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July 21 - August 18, 2019
When God spoke to Job “out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1), he told him that when he, God, “laid the foundation of the earth,” that is, created everything that exists, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (verses 4, 7). Which is to say, if we throw our minds back into the past as far as we can imagine, what we find is joy: the stars of God and the sons of God singing and shouting joyfully. Then go the other direction as far into the future as we can imagine, into heaven, and we find a similarly joyful pleasure. In John of Patmos’s apocalyptic vision, all
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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.
One conspicuous area in which we need the Preacher’s help is the pursuit of pleasure, of joy. There is no way to experience God without also experiencing joy. Anyone who gets in touch with God gets in touch with joy. But what happens when we separate the joy from the God who gives the joy? Hold on to the joy but dismiss the God of joy to the sidelines? And then we wonder why the joy we were looking for has turned into something dull, boring, and meaningless! We need to be rescued from that tiresome fate. The Preacher is on hand to do it with us.
The Preacher has used the Solomon mask as a prop in a brief charade, showing the crudeness in supposing that getting things and arranging the world to our whims has anything to do with joy. No matter how great a reputation you have for wisdom, if all you can do with it is buy castles and bed whores, you are a fool all the same.
Making and getting are dead-end streets to joy: “I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (2:11).
The Solomon mistake in regard to God’s gift of joy can be summarized in two statements: you must not pursue pleasure; you cannot purchase pleasure.
We will pray, then, for grace to live joyously and abundantly and for caution to live discerningly and carefully. We will be wary of sin and enthusiastic in grace, watchful of temptation but awake to the Spirit.
If we can leave off the anxious work of plunder long enough, we will discover the occupation of joy. Joys are given by God; they can only be received by us.
The novice tempter thinks he can ruin the young Christian by leading him in the path of pleasure. His boss, the senior devil Screwtape, reprimands him: “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s [God’s] ground….It is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures….[God’s] a hedonist at heart….Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us….Nothing is naturally on our side.”*2
And, conversely, everything is by its nature on God’s side. Every pleasure. Every joy. Every delight. The Preacher opens our eyes to the distortions and corruptions of pleasure—our attempts to pursue it, our attempts to purchase it—and leaves us free to accept it as God’s gift and to enjoy it as his will. One of the most joyful passages to come from his pen is Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white. (Ecclesiastes 9:7–8)
Gospel is a true and good form by which we live well. Storytelling creates a world of presuppositions, assumptions, and relations into which we enter. 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. It is an incarnational story, that is, a flesh-and-blood-on-the-ground story, a story worked out in actual lives and places, not in abstract ideas or programs or inspirational,
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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.
The American poet Christian Wiman, exploring his newly realized Christian identity, says it like this: “I begin to think that anything that abstracts us from the physical world is ‘of the devil.’…Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person.”
We need an incarnational imagination, a Jesus-soaked imagination, so that every truth becomes a lived truth, lived in the homes and workplaces that our congregations face us with every time we preach a sermon. *1
The usual way we try to become like God is first to eliminate the God who reveals himself in human form and then to reimagine God as the god I want to be, invest this reimagined god with my own god-fantasies, and then take charge of the god business. The old term for this reimagined, replacement god is idolatry. It is without question the most popular religion in town, any town, and it always has been. In previous generations these idolatry-gods were made of wood and stone, of gold and silver. More often these days they are made of words and ideas, abstractions and principles. But the common
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But idolatry always backfires. In the attempt to become more than human, to be godlike, we become less human, nonhuman: “Those who make [idols] and all who trust them shall become like them” (Psalm 135:18, NRSV). You’d think we would learn. As we cultivate a relationship with God, we need to be wary of god-fantasies so we don’t end up less human, less personal, less relational, less than who we were created to be. I want to grow up fully human. I want to be as human as Jesus was human. I want to live the Jesus Way, robustly human. And I want to do it with you.
Way is not only a route we take but the way we go on the way, whether by foot or bike or automobile. The way we talk, the way we use our influence, the way we treat one another, the way we raise our children, the way we read, the way we worship, the way we vote, the way we garden, the way we ski, the way we feel, the way we eat…and on and on, endlessly, the various and accumulated ways that characterize our lives. Later, Jesus will explicitly identify himself as “the way”: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6, KJV).
The person who tests us wants to make us better; the person who tempts us wants to make us worse. But the tempter may make us better, for he forces us to a decision. He awakens in us the power of choice, where we find we have the ability to transcend pressure, circumstance, and heredity and then embrace who and what we will be.
What we are focusing on here is a time of testing to find out what works for us and what work we will do. A time of intensified experience in which we find the meaning of what is conveyed in our baptism. It makes sure that no part of the gospel life, this kingdom life, will remain simply as data, information, or a mere idea. So here we have Peter, with Mark faithfully writing out his message, introducing Jesus to us as the incarnation of God in a human life, a life just like ours. Take Jesus’s humanity seriously as God’s gift. Take your humanity seriously as God’s gift, God’s gift to you.
Scripture, the Word of God, is our basic grammar for becoming fluent in kingdom-of-God language, the meaning of the words and the way sentences are formed.
Jesus is a teacher. But he is not first of all a teacher. Matthew in his first four chapters makes it clear that Jesus is first of all “God with us” (1:23). God coming to us in the flesh, as a human—what we designate as Incarnation. Thoroughly God, God through and through. And at the same time human, human through and through—living through everything we live through, speaking our language, and understanding our language. We can never reduce Jesus to one dimension: Teacher. Nevertheless it is necessary to pay attention and understand as accurately as possible what he taught, this new
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Think of the Beatitudes as the McGuffey’s Reader in the kingdom of God. By establishing them in your memory bank, you will be able to develop an imagination adequately comprehensive to take in the entire kingdom-of-God teaching that Jesus puts before us.
And then Jesus appears and says, “Blessed are you.” He repeated it. His disciples repeated it. Christians continue to repeat it, even if only as a kind of talismanic gesundheit. The repetitions accumulate, and the world changes. The world changes from a place where people expect, as a matter of course, to be unhappy to a world where people expect to be happy. The change pivots on Christ’s word. I think that is an astounding accomplishment, a terrific victory, reversing that climate of expectation. Obviously it is not universal and complete, but something significant has happened.
• the poor in spirit: We empty ourselves of pride so we can be filled with God’s spirit. • those who mourn: We share the sufferings of others rather than avoid them. • the meek: We hone our passions to a skilled gentleness. • those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: We reject the appetites of a consumer society and cultivate deep personal relationships with God and others. • the merciful: We refuse to react to the wrongs and troubles in the world by condemning and blaming, but instead we involve ourselves in compassionate serving. • the pure in heart: We don’t allow ourselves to be
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Unfortunately, these eight conditions involved in blessings are commonly despised and rejected by men and women who think they will interfere with happiness. And so they continue unhappy—but puzzled. Why? Perhaps they need to take another look at the depth of joy in these eight invitations to happiness. The Christian accepts and honors them and becomes, to the surprise of onlookers, cheerful and complete. Blessed are you!
Jesus lived out the God-life in the conditions in which we ourselves are living. He said it himself: “I am come that [you] might have life, and that [you] might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10, KJV). It is Peter, with Mark writing what Peter experienced with Jesus, bringing us into the loop so we understand that when we are dealing with Jesus, we are dealing with God. Quite literally, the words and presence of God—all that is life affirming and life restoring—as we ask questions and listen to the answers of Jesus.
Let Jesus say it to you again. You are not happy in what you are doing. Otherwise, why did your face cloud over? You are not free in the way you are living. There is no joy in your future, no hope in the path you are traveling. Don’t leave. Don’t walk away from this love.”
You understand, I hope, that Jesus has nothing against possessions. Christianity is the most material religion the people of this earth have ever seen. Everywhere in our Scriptures and our history, we are told that matter is good. God creates it; Christ redeems it. God comes to us in the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, and we behold his glory (John 1:14). In the story of God with us, there is touching, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling. All five senses are used and developed to their highest potential in the life of faith. We become materially and sensorially alive when we live by faith.
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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.
Here is what I want you to hear in this conversation. Everything Jesus says and does has this premise: Jesus loves us just as we are. And with that as the premise, he invites us to join him and let him be our companion—in other words, to follow him, to experience his love in our everyday lives, our work lives, our family lives, our joys, and our sorrows.
Jesus’s command, “Follow me,” was an invitation to learn how to receive God’s love and let that be the centering focus of his life.
In his love Jesus diagnoses what is unique in us. He understands the precise ways in which things have gone wrong and diagnoses the particular aberrations that have seeped into our lives, and then he commandingly and mercifully saves us from them. Jesus’s love awakens the sleeping parts of our lives to the colors and delights of eternal life. This waking is not without pain or difficulty or struggle. Being awake requires more energy than sleeping. There is also the possibility of more pain. Sleeping people don’t suffer.
One last word. Did you notice that when the man asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, the word that stands out in the context is inherit? Inherit is what comes to us in the future. But Jesus gives his answer in the present tense: “sell…give…come…follow,” four verbs in the present tense. Eternal life is not just life in the future. It begins right now. I have long been impressed by the words of Teresa of Avila, the Spanish saint: “The pay starts in this life.”*2 Will you do it? Follow him?
Saul Bellow’s comment: “Silence is enriching. The more you keep your mouth shut, the more fertile you become.”*4 Silence is the manure of resurrection.
God is a God who acts. We are constantly called on to pay attention to “his wonderful works to the children of men” (Psalm 107:31, KJV). But he is also the God who waits: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9, NRSV). All who follow Jesus must learn to put up with this slowness, “as some count slowness.”
