Jason Micheli's Blog, page 20

Paul's Love Song is Not Law

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The lectionary epistle assigned for this coming Sunday is a passage made familiar by its ubiquity at weddings, 1 Corinthians 13.

Too often its nuptial use insures Paul’s love song is preached in the register of advice— your love should be patient, you ought to be un-envious, etc.

This is to hear it according to what Paul calls the Law. The Law is shorthand for an accusing standard of performance. In the Bible, the Law is all those thou shalt and shalt nots. Be perfect as God is perfect, Jesus says. That’s the Law.

And the Law, Paul says, is inscribed in every human heart (Romans 2.15).

So even if you don’t believe in God or follow Jesus or read the Bible, the capital-L Law manifests itself in all the little-l laws in your life, all the shoulds and musts and oughts you hear constantly in the back of your mind, all those expectations and demands and obligations you feel bearing down on you from our culture.

Martin Luther said that the Law always accuses; that is, it points out our shortcomings. And when we hear Paul’s love song according to the Law that’s just what it does. When we hear 1 Corinthians 13 as advice or suggestions or, worse, commands, it just accuses us for how impatient and unkind and rude and conceited and quick to anger we know ourselves to be a whole lot of the time.

But Paul’s love song isn’t meant to be Law; it’s meant to be the opposite of the Law. It’s meant to be Gospel.

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Preachers Too Can Announce, "Today This Scripture is Fulfilled in Your HEARING."

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In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus inaugurates his ministry by reading from the scriptures in his hometown synagogue. Whether Mary’s boy chose the passage— from the prophet Isaiah— or whether it was the assigned reading for the day, Luke does not specify.

In either case, Jesus finds the verses on the scroll and reads:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Having read from the prophet, Jesus sits down as one among the congregation. With their eyes fixed on him, Jesus makes an announcement, the oddity of which often goes unnoticed, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing .”

Jesus fulfills the promise, which he himself had laid on the lips of Isaiah, verbally.

Our access to the salvation he brings is auditory.

Much preaching moves immediately from this passage in Luke to lift up the church’s advocacy for justice, her accompaniment alongside the poor, and solidarity with the oppressed. That this passage coincided in the lectionary with the reaction to Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral concentrated even more attention on these marks of the church’s lived witness. Yet the word Jesus announces in Nazareth is not a summons for his fellow worshippers to do work on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Jesus straightforwardly suggests that all the work prophesied by Isaiah has somehow come to fruition in the happening between Jesus’s mouth and their earballs.

Jesus straightforwardly suggests that all the work prophesied by Isaiah has somehow come to fruition in the happening between Jesus’s mouth and their earballs.

The worshippers in Nazareth haven’t lifted a finger to help the poor or free captives.

They’ve only heard a word from the Word.

While the lection from Luke frequently— ironically— provokes calls to Christian action, it should instead compel believers to reflect upon the odd scandal of Christian proclamation. The promised salvation is fulfilled through audition.Or rather, to proclaim the gospel is to justify the ungodly.

In his book Story and Promise, Robert Jenson writes:

“What happened to the world with Jesus was that at the end of the long history of Israel’s promises, a sheerly unconditional promise was said and became sayable in the world.”

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Our Bipartisan Need

Psalm 23

In the spring of one year during his reign as king, David does not join his soldiers and officers in battle but stays behind in Jerusalem. And one afternoon it happens. David rises from reclining on his couch. He prowls the roof of his royal house. He spies a beautiful woman bathing. Large and in-charge, the president— I mean, the king— does not think the law can touch him. Thinking himself accountable to no one, David takes her. David rapes her. And David walks away. But when the wife of Uriah later informs him that she is pregnant from his trespass, David makes Bathsheba a widow by sending her husband to the front lines.

“The thing that David had done displeased the LORD,” scripture reports.

In response to David’s sin, the LORD sends a preacher.

And like a lot of preachers, Nathan hands over God’s word by means of a story. Nathan preaches a parable about a rich man who, rather than sacrificing from his abundance in order to feed a hungry guest, steals a poor man’s only and precious lamb. The word works on David, who immediately responds to the sermon, “As the LORD lives, whoever has done this deserves to die.”

And the preacher takes a step back from his prey and lands the killing blow, “You are the man.” Like a dead man, David falls over, weeping, “I have sinned against the LORD.”

Not, I have sinned against Uriah.

Not, I have trespassed against Bathsheba.

But, “Against you, you only LORD, have I sinned.”

Having killed him with the law, Nathan raises him with a gracious promise from God, “The LORD has put away your sin. You will not die.”

Thus does King David pray in the twenty-third psalm, “My life, he gives back.”

But King David never would have been able to utter this praise of God’s grace had the preacher Nathan stopped his sermon at, “You are the man!”

Having recently returned from a cross-country flight, I recalled a story I heard the theologian Jim Nestingen once tell. Lecturing on the gospel at an event years ago, Nestingen shared a story about how he’d been traveling long hours and many miles from conference to conference.

“As the plane was taking off,” he said, “the guy sitting next to me asked what I did for a living. I said to him, “I’m a preacher of the gospel.” Almost as soon as I got the words out, he shouted back at me, “I’m not a believer!”

“But the man was curious,” Jim said in his presentation:

“Once we got to cruising altitude, he started asking me about being a preacher. After a bit, he started telling me stories about the Vietnam War. He’d been an infantryman in the war. And he’d fought at all the awful battles and done the terrible things his country required of him. This went on the whole flight, from coast to coast, him giving over to me all the awful things he’d done. As the flight was about finished, I asked him. I said to him, “Have you confessed all the sins now that have been troubling you?”

“What do you mean confessed?! I’ve never confessed” the man replied.

“You’ve been confessing your sins to me this whole flight long. And I’ve been commanded by Christ Jesus that when I hear a confession like that to hand over the goods I’ve received and speak a particular word to you. So, you have any more sins burdening you? If so, throw them in there.”

“I’m done now,” the man next to him said, “I’m finished.”

“So I unbuckled my seatbelt and I unsqueezed myself from my chair,” Nestingen said, “and I stood up. The stewardess then— she starts yelling and fussing at me, “Sir— SIR— you can’t do that. Sit down. You can’t do that.”"

“Can’t do it?” I said to the stewardess. “Ma’am Christ our Lord commands me to do it.”

Recalling the exchange, Nestingen said,

“And she looked back at me, scared, like she was afraid I was going to evangelize her or something. So I turned back to the man next to me and, standing up over him, I put my hand on his head and I said, “In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority, I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”

“You— you can’t do that,” he whispered to me.

“I can do it. And I must. Christ compels me to do it, and I just did it and I’ll do it again.”

“So I gave him the goods again. I tipped his head back and I spoke faith into him, and I did it loud for everyone on that plane to hear it. And just like that, the man started sobbing… like somebody had stuck him. Soon his shirt was wet from all his weeping and I held him in my arms like I’d hold a child.”

After the guy stopped weeping, he laughed and wiped his eyes and he said to me, “Gosh, if that’s true, it’s the best news I’ve ever heard.”

When I thought the story was over, Jim started to cry all over again and he said, “After the plane had landed, I handed my business card to him. I told him, “If you get hungry for that word in the future, call me and I’ll hand it over all over again.”

And then Jim laughed a big, deep laugh and said:

“Wouldn’t you know it. He called me every day— every day— just for me to serve up the little word of the gospel to him. So I did, every day until he died— I wanted the last words he heard in this life to be the first words he would hear Jesus himself say to him in the next life. That way, in the future he will discover he’d already met Jesus in his past— he got him in his word.”

Now, I have told that story before— like the gospel, it’s too good a story not to tell over and again— but this time I want to attach a question to it. I want to consider an imaginative alternative.

What if that infantryman, broken by the world and burdened by his sins, had not been sitting in the middle seat on a 737 but had instead been sitting in a pew?

What if Jim Nestingen had not been sitting on top of him in his aisle seat as a fellow passenger but had instead been standing in the pulpit as his preacher?

And what if Jim Nestingen had not handed over the goods that morning but instead had opted to preach a word otherwise than the gospel?

What if the preacher had instead selected to preach that Sunday a sermon on stewardship or, God forbid it, relationships?

Imagine he had chosen to use the sermon time not to proclaim a promise on the basis of the scripture but to summarize highlights from the church’s recent service project.

Or consider the stakes if the preacher had elected to preach a word about politics.

If that Sunday he had not preached what my friend calls “the Big Relief at the heart of Christianity,” then that man in the middle seat on the 737 would have returned home yet dead in his sins.

And who knows to what ends his despair would lure him.

My friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones is the director of a Lily-funded grant project, for which I serve as the Preach-in-Residence. Our inaugural cohort closed out their second gathering this week in California by receiving the preached word from Ken.

During his sermon to preachers, Ken made himself vulnerable and shared the desperation he endured during his last parish call. Two yoked congregations comprised the church, and Ken immediately found himself at odds with them, for they refused to pay him what they had originally offered him. Ken and his wife exhausted their savings in his first year in the parish and they went into debt during the following eighteen months. The church convened secret meetings about him. They even refused to allow him to use the cemetery riding mower to tackle the hour-and-a-half lawn mowing duties at the church parsonage.

Ken quickly spiraled down into a dark depression.

“In those days, I frequently found myself in the garage,” Ken confessed to us, “contemplating whether or not the rafters were strong enough to bear the weight of my body at the end of a rope. And in the kitchen, I often stared at a drawer of knives wondering if they were sharp enough to open a wrist.”

Ken worked himself into despair.

He confessed to us:

“If a friend and fellow pastor, Steve Jacobson, had not recognized the death spiral in me and changed its course by proclaiming the gospel of grace to me, then I have no doubt that today I would be planted in a cemetery, lying horizontal beside a church with which I had nothing but disgust, having forsaken my own life.”

Here’s my question:

What if Ken Jones had not been the pastor of a toxic church a lay person in a pew? And what if Steve Jacobson had not been a friend and clergy colleague but a preacher at a church into which Ken Jones had wandered into one Sunday morning in his despair?

Imagine if Steve Jacobson had elected that Sunday morning not to point to our bipartisan need— the love and mercy of God on account of the shed blood of Jesus Christ— but instead had elected to preach a prophetic sermon about the new administration’s policies?Finally at the end of his rope, maybe Ken would’ve left church that morning and put himself at the end of one.

My friend Ken, the man in the middle on the 737— they are not alone.

Seth Stevens-Davidowtiz is a data scientist whose PhD is in economics. In his book Everybody Lies, he documents his years-long research into the big data that Google made available eight years ago. Illustrating the illuminating uses of such data, Stevens-Davidowtiz admits to a reporter for The Guardian, “If you examined the Google search record of me, you could definitely tell I’m a hypochondriac because I’m waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health.” Explaining the ability of Google’s search history to unveil our true selves— our actual fears and desires, he says, “I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what they’re searching on Google.”

For example—

Based on the anonymous search history of users across the country, Stevens-Davidowtiz concluded that the concerns, anxieties, and priorities people volunteered to pollsters did not align with their actual concerns, anxieties, and priorities. For instance, he notes how the Google search data shows that when Donald Trump first became president in 2016 a majority of Americans told pollsters and friends how anxious they were, losing sleep because they were so concerned about immigrants and the so-called Muslim ban. “But,” he counters, “from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there was not a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. What’s more, when people were waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, their Google searches were not about the Muslim ban or the southern border or global warming. People were actually anxious and afraid about concerns much closer to home: their jobs, their health, their relationships, or their loneliness, depression and despair.”

My friend Dave serves an Episcopal church in Charlottesville. He told me recently that in the last three months there have been four suicides in his congregation. Each of their families responded with the same words, “We had no idea.”

What they presented to the word was not what they were googling at the three o’clock in the morning.

From the second century theologian Origen to the fourth century church father Augustine to the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, the interpretive consensus of the church is that the “green pastures” and “quiet waters” in King David’s prayer are in fact allegorical references to God’s two words, law and gospel. The former nourishes us in God’s moral intent but it cannot create the righteousness it commands. Only the latter, the quiet waters that are the gospel, can— like David before Nathan— make us alive.

According to Martin Luther, not only are the green pastures and quiet waters allegories to the LORD’s two words, the ordering of verses two and three is essential to a proper distinction between those two words, law and the gospel.

That is—

In between the law’s nourishing pastures and the Good Shepherd giving your life back stands the gospel’s gracious promise for you, applied to you in the quiet waters of baptism. And only after the gospel has raised you from being dead in your sins can the LORD set before you pathways of justice. Or, as the apostle Paul explains to the churches in Galatia, good works are the effects of the gospel, its fruit; they are not the gospel. And notice too, in Psalm 23 it is the Shepherd who sets before his flock works of righteousness; the sheep do not set out in search of them— that’s how sheep get lost.

The essential link in David’s prayer chain are the quiet waters, the gospel.

The only word that can make alive.

Luther says of the LORD’s second word:

“Little can there any comfort and peace of conscience be found without the gospel, for it requires nothing of us, but brings us tidings of all good, namely, that God has given us poor sinners his only Son, to be our shepherd, to seek again us famished and dispersed sheep, and to give his life for us, that he might deliver us from sin, from everlasting death, and from the power of the devil. This is the fresh water, wherewith the LORD gives our lives. And thus were are set loose from our troubled consciences and heavy thoughts.”

In other words—

No matter how many times Nathan exhorts David with “You are the man!” it will not make David a new man.

How could it?

David is dead.

To be a new man, David requires a resurrection.Which means, Nathan needs another word, the Big Relief, “The LORD has put away your sin.”

At the end of his story, as Jim Nestingen recalled his coast-to-coast flight, he started to weep. He remembered the reaction of the passengers and crew as he handed over the goods.

He said to us:

“The stewardess and all the rest who’d been freaking out and fussing at me for standing up on the plane— when I handed over the goods to the guy, they all stopped and became as silent as dead men. They knew something more important was happening right in front of them— something more important. This man’s life was breaking open. The Future was intruding upon his past. The old world was being unmade. Jesus Christ was raising this man from the dead right in front of them, and even if they didn’t know it to put it that way, they knew that they were seeing God in front of their eyes. I don’t care what else was going on in the world that very moment. This was more important.”

Donald Trump is the fifth president to be inaugurated during my ordained ministry; therefore, I’m not surprised that about half of the congregation hopes I will speak a word about politics while the other half has their fingers crossed I’ll keep my head down and ignore such matters. Karl Barth purportedly instructed public proclaimers of the gospel “to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other." I often think this is the only bit of Barth most pastors know.

While there is wisdom in Barth’s counsel, the little time I spend on social media these days the more convinced I’ve become that far too many proclaimers (as well as believers) are preaching instead with the newspaper in both hands— or the newspaper in one hand and their smart phone in the other.

If you are certain that your faith convictions can be exercised politically in only one direction, well, the church has a word for that certainty.

Sin.

Or perhaps two words: self-righteousness.

It’s true, of course, that the commandments stipulate the parameters for joyful obedience to the LORD. And Alexa Johnson just today pledged at her baptism to resist the forces of sin, death, and the devil. It is also the case that Jesus alone is fully human and so sets forth an example for us. Yes, the United Methodist Church has Social Principles and John Wesley stressed social holiness. And of course the larger Christian tradition has the saints who exemplify faithfulness for us.

You see, Bishop Mariann Budde on the left and Franklin Graham on the right are both correct in their way— in the scriptures, Israel and the Church are not simply people, they are a polity.

All of this is true.

But imagine—

Imagine that Christianity is a house on fire with flames erupting from the rooftop and chimney. If Christianity is a house on fire, the one family heirloom worth running into the blaze to fetch is the gospel, the Quiet Waters, the Big Relief of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Grace is the one item of the faith worth risking life and limb to retrieve because— the survey says— the LORD’s love and mercy for sinners is our abiding bipartisan need.

Like I said, I have been a pastor for twenty-five years, and in that time I have accompanied hundreds of people to their deaths. Many of them left this life expressing regret over relationships they’d ruined or reconciliation they never sought. Like a tongue over a hole where a tooth once was, even more revisited their guilt over a person they had wronged or a sin they had committed. Not a single person has ever died on my watch wanting to talk politics or litigate the outcome of an election.

Something more important was going on.

Laura Kallal and her two small children began worshipping with us a few years ago. David and Ruthie were in the Christmas Pageant. Laura taught Sunday School and Children’s Church. She dressed up in a Lord of the Rings theme for the Trunk-or-Treat event.

Laura was only thirty-seven years old. And you would never have known from looking at her that Laura was battling a lethal disease. She had a PhD and, though we never discussed politics or current events or public issues, I’m certain Laura had convictions about matters that matter. Just as I do. But knowing the burden she was bearing, I’m willing to bet those were not the issues Laura was googling after she put her children to bed at night.

On Epiphany, Laura died suddenly, unexpectedly, and far too quickly.

I am so relieved that the last word Laura heard in this place was the promise that God in Jesus’ shed blood had put away her sin, that at her baptism God had clothed her in Christ’s own righteousness, and that therefore, on account of Christ, God will give her life back.

All of it by grace.

I am so relieved.

May God forgive me for the Sundays where that might not have been true.

There is a lot going on in the world. There always is. But every Sunday, here, there is something more important going on. It’s an insistent bestowal of a promise that, even in the midst of change or sickness or oppressive darkness, the LORD remains count-on-able; that is, God remains for you.

And in all the world, it only happens here, not in newspapers headlines or CNN chyrons, but with words that are his word, with wine that is his blood, and with bread that is his body. Here God continues to assert sovereignty over kingdoms, dominion over powers, and supremacy over political pieties in order to create spouse for his Son. Only here does God himself promise a sinner, “This is my body, given for you.”

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We Should Not Give to Our Politics the Passion They Seek

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Politics: A game that is played in full and vigilant awareness of its relativity

This may be an odd time in history, but it’s not unique.

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“You’re right. You’re not enough and never have been. But that’s not the point. There’s a Lord who’s even better. Let’s get you some help.”

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I can’t think of a better way to have spent Inauguration Day than to gather with a cohort of preachers who want to work on proclaiming our bipartisan need, the love and mercy of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

It’s a great and invigorating privilege to serve as the Preacher-in-Residence for the Iowa Preachers Project. It’s funded by the Lily Endowment and sponsored by Mockingbird ministries. If you’re a preacher, be on the lookout to apply for the next cohort.

Here is the— powerful— sermon by the program’s director, my friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones (aka: the Old Guy in the photo).

His text was the daily epistle passage from 1 Corinthians 3:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispusand Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Midway through this inaugural year of the Iowa Preachers Project it has become glaringly obvious how mistaken I was to invite you into this esteemed group. A very wealthy family with a faith commitment created a philanthropic endeavor in part to assuage the tax penalty from the sales of my personal favorite injectables, insulin and Ozempic, and other pharmaceuticals they developed. Their largesse was given in the case of our particular grant program to somehow mend some kind of short circuit in the church’s proclamation that’s led to non-compelling preaching that’s led in turn to empty pews, empty “plate,” and empty hearts that look at the church and either go “meh” or say “Get behind me, Satan.” The Compelling Preaching Initiative, which funds this project, began with the hope that you’d be getting better at the preaching game so that the broken could be fixed, to make ecclesialdom great again. And what do I find in you?

We have ten Preaching Fellows who are inept, not fully committed, and unable to create an uptick in the important metrics the world judges churches by. You miss deadlines. You forget to Zoom. You prioritize your kids rather than the Project. You ghost your Sermon Whisperers. You make Kathryn gasp monthly when she reckons our outlay for hotels and flights and meals and the director’s salary. And for what?

Our grant stipulates that we’re supposed to create some internal way to assess whether we’re advancing the goals of the initiative. In some way, it implies that the church’s declining trends and its leaders’ concomitant guilt over such can themselves be assuaged by tweaking its public proclaimers’ work with some well-placed advice and offers of techniques for attaining relevancy. Underneath it all is a veiled understanding that you are openly failing your own ordination promises, that the Holy Spirit was having an off day when it tapped you for this vocation, and ultimately that you haven’t done your part to complete Jesus’ apparently unfinished work on the cross. How dare you show up here and spend our money? I might admit to having read Jay’s Christmas sermon and to enjoying a phone call with Lara and to liking Willie’s raspberry rhubarb jam and homemade breakfast sausage, but I’m perplexed about what to say about the cohort in our annual report to the Lilly Endowment next month.

Paul’s relationship with his letters’ recipients in Corinth is an indication of how the church functions when it’s not in its ivory tower, Pollyanna mode and actually deals with the reality of sinners gathering together and having them served by bumbling, inept, self-regarding shepherds. The epistolary evidence is clear that even the best of Jesus’ followers can do little in the face of the inertia and factionalism among so-called “believers.”

A mere letter isn’t going to do it. Paul is so disgusted that he’ll only cop to baptizing Crispus and Gaius, and then going, “Oh, my bad, I forgot, there was that Stephanus family.” It’s as if he’s so had it with them that he’s ready to quote Cee-Lo Green’s glorious break-up anthem to them. There’s a reason we have a Second Corinthians, which was probably initially also letters three, four, and five. Does anyone imagine that those Christians in that Ancient Greek seaport and retirement complex for Roman soldiers got better because of some technique Paul tried out or a new program he concocted or a grant initiative he established to dole out millions of drachmas to well-intentioned but incalcitrant pew-sitters?

What we find in the appointed passage from the daily lectionary puts the lie to everything I’ve said about the grant initiative and you, for Paul calls it all into question with these words: “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In essence, Paul is saying that the whole endeavor to fix the brokenness of life in the face of sin by exerting the law and assessing its fruits through the law’s solipsistic metrics is a fool’s game for adjudicatory functionaries and grant managers to play but something for people serious about Jesus Christ and his benefits to be leery of. In other words, Paul is telling you not to buy into that garbage. It’ll perpetuate the dysfunction. It will kill your joy in ministry and maybe even be the undoing of your very existence.

In my last parish call, I faced a pair of yoked congregations with whom I found myself at odds. They didn’t pay me what they’d promised. We used up our savings in our first year there and went into debt over the next 18 months until I fled to grad school. They had secret meetings about me, and they refused to allow me the use the cemetery riding mower to tackle my hour-and-a-half lawn mowing duties at the parsonage. I spiralled down into a depression and found myself in the garage contemplating the strength of the rafters for bearing the weight at the end of a rope and in the kitchen staring at a drawer of knives wondering if they were sharp enough to open a wrist. I worked myself to despair over not despairing and became more despairing. I saw my entire performance in that call as an arc of forsakenness and desolation. I have no doubt that today I would be planted in a cemetery lying horizontal beside a church I was disgusted with if it were not for my friend and fellow pastor Steve Jacobson who recognized the death spiral in me and changed its course by saying, “You’re right, Ken, you’re not enough and never have been. But that’s not the point. There’s a doctor who is plenty good and a Lord who’s even better. Let’s get you some help.”

What I had so wrong when I started that call thirty years ago was that, when it came to ministry and the vocation of being one of the church’s public proclaimers of the gospel, I gave good homily, I mouthed law and gospel, and said nice things about grace to others, but I never believed it applied to me. And when my wife tried to preach it to me, I heard Charlie Brown’s teacher intoning. Ministry was a danger zone, and worldly metrics were this codependent legalist’s most cherished drug. Better than the nicotine I sneaked in the car on the way to visit shut-ins.

So listen to Paul again. “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Such a spiritual gift has nothing to do with charm or popularity. Still less is it connected to budgets and forms and whether the church toilets flush.

If Paul’s desire that emptying of the cross of Christ of its power is to be prevented, it means the spiritual gift the apostle speaks of earlier, that he says is not lacking in Corinth, must be both utterly limited in scope and universally applicable. If the cross of Christ is to retain its power, it means no one else is allowed to accrue power and authority themselves. When the revealing of the Lord that we await happens, every knee will bend because the bodies they’re connected to will have seen the impotence of their potential and good intentions. Their spiritual gift will be the most excellent state of being unmoving, unwilling, un functioning cadavers, in other words, being dead to themselves.

Which, of course, is good news for people like us who await the Youngest Day, fully aware that even on our best days we have one foot in the grave, with knees shaking and equilibrium lost. Wretched ones that we are, who will rescue us from this body of death? Whatever ineptitude, disquiet, or despair you bring to the table, the gospel you have been called to preach is for you, precisely you, my friends and colleagues, my beloved companions in the grave who long for the promised coming of the Lord.

If this goofy little Project out of Iowa is to be faithful to our calling and to serve as an outpost where the power of the cross is undiminished, then this gig has to be an endeavor steeped in grace, abounding in mercy, and able to rejoice in the actual people who are linked to each other through it. What’s more, if you’re to be compelling preaching lab mice, you will only become such exotic creatures if you’ve known sin, death, and the devil coming after you to aim accusations of failure your way and then, in turn, that you’ve heard that this same good news you preach is for you.

So let me tell you again: You are not lacking, for you have at your command the undiminished power of Christ’s cross that has severed you from guilt and protects you from any accuser’s slings and arrows. And when your faults are pointed out as evidence of your unworthiness, take a page from Luther’s playbook and say, “Ah, my blessed accuser. Thank you for reminding me and for sending me back to the gospel. You’re exactly right. I don’t deserve any of the panoply of blessings my Lord promises me. I belong neither to Paul nor to Apollos, and certainly not to you. I belong to him who gave me his life in my baptism. You’re just gonna have to take that up with him and let me get on with whatever paltry bit I can contribute to his mission. Let’s put a pin and this and talk later. I’m eager to see how your chat with him goes.”

When I take on Chloe’s role in my annual report next month, that’s exactly what i’ll have to say about you: “I give thanks to my God always for our cohort of Preaching Fellows because of the grace of God that has been given them in Christ Jesus, for in every way they have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind — just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you — so that they are not lacking in any spiritual gift as they wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” What a gift you are! Amen.

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"I Have Seen the Voice of God"

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I closed out the “Preaching Slam” at the Iowa Preachers Project on Monday night in Corona Del Mar, California, by preaching on John of Patmos’ call story in Revelation 1.9-18.

My friend and former seminary classmate, Chris Hays, teaches Old Testament up the road at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Ten days ago he wrote to his friends and family:

“Our house, with redwood beams and quarter-sawn oak that had stood up against the Altadena elements since 1913, is gone. Our church, our son's preschool, many of our neighbors and friends' homes, and our athletic club— also gone.

This was a little Eden up against the hills. The scale of the loss is incomprehensible. Now we're sitting in LAX waiting to fly to Oklahoma City for my father's funeral. And all of my clothes and personal effects now fit in my carry-on. I was not, am not ready to talk about most of this. I wanted to sit shiva with my losses. But the oddity of receiving condolence emails and not being entirely sure whether people were comforting me for the loss of my home or the loss of my father to cancer compels me.”

He then ended his message by acknowledging the split within themselves, “We are safe, but we are not okay.”

Near the end of the first century, when the Beloved Disciple is an old man on the prison island of Patmos— deported there by the new guy in charge in the capital— the Spirit of Jesus carries John up into a series of cycles of visions.

The visions unveiled to John are prophetic promises about the future.

In scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present.

Thus, in the final vision unveiled to John, the Spirit of Jesus promises, “Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

“The sea,” the biblical symbol for chaos, “will be no more.”

The church of John’s day, the church under the thumb of Nero and Domitian, had been beset by the mourning and crying and pain and death that political persecution occasioned.

Just so, the final gospel promise to John.

Here’s my question:

If the gospel is a promise about the future, and if, in scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present, then the question is— despite how much we keep up appearances to the contrary, “Are any of us okay?”

About ten years ago, a woman in my congregation asked to meet with me. Diane sat across from me one morning in my office. I knew her from classes I’d taught, pleasantries in the line after service, and a few hospital visits to her spouse, but I didn’t know her.

“Since we’ve decided to make this our church home, I thought you should know my story,” she told me, rubbing her hands along the channels of her corduroy skirt over and over again.

Her voice was taut with anxiety or shame.

I didn’t say anything.

I just waited.

What he told me surprised me.

It wasn’t the sort of story you hear everyday.

With long pauses and double-backs and tears— lots of weeping— she told me how a few years earlier she’d been driving home from the grocery store in the middle of the afternoon on Route One in Alexandria, Virginia.

Out of nowhere a pedestrian stepped into the street. Diane hadn’t been drinking. She hadn’t been distracted. She wasn’t texting or talking.

“There just wasn’t enough damn time!” She said with such force it was clear that she— not me— was the one she was trying to convince.

What she told me next surprised me even more.

Diane told me how her mind developed a split personality to cope with the trauma of having killed another person.

She spent nearly a year, she said, hospitalized for schizophrenia.

She told me how worshipping at a new church, where folks didn’t know her and didn’t stare at the floor whenever they saw her, was one of the goals she’d set for herself upon her discharge.

To convince Diane she shouldn’t be so hard on herself would’ve required converting the complete alternate personality the injury conjured in her.

Here’s another question:How is the gospel good news for her?

I have a friend whose son somehow— the word miracle goes down like a tough pill— survived a horrific hit-and-run. She celebrated his unexpected recovery as sheer grace; the same recovery process festered his Tourette’s into schizophrenia.

Healthy, he ran away, utterly convinced by delusions that the parents who loved him had once horridly abused him.

How is the gospel good news for them?

Or the boy with autism whose mind will not allow him to escape the trauma his birth family visited upon him— how is the gospel good news for him or those who love him (or simply give a shit about him)?

It is from one of the most remembered of memory passages, Paul’s line in Romans about how all of creation groans (note: present tense) in labor pains.

Too often preachers head straightaways to the summary verse of Paul’s climatic chapter, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Seldom do preachers like me summon the stones to parse that verb groan into its specifics.

As creatures, we all— some more than others— comprise the creation that is groaning, awaiting to be made what the Creator intends.

To varying and often unacknowledged degrees, we all have bodies and minds which betray us.

In the past months, I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD and a recurrence of a rare cancer in my marrow, the latter diagnosis leading to the former. And since Christmas I’ve had to self-administer chemotherapy twice a day, possibly for the rest of my life. The present world has reacquainted me to the ease with which our bodies and minds may betray us.

Which is to say, I’m safe but I’m not okay.

Just like you.

Preachers already know the exegetical details.

The words revelation and apocalypse both, Latin and Greek respectively, carry the same meaning, unveiling.

Like pulling up a curtain.

Like lifting a lid.

The metaphor is altogether visual.But oddly, or at least surprisingly, what the Seer John sees in the Apocalypse is a voice, “Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me…”

The vision is somehow auditory.

John does not not report, “I turned to see the one who was speaking to me,” as some translations put it.

Rather, John says, “I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.”

What the Beloved Disciples sees is a voice.

A visible word.

“I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.”

John of Patmos sees what Mary saw on Easter morning at the tomb.

In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene faces the tomb and addresses the angels, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

Next, verse fourteen, John tells you that Mary turns.

Her back is to the tomb now.

And Mary “sees” Jesus but she doesn’t recognize him as Jesus.

Supposing him to be the gardener, she says to the man in front of her, “Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

And then— pay attention— John reports in verse sixteen that Jesus says to her, “Mary.”

And Mary turns, John says.

She turns in the direction of his voice.

She turns towards the tomb so that her back is again to the man she took for the gardener.

Mary’s facing the tomb when she says, “Rabboni! Teacher!”

She’s talking to the tomb. And it’s from that same direction that the voice of the Risen Christ corrects her, “Do not cling to me.”

But again, notice— John hasn’t said a word about Mary grasping anyone.

Rather, she sees a voice and addresses him as “Teacher.”

And he replies, “Do not cling to me.”

Which is to say, “I am not who you have known me to be. I am more than you have known me to be. I am free of even your memories of me.”

And then Mary turns again and she runs.

And she tells the disciples, no longer calling him “my lord,” (as though she could possess him) but “The Lord.”

And what she tells them about him is so mysterious, so unsettling, so incomprehensible that they hide.

“I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me,” John reports in Revelation.

As my teacher James Charlesworth says, Jews spoke of God’s voice as a distinct person or hypostasis, but understood the voice as capable of being seen, not unlike the divine glory, the shekinah.

Therefore, when John says he saw the voice of God he means, quite simply, that he saw God’s voice.

In other words, by being carried up by the Spirit into the future called heaven, John foreshadows a wholeness— a unity of perception, an identification of hearing and seeing— we scarcely can conceive.

John experiences what prophets before him had been given, a remarkable identification-in-difference of voice and vision.

This duality of voice and vision, hearing and seeing, runs all through scripture.

Israel at Sinai must not climb the mountain because “no one shall see God and live;” nevertheless, they are commanded to approach and hear him speak.

But when that same word of God comes in his own person, it is in order that we may see his glory.

As Robert Jenson writes:

“It is something deep in the reality of God that appears in these phenomena. Both in scripture and doctrine, the second person of the triune God is sometimes Son and sometimes Word. As Son he is the image of the Father, so that one who has seen him has seen the Father. As Word, he is the message from the Father, the gospel of which he is at once the messenger and the content.”

Back to the question begged by Diane’s confession to me:

How is the gospel gospel for those whose bodies or mind betray them?How is the gospel gospel for those who are not okay?

There is good news, I believe, in the Seer’s seeing what we can only hear.

When I returned to my office with more tissues for Diane and sat down across from her, she said, “I know Jesus forgives me, but Pastor Jason, honestly, forgiveness doesn’t seem to go far enough.”

“It doesn’t go far enough,” I responded, “Sure, you’re forgiven for Christ’s sake. But— read the book at the back of your Bible— that’s not the whole promise. The promise isn’t simply the forgiving of all wrongs, done or suffered. Don’t forget: time is one of the creatures God creates. Therefore, time is one of the creatures God will rectify. The promise is that your past is as unfinished for God as your future; such that, without violating who you are, Diane— your car never struck that man that morning and your mind never split.”

And she looked up from her damp tissue and I could tell she didn’t get it.

“But I did hit that man with my car,” she said and blew her nose, “and my mind did split.”

And I thought of what the apostle says about how it has not yet entered the heart of human beings to imagine what God has prepared for those who love him.

The good news is so good we can’t conceive of it!

So I said to Diane:

“You’re a reader. It’s like Tolkien put it, “One day all sad things will come untrue.”The promise is that God is at work in Jesus Christ to heal your whole timeline, to mend everything that is broken, every wrong you’ve wreaked, every sin you’ve suffered. Without undoing you, all of it will be undone. That’s the hope of the Resurrection.

Resurrection will happen not just to dead bodies but to all things, not just in the future but backwards, to God’s creature called time.

Diane blew her nose and it made a sharp coronet noise.

“I don’t understand any of that,” she said.

“Good!” I replied, “Look at you— you are NOT okay. If you could understand every nook and cranny of the promise, then it probably wouldn’t have the power to save you.”

Resurrection will happen not just to dead bodies but to all things , not just in the future but backwards, to God’s creature called time .

In scripture, the promise of the future is always the negation of the present.

If John of Patmos is indeed a portent of our coming perfection, then we may conclude from him that one day— in the last future— when we have been taken into God, we too will see by hearing and hear by seeing.

That is, we will be made whole.

Preachers in my corner of Christ’s Body like to talk about prophets being those who speak truth to power.But the prophet of Patmos suggests something more than the first becoming last.Perhaps prophetic preachers are those whom the LORD calls to point broken people to the Future where we will be made more than okay.

And the mystery doesn’t start with John at the End of the New Testament anymore than it starts with Mary at the tomb. Go back to the Old Testament, “The word of Amos . . . which he saw.” The good news, for all, of so simple a sentence is that one day— in the last future— we will be made whole in the way the Holy God intends.

But the odd surprise of this good news is that this future mode of perception— this promised wholeness— is already available in the present.

But it’s not surrounded by golden lampstands.

And it doesn’t glow bronze like a furnace.

It’s smaller even than Mary’s boy in her belly.

This future is present wherever a little word of promise alights upon the lips of those whom God has called to proclaim it.

So here’s my promise to you:

Preach. Preach.

Preach.

And exactly because you have stood before sinners with the One who lives in the last future on your lips, those who have ears to hear will be able to say, “I have seen the voice of God.”

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LORD, I AM Their Shepherd

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For the opening worship of the Iowa Preachers Project gathering in Corona Del Mar, California, I decided to continue preaching on Psalm 23.

In his little book The Doors of the Sea, my former teacher David Bentley Hart recalls reading an article in the New York Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent his wife or any of his four children from being swept to their deaths. The father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter, “My wife and children must have thought, “Father is here . . . he will save us” but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

At which point the man broke down, overcome by his weeping.

Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father in the moment of his deepest grief, what should you say? Hart argues that only a moral cretin would have approached the man with abstract theological explanation, “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels.” Or, “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation.” Certainly you would not quip, “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Most of us, Hart writes, would have the good sense and empathy not to so speak to a father broken and bewildered by grief…Such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God.”

According to Hart, there is a homiletical mandate here, for preachers of the gospel above all. “And this should tell us something,” he asserts, "For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.” If we must not say utter such cruel and unfeeling bromides to a father in grief, then believers ought never proclaim them about God.

On Sunday, I had not yet buckled my seat belt before I landed on the receiving end of every preacher’s most dreaded question, “So— what do you do for a living?” Normally in such situations I summon my inner George Constanza and lie. “I’m a marine biologist,” I’ll say, “I’m an architect. I’m a latex salesman for Vandelay Industries.” But on Sunday my laptop was already open and illuminated with my exegetical notes. And Psalm 23 is nothing if not exceedingly familiar, leaving me with no option but to tell the truth.

“I’m a preacher,” I mumbled.

To my surprise, he did not expect me to apologize for all Christians in every time and place nor did he confess any troubles burdening his conscience. He left me alone. Until the plane began its slow descent to Los Angeles. Peering out the window, he pointed to the scorched earth and desiccated neighborhoods. It looked like a tsunami of flames had flooded the land.

He elbowed me.

“Preacher, how do you look at something like that and talk about God?”

“I’m genuinely curious,” he added with a hint of moral indignation.

I started to reply but then I recalled my teacher’s admonishment.

Then we ought never to say them.

So I bit my lip.

David Bentley Hart’s homiletical mandate brings us back to Karl Barth’s dialectical conundrum on preaching. “As preachers,” Barth insists, “we cannot speak of the God who is God. It’s an impossibility! Nevertheless, as preachers we must.” For Barth, what sets preachers apart as particularly peculiar from all other believers is that our lack is precisely our task.

Our deprivation is nonetheless our obligation.

Just so—

With the words of my mouth and the meditation of all your hearts, we must proclaim a word with these words of King David. And this is an endeavor fraught with danger, for this psalm of David appears to invite proclaimers to commit the homiletical malpractice David Bentley Hart chastens us to avoid. Whatever else this scripture might license us to say about God, it will not permit us to survey our world and speculate that God is not in control.

After all, the very first verb on David’s anointed lips makes the LORD’s sovereignty absolute. This is the only instance in the scriptures where the common verb hasar (to want) has no direct object. The verb stands alone because the objects are infinite. In other words, “The LORD is my shepherd; he supplies everything.” And while the underlying structure of the twenty-third psalm is difficult to discern, the prayer’s succession of images reinforces this stress upon God’s sovereignty. From grass meadows and quiet waters to the pathways of justice and the vale of death’s shadow, the LORD is in control at every location in creation. Even in the face of your foes— even there the Maker of Heaven and Earth is supremely in charge, setting out a table like he arranged the very encounter.

The psalm seems to say that which my teacher charges preachers not to say.

In fact, when the Lord Jesus comes to Isaiah and lays a word on the prophet’s lips, he echoes David’s prayer but raises its claim to an astonishing and discomfiting degree. “King Cyrus is my shepherd,” Jesus says to Isaiah. A God who can will the punishment of his unfaithful people to an end by means of the political maneuverings of a pagan monarch two thousand kilometers away in Persia is not a God we can exonerate by positing him as distant and removed from the events of the everyday.

The shepherd’s world is not a machine.

The shepherd’s world is his creation.

As David prayers elsewhere, “This is the day the LORD is making.”

Even the tense of Psalm 23 is problematic.

David does not locate the LORD’s sovereign care into an incontestable past, “The LORD was my shepherd when he…” Nor does David conjugate God’s sovereign care as a promise about a not yet future, “The LORD will be my shepherd…”

It is already; it is now, “The LORD is my shepherd.”

Of all the sheep in the shepherd’s flock, this is an odd assertion for David to register. At several junctures, King David’s own life appears to invalidate his contention about the LORD’s supreme control. After God strikes down Uzzah for touching the ark, David’s fear and second-thoughts prevent the LORD from taking his place in Jerusalem. If the LORD is shepherd, he is one who lets David wander from Michal to Abigail to Bathsheba. Speaking of Bathsheba, if God is in control as this scripture attests, if the shepherd’s world is not a machine, then this does not turn out to be good news for Uriah.

Before I departed Washington for Los Angeles, I spoke with a friend and parishioner. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Glenn enlisted in the Army out of high school. He has served several tours of duty and works now for the State Department. He and his wife have a toddler named after an Old Testament hero.

Just the other day, in the middle of the night, a disturbed and aggravated intruder attempted to break into his home. He was on the phone with the dispatcher when the intruder finally, violently breached his doorway. At which point, his training took over.

“It’s not the first time I’ve had to do that,” he told me, “But I never thought that part of my world would happen in my home.”

In the Book of Samuel, the LORD makes a covenant with King David. “He shall build a house for my name,” God pledges, “And I will establish his throne forever…my steadfast love will never depart from him.” And David responds to the LORD’s unconditional promise by praying.

It is a pattern throughout the scriptures:

Address/Reply.

Pledge/Response.

Promise/Prayer.

In the case of Jacob:

Covenant/Petition.

On the one hand, it is odd that the Bible should contain a prayerbook. It is strange that human words uttered to God could be also God’s word to us.

On the other hand, we might expect the scriptures to include a prayerbook if the covenant is real.

A covenant, after all, is a promise that binds the promise-maker to an other. To make a promise to an other, the promise-maker must acquire a shared history with the other. But for God to inaugurate a joint history with an other, God must accept no other future than with this other. As Luther taught, a covenant is like a wedding vow. The promise creates a shared history and a mutual future that would not have been apart from this promise.

But if this covenant is real, then God must be a God who can meaningfully be petitioned. Since a covenant-maker and those with whom he makes covenant have a common history, those with whom covenant is made must have their own voice within the relationship. And since in this case the covenant-maker is the Creator, that voice will be the voice of prayer. Implicit in the covenant is the fact that the Shepherd wants you to speak up, make a motion, voice your opinion about his job performance.

As Robert Jenson writes:

“If the covenant is to be real, we must be able to address God and tell him how we think events should go in our history together, in trust that somehow he will take our opinion seriously. And that reliance must be able to appeal to something real in God. Our expressed opinion is an essential pole of the process of God’s decision-making. Prayer is participation in Providence.”

In other words—

The sheer fact that David prays and the frequency with which he prays to the LORD who made covenant with him is itself acknowledgement that the world too infrequently conforms to the expectations set by the covenant.

If you really are our shepherd LORD, then do something! Because right now, you don’t seem large and in charge.

“I never thought that part of my world would happen in my home.”

Listening to Glenn, I thought of my teacher’s homiletical mandate. So I bit my lip. And I waited for Glenn to speak.

“I know God’s in control,” he finally said, “But life rarely feels that way. Now my house is surrounded by news crews and my wife is traumatized and…I’ve got a bone to pick with the Almighty.”

Robert Jenson notes that the doctrine of creation and images of God as shepherd are ubiquitous across the scriptures. They are so, he says, because what is persistent among God’s people is a set of worries, ascending ultimately to an anxiety about God’s very self. That is, the fragility of human life and the cruelty of the created world calls into question the goodness or competence of its Creator.

Just so—

Again and again, the LORD Jesus alights upon lips to say what faith cannot always see.

Goodness and mercy are pursuing you.

You will not want for anything.

In the house of the LORD, mourning and crying and pain…

No more.

King David responds to God’s covenant address by praying.

Promise/Prayer.

Address/Response.

Pledge/Petition.

But the pattern does not cease with this back-and-forth. The LORD to whom we are bidden to speak replies. He answers. The God of the Covenant not only solicits the prayers of his people, he answers them. David learns this the hard way, landing himself at the receiving end of a sermon.

The guy raw-dogging it in the window seat wasn’t going to let me get away with silence.

He repeated his question, “Seriously, how do you look at something like that and talk about God?”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” I replied, “It’s not my vocation to talk about God. Talk about God is speculation not proclamation, and speculation is how believers beget unbelievers. I’m a preacher— my job is to speak for God.”

He raised his eyebrows like I should be wearing a straightjacket instead of a collar.

Then he shook his head and rephrased his question, “Okay, how do you look at something like that and speak for God.”

I thought about the text that had been open and illuminated on my screen.

I turned to him.

And I said:

“I can’t explain God’s governance of his creation to you. I don’t even understand it. And I frequently file complaints with him. But I can promise you that when Jesus Christ looks at that (and I pointed out the window) or when he looks at the dumpster fires in your life, he prays to his Father and says, “LORD, I am their Shepherd.”

“I don’t know that I can believe that,” he said.

“Of course you can’t,” I replied, “Without a preacher, it’s impossible.”

It’s odd that we persist in trying to tease out answers to our prayers in the random acts and chance developments of our lives.

Events rather than words.

If the Triune identity is a colloquy, if our chief relation to God is through word utterance, if we reflect the image of God in that we are bidden to speak to God, if God creates a covenant history with us through address, then why would we think that the LORD answers prayer by any other means but words?

And where else would we expect to hear those words except in the particular word in which God promises to give himself?

A promise that you are able to hand over— on the basis of a passage of scripture— the gospel on the lips of a preacher, is how the LORD replies to a weary world. God’s answer to prayer is you.

The audible sacrament uttered by a preacher is how the LORD replies to the lamentations and petitions of his people.

This is not how I would arrange the world.

If you think God could find a more reliable, clearer means of communication, then take it up in your prayers.

But in the meantime, preach like your life depends on it.

Because, other lives do.

As David Hart says in The Doors of the Sea, “To see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain.”

About Easter faith, Paul wonders, “And how shall they believe if they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?”

Of course, having laid such a terrific burden on you, I can’t leave you there.

I can’t get out of here until I’ve handed over the goods.

Just so—

What does this text promise that I may promise you based on the fact that Jesus lives with death behind him?

The Lord Jesus hides his promise to preachers smack dab in the middle of David’s prayer.

There are precisely twenty-six Hebrew words before it and twenty-six Hebrew words after it, “I am with you.”

So hear the good news:

As you wander in what Origen called “the pastures of the scriptures,” you will not always find “quiet waters” and pastoral scenes.

At times, you will want to take the shepherd’s rod and, like Moses, strike a passage in the hopes it will yield a leak of living water.

Often, you will want for a word.

Even worse, it is not easy to frequent the vale of other people’s deaths.

And in the Lord’s dark humor, the table he regularly sets out in the face of your foes is the loaf and the cup between you and your hearers.

Nevertheless! He who is the Word is with you in your words.

In this House of the Lord, he promises his Father, “Lord, I am their Shepherd.”

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Married in Your Baptism

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I’m in California this week for a gathering of the Iowa Preachers Project. My friend Ken Sundet Jones delivered this morning’s service at our host church, Lutheran Church of the Master, in Corona Del Mar.

Here it is:

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Until a year ago, in my pre-retirement job as a fully tenured old coot college professor, I taught a course called “Christian Faith and Life” each semester to earnest 19-year-olds who by and large knew little about the story of God and those chosen people, the Israelites, who figure prominently in our holy book. One of the ways I tried to open up God’s word to my students was to tell them to pay attention to the names of biblical characters and places.

I often recommended to them that the Bible would make a great source when deciding on names for their future babies. You’ve got Sisera and Gomer, Lo-Ami and Lo-Ruhamah, and Jephthah and Jezebel. Certainly they’re no worse than my grandmothers’ non-biblical names: Mamie, Hedwig, and Luberta. There’s even a name an Oscar winner’s parents bestowed on him: Mahershala (although in the Bible it’s really Mahershala-Hash-Baz). If you don’t like Zephaniah or Zebulon, you could choose a wild Bible name like, say, Dan or Deborah or Donkey (who was in both the Christmas story and Shrek).

So often names in the Bible function as a short-hand way to let you know something about the character.But that generally only works if you’re a native speaker of ancient Biblical Hebrew. We know the stories about Jacob getting his brother Esau to sell his birthright to him for a bowl of stew, about how Jacob had to bargain with his relative Laban to marry his daughter Rachel but got tricked into marrying her sister Leah instead, and about how Jacob had an all-night wrestling match with God. They’re great stories but they’re all the better in Hebrew where you’d catch the jokes in the names.

Esau's name means “Big Red” and Jacob’s name in Hebrew is “Cheater.” Even more enlightening is that the cheater wants to marry Rachel, “the little ewe lamb,” and is conned into marrying her older spinster sister whose name means “heifer.” And when the cheater and conniver spends the night wrestling, God renames him Israel which means “God grappler,” a name handed to his descendants the Israelites whom, we are to understand, are chosen as a people to wrestle with what it means to be connected to this particular God.

All of which is to say that, in our Old Testament reading today, when God gives the prophet a word to speak to the exiled Israelites and includes names being changed, we ought to pay attention. The names in Isaiah’s words to the God-grapplers are to be grappled with, because they are names we bear ourselves. In the prophetic utterance, God says he sees who we are by naming us Azubah, and he names the place we live Shmarnah.

Azubah means “forsaken.” To be forsaken means to be abandoned and left behind, to be utterly lost and disconnected. Forsakenness was regarded as being visited upon you as God’s wrathful judgment. Any number of people in the Bible could be seen as forsaken: Sarah who had never born a child into her 90s or Hannah who was equally barren, for instance, or the woman Jesus encounters who was caught in adultery, or the blind man by the side of the road, or the Ethiopian eunuch. Each of them was a forsaken outsider unable to concoct a righteous, blessed, fruitful, or pious life.

Shmarnah means “desolate.” If you lived among the people in the Bible, you wouldn’t have to walk far before you found yourself in desolate country. Lonely, arid places were all around. It was close to them than you are to Death Valley. Arable land where you could grow crops was in short supply, and moisture was undependable. But the desolation of Shmarnah is worse. It’s like soil strewn with salt. It’s a place where no way and no how is anything going to grow up there again. All hope for that acreage is lost.

The Israelites, the God-wrestlers Isaiah is preaching to, wouldn’t have been surprised at the prophet’s words. They saw themselves as having been forsaken by God when the Babylonians had conquered their land of Judah and carted them off to exile and for good measure had torn Jerusalem’s temple to the ground. God’s face was turned away from them, and what they’d left behind at home was desolation. Salt-strewn earth. What could ever come of them or the land God had promised their ancestors? Azubah and Shmarnah were what they were now and ever would be.

This is the exact right word for us today when so many, including, I suspect, people you may know and love, have come face-to-face with the deadly destruction visited upon them when a combination of dry hills, high winds, and a spark become what one commenter said is the worst natural disaster our country has ever known. Lost lives and lost home, lost hopes and lost futures. To consider the burnt-out shell of your beloved home in Altadena or Pacific Palisades, no matter your income level, is no different from gazing at a casket bearing your loved one’s lifeless body. It is to be named Azubah in Shmarnah, Forsaken in Desolation.

I’m not interested in saddling this disaster with the assertion that it reveals God’s judgment on its victims or that those of us with four intact walls and no scorched land around us are somehow more blessed or God-pleasing. Like Joseph at the end of Genesis, I can’t claim the wisdom to discern God’s motives. But I do know this: God never shows up in a Shmarnah or visits an Azubah without renaming them Hephzibah and Beulah. For our God is the God who says, “I kill that I might make alive.” In other words, we have a God who shows up in desolated lives at the point when we are most desperate to water the earth.

God consistently remakes the desolate and forsaken ones of the biblical story into the beloved whom he marries and in whom he delights. The widow of Zarephath on the verge of starvation is given a jar of meal that yields more than its volume. God grants Sarah and Hannah children. The adulterous woman about to be stoned to death is given the Lord’s mercy instead. Peter, who denies Jesus three times, is called by him to feed his sheep. Lepers are cleansed. The sick are healed. Those bound and chained are freed. And the worst persecutor of the early Christians, who called himself the chief among sinners, is sent out to be the greatest missionary of the church.

The question is not about judgment nor about whether we bootstrap-pullers can scrape together a future ourselves from the forsaken soil of disaster and remake ourselves into Beulahs and Hephzibahs. The better question is whether God can do it. Is the desolation so bad that God cannot make it his delight? Is anyone so far gone and forsaken that God will not claim them as his bride?

Jesus himself told parables that take place at wedding parties like the one in Cana where he turns the disaster of running out of wine into a delightful miracle. When we hear the parables of the ten bridesmaids and of the wedding banquet, we ought to take a step sideways and remember God’s command to the prophet Hosea to act out a parable of God’s love and faithfulness through marriage.

God tell Hosea to get himself hitched with the prostitute Gomer, because that’s what it’s like for God to be connected to sinful self-seeking people. Yet God’s command of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is a sign of God’s promise to be here in the midst of our desolation and our disasters, personal or natural.

Last weekend I had the privilege of presiding at the wedding of a former student whose bride is an asylum-seeker from Honduras. Her immigration status has left her with great anxiety as the two of them face possible policy changes in Washington. That wedding provided some balm to their fear because with the signing of the wedding license the bride’s name was changed. Now her connection to her new husband provides her with a new identity and, they hope, with a modicum of protection.

The promise of Isaiah is that God’s naming the Israelites as Hephzibah, married, and their land as Beulah is a divine declaration of protection, good favor, and faithfulness in the face of disaster. The Israelites are provided freedom by an enemy king and the road home to Jerusalem is opened. There the Temple will be built anew and a bridegroom will arrive when the bridesmaids least expect it. He comes as Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. Jesus who cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” from a cross on a desolate hill rises from the grave to claim his beloved, to claim his people, to claim you.

And he brings you into his wedding feast at this altar where he gives himself to you in the bread and wine. Notice God doesn’t ask Azubah if she wants to become Hephzibah. He simply declares it so. Just so, does he declare you married in your baptism and celebrates his nuptials in this meal. In the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper we see that the desolations of Babylon and Pacific Palisades and Altadena are not the last word on the fore forsaken or on you. Now you can say, “I am not desolate, for my name is Hephzibah, and I’m heading to Beulahland where there will be no divorce or fires or destruction or weeping or mourning. My Lord has made me his and saved me from fiery condemnation. He’s reserved an indestructible home for me. Even in the face of loss I can rejoice. Come feast with me.” Amen.

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Prophecy is Always in the Mode of Promise Not Prediction

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This Sunday’s lectionary epistle is from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, in which the apostle addresses the charisms bestowed upon the body by the Holy Spirit:

“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of power deeds, to another prophecy.”

Firstly—

It’s critical to notice that the object of the Spirit’s gifting is Christ’s body not individual believers. That is, after Pentecost prophet is no longer an office occupied by individuals.

To Jews, the sure surprise of Luke’s account of Shavuot in the Book of Acts is that the Spirit, who heretofore had descended only upon individual leaders of Israel (e.g., Moses, Jeremiah, David) fell upon the whole body of believers. Just so, the church herself now holds the office of prophet because the Spirit who lavished herself so gratuitously at Pentecost persists in pouring herself out on all believers in word, water, wine and bread. Post-Pentecost, prophecy in the spirit is a communal work rather than the endeavor of anointed individuals. Pentecost alone is enough to disqualify many pretenders to prophecy.

Here are two scriptural criterions for discerning true prophecy in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Robert Capon's "The Mystery of Christ"

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Hi Friends,

Here is the first session of our new study on Robert Capon’s The Mystery of Christ.

And here is the link to join us live Mondays at 7:00 PM EST.

Show Notes

Summary

This conversation delves into Robert Capon's book, 'The Mystery of Christ and Why We Don't Get It,' exploring themes of grace, pastoral counseling, and the nature of God. The participants discuss the role of clergy, the complexities of human relationships, and the importance of understanding unconditional love. They analyze a character named Helen, who grapples with her own moral dilemmas and seeks justification, ultimately revealing deeper insights into the nature of forgiveness and grace in the Christian faith.

Takeaways

Capon's work challenges traditional views of ministry.

Pastoral counseling should focus on proclaiming the gospel.

Understanding grace is essential for healing and growth.

Helen's story illustrates the struggle between sin and grace.

The nature of God is fundamentally loving and unconditional.

Justification and forgiveness are distinct yet interconnected concepts.

Human relationships are complex and require grace.

Capon emphasizes the importance of mystery in faith.

The church should not be transactional but relational.

Unconditional love is the foundation of Capon's theology.

Sound Bites

"The church is not for you."

"You are beloved children."

"God loves you no matter what."

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