The Soulful Bells of Summer

THE SEASON AFTER Pentecost is a challenge. Some churches call it “ordinary time.” This is where most of our life is lived, spiritually speaking. The fact that other churches call it “the season after Pentecost” reminds us that a miraculous tongue of fire is needed for any sermon to work—and the Holy Spirit has a tongue of fire for us. Pentecost propels us through ordinary time. The Holy Spirit can take as sorry a lot of losers as the ones Jesus chose as disciples and turn them into apostles, martyrs, world-changers. God has always done more with less-promising material.

A retreat at a monastery gave me a glimpse of what ordinary time means. By the time 8 a.m. Mass rolls around, we’ve already been in church three times that day. Mass is beautiful, we leave buoyantly, the Trappist monks are nearly chatty. Then the bell rings. It’s time for Terce, another hour of prayer. That bell sets me to sighing—weren’t we just in church? Terce is like the Sunday after Easter or Christmas—a letdown. Same building, half full of people, and with a quarter of the energy. And it is precisely then that it’s important to worship God. The church’s worship of God carries on when we’ve all gotten bored or tired. Such worship is good for souls. Preachers’ souls included.

[ June 7 ]

Out of the Depths

1 Samuel 8:4-20; 11:14-15; Psalms 130; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35

ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL famously said that the biblical prophets show God’s pain. Here in 1 Samuel, God grants the people’s wish for a king because “they have rejected me from being king over them” from “the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day” (8:7-8).

God’s people are supposed to be distinct, set apart, so as to be a blessing to the world (Genesis 12:1-3; Exodus 19:5-6). Jesus’ encounter with his biological family in Mark 3 shows anew that God calls a people out to be unlike others. Jesus’ family thinks he’s crazy (Mark 3:21—a verse missing from sentimental portraits of the Holy Family). Jesus responds that his actual family is those who do the will of God, leaving his family of origin out in the cold. So too God’s people, Israel, are to be different from the nations around them. But they insist they’d rather be identical to them: “We are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations” (1 Samuel 8:19-20). God wants a people set apart to be a light to the nations. And, like insecure middle schoolers, we cram that light under a bushel in a pathetic effort to fit in.

What does the world do without a people whose set-apart life shows real hope? It suffers silently. God’s people suffer too when we fail to live out the peace Jesus calls us to, the holiness that the law demands, the justice for which the prophets screech. “Out of the depths,” the psalmist cries. The De Profundis (the first words of the psalm in Latin) has opened funerals for millennia. When we are in the deepest despair—even over our own failures!—God gives us words suitable for our pain. And a hope to wait for in the morning, like the one for which watchers at sea are desperate (Psalm 130:6).

Ever felt despair at the failings of God’s people? Of course you have! Take heart. God despairs with you. And God will bring the dawn. And there is not a thing we can do to stop it or even hurry it.

[ June 14 ]

Anoint This One?

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34

SAMUEL PRESENTS one of the saddest lines in scripture: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel” (1 Samuel 15:35). We want to protest, to console: Wait, God, you didn’t do it; the people did. But God lets humanity go our own destructive way. God could stop us, but mysteriously God does not.

What God does instead is start an insurgency. God anoints a new king in the midst of the reign of the old. Even God’s own prophet questions the sanity of this (16:2). Anyone would question the wisdom of choosing Jesse’s unlikely youngest son when so many stronger, handsomer options are available. Yet God says, “Rise and anoint him; for this is the one” (16:12). God’s insurgency looks weak. It’s a handful of tiny seeds falling between our fingers, an unpromisingly sown field waiting to produce we know not what (Mark 4). And yet, look! A crop we couldn’t have imagined that the dark loam of the earth throws up overnight, a bush that makes shade for every bird. This is the way God’s insurgency of goodness works. It looks pitiably weak. It’s actually unstoppably strong. One day it will flood the world with love the way God has always intended.

The reading from Paul includes some of his most famous phrases: “We walk by faith, not by sight”; “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation!” I’m particularly captivated by this: “The love of Christ compels us” (2 Corinthians 5:14). It’s a strong verb, “compel,” often misused to justify using state power to make “sinners” do this or that. Let’s fill it with content from our gospel text. The soil has a fecundity to it, a fertile creativity that launches a crop. We know not how. Growth is compelled by something beyond our understanding. This is the strange way God goes about saving a world gone to seed. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. As great a hash as we make of God’s beautiful world, God will recreate it from within. You watch. And be amazed.

[ June 21 ]

Thief of Joy

1 Samuel 17:57-18:5,10-16; Psalm 107:1-3,23-32; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

TO PREACH WITH St. Mark is to preach with urgency. “Immediately” appears so often it almost seems a writer’s tic. The point is not just grammatical—Jesus is in a hurry in Mark. Preachers and leaders, like all other disciples, have to hustle to keep up.

Of course if you hurry you might strain yourself, wear down, get sick. And these lectionary passages have a red thread running through them: sickness. Jealousy and resentment roil us internally and can make us less than human. The psalmist and the evangelist describe God as a quieter of terrifying seas. And Paul promises to the Corinthians the calming presence of Christ in the midst of unimaginable hardship. The texts drive us to ask with the disciples, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41).

Saul demonstrates one of the great spiritual maladies of any age: envy. Everything young David does turns to gold. He’s besties with Saul’s own son, and worst of all God has abandoned Saul. Epic, tragic Saul reminds me of the hope of one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s similarly cursed characters—he prays he could serve God if only as a bad example. Amy Laura Hall says, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” When a 29-year-old was nominated for an Oscar this year, NPR reported the reaction of many older, less-recognized veterans of Hollywood: sheer, agonizing envy.

The psalmist gives voice to Israel’s terror of the sea. It’s a place of chaos where sea monsters reign and from which many don’t come back. Is the disciples’ terror in the storm any surprise? Greeks tell tales of great seafarers and naval conquests. These Jews are just happy to get back to land, thank you very much.

And Jesus, sleep seeds still in his eyes, rebukes the storm with a word. The evangelist’s Greek is so much better than our English: “they feared a great fear” (4:41). And they asked the right question: Who is this?

Jesus is the “name that charms our fears,” writes Charles Wesley. Even resentment, even epic tragedy, even the sea, even the worst versions of ourselves.

[ June 28 ]

Time to Get Up

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

“HOW THE MIGHTY have fallen,” David laments over Saul and his beloved friend Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:25). It is interesting that David laments equally over the bitter king who tried to kill him and over the friend whose soul was his own, whose love meant more to him than the love of women. Death is a great leveler. We should all tremble before its omnivorous power. The dust that used to be a good person is no different from the dust that used to be a bad person.

“Will the dust praise you?” the psalmist asks in verse 9. The answer is harder than it might appear. The psalm prays thanks for delivery from death—the sort of thanksgiving that the hemorrhaging woman of Mark 5 likely prayed after her healing. Ancient Israel had no great sense of life after death. God should keep God’s people from death because only then would there be a people to praise God. But in light of the resurrection of Christ, the church has come to realize that, yes, the dust can praise God. Just as God took dust in hand in the beginning and blew life into it to make adam (the human), so some day God can collect the dust that we have become and blow life into it once more. Our hand will be as cold as the dead little girl’s in Mark 5. And Jesus will intertwine fingers with ours and invite us to get up.

The church is a people who wouldn’t exist without the resurrection. How then should we live? Paul suggests our life is based on manna. We can trust that God will provide, but not too much, not too little. No doubt Paul had those who complained that he was mixing religion with politics or economics. Paul responded with his most breathtaking description of the mystery of the incarnation: “Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” The church has yet to fathom the mystery of that verse. But it is worth all the effort dirt can muster to try.