate—but for those of you who have lived in an agricultural community for a long time you should know why that turn of phrase is there at the very end. The fields are dead… but the seed is planted.

There are plenty of times where the pastor is honestly less qualified to talk about the Bible than the farmers.

Can you imagine if farmers were as scared of facing harsh realities as we are when we read scripture? Nobody would ever grow anything. In fact, farmers provide us the model for how to read scripture. Good farmers are interested in every little aspect of the farm, but they never lose the big picture. When we read the Bible we are interested in every little aspect of the Word—not because we like it all, not because it all makes sense, and certainly not because every part of it is as important as every other part. No, we read the whole picture, because just as a farmer is concerned with the whole farm so are we concerned with the whole picture of God—the parts we like and the parts we don’t. At the same time, a farmer could obsess over one beet—or one acre—but it would be to the detriment of the whole. The winds will howl, the snow will blow, and everything will turn to muck—frozen, dead muck. Winter has come. The harvest is over. Isaiah brings us a message of death and despair. Green has turned to yellow has turned to brown has turned to black.

Still, underneath it all, buried under snow and our fears of what may come, something lies dormant; a seed you cannot see. Holy, holy, holy, say the seraphim. Holy, holy, holy, we sing—both merciful and mighty—worthy of fear, the God who will lay waste and the God who will plant seeds. Winter has come. Harvest is over. The promise is hidden.
            …

But the seed is planted.

---

[1] This reminds me of Jesus in the Gospel of John saying to the Pharisees, “‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see’, your sin remains’” (John 9:41).

The Internet and the "Devil's Work" of Abstraction

Today I was reading from a collection of Wendell Berry's essays when I came across two paragraphs that left me both vindicated and convicted. What I read so perfectly applied to everything that I have lately been pondering as our little corner of northwestern Minnesota has seen the harvest ending and Thanksgiving looming. I should say that I felt the hypocrisy in this post from the very start, and so I promise to get to that before this is over. Firstly, however, I give you what I read: Wendell Berry on the characteristics of the failed hero of modern industrialism:

"This would-be heroism is guilty of two evils that are prerequisite to its very identity: hubris and abstraction. The industrial hero supposes that 'mine own mind hath saved me'--and moreover that it may save the world. Implicit in this is the assumption that one's mind is one's own, and that it may choose its own place in the order of things; one usurps divine authority, and thus, in classic style, becomes the author of results that one can neither foresee nor control. And because this mind is understood only as a cause, its primary works are necessarily abstract. We should remind ourselves that materialism in the sense of love of material things is not in itself an evil. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, God too loves material things; He invented them. The Devil's work is abstraction--not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities...It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the 'acceptability' of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield." (from "The Gift of Good Land," 1979)

Wendell Berry (image from Wikipedia)

If you skimmed the quote go back and read it again. Then stop for a minute and think about what he is saying and how in the last thirty-three years abstractionism has penetrated the very fibers of our lives. Many of us who have grown up with the internet as next-to-kin have lived in a world where "The Matrix" is not just a fascinating idea for a movie but part of the genesis of our digital lives. We don't just do Facebook or tweet to the realm of Twitter; we have online identities. We share our lives digitally to such an extent that many of us are more comfortable online than in day-to-day dealings with other human beings. I recognize this in myself from time to time--even if I abhor it.

Let me step back for a minute.

A couple of days ago I heard a comment from an atheist that the worst of all careers is a pastor, who, by definition, does not contribute anything to society. Anybody thinking of attending seminary, he suggested, should instead become a mechanic or a pilot or a nurse or an engineer. Of course, I think this person is wrong... and yet... there is a grain of truth in what he says. Many pastors end up in their own theological worlds and don't actually produce anything. For the last few days, therefore, I have been on my own personal hunt for the good I do on a day-to-day basis.

This morning I was preaching and offering communion at worship services at the nursing home in town when I was finally struck by the absurdity of that person's comment. Here I was offering something that was profoundly necessary for these elderly and enfeebled people--people who didn't care if I had a great sermon or a horrible one, people who didn't mind if I stuttered or spoke with clarity; all that mattered was that I was there. I had left the world of abstraction in my office, and I found myself in a place where presence is the only qualification for good work. My success in the nursing home is purely dependent on how present I am. And lest you think that is hardly a unique vocation, I ask: What is my purpose for visiting the elderly? It is theological and pastoral; it is part and parcel of the call. It is by no means the only things I do with others for the sake of the betterment of the world, but it is perhaps the simplest and most honest. A nurse can be a loving servant to the elderly (and believe me, they are!), but a pastor is still capable of bringing something unique that the nurse cannot--a purpose for their life that is bigger than the walls in which they are confined.

You see, that atheist commentator was right to the extent that it applies to Berry's insight; the Devil's work is abstraction. If my work were only to think thoughts about God then, yes, I would be doing nothing for the common good. If my thoughts weren't borne out in actions then my life would be meaningless. This could be leveled as an critique of academia--and, Lord knows, it has been!--but in truth the best professors are teachers who seek to impart what are often abstract ideas into the day-to-day material lives of their students. They are training their students for a physical world, and in-so-doing entering into it with them.

But now, I fear I must return to the place where I will prove myself a hypocrite. On the internet we are able to share ideas in real-time across wide reaches of the world, but the abstract often stays there. We argue endlessly about ideas; we treat our online world as if it is a product of our own making; we become online gods, smiting those who question our omniscience with a single mouse-click. All the while we find ourselves doing the Devil's work, feeding the insatiable monster of abstraction. This blog post could be just that.

But I hope not.

Instead, I have a different hope, but it will take your help to accomplish. I hope that you go out and do something; that you get off the internet and into the lives of people you love and people you don't yet know that you love. I hope that you treat the internet as a tool in the service of doing rather than a place where you can be. Just as C.S. Lewis reminds us that material things are not, in themselves, bad, so too is the internet a creation capable of being good, but it runs the acute risk of abstracting everything that gives our lives meaning and purpose. Don't let it do it. That is the Devil's work. And it can happen to pastors and students, politicians and business people. Our lives are not our own, so we had better start attending to what we are doing with them.

I'm off to visit our new food shelf. How about you?

Jonah: Why Bad Preaching is Sometimes Good Preaching

Text: Jonah, chapters 3 and 4

            The good news for me today is that Jonah preached the worst sermon in the Bible and he just so happened to have more success than all the Old Testament prophets put together, so if today’s sermon is really lousy it may not matter.

            I still remember the worst sermon I ever heard. It was so bad that I could not shake it from my mind a day later or a week later or even today—years later. This wasn’t just your typical, unremarkable sermon or a sermon that said things with which I disagree. I’ve heard plenty of those sermons, and even though I find myself cringing and sometimes resisting the urge to bang my head with a Bible I can at least chock those up to differences in theology; not just bad preaching. However, this particular bad sermon was a problem because the pastor, who was a guest preacher at the church where Kate and I were worshiping, made the sermon into a performance—not about God, but about—well, there’s no other way to put this—it was all about him. He played some songs he wrote, while singing along with the piano. He talked a lot about his life. The only mentions of God were segues between his experiences. He made the sermon all about himself. It was horrible to sit through.

            The funny thing about that sermon, however, is that it stuck. In fact, after that Sunday morning an idea started to germinate in the back of my mind, and it was this: maybe some of the best preaching is actually, strangely, really bad preaching. Maybe even when the pastor tries to make it about him and her self God will work through that person to say something that gets the cogs turning. Then, I realized, we have the perfect model for this in scripture: Jonah! Who better to remind us that neither a person’s motives nor their preaching acumen matters? God is going to work through the sad, sorry preacher no matter how much they refuse to listen.

            This is good news, because there is plenty of bad preaching out there. There is plenty of preaching about the news or about the pastor him or her self. There is preaching completely out of touch with your lives, completely out of touch with the lives of young people, or old people, completely out of touch with the poor… or the rich; preaching unwilling to focus on the Gospel and unable to convey the message of salvation by grace through faith; preaching that forgets about Jesus, preaching that turns political; preaching that tries to use God’s word for its own ends.

            And yet, God works through that. That is the fascinating thing. There are those who have beliefs I find simply wrong that nonetheless experience the fullness of God’s word and who, through that word, come to know the God who created them, died for them and will raise them when time comes to an end. There are plenty of Christians who believe all sorts of things in large part because of their pastors who tell them all sorts of things—things that find their justification in some odd verse here or there in scripture but seem completely out of touch with the God we experience in communion and the forgiveness of sins—but you know what? In spite of that, these people are hearing and learning about the God behind it all—behind all the nonsense and the pastors’ egos.

            Jonah was a horrible pastor.

            He wanted nothing to do with those Assyrians who, he believed, deserved to die because of their heathen ways and warring against God’s chosen people. To Jonah, Nineveh represented everything that was wrong in the world—all the undesirable peoples that were acting contrary to God’s word; people, who God tells us, “did not know their right hand from their left.”

            Into this mix walks Jonah, still dripping in whale vomit, and he preaches a momentous five word sermon that is long on judgment and without any promise: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” he preaches. It might be the worst sermon in history. He completely misses the important part; the part where he tells them on whose authority this message comes—the prophetic introduction that always begins these kinds of sermons where the prophet says, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel” or something along those lines. Jonah makes it sound as if the message is just his idea. You have forty days to get your affairs in order then you will be smitten. Sorry, chaps.

            The funny thing—well, there are so many funny things about Jonah, but one of the things that is funny about this story—is that the people of Nineveh listen to this horrible sermon and they believe it immediately. The king even goes to the extravagantly unnecessary step of putting not just his people in sackclothes of repentance but doing the same thing to their animals as well. I can imagine walking around the giant city of Nineveh with its one hundred and twenty thousand people wearing potato bags with goats and sheep and chickens looking just the same. Now, that would be a sight. Oddly, they do this even without a promise that this will appease God. Jonah didn’t even tell them to repent. Instead, the king seems to wonder aloud, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind.” It’s like he figures it can’t hurt, so they might as well try.

            So, to recap: Jonah preaches a horrible sermon, the people repent—and how!—and God changes his mind; the city of Nineveh is saved, which is where we find Jonah by the final chapter of the story. It is here we discover that Jonah is not just a bad preacher but that he is also a vindictive person. He doesn’t care that the people repented. He wants bloodshed, he wants vengeance, he wants those outsiders—those enemies of Israel—shown the true force of God’s wrath. He wants fire to fall from heaven, like with Sodom and Gomorrah. He does not understand that salvation requires forgiveness for our misdeeds because he cannot see past the other-ness of the Ninevites. They are bad; he is good. A just God should punish them. Jonah, unlike Nineveh, cannot change his mind.

            A comic strip appeared on my Facebook feed two weeks ago from a group called Radio Free Babylon. They put out these daily comics called “Coffee With Jesus”—I don’t often do advertisement but check them out if you’re on Facebook and you won’t be disappointed. Anyway, this comic strip always has somebody talking with Jesus over coffee, and on the 29^th of October the strip looked like this: 

Check out RFB on Facebook here.

            Isn’t that just it? We make it complicated. We make it about the evil of others. We sit, like Jonah on the hill, waiting for our enemies to be destroyed. Our inner sense of justice yearns for that kind of vengeance, because—honestly—they deserve it. They deserve death. I can hardly say this without thinking of that scene from Lord of the Rings where Frodo tells Gandalf that Bilbo should have killed Gollum—OK, I just completely lost all of you who don’t know Lord of the Rings so feel free to plan your grocery lists in the next 20 seconds of the sermon. But anyway, Gandalf responds to Frodo with one of those epic J.R.R Tolkien philosophical segues, saying, “Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo?”

            Can you give it to them, Jonah? Can we?

We need to get off our ethical high hills. We need to stop preaching bad sermons, because even when we preach the opposite God will work through our inadequacy. We need to applaud Nineveh because repentance takes admitting that there is something wrong with us in the first place. That is the harder path. It’s the path Kevin has to take to ask Jesus for forgiveness. It’s the path Bilbo took in sparing Gollum’s life. It’s the path before us every day of our lives, because all of us are both in need of forgiveness and forgiving. All of us are preaching bad sermons. Not just Jonah. Not just that pastor playing piano and singing his songs. Not just me. You too. Each of you occasionally preach—to your friends and families, to people you know and people you do not, on the internet and in your living rooms—and sometimes you preach poorly. It doesn’t matter. God will work through you. God will upend the natural order of the world in spite of you. That is the promise Jonah never knew. God is at work, changing things, doing things, forgiving things, and our words—though necessary—only work through the one who gives them meaning.
Thanks be to God for that.

All Saints Day- Life, Death and Resurrection

Text: 1 Kings 17:1-24

            This is a macabre time of year. The turning of the calendar from October into November brings with it Halloween, scary movies, the passing of the seasons, and in the midst of all those reminders of death we have a Sunday dedicated to the saints, especially those who have died in the last year.

            Well, isn’t that just a depressing way to start a sermon?

            But if we’re honest about our cultural traditions around death we don’t actually talk much about it. As much as parents are sometimes concerned about the message of Halloween, most of it has much more to do with candy and dressing up than it has anything to do with demons or anything like that. The same can be said about our scary movies. They have plenty of blood and gore, but most of it is so sensationalized that it is actually a detriment to approaching real-life death. In fact, we are so saturated images of death that we’re desensitized to the entire concept.

            Society spends an inordinate amount of time evading questions of mortality. The more Zombieland or Saw that you watch, the more you will be convinced that you have seen death. The same can be said for the more realistic killing in video games. All of this makes real death in real life actually kind of awkward, because society has prepared us for the graphic nature of bodies being beaten, shot and otherwise abused but they have done nothing to prepare us for the ramifications of loss. Now, I don’t want to make this a message about the evil of graphic movies and video games; it’s enough to say that our younger generation is handicapped in talking about death, strangely, because they are saturated by it.

            Death should cause a rift; it should not be normal; it should smack us in the face.

            In today’s lesson we have a prophet named Elijah who stopped the rain from falling in all the land of Israel because the king had turned from worshiping the true God and had started to worship the god of fertility, Ba’al. And what happens when there is no longer any rain? Death. The land starts to die. First the wadis—or stream beds—then the rivers, then the wells, and then the animals and the people with them. No water—then, as now—means death. Elijah’s control over the rain is meant to demonstrate who it is that truly has power over the rain; not Ba’al but the one true God of Israel.

            But Elijah too needs water and so we have this odd scene where he is sent to a widow in the town Zarephath who God commands to feed him. When Elijah visits the widow the abstract concept of death that he helped cause becomes specific and real. She and her son are dying; they are without water and without hope. They are the most vulnerable in society: a widow with a child. Weirder still, God sends Elijah not just to see her suffering or, better still, to fix it; instead, God sends Elijah to the widow so that she might feed him. It’s a strange turn. The widow wants nothing more than to be left alone. She has given up and truly expects that both she and her son will die. And in precisely that moment Elijah arrives not to offer a hand but to do exactly the opposite: he asks her to give up just about everything she has left. He casually acts like he’s ordering a sandwich from Subway when in fact he’s asking for the last little nuggets of food this woman has—bread that would have been her final meal.

            Remarkably, the woman gives it away, but the moral of the story isn't simply about her blind faith; the scene continues on without missing a beat. Suddenly, the son of the widow falls ill, probably from malnutrition, and dying. The widow loses the last thing that is hers—the life of her only child. She is left with nothing. Only then is she in a place to discover the true God; so when Elijah stretches out over her son and he is raised from the dead she finally exclaims, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” The false god is crushed by resurrection. Death does not have the last word.

            Death and resurrection are probably the most critical themes in the Christian faith. They represent our human limitations crashing into God’s unlimitedness. Death and resurrection are why we worship god incarnate in Jesus Christ, but in today’s world—especially in today’s church—we have just two little problems with death and resurrection. One little problem we have is with the resurrection part… and the other problem is with the whole death thing. It is a fascinating trait in human beings that we hide from the very things that give us life. We are truly all Adam and Eve, hoping that God will not see us in our nakedness.

            Resurrection doesn’t make sense. It’s kind of an absurd and extravagant promise. So, in some sense, I get why we have issues honestly believing it to be true. We are suspect of stories like Elijah and the widow’s son—maybe Elijah was just doing some kind of CPR on the boy; maybe it wasn’t really a resurrection. We do the same things with Jesus. Even if we believe he was resurrected, we make our life's journey about getting to heaven to be with Jesus rather than the more incredible promise we have of resurrection.

            But the death part is even stranger. We hide from death by trying to make it something laughable and commonplace. How many horror/comedy genre mash-ups are there these days? They tap into something people want: to minimize the impact of death; and in-so-doing they attract a wide audience. All of this tries to make death less powerful, but in fact it makes real death, actual death, something strange and more powerful. It makes us unable to process real death because we are stuck behind images of comic and horrific death that do not allow us to confront the reality of loss.

            On this All Saints Day we celebrate the lives of all those who have completed their journey on earth. We celebrate the promise we have of their resurrection, but we can’t do that unless we also remember and comprehend their deaths and deal with the fact that they are no longer with us. Today, we proclaim that death is real but also that death is central to new life. Never is that more evident than in baptism. Our church’s understanding of baptism is that in these waters you are drowned—not washed; we’re not cleaning you of sin—no, in the waters of baptism you are drowned and put to death. This is the big death. This is why it should really say on my gravestone: Francis Bradley Johnson. Born March 26, 1986; Died (in baptism) December 2, 1987; Finished him off: such and such a date 20-something.

            Baptism is the big death because it is in these waters that God raises you as a new creation. It’s not just a sign; it is quite literally a death. This is why the South American priest, Juan Carlos Ortiz, baptizes with the words: “I kill you in the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.” That doesn’t go so well on a Hallmark card, but it’s true. If death is the last word then what we are doing today is horrific. Without resurrection, baptism is nothing more than a horror movie kind of escapism.

            That’s why resurrection is so important. We see the widow’s son, risen from the dead; Lazarus, so dead he’s smelly, and all other little resurrections in our life as pointing to the one who was, and is, and is to come; Jesus Christ—crucified, died and RISEN.

This All Saints Day we celebrate death because it is the only precursor we know to resurrection. We celebrate those who have gone before and those who will follow—all God’s saints, those who have been drowned in the waters of baptism, finished off at the end of their earthly lives, and finally raised with Christ as a new creation. We shall not run from death; we shall not become desensitized to it. Death brings new life, new life requires death; there is no way to wrap our heads around the reality of resurrection without honoring and respecting the reality of death. Today, we celebrate it; we live it; because this world will end, our lives will end—whether we want to acknowledge it or not—and the only reality that matters then is the empty tomb, Christ risen from the dead, and our resurrection in the world to come.