Living the Word: Is There a Crack in Everything?

THE YEAR IS YOUNG AGAIN. Folks are making soon-to-be-broken New Year’s resolutions. Why not preachers? Resolved: Prepare to preach far enough in advance that the Holy Spirit has some time to work with me. Preachers I admire sketch an entire year out in advance. Pastor Ken Shigematsu at Tenth Church in Vancouver, B.C., suggests that we’re creative on 10-day cycles. So he begins working in earnest on a sermon 10 days before he preaches it. Whatever system you come up with, resolve not to preach “Saturday night specials.” Sure, the adrenaline is nice, but it’s as hard to be creative on demand as it is to be intimate on schedule. That way, when you have a brilliant insight you can see that it fits, say, 10 weeks from now, and that insight is not lost if it fails to live up to the demands of a sermon to be preached in 10 hours.

Epiphany is one of our best, most underutilized words. The chapel at our seminary is blessedly named Epiphany chapel. For no actual connection to God happens in preaching without the illuminating light of the Spirit. I like to preach through the old hymn “We Three Kings” at least once during Epiphany. It reminds us who God is: God is born in our flesh, hailed as prophet and as king, and will die at our hands. Especially during an election year in the United States, when many ridiculous things will be said about God, we do well to remember these particular claims about who God is.

[January 3] 

Costly Materiality

Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 147:12-20; Ephesians 1:3-14; John 1:1-18

THERE ARE TOO many great texts here for one Sunday. The Hebrew scriptures speak of the radiance of God’s people as they return from exile, full of grain and wine and oil and fat, dancing with their faces radiant. After the holidays we may also feel full of fat for other, much less God-related, reasons. But the church feasts while others fast and vice versa. Ephesians, with its masterful run-on sentences about God’s cosmic purposes in Christ, could keep you busy for a year.

But this John text is too lovely to pass up. You could chew on any of its magnificent phrases and never exhaust their depths: “Without him not one thing came into being”; his “life was the light of all people”; and “the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” I’m not sure we’ve ever come to grips with the radical nature of this passage. Most faiths, our own included much of the time, are world-denying, body-denying, materiality-denying. There are good reasons for that. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says anyone who’s ever been hit by a car can understand the allure of Platonism. Time, bodies, materiality cause most of our suffering. We might have expected the Word to become flesh and be disgusted with embodiment. Instead, the Word shines with glory, like the faces of the Israelites dancing as they return from exile. This is the scandalous heart of the Christian faith: that God has a Jewish mom, that God has a spleen and eyelashes and toenails, that God becomes everything we are—to make us everything God is.

[ January 10 ]

Before Heaven Opens

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

BAPTISM PLAYS INTO each of these passages. Isaiah promises God will be with us as God was with the Israelites on their way through the waters of the Red Sea. The psalm imagines God’s voice in a violent way, tearing across the waters and stripping the forest bare. Acts says some folks “believe” who know nothing of the Holy Spirit. They’ve only been baptized in Jesus’ name. So the apostles come and baptize them and they speak in tongues. And John the Baptist insists he’ll decrease. Luke narrates Jesus’ baptism in the past perfect tense: “After Jesus was baptized,” before the heavens open up.

The early church theologians often see in John’s charming description of being unworthy to untie Jesus’ sandal a pointer to the incarnation. Sandals, after all, are made of animal skins. In Christ, God has taken on an animal skin—that is, our flesh. John is saying he’s not even worthy to touch God’s humanity. How much less is he worthy to touch Christ’s divinity? So all John does is point to Jesus from afar.

Yet God doesn’t stay aloof. Never does. When (not if) we are in fire or water over our heads, God is with us. God’s voice hurtles through nature and has all cry glory. Apostles show up at our doorstep to tell us there is so much more of God than we thought. And anytime we look at them aright, the heavens are split and God is closer than we might think safe.

[ January 17 ]

Extravagant Light

Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

ONE OF POPE John Paul II’s quieter gifts was to encourage Catholics to pray through the “mysteries of light” as part of the rosary: the baptism of the Lord, the wedding at Cana, the preaching of the kingdom, the transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist (being pope does have its perks). Watch the light weave itself throughout these readings. It bursts from Isaiah’s promise to make Israel God’s bride. It shines from the psalm’s gratitude: “In your light we see light.” Paul makes clear no one can see Christ’s light without the Spirit’s power. And light bursts through every crack in the story of John 2—even as light isn’t mentioned! It’s hard not to “see” this story in my mind without imagining it as Caravaggio would have painted it—with a light so numinous all ask, “How’d he do that?!”

In the Cana story, Mary gives us a directive always worth following: “Do whatever he tells you.” This after her son sasses her in public! The steward utters a truth the depths of which he cannot know: No one saves the good wine for last. Except God, that is. Water is good. Wine is glorious. A party is good. An unending tap at an endless wedding banquet is better. Christians so often contrast ourselves positively with negatively portrayed Israel. But God becomes Jewish flesh. And the kingdom God brings is filled with light and wine and extravagance all around.

[ January 24 ]

Knowing Our Stories

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

ANYONE WHO'S BEEN around the church has likely heard the metaphor of the body of Christ. And probably gotten tired of it. We tune out. The preacher is yakking, but all we can hear is “yada yada yada.”

Scripture knows this. So Nehemiah tells us the story of a rediscovered scroll, of the people assembled to hear what scholars think was the book of Deuteronomy. They weep. They haven’t heard this before. Why have they gone their whole lives without this direction, this beauty, this gift from God?

Of course they had nature and its manifold beauties. The psalmist tells us the whole creation shouts with God’s glory from every leaf and flower and grain of sand. But it’s not enough. We also need to know the stories and songs we can only get in full from scripture. And more specifically, from Jesus. He preaches his first sermon in his hometown, and the only content we get is this: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Imagine! Someone should have grabbed that manuscript and recorded the whole thing for posterity. But perhaps the evangelist recorded all that was necessary. Scripture is fulfilled in Christ. Christ is its chief interpreter. And the body of which Christ is head honors its weaker members above all others.

Weep if you’ve not heard this. But laugh that we can now go on hearing it unendingly.

[ January 31 ]

From Cliff to Cross

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

SOME OF THE APPEAL of the Christmas season, and of the current Epiphany season, is all the baby stuff. Baby Jesus getting born. Baby Jesus receiving gifts from the magi. This is appropriate—we Christians worship God as an infant. And Jesus was insistent about his love for children. But all the baby talk can lend itself to the worst sort of sentimentality.

These texts can return some realism to our notion of babyhood. Jeremiah was called to be a prophet before he was born (1:5). The psalmist talks about relying on God “from before my birth” (71:6). How’d that work out for Jeremiah? He was sawn in two, tradition has it. The psalmist’s words are lived out best by Jesus in passages such as Luke 4. The preacher fumbles a perfectly good homecoming, throwing in the face of his fellow Nazarenes that God always prefers the outsider. They try to throw him off of a cliff. Later, we succeed in what they started, pushing him out of the world and onto a cross.

Then talk about texts we overly romanticize! The “love chapter” in Corinthians is not about weddings. It is about loving your worst enemy in the pew next to you, on the next pillow, or in the mirror. It is about love of those who want to saw you in two or crucify you. Never fear. Nothing worse will happen to you than happened to Jesus, as Will Willimon likes to say. And nothing better can happen to you than Jesus’ resurrection, which he will share with all of us.

“Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.