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July 6, 2017 - January 2, 2018
The word midrash is a Hebrew word that means “seek out.”
Out of that vast field of stumps, a shoot sprouts, and the sprout becomes a person anointed by God to save us. Christians have learned to identify him as Jesus Christ, raised high against the heavens as a banner, marking our destination, making it quite clear that God is our goal: “him shall the nations seek.”
God is the origin of our existence and continues into eternity. He is no absent Father. There is continuity in God, and as we live in him, our lives have continuity. We escape the jumble of impressions and the chaos of experience. We don’t have to start each day looking for something new to keep us going, to be happy or entertained. We have histories that accumulate in meaning and significance and worth, for we have both a past and a future in God.
prophet and preacher can try to make things easy for people by baptizing the status quo, sanctioning whatever is going on, and making people comfortable in a selfish and irresponsible life by failing to challenge or expose them.
All through the Isaian prophetic writings behold occurs frequently. It is a call to pay attention: “Listen to this!” It is most often used in relation to God, with an exclamation mark. It is the prophet’s primary task simply to get us to pay attention to God. God first and foremost. Don’t miss this!
The central thrust of this attention-getting exclamation “Behold your God” is that God is mightier by far than our imaginations conceive him to be and that it is his will that we participate in this large God-life.
Servant is the form in which God deals with his creation.
The God who in his majesty, strength, and wisdom is beyond our imaginations has chosen to work primarily as a servant who is almost beneath our imaginations, so far beneath we don’t even notice him.
It is somewhat common among people who get interested in religion or God to get proportionately disinterested in their jobs and families, their communities and their colleagues. The more of God, the less of the human. But that is not the way God intends it. Wisdom counters this tendency by giving witness to the precious nature of human experience in all its forms, whether or not it feels or appears “spiritual.”
What having the Song in the Bible does is demonstrate and convince us that we have been created physically, emotionally, and mentally to live in love.
Salvation is the act of God in which we are rescued from the consequences of our sin (bondage, fragmentation) and put in a position to live in free, open, loving relationships with God and our neighbors. The double command “Love God…Love your neighbor…” assumes salvation as the foundational background for living in love.
The easy answers of Job’s friends are a cruel substitute for God himself.
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Preaching in the company of Solomon moved me into an immersion of the human situation where God is graciously at work in the everyday workplaces, hospital rooms, playgrounds, and family rooms—“the street.”
The gospel is not only good news about the big issues and the deep realities. It is also about the time of day and the feeling you have when you get up in the morning.
A critical question every Christian has to deal with is “How can I best assist others to a full, mature growth in the Christian way?” Parents ask the question regarding their children. Husbands and wives ask the question regarding each other. Individuals ask the question in regard to associates in the workplace and playground.
Any of us who think we can train up another into the Christian faith by drawing some maps, compiling some statistics, and writing out some out-of-context road signs is going to end up with a similar disappointment. The world changes, fashions change, culture changes, and social structures change. The one thing that doesn’t change is the living God and his way of loving and saving us.
It means that every time you engage in an act of faith in Christ, you are training another person. Every time you love another in obedience to Christ’s command, you are educating someone else. Every time you forgive someone because Christ forgave you, you are assisting materially in the Christian growth of that person. Every time you hope because Christ has promised his help, you are opening up new possibilities of growth in another person.
The Holy Spirit is God moving in us to live God’s life.
There will be unexpected encounters with the dark side of existence. When they come, Lady Wisdom will not blame you but help you develop strength to endure. Christ did not come to tell us how terrible we are but how forgiven we are. The dominant note is not warning but promising.
We bring so many mistaken expectations to the gospel, so much silly sentiment, so many petulant demands that we have unknowingly picked up in our work or play and that get in the way of eating a nourishing and safe meal.
An unctuous smile and a sincere tone do not make a gospel.
The danger is that we will get so busy running a religious institution that we have no energy or attention left over for prayer.
When we take the truth of God and use it in superstitious or manipulative or prideful or selfish ways, that is religion. Its opposite is gospel: the truth of God heard in all its originality and power in the person of Jesus Christ, listened to in faith, responded to in faithful discipleship.
You don’t have to read very far in the Bible to find that it is intolerant of humbug that masquerades as pious rectitude.
Joy at the beginning, joy at the end, joy everywhere in between. Joy is God’s creation and gift. No authentic biblical faith is conceivable that is not permeated with it.
There is no way to experience God without also experiencing joy.
Joys are profuse and various. But the capacity to enjoy them is questionable. Actual enjoyment of joy is spare in our culture. Reaching for or holding on to joy does not automatically convey the ability to enjoy.
you must not pursue pleasure. Pleasures are gifts to be enjoyed, not goals to be pursued.
Stories invite us into a world other than ourselves and, if they are good and true stories, a world larger than ourselves. Gospel invites us into a world of God’s creation and salvation and blessing, God in human form in action on the very ground on which we also live.
The distinctiveness of the gospel form is that it brings the centuries of Hebrew storytelling—the Holy Spirit telling the story of creation and salvation and blessing—to fulfillment in the story of Jesus, the mature completion of all the stories, in a way that is clearly revelation (that is, God’s self-disclosing), in a way that invites and even insists on our participation.
Line after line, page after page: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
None of us provides the content for our own salvation; it is given to us. Jesus gives it to us. The text allows for no exceptions.
One of the seductions that interferes with mature Christian living is the construction of utopias, ideal places where we can live the good life totally without inconvenience. The imagining and then attempted construction of such utopias is an old habit of our kind. But it always turns out that we can’t actually do it. Utopia is literally “no place.” We can only live our lives in an actual place, not in an imagined or fantasized place.
Jesus is not a principle or a truth, nothing abstract, nothing in general, nothing grandiose. When God revealed himself to us, he did it in a human body, an incarnation.
We are not, it is clear, to think of the wilderness as a bad place, an empty place, a desolate place. It was empty of vegetation and human artifacts but full of God.
Take Jesus’s humanity seriously as God’s gift. Take your humanity seriously as God’s gift, God’s gift to you.
International diplomacy takes time and careful listening. Parenting takes time and careful listening. Friendship takes time and careful listening. And Scripture takes time and careful listening.
We moderns are afraid to display our unhappiness for fear our neighbors will disapprove of
That doesn’t make much sense, does it? To take Christ’s goal and ignore his instructions on how to get there?
God is the living center of this life, life now. God is not a distant deity that we will meet for the first time only after we die.
We are a here-and-now people. The present is always the point at which eternity enters our lives.
So “Sell what you have, and give to the poor.” That takes care of the millstone possessions hanging around his neck. “Come, follow me.” That takes care of the obsessive-compulsive morality. Neither material goods nor moral habits are dismissed. Rather, both are made useful by setting them in a new relationship, a personal God relationship.
Matter is good; things are good; possessions are good. But if they get in the way of relationships of love and block them instead of blessing them, if they clog the channels made for the flow of love, then they need to be put in their place. Sell them. Give them to the poor. Use them to express your life, God’s life.
What must we do? Simple. Use our possessions as gifts. Use our morality as a means of love. Use the stuff of creation, this marvelous material world, and use the stuff of our personhood, our capacity to choose and express love. Use what we have in our hands and what we have in our hearts. Put it to use in our neighborhoods with our neighbors.
But not every gospel story is a success story on our terms. Some of the people who come to Jesus do not get what they want, do not hear what they want to hear.
A lot of people in our culture come to Jesus, to God, wanting him to help them put the finishing touches on what they have very industriously and capably begun. They want to pull God in as a part-time assistant, usually low paid, but they want to stay in charge. When Jesus does not do it, instead of letting his love and truth change them, they leave and go off to look for someone who will do what they want on their terms.
Eternal life is not just life in the future. It begins right now.
The manure story interrupts our noisy, aggressive problem-solving mission.
Manure. God is not in a hurry. We are told repeatedly to “wait for the Lord.” But that is not counsel that is readily accepted by followers of Jesus who have been conditioned by American promises of instant gratification.
