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July 6, 2017 - January 2, 2018
A sermon changes words about God into words from God. It takes what we have heard or read of God and God’s ways and turns them into a personal proclamation of God’s good news. A sermon changes water into wine. A sermon changes bread nouns and wine verbs into the body and blood of Christ. A sermon makes personal again what was once present and personal to Isaac and Rebekah, to Ruth and Boaz, to David and Abigail, to Mary and Elizabeth, to Peter and Paul, to Priscilla and Aquila. To you. To me. No word God has spoken is a mere literary artifact to be studied. No human experience is dead history
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We suppose we are in charge of prayer. We aren’t. God has spoken. We are required to enter a world of listening to God.
We learn to listen reverently and attentively by praying the psalms.
We are most ourselves when we pray.
When that deep, deep center of our lives is exposed—our core humanity that biblical writers so vigorously designate as “heart”—we unthinkingly revert to our first language. We pray.
Poetry grabs for the visceral. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal.
If we pray without first listening, we pray out of context.
we need to pray not only out of an awareness of our personal stories (David’s life gives us that) but in the context of the “old, old story,” the salvation story. Our daily lives have a narrative shape, but the Bible as a whole (the large context in which we live) is also cast in the form of narrative.
After Jesus was resurrected and spent time with them, his followers started reading their Bibles, their Hebrew Bibles, their Genesis-through-Malachi Bibles, with fresh eyes. They quite literally ransacked the Scriptures for hints and anticipations of the Messiah that they now believed had lived among them in Jesus: his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. As these first Christians
These people were interested above all in hearing what God had to say to Jesus. Their thirst for the good news was insatiable. Their appetite for the Word of God was bottomless.
The voices that command the largest audiences in our American culture are spokesmen for the ego, sometimes the religious ego, but nevertheless the ego. Deep-rooted, me-first distortions of our humanity have been institutionalized in our economics and sanctioned by our psychologies. And now we have gotten ourselves a religion in the same style, a religion that will augment our human potential and a gospel that will make us feel good. We want prayers that bring us daily benefits in the form of a higher standard of living, with occasional miracles to relieve our boredom. We come to the Bible as
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Jesus is king. Jesus is priest. No question about that. But he is neither king nor priest in the way we are in the habit of defining them. We have to let Jesus be king and priest in his own way.
This salvation life, this Christian life, is a life to be lived, not just talked or written about.
Too often the living Word made flesh is desiccated into propositional corpses and then sorted into exegetical specimens in bottles of formaldehyde. We end up with god-talk. T. S. Eliot put it like this: Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word…. Where is the Life we have lost in living?*
God-talk is human speech in which God is depersonalized into a language of information, manipulation, propaganda, and gossip.
The Christian life is not, in the first place, something we do. It consists of the healthy and mature formation of our lives by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Christian living goes off the rails badly when it is conceived as a program or routine that we engage in or skills that we master.
One: every word, every phrase, every sentence, every silence must be received personally, relationally.
Two: our participation in the land and language “of the living” must always be responsive.
Instead of walking straight to a destination by the shortest route, it suggests a casual walking around, taking in the sights, absorbing the beauty, communing with one’s soul, conversing with a friend—what one of my friends calls prayer walking.
Beauty is the outside and holiness the inside of what is essentially the same thing: life full and vibrant, life God created and God blessed, life here and now.
Beauty is fundamental. It is the evidence of and witness to the inherent wholeness and goodness of things.
Moses and Isaiah walked out of those stories on fire themselves, energized for lifelong, life-giving vocations.
Holiness did not make God smaller so they could use God in convenient and manageable projects. It made those men larger so God could give out life through them, extravagantly, spontaneously.
For it is not possible to have a Christian gospel apart from place and person. The gospel is not an idea or a plan or a vision. It works exclusively in creation and incarnation, in things and people. Disincarnation is the work of the devil.
We need to rub our noses in the stuff of this world, inhale its fragrance, press our hands into the clay, listen to the songs and stories.
The change has come about because we were taught to look, notice, be attentive. And when we don’t see any birds, we know better than to complain that we live in a part of the country that is deficient in birds. Rather, our eyes have become lazy, our attention spans atrophied. Our self-preoccupation had reduced us to tunnel vision.
Henry James once said that a writer is a person on whom nothing is ever lost. That sounds like a focused Christian identity to me: the men and women on whom nothing, at least nothing that has to do with life—and virtually everything does—is lost. “Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness” (verse 2, KJV).
The lived Christian life always occurs in a place. It is never an abstraction, never a generality, never a technique.
Geography is every bit as essential to the Christian life as theology.
It is always a surprise to Christians, isn’t it (and that includes pastors), when we realize how many people there are who do not want us to do our work, who have no idea what we are doing, who think nothing of interrupting us with their noisy agendas.
the unfortunate separation of Scripture from prayer, or of prayer from Scripture, that is all too common in the Christian way.
Scripture is the Word of God understood, comprehended, honored. Prayer is the Word of God assimilated, absorbed, lived. Scripture without prayer has no soul; prayer without Scripture has no substance.
In prayer we do not act. God does. In prayer we do not develop a technology that sets the gears and pulleys of miracle in motion. We participate in God’s action. “Not my will but yours.”
Nothing here suggests there is something we can do to shape history to our convenience. The earth is not here for us to use. The earth is the scene of God’s action.
Being a good shepherd meant taking the risk of life against beasts, robbers, and murderers (and they knew it).
we don’t just read it on the run, don’t just memorize a verse or two, but meditate.
But in the Christian way, it is firsthand relationship, personal knowledge, historical, and existential. In Jesus Christ, God knows us, and then, because the initiative has been Spirit-given to us, we know God. But the knowledge is not speculative or literary. It is personal and experienced. In this knowledge we are in on the foundational reality of existence.
They delivered God’s commands and promises and living presence to communities and nations who had been living on god-fantasies and god-lies.
Everyone more or less believes in God or gods. But most of us do our best to keep God on the margins of our lives, or, failing that, we refashion God to suit our convenience. Prophets insist that God is the sovereign center, not off in the wings awaiting our beck and call. And prophets insist that we deal with God as God reveals himself, not as we imagine him to be.
Prophets train us in discerning the difference between the ways of the world and the ways of the gospel, keeping us present to the presence of God.
The God of whom the prophets speak is far too large to fit into our lives. If we want anything to do with God, we have to fit into God.
The prophets don’t explain God. They shake us out of old conventional habits of small-mindedness and trivializing god-gossip.
That which is holy is not derived from something we are or have. It cannot be related to something we know. It is “other than.” It comes from outside. God is not a projection of our imaginations, not wish fulfillment, not a childish fantasy. God is holy.
We don’t confess our sins so we can wallow in despair but so we can hear the joyful words of forgiveness: “Friends, hear the good news of the gospel. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.”
What we are regularly aware of is the shaping influence that worship has for life lived beyond the sanctuary, in our homes and places of work, among our neighbors—the reality of God as holy and this earth as a place of glory, the awareness of our failures and of God’s reconciliation, the command that when obeyed enlists us as participants in God’s holiness and the glories in which we are immersed daily.
Exchanges are possible. Instead is a gospel word.
The possibilities for these transactions are embedded deep in the nature of the life that God creates in Jesus Christ: the ashes of disappointment traded in for the garland of hope, the mourning over sin traded in for the oil of a glad salvation, the faint spirit of depression traded in for the praise mantle of the God who makes all things new. Jesus continues to post his willingness to make the trades. Millions have done it. They continue to do it in this congregation. Jesus Christ is a most welcome trading post.
Be with the one who suffers, the one who grieves, the one rejected. Say little but be there as a silent, patient witness to God’s insteads.
A prophet is a person who sees what God is doing and then tells us so we can get in on it.
“If we are realistic persons, honest persons, alert persons,” he said, “then midrash will enter our lives.”
