thoughts on the domestication of easter

Easter focusses the mind of the church and its pastors. One of the gifts of the Christian Year is its seven Sundays to celebrate and to explore the vast implications of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet most around us think of Easter as a single celebratory Sunday. It means that it is crucial for Easter Sunday preachers and presiders to focus the mind of the congregation on the gospel and its implications for the church and for the world in which it serves. This is no easy task given the commodification and domestication of Easter weekend. The church's proclamation is overwhelmed in my part of the world by bunnies and chocolate eggs. The clerks and tellers greet their customers with a cheery "Happy Easter" comfortably assured that it has little to do with proclaiming their shared faith in the Saviour of the world.

like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon

"We should not try to master the text. The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes. They will see all the depths and distances. They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon. The true exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files" (Karl Barth, Homiletics, p. 128).

to take the downward path

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, the day when Christians re-enact the scene when Jesus gives a new commandment as he washes the feet of his apprentices. There is some more about this tradition posted here at the eleventh commandment. The washing of feet is a central act in the life of L'Arche communities around the world. Here are some words about this practice from Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche ...

“To wash the feet of a brother or sister in Christ, to allow someone to wash our feet, is a sign that together we want to follow Jesus, to take the downward path, to find Jesus’ presence in the poor and the weak. Is it not a sign that we too want to live a heart-to-heart relationship with others, to meet them as a person and a friend, to live in communion with them? Is it not a sign that we yearn to be men and women of forgiveness, to be healed and cleansed and to heal and cleanse others and thus to live more fully in communion with Jesus?”   
                                                                                                - Jean Vanier

not talking about the bible, not using it, but listening

quoted from "Karl Barth's Emergency Homiletic" by Angela Hancock (pp 212-213) ...

"Sermons, Barth argued, must be tempered, shaped, qualified by God's Self-disclosure. What did this mean for these young preachers?

if i have accomplished anything

A painting by Nicholas Brian Tsai

"If I have accomplished anything in my life it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."

- Dorothy Day

time is our choice of how to love and why

This year on Epiphany (January 6 at 7 pm) our congregation is co-hosting a dramatic reading of W.H. Auden's long poem "For the Time Being". The poem sets the Christmas story as a timeless event that also takes place in our time. In it Auden blends lyric poetry with comic verse and prose. Mary and the angel Gabriel seem timeless while Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men are our contemporaries, stumbling their way into a setting that almost - but never altogether - overwhelms them. Between now and Epiphany I will share some lines from the poem here, beginning with these words that conclude the experience of the shepherds and wise men at the manger:

    "O Living Love, replacing Fantasy
     O Joy of Life revealed in love's creation
     Our mood of longing turns to indication.
     Space is the Whom our loves are needed by,
     Time is our choice of How to love and Why."

the only thing it cannot be

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

- C.S. Lewis

in a world of impatience

"Advent is the recovery of how to live in a world of impatience as a patient people."

- Stanley Hauerwas

the last thing

Who'd be afraid of death.
I think only fools
are. For it is not
as though this thing
were given to one man only, but all
receive it. The journey that my
friend makes, I can
make also. If I know
nothing else. I know
this, I go where he is.
O Fools, shrinking from this little door,
Through which so many kind and lovely souls have passed
Before you,
Will you hang back?
Harder in your case than another?
Not so.
And too much silence?
Has there not been enough stir here?
Go bravely, for where so much greatness and gentleness have been
Already, You should be glad to follow.

- by Monk Gibbon

whose pulse may be thy praise

"Thou that has given so much to me,
Give one thing more - a grateful heart ....
Not thankful when it pleases me,
As if Thy blessings had spare days;
But such a heart, whose pulse may be Thy praise."

- George Herbert, "Gratefulness", The Temple

like brooks that hold the sky

During my weekly chemotherapy appointment on Thursday I enjoyed rereading the collection of quotations by Abraham Joshua Heschel published in "I Asked for Wonder". Here are a few of my favorites ...

"It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being:
           God
           A Soul
          And a Moment.
And the three are always there." (p. 65)

"To meditative minds the ineffable is cryptic, inarticulate: dots, marks of secret meaning, scattered hints, to be gathered, deciphered and formed into evidence; while in moments of insight the ineffable is a metaphor in a forgotten mother tongue." (p. 7)

the performance of the biblical text ends only at death

Recently I purchased a copy of "Theology on the Way to Emmaus" by the Roman Catholic writer Nicholas Lash. Over the years I have borrowed the book from the theological school library many times, finding in it a helpful interpretive lens. Out of print for a number of years, it has recently been reprinted by Wipf & Stock publishers in Oregon. It now sits by my bedside (yes, I know, how many of us consider books on theology and hermeneutics to be bedside reading?). Each night I am reminded of the reasons that I have found Lash so helpful over the past fifteen years.

It is from Lash that I discovered the language of the performance of scripture to describe the purpose of Christian life in community. As I think about the conversation we are having in the congregation this autumn about Christian practices of forgiveness I realize the conversation is primarily intended to thicken our capacity to enact forgiveness and reconciliation in our lives and life together. Our talking about forgiveness is akin to actors discussing how to interpret a script before going on stage. The discussion is necessary but it is only preparatory to the performance of the story in our lives.

In the same way, the story of the way in which we play out our mortality - and, in my case, the symptoms and treatment of multiple myeloma and amyloidosis - enacts our interpretation of the biblical story. Recurrent themes in a people whose lives are scripted by the gospel include the sharing of suffering, the embodiment of compassion, and courage rooted in a cruciform hope. When I look to the years ahead my hope is to belong to a cast who help me to live this script faithfully.

Here are some quotes from Nicholas Lash ...

before the gospel is a word, it is a silence

"The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be only pointed to by the language of poetry - of metaphor, image, symbol - as it is used in the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the Gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it - meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful - but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery. The silence of Jesus in answer to Pilate's question about truth seems such a presenting as does also in a way the silence of the television news with the sound turned off - the real news is what we see and feel, not what Walter Cronkite tells us - or the silence the Psalmist means when he says, 'Be silent and know that I am God.' In each case it is a silence that demands to be heard because it is a presented silence, and the preacher must somehow himself present this silence and mystery of truth by speaking what he feels, not what he ought to say, by speaking forth not only the light and the hope of it but the darkness as well, all of it, because the Gospel has to do with all of it.

the fulcrum upon which the gospel narrative balances

As I journey to the pulpit this week I am appreciating the accompaniment of Ched Meyers, who writes:

"We have arrived at the midpoint of the story. Once again, Mark's Jesus turns to challenge the disciples/reader. 'Who do you say that I am?' (Mark 8:29a). This question is the fulcrum upon which the gospel narrative balances. Not only that: upon our answer hangs the character of Christianity in the world. Do we know who it is we are following, and what he is about? Mark began the story by telling us who Jesus is (Mark 1:1); the reader, like the Christian church, 'knows the right answer' to this question. Thus we are shocked when Peter's answer, which is 'correct', is rejected by Jesus! With this 'confessional crisis' Mark opens the second half of his Gospel."

- "Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus" by Ched Meyers (p. 235)

a scandal to the natural mind

I have begun the journey to next Sunday's sermon which will host the text found at Mark 8:22-38. On the way to Sunday I received a copy of "Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World" by Lee Camp. The book fell open at a page that quotes Mark 8:34-37 ("If any want to become my followers ...). By way of introduction to the passage the author includes these two provocative quotations:

it takes every word

Well, so much for posting the written text of yesterday's sermon. I had good intentions but just could not get a written draft down on paper before it was time to preach. While I knew that there was a sermon waiting to be born it would not arrive in time to line out before the congregation gathered. In the end it felt as though this was how things were intended. The sermon felt fresh, engaged, connected. And, like manna, it is now gone. No written record. No video. No notes. Just the memory, for now, until it seems forgotten. It leaves me wondering about the impact, over time, of such preaching events in the life and mind of the congregation. There are two things that I do want to remember from yesterday, so I'll post them here.

an act of relentless hope

I was up early this morning in order to beat the traffic on my way to my weekly chemotherapy treatment. It was dark, reminding me that the sun is working its inevitable way towards the southern hemisphere. On the way out the door I remembered to grab something to read while waiting for my treatment. A dog-eared book on my shelf called out, its binding no longer any use, with the pages falling out - "Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation" - Walter Brueggemann's 1988 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. It is not uncommon for me to seek inspiration - to be reminded of the reason that I take up the call to preach - in the midst of the full weeks of ministry that arrive in September. The tattered state of my copy of "Finally Comes the Poet" reminds me that I have returned over and over to its pages. It is not alone among published volumes of the Beecher Lectures. Three others in my collection are underlined, dog-eared and well worn. I remember being captivated by Frederich Buechner's "Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale". Reading it again now I can see the arc of my ministry prefigured in its pages. Along the way my apprenticeship included learning from Fred Craddock whose Beecher lectures were published as "Overhearing the Gospel: Preaching and Teaching the Faith to Persons Who Have Heard it all Before". Then in recent years a new favorite came along in the form of Richard Lischer's "The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence". These books are trusted companions on the way, friends that remind me of the challenge and gift that is the call to preach the good news of the gospel in this time and place. In the midst of what may seem a time of dispirited decline in the church these voices remind me of the vitality, energy and wonder that is present among the company of preachers for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

When I opened "Finally Comes the Poet" once again this morning I was not disappointed. For one thing, I had forgotten that the first chapter - "Numbness and Ache: The Strangeness of Healing" - is an extended meditation on the way in which Jeremiah provides preachers with a model of poetic speech that opens the community to the painful yet needful path to healing. Reading Jeremiah, chapter by chapter, in our Wednesday morning breakfast conversation is, at once, painful and instructive. We are tempted to turn away from the harsh rhetoric and, yet, are drawn in by the longing and grief of God. But, before chapter one's meditation on Jeremiah, Brueggemann situates his argument in this way in the Introduction ...

the god we would rather have

We are your people and mostly we don't mind,
       except that you do not fit any of our categories.
We keep pushing
                  and pulling
                  and twisting
                  and turning,
       trying to make you fit the God we would rather have,
                  and every time we distort you that way
                             we end up with an idol more congenial to us.

jeremiah & jesus

Next week our Wednesday morning Bible at Breakfast group is discussing chapter seven of the book of Jeremiah. The story told there is an obvious point of contact between Jeremiah and Jesus. The correspondences between Jeremiah and Jesus seem largely forgotten in the church these days (witness the lack of passages from Jeremiah's Temple sermon and trial read in the church during Holy Week). Yet these parallels have long been recognized, as noted in the following quotation by H. Wheeler Robinson (originally published in 1915):

but it's received

"Too often (North) American Christians, I think, think they get to make Christianity up. But it's received."

- Stanley Hauerwas (in "Sunday Asylum: Being the Church in Occupied Territory", Work of the People, 2011)