Performing the Scriptures: Mark’s Gospel

A couple years ago, when last the lectionary was in Mark I stumbled upon some Youtube videos of people doing dramatic performances of Mark’s gospel in its entirety.  At the time, I thought, “This is something I could do” and put it on the back burner of my brain until January 1st of this year when I decided to go ahead and memorize Mark and perform it dramatically for Tenebrae Friday.

I went about the arduous task of memorizing Mark passage by passage.  As I did I came clever audience interaction bits and props.  As I memorized it out loud I rehearsed various ways of saying every single sentence.  Some I tried sad and then happy and then sarcastic to see which I felt worked best and also conveyed the tone that I thought Mark used.

The performance was last Friday night and, though I am relieved to be done with Mark’s gospel, I am also grateful for the amount of wisdom and knowledge I gained over the last several months.  So it is my pleasure here to share with you some of those insights I have learned during this journey:

1. I am more convinced than ever that Mark’s gospel was meant to be spoken and performed, not read.  The high amount of intense action verbs make this obvious.  The heavens do not open.  They are TORN open.  People do not kneel.  They fall down at his feet.  Nobody “asks” anything, (well, except the boring bad guys).  Instead, they plead or beg.  These verbs lend themselves to broad hand and arm gestures and overly dramatic facial expressions, making this a very fun gospel to read out loud.  You can almost imagine an elderly Peter performing this for a younger Mark and then a young Mark in turn performing it for his younger disciples.
2. Sarcasm and irony permeate this text.  I am going to write a follow up post in the next day or two about my favorite bits of humor in Mark but moments of irony carry the gospel along.  The scene with the legion of demons and the large herd of pigs is hilarious, making its sad ending very poignant.  Jesus’ use of the prophet Isaiah and the commands of Moses to insult the Pharisees and teachers of the law is brilliant and funny.  And who can forget Jesus getting mad at a fig tree when it didn’t have figs in the middle of Spring!  I will talk more about the humor later but it sure made Mark fun to memorize and perform.
3. Mark’s over-use of the word “immediately” is not what a lot of people try to make of it.  The word “immediately” appears over 15 times in Mark, more than one a chapter.  Other “hurry” words like “just then,” “as soon as,” “at once” and the like appear just as often.  Therefore, some argue that Jesus in Mark is in a hurry and doesn’t slow down.  I don’t think that is true.  The word “immediately” very rarely describes Jesus.  Instead it comes up most often during miracles.  When Jesus speaks immediately the leprosy leaves, the bleeding stops and the demon flees.  The word doesn’t convey a Jesus in a hurry.  It conveys the darkness and evil of our world in a hurry to get of Jesus’ way.
4. Right around chapter 7 the entire tone of the gospel changes.  Somewhere in chapter 7, the hurry words disappear.  The strong action verbs get a little bit weaker.  The humor fades.  Chapters 8-10 were the hardest to memorize because they weren’t as dramatic or fun.  But these are the chapters which focus heavily on the demand for followers of Jesus to live humble and sacrificial lives.  It is as if Mark used the humor, intensity and hurry to get your attention but once he had it, he slowed things way down so that you could really hear the core message of the book which is.  .  .
5. HUMILITY.  This guy Jesus has all the power in the world but doesn’t want people to talk about it.  The person Mark labels in the very first verse as the “Son of God” comes from middle of nowhere Nazareth and hangs out in forgotten Galilee for 2/3rds of the Gospel.  He then hurries back out to Galilee right after the Resurrection.  This popular teacher spends his time running away from crowds and hiding in houses.  He demands both demons and those healed to keep their mouths shut about him and in chapter 9 he is transfigured and then immediately tells the eyewitnesses not to go blabbing.  In chapter 8, right around the time the tone changes, he begins to teach that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected.  Then he starts talking about how he didn’t come to be served but to serve.  He begins teaching his disciples to do the same thing.  The first will be last.  The one who wants to be great will be the slave of all.  Those who wish to enter the kingdom of heaven must do so with one eye, one hand, one foot and with the posture of a little child.  Then the rich man goes away sad because he has great wealth.  But blind Bartimaus is filled with joy because he just wanted to see.  And in the parable of the sower some receive the word but because of the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things, the word is choked and they are unfruitful.  Mark has much to teach us about the path of salvation and he illustrates it to us as the path of sacrificial humility.  This climaxes at the Resurrection scene.  Many commentators have pointed out that it is a young man dressed in white who gets to proclaim the resurrection news in the empty tomb.  There was another young man in white you fled naked and in shame at the arrest.  It is quite probable that Mark did this on purpose to illustrate that those of us who humble ourselves completely, leaving everything, even our clothes, in order to follow Jesus will receive so much more from God!

Oh that we would learn that lesson and learn it well and join Bartimaus and the young man in white on the road to the cross and then to the empty tomb!

Advertisement

Palm Sunday Devotional: The Divine Stir Stick (From Matt. 21)

This morning my eyes beheld something not entirely unique, but still fairly special: April snow!  It didn’t last long.  It was gone by the time our Sunday worship service began.  I spent our Sunday School hour watching it melt quite quickly off of our church roof.  It is still glistening in the sunshine on the mountains outside my window but won’t be for long.

I spent the informal parts of our morning services talking to my congregants about the snow.  Some were thrilled.  One woke up at 4am just to watch it fall.  Others were not quite as excited, a few choosing to sit the morning out in order to stay in the confines of their homes.

Overall the snow seemed to have a calming effect on my congregation.  It’s effect was not too much different from a heavy dose of Nyquil.  A full five minutes before we were set to begin worship, our full sanctuary was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.  This became humorous the minute my son started screaming because someone (me) would not let him have something he wanted.

We began our service by showing an introduction video, (which you can watch below).  We turned the lights off before playing it which was a mistake.  The dark killed the last vestiges of energy and made everybody all the more sleepy.  The opening songs wakened us up a little but not much.  My sermon didn’t help much either.  On such Sundays I often joke that I keep a pillow in the pulpit to pull out and use when the last faithful parishioner nods off!

It’s been a couple hours now.  The sun is shining, the snow has melted and I am sitting here at my dining room table in my own Sunday afternoon stupor, worn out from another morning’s activities.  While I sit here stupefied, or rather stuporified, my eyes can’t stop staring at one word in Matthew 21:10, at the end of the Triumphal Entry.  “The whole city was STIRRED.”

The people were stirred.  This means that they picked their heads up.  They focused their eyes.  They took notice.  They were alerted.  They were awakened.  They maybe even were energized.

We should be so jealous!

To be honest, the last five weeks of my life have been anything but “stirring.”  This time of life continues to take a large toll.  There have been miles driven, poopy diapers changed, arguments with toddlers, marathon training, marathon board sessions, emotionally exhausting counseling sessions, long phone calls with mentors, family members and friends and on top of that many sleepless nights.  In sum, the last five weeks have been the opposite of “stirring.”  They have been exhausting.  They have been numbing.  They have been tiresome.  And they have taken their own toll.

I don’t write this out of any illusion that I am alone in this exhaustion.  My quiet sanctuary this morning certainly proved that we are all tired.  We are all worn down.  We all have been beaten up on this weary road we travel.

How badly we need to be stirred again!  How badly we need to be awakened anew to the power and presence of life in our lives!  How badly we need resurrection!  How badly we long for Easter!

As I prepared to lead my congregation into Holy Week this morning I could not help but realize that I desperately need Easter.  I need Resurrection.  I need an uplift and a facelift!  I need to be stirred again to the realities of life breaking into death, holiness breaking into sin, hope breaking into fear and light conquering darkness.  I think you do too.

The sentiment about “stirring” only appears in Matthew.  Luke, Mark and John go other directions.  And not surprisingly it is followed by a very typically Matthean sentiment: “[They] asked, ‘Who is this?’  The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the PROPHET from Nazareth in Galilee.”

From everything else we read in Matthew, he really loved pointing out Jesus was a prophet, particularly a teaching one.  Allusions to the prophets appear in almost every story of Matthew’s gospels.  And Jesus’  prophetic teachings are central for Matthew in a way that they are not for Luke and Mark and to a greater extent than they are for John.

So here is Evangelist Matthew reminding us again that Jesus is the prophet.  Jesus is the divine stir stick.  His prophetic teachings mix us all up, throwing us here and there, turn our heads, capture our hearts and awaken us, illuminate us revive and pull us towards that Glorious Easter Morning!

Do you need to be stirred again?

Tune back in tomorrow where we will look at some of the prophetic teachings that Jesus gave the week before he died.

Until then I hope Palm Sunday is still stirring your hearts and your minds.  This video might help:

At the Casket of a Newborn: A Lenten Reflection

Yesterday for the second time in my life I stood over a casket that was only a couple feet long.  I had to be there.  The word “had” is such a modest word, designed to be over used and yet I use it here reluctantly and carefully.  I did indeed “have” to stand there.  Nothing external compelled me, only the internal bonds of friendship forged over years of shared experiences with the father of the infant who lay in the casket.  My friendship with Camden was so deep and so suddenly profound that I told many, “I couldn’t NOT be there.”  I had to come.

We arrived to the funeral forty five minutes early and walked into the sanctuary, which happens to be “ground zero” for my spirituality.  It is the sanctuary where I worshiped weekly for nine years during my youth.  It was the sanctuary where my friends and I played ridiculous night games.  It was the sanctuary where I spent hours in prayer and the sanctuary where I was ordained.  That sanctuary holds some profound mysteries.

It’s the season of Lent and so the sanctuary also held the colors and slogans of this time of the liturgical year.  The purple hue was everywhere.  A giant wooden cross, much longer than the casket, hovered over us on the platform.  Decorated cloths held pictures of crowns of thorns and nails with the words of Isaiah woven into them.  “He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.”

And there right in the middle of it all, was the infant laying in a casket.  And here, right in the middle of my own Lenten journey, was the infant laying in a casket.

Ten short, but tortuously long days earlier her heart had stopped beating during delivery, sending the family and friends into a downward spiral of grief.  I personally read the news in a grocery store parking lot, where I sat in my car for a good ten minutes crying before mustering the strength to go into the store.

Ten days later here I was, standing in Lent, staring at a two foot long casket unable to keep myself even remotely composed.  I wanted to turn around, wipe the tears from my eyes, tell a joke or two and flee back to sunny Utah where I could bury myself back in the drudgery of daily ministry.

Yet as I said at the top of the post, I “had” to be there.  I had to stand there and look at it and cry because this casket is a profound piece of the Easter story that we tell and commemorate every year, even every Sunday.

As I sat there looking at it through tear blurred eyes, I could not escape from the fact that there is something desperately wrong with the world in which we live.  It is as if the casket was calling out, “Houston, we have a problem.  Heaven, we have a problem!”  And as I contemplated the mystery of the infant’s casket, I realized the problem it proclaims goes much deeper than human behavior.

In fact, this Lent I have been thinking a lot about the Galilean Pharisees of Jesus’ time, these people whose job it was to fix people’s behavior.  In the Gospel of Mark we see them partnered with the politicians, known as the Herodians.  They were strange bedfellows for sure, but they had one great thing in common, other than their mistrust of Jesus.  Both of them sought to build religious and political systems and structures to mitigate personal behavior in the hopes of fixing what is wrong with the world.

Then I thought about Jesus who wept at his friend Lazarus’ tomb.  Lazarus didn’t die because of human behavior.  He died because, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “the world has been subjected to futility.”

All of us, from every dot on the spectrum from sinner to saint, carry that futility with us in our bodies and every once in awhile that futility makes itself plainly evident, as it did for my friends on the delivery bed two weeks ago and as it did for my sister five years ago when my niece died of SIDS.  The Pharisees would have chalked the casket up to “secret sin.”  But we know the truth.  This infant did not die because of sin.  This baby died because of a world subjected to futility.

How ridiculously powerless we are in the face of that futility.  In fact, how absurdly powerless all of our pastors, all of our politicians, all of our churches and businesses and universities and clubs and committees and manuals and TV shows and pharmaceutical pills and self help books and rules and laws and systems and structures and so much more are when faced with the casket of an infant!

This Lent, at the casket of an infant, only the almighty God, maker of Heaven and Earth and Jesus Christ his son, savior of Heaven and Earth can break the chains of futility and unleash the tide of Resurrection.

Come oh Easter.

Come oh Christ.

Come oh God.

This world desperately needs you and only you.

Photo courtesy of my friend Robin Wheeler.

Golden Globes, Football, Fiscal Years and Epiphany: A Tale of Liturgical Seasons

My church kicked off the season of epiphany in style this morning with a fun Epiphany introductory video I made with some kids.  Then we sang the traditional We Three Kings, followed by a bunch of fun upbeat songs about “light.”   Then we read the lectionary Psalm (#29) together and talked about what it means to be in Jesus’ fan club.

But I have to be honest and admit that now Christmas is over, Epiphany is one of the last things on my mind.  Instead, this first month of a New Year is weighed down by seasons of another sort.

My news feeds are saturated with stories of the Golden Globes, reminding me that for the entertainment industry this is Awards Season, a time filled with what we might call liturgies of human glory and honor.  In fact, if I was a bit more of an arrogant Hebrew Prophet I would call the awards shows worship services to the idols of vanity.

So too my social media feeds remind me that the NFL is providing another season, or rather a post season.  This week we watched the first of the teams falter in their quest for dominance, a liturgy itself of human strength and cunning.  And we watch and wait to see which team will rise to the top.  150 million will watch the last match, which is a bit more than the number of people who voted for a US President just months ago.  The angry Hebrew prophet in me is tempted to call those games worship services, worship to the idols of violence and competition.

Then there is this other thing weighing on my heart and, mostly, mind.  My church ends its fiscal year on February 28th this year.  With the close of a fiscal year comes a mountain high list of responsibilities.  We have numbers to crunch, vision to share, a new board to elect and goals to set, all of which will be accomplished with no less than 1 dozen business meetings.  We might call these a liturgy of institution.  The arrogant, angry and overwhelmed Hebrew prophet in me is tempted to call those meetings worship services themselves, worship to the idol of human control and manipulation.

Yet today was not just the first Sunday of Epiphany.  It was also the Baptism of our Lord.  The Gospel text for today was Matthew 3, that famous story where Jesus begins his ministry by entering into the waters of the Jordan River.  John the Baptist didn’t know quite what to do with Jesus in the water and I don’t either.  Baptism is for sinners.  Jesus had not sinned.  The waters are for the spiritually dead.  Jesus was more spiritually alive than anybody has ever been.  The sacrament is for humans.  Jesus is the Son of God.  Yet here is Jesus, wading into the waters of death, sin and chaos and beginning his ministry right where we are at.

In a way the Baptism of Jesus reenacts the incarnation.  This might be why Mark and John leave out the manger, in favor of the water.  In the baptism waters Jesus is taking on flesh again, taking on the unique position of being a human after Adam, a human represented by all humanity’s shortcomings.  This is a God entering into sin and death as one of us.  Like the manger, this is Immanuel, a God with us, a God among us, a God meeting us in our human liturgies of award shows, violent competition and financial reporting.  Here is God in the flesh, come to redeem us from the life taking, death dealing liturgies of the world and light up the better way which is the only way, the liturgy of the cross and the resurrection.

So my hope this Epiphany season is that God will enter into our awards shows, our sporting matches and our business meetings and bring new Epiphany so that our feet can stay on the path of life!

The Sermon I Should Have Preached: About those Pesky Shepherds

For various reasons I chose to preach through the Psalms for Advent.  This meant not being able to talk about the traditional aspects of the season, namely shepherds, wise men, a star, the virgin Mary and the like.  Yet over the last year I have read a lot about the Jewish heritage of the Christian faith and come to appreciate more fully how Jewish Jesus’ story is from start to finish.  Therefore the following is a short sermon, or even devotional thought, I have put together in my head and wanted to preach this season but did not have time too:

Tell me if you have heard this sermon before around this time of year:  “Jesus was God, in very nature God, completely God and Jesus came to save the world and reassert God’s reign over it.  He was a King!  But Jesus didn’t do it like any other King would do it.  Instead he chose to be born of a lowly virgin Mary who came from the wrong side of the wrong town.  He wasn’t born in a palace but a barn (or a cave) and God announced it not to elites but to lowly shepherds.  After all shepherds were the laughing stock of the 1st century Middle East.  They were lowly nobodies.  They were worthless to society and to make it worse these shepherds seemed to be working the night shift.  Yet God thought them so important that angels sang to them of the newly arrived Baby King.”

I like that sermon.  I have preached it myself a time or two and for the most part it holds up.  But some time in the last year I began actually reading and studying about shepherds and not just the cultural context of shepherding in the 1st century middle east, but about shepherds in the entire Bible.

To be sure, shepherds in the 1st century were not popular or revered.  However, in the Jewish society being a Shepherd was actually a high honor because King David was a shepherd and King David taught us that God is a shepherd (read all the Psalms).  For those of you unfamiliar with David’s biography, David didn’t convert from shepherd to King.  He wasn’t a shepherd who suddenly decided being a shepherd was bad and then chose to be a King.  Instead David took his shepherding role with him to the monarchy.  He was always a shepherd, a shepherd King.  This reality profoundly impacted how Israel viewed God’s kingship over us.  God is our shepherd King.

So during this time of year when we read and sing about angels going to shepherds, the point may not be that God could have sent angels to kings but went to lowly shepherds instead.  To the Jewish ear, trained in the Hebrew scriptures, God did send the angels to kings, the true kings, the shepherds.  The angels and shepherds are not God doing a new thing.  It is God doing that same old thing God did throughout the entire Old Testament, going to the true salt of the earth, the meek who work hard with their own hands and live quiet but profound lives.

One of the most influential essays I have read in the last few years was written by George Orwell about coal miners in the industrial revolution.   Back then, coal mining was a miserable chore.  They worked long hours for very little pay and mining was hazardous in the extreme.  This was before labor laws so even children and women were forced to work in the mines.  Most of the miners died prematurely.  In addition coal miners had the same reputation that 1st century shepherds supposedly had.  It was a reputation we might give to warehouse workers today.  They were uncivilized.  They didn’t dress well.  They weren’t educated.  They were immoral.  For that reason, the elite of society propagated a fantastic lie that the coal miners could change their lot by changing their behavior, that if those lousy coal miners would just become moral and civilized they too could matriculate from the mines to a high society position.  George Orwell pointed out that if that did indeed happen, if revival did break out upon the coal miners and they all managed to gain upper class banking jobs, the entire economy would shut down and the homes of the wealthy, moral, civilized bankers, wouldn’t even be able to have heat.

More than that, before writing the essay, Orwell lived among the coal miners for a few years and discovered that they had a deeper morality than any other elite.  Far from being immoral, the coal miners were a courageous bunch, a generous bunch, a loving bunch and they were the most valuable group to England because they braved the conditions and extracted the fuel that kept Industrial Society running. (You can read the full essay here)

As much as I love Orwell’s essay, it was hardly original.  Orwell seems to have plagiarized the entire Bible.  God wrote that essay 2500 years ago when God sent the prophet Samuel to a shepherd and chose David to be King in Israel.  God revised and updated it again when God sent angels to shepherds to proclaim Jesus’ birth.

Here is a God who is not the God who condones the rich and powerful.  Here is a King who values and adores those who work hard with their own hands.  Here is a King who understands that shepherds and coal miners and truck drivers and manual laborers of all stripes are far closer to the character of God than any other group.  And here is a Savior who taught us “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.”  Here is a God who commands us to be meek and lowly like the shepherds because God established what Orwell discovered, that coal miners and shepherds actually run the world.

Beyond the Talking Points: Of Fake News and Real. . .ly Annoying News

There is a fascinating line in John’s gospel that is often overlooked.  Jesus is on trial before Pilate, the politically weak governor of Judea.  Jesus was brought to him by a group of religious fanatics with no real data or evidence, just blind rage with a petty accusation.  Pilate is all questions, just trying to get a hold on the situation.

Jesus replies, “For this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” (John 18:37 CEB)

This vague theological statement is par for the course for Jesus.

But Pilate gets the million dollar question, the question we all are asking, “What is truth?”

This is my question as a pastor in today’s world.  “What is truth?” and I am as equally frustrated as Pilate that Jesus doesn’t give me an easy answer.

Over the last three weeks I have been reading all the articles about the fake news which saturated our feeds over the last several months.  My favorite is this one put out by NPR about a liberal who writes fake news articles that attack liberals because he enjoys how quickly conservatives will spread lies.

And those lies have spread quickly.  Over the last several months, completely false articles were shared more times on Twitter and Facebook than real news.  Over the last year fake news sites have grown exponentially and they are now a legitimate economic market.  People are becoming rich by spreading lies on the internet.  Some days I hate having integrity.

If it all stayed on the internet I would probably be okay with it.  In fact, I most certainly wouldn’t be writing this blog post.  However, those lies have spread into my congregation and into my friendship groups.  They’ve even spread into my family.  Everywhere I go someone says, “I heard somewhere that.  .  .” followed by a completely unverified piece of data.

I would correct people on how wrong they are but there is no use to it.  After all in a world saturated by lies, I am not even sure if I know what is correct.  And the last thing anybody wants is a smart phone stand off where our thumbs quickly search to verify opinions as we argue about which websites are authoritative.

“Fox News said.  .  .”

“You can’t believe anything they say!  They’re conservative.”

“Well Huffington Post says,”

“Huffington Post?!  Really, Huffington Post?!?!?!  They are a glorified dorm room blog!?”

“Well The New York Times,”

“I can’t believe you would even bring them up!  You lousy liberal!”

Nobody is friends after such a conversation.  Nobody is even Christian after that.

The problem isn’t just fake news.  There is also the problem that now more than ever people are claiming the “real” news’ sites are hopelessly compromised.  I saw a conversation the other day where someone cited “Snopes” and was quickly dismissed with “Snopes is getting everything wrong now too.”

It seems we have successfully created a world where no one can be trusted.

This has crept into my sermons as well.  I now step out of the pulpit every Sunday morning wondering that if some datum was attacked if I’d even be able to defend it.  There is always another way to interpret a passage, always another theory left out, always another resource to double check and as is commonly held to be true in my profession, “The next Sunday is always 3 days away!”

In such dilemmas, historical perspective has always helped.  After all Mark Twain noted in the mid 19th century, “A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Only Mark Twain didn’t say that.  After all it was Abraham Lincoln who once said, “You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.”  I read that on the internet.

Putting fake quotes aside, for centuries, even millennia, lies spread around the world with no help from the internet.  Let us not forget the earth was once almost certainly flat and the best way to heal people was to bleed them slowly but surely.  Even John Wesley, the great patriarch of my tradition, published a book of home remedies that weren’t exactly remedial.  He was one of the great fake news anchors of his generation.  His brother Charles Wesley also embarrassingly and wrongly predicted the end of the world.

So fake news isn’t new.  Lies have been spreading faster than the truth for millennium.

That is of no comfort to me.  The fact that we have never been good at “truth” doesn’t help me when I have to get up and preach a sermon once a week that is supposedly “true” but which even I can tear apart with relative ease.

With poor Pontius Pilate, I ask, “What is truth?”  If I can’t trust anything I am hearing and have huge qualms even about what I am sharing and saying, how can I pastor with any sort of integrity?  What is truth?

Luckily the good gospel has all ready answered the question.  Truth has actually come up in John’s gospel several times before chapter 18 but nowhere more prominently than in Jesus’ famous declaration to weeping sisters, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

For us Christians, truth is not a datum or an article or a fact and it certainly isn’t a book.  Truth is a person.

What is truth?  “Well Pilate, I am the truth.”  Truth is a personality.

When I get up to preach or sit down to write or even engage in conversations I am way more concerned with proclaiming a person than I am with facts or data.

If this is “true” than our obsession with data and articles and how true or false they are may be idolatrous.  We may be more obsessed with facts than with Jesus and if that is true repentance is needed, not fact checks.  This is a repentance that seeks to serve the true God of humility while rejecting the serve of fact checks which serve our pride.

At the very least that is what I am going to tell myself next time someone fact checks me.

A Sermon About God and the Corrupt Powers and Authorities

Hello everybody.  Long time no read.

There is much to write about but little time to write about it.  I did however record one of my recent sermons and upload it to YouTube.

Unfortunately this is a rerecording of the original sermon since the original was destroyed or not copied or some disaster or other.  As a rerecording I hate most things about it.  But it is here for you all.

It was recorded before the political revelations of the prior weekend and, needless to say, this last weekend pushed this sermon to its limits and maybe even beyond.  In short there was a lot that happened among the “rulers and authorities” this last weekend that made me want to give into anger, rage, malice and slander.  Still, we are children of the King and he has humiliated them on the cross and continues to do so and therefore we should be kind and compassionate and humble and loving and all that.

Also I should note that this was the third in a sermon series that is roughly based on the Atonement Theories.  The first sermon was about the wrath of God and the forgiveness that comes through the cross (Satisfaction Theory).  The second was about being slaves to Satan and the cross as a Ransom (Ransom Theory).  This is the third.

Hope you enjoy it.  Or at the very least don’t hate it as much as I now do.

https://youtu.be/xJbo9DCG4WY

Why I Like Paul More Than Jesus (And Why That Might Not Be Good)

I have been reading and studying the book of Acts since right before Easter.  Other than Revelation, Acts stands alone in its uniqueness compared to other New Testament books.  If Revelation is the blond headed step child of the New Testament, than Acts is the tall, dark and handsome eldest child who seems to do everything well.  What I mean by that is Acts isn’t really one genre but it does all the genres.  If you want epistles, you will find them in Acts.  If you want crazy gospel miracle stories you will find them in Acts.  If you wants sermons, Acts has them in plenty.  And if you want apocalyptic visions, Acts even throws a few in there for you.

But it is not just the weird confluence of biblical genres that makes Acts unique.  Also helping Acts stand alone is its main protagonist, the Apostle Paul.   The famous apostle and letter writer is introduced in the 9th chapter, making the previous 8 seem like prologue.  He becomes the main character in the 12th.  From then on out the book is not so much about the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Early Church but the Acts of the Apostle Paul.

With that said up until last month I had not spent much time studying Acts’ portrayal of Paul.  I have read through Paul’s letters hundreds of times.  I have memorized a few of them.  I have led Bible Studies and sermon series through most of them and even claimed some of Paul’s words as my “life verses.”  I absolutely adore the Apostle Paul.  I even thought for some time of becoming a Pauline Scholar.  This dream was undone by a wonderful and blunt mentor who said, “oh, those are a dime a dozen.”

Still I am a Pauline Scholar, just not in the formal academic  sense.

And yet I have never truly read Paul in Acts.

And yet, to no surprise, as I have studied Acts’ Paul this last month I have fallen even more in love.  The Paul in Acts just as attractive as the Paul who wrote to Philipi, Corinth and Ephesus.

Speaking of Ephesus, Paul’s speech to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 is beautiful, every bit as beautiful as his letters.  I am planning on preaching on it in a couple weeks and excited for that sermon.  So too is Paul in Athens.  He begins his sermon there with a very typical Pauline sarcastic insult and then weaves it into greater truth.

As far as studying the Bible goes, this has been a great month!

But therein lies the problem.  You see, I stand in the now old Protestant tradition who has placed the words of Paul above the words of Jesus.  At first the Protestants claimed “Sola Scriptura.”  Then they began claiming “Sola Paul” and then “Sola Romans.”  In fact I have spoken and read books by several biblical inerrantists who claim that the rest of the Bible has to be true only so that we know that Romans is true.  None of Scripture is formational except Romans.  It just helps us prove Paul knew what Paul was talking about.

At one point several people have even said that nothing Jesus said was binding for us.  Jesus just preached the sermons to show us how hard earning our justification by works was so that we would listen to Paul in Romans.

Under that thinking we shouldn’t love God or our neighbor or our enemies.  We shouldn’t pray in prayer closets.  We definitely shouldn’t mimic the good Samaritan or the prodigal’s father.  Silly Jesus was just letting us know how hard it is so that we wouldn’t do anything he told us to do.

I was raised in this tradition and so it is of no surprise that when Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:24) I laugh it off as silly Jesus just setting us up for failure.  But when Paul says, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith” (Eph. 2:8) I yell a hearty “amen!”

I am not implying we set up a dichotomy between Paul and Jesus.  Paul words are sacred Scripture and it is because I believe that, that I also truly believe he was following in the very teachings of Jesus and even pleads with his audience to “follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:1)

If you read Romans 12-15, you find it is nothing but a sermon about the sermon on the mount.  This comes after all the saved by grace stuff in Romans 5-8 which implies that the saved soul follows Jesus’ teachings, and yes it is not the other way around.  We are not saved by following Jesus’ teachings.  To put it perhaps too simplistically we are saved to follow Jesus’ teachings.

Or to put it another way, true Paul scholars should never minimize the teachings of Jesus, only maximize them in their lives.  A good reading of Paul should cause us to stop, reflect and then flip back a few books to the gospels and read Jesus again.

Speaking of reading Jesus, it is only fitting that I close with these very true words of His from Matthew 5:19: “Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Tenebrae Friday Reflection: Who’s On Trial Here

To Read: Mark 12:38-43

Today is Tenebrae Friday, a day of shadows and darkness where we remember that our God died.  Today we make much of the trials of Jesus before the Chief Priests, the Jewish governor of Galilee and the Roman governor of Judea.  We talk a lot about the accusations against Jesus and how that all led to the horrible moment when Jesus spoke the final words, “it is finished” and breathed his last.  We do this in various ways.  Some of us attend a traditional candlelight service.  Others pray through the stations of the cross.  Others watch various film depictions of the event like the Passion of the Christ or the Jesus film.  Still others read the Passion narratives in the four gospels, taking special note of the 7 last words Jesus spoke while on the cross.  The truly super spiritual do all of the above!

But no matter how we commemorate Good Friday, we are prone to realize again that the real trial at the heart of the crucifixion was not Jesus’ but ours.  All of humanity was put on trial before the throne of God.  After all the God who loves us, who created us, whose very presence sustains our being, pitched his tent and camped out among us and we killed him for it.

My devotional reflections this week have been following Mark 12 where Jesus is repeatedly questioned by various members of the Jewish scholarly elite during the last week of his life.  Jesus successfully parried attacks by the Chief Priests, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and one over confident teacher of the law.  These various tests serve as a precursor to his upcoming trial.  Even though they had yet to arrest Jesus under the cover of darkness and serve up a mock trial to reaffirm their own prejudices, they publicly tested Jesus in the hopes that the surrounding crowds would be the jury and judge.

It didn’t work.  In fact, after Jesus successfully answered their questions and avoided the traps they had set, he turned the attack on them.  In chapter 12, verse 38 Jesus says, “Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.  They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”

Right after that he contrasts them with a very poor widow who offered two tiny pennies to the temple system.  Her offering, Jesus says, is worth more than all the others.

This image of the humble widow becomes a forerunner to the image of the crucified God.  The arrogant chief priests and teachers of the law respond to the presence of Christ by trying to trick and trap.  The widow responds by giving all she has.  It is her two mites that become the image of true humanity, a humanity formed and shaped and called to the image of the sacrificial and self giving God.

Days later, Jesus as fully God and fully human magnifies the image of the widow for us as he hangs on the cross.  This image of sacrificial and self giving love is who we are supposed to be.  Such an image shames the know it alls and the proud and the arrogant and the powerful.  The cross is a verdict on our own ability to save ourselves by pretending to be more than we are.  It is a sentence of “guilty” for those who “walk around in fancy clothes and soak up the praises bestowed upon them while sitting in the most important seats in public gatherings but who devour widows’ homes.”

And it is a call to repent from our arrogance and pride and embrace the sacrificial giving of a poor widow.  Only by picking up our own crosses of shame and following Jesus can we arrive at a Resurrected morning.

Heavenly father, restore unto us the joy of our salvation as we gaze upon your self giving cross.

 

Emmanuel: God With Silliness

A few posts ago I mentioned that I try not to blog what I preach or preach what I blog.  Not surprisingly, this is the second time since that post that I am breaking that rule.

I wanted to bring something Christmassy to you all on this glorious day, something a bit more profound than that last post about my favorite Christmas TV episode.  And I have been reading blog posts of other Christmas homily’s that were given last night and eventually thought, why not post mine as well.

What follows is an abbreviated version of what I shared with my church last night.  Enjoy!

————————————————————

About 3 or 4 times a year I find myself preaching the same message.  The message goes something like this.  We live in a tragic world.  Bad things happen to good people and, even more aggravating, good things happen to bad people.  There are tornadoes and earthquakes and floods.  There are car accidents and drug overdoses and sudden heart attacks and brain aneurysms.  There are bad people whose purpose seems to be nothing but to kill and destroy.  But even though we walk through valleys of the shadow of death, God is with us.  Even though we mourn, we do not mourn like those who have no hope.  There will be a new heaven and a new earth where there will be no more tears and we will be with the Lord forever.

It’s a good message.  It is at the heart of the Bible which is why I preach it so much.

And I deal with tragedy on a regular basis, about once a week on average.  Pastors get to be the unsung heroes of tragedy.  We are one of your first calls, right after the paramedics I hope!  And it is my privilege to be there.

I am not perfect at responding to tragedies but I am confident that I know the places to go and the things to say and not to say.  I have the Bible verses memorized and I can shed the tears and use the right tones that convey shared sorrow.

But I also deal with another element of the human condition on a regular basis, probably daily.  And I am not as confident when it comes to this.  You see, I deal with silliness.  People are just silly.  While it is true we live in a tragic world, it is also true that we live in a very silly world.

We took the wonderful story of a black, skinny 4^th century, African saint named Nicolas who gave gifts to children and we turned that story into a cosmic tale of a fat, white, bearded man who lives on the north pole.  He sees you when your sleeping and he knows when your awake and he breaks into your house every Christmas Eve but don’t worry, it is to give not to steal.  It is a silly story.

To make it sillier we added reindeer and gave one of them a shiny nose.  Then we turned Tim Allen into him and that is probably the moment when Santa jumped the shark.  If not, then it was definitely when Will Ferrell became his “Elf.”

And I just have to say for all the father’s in the room that my money paid for the presents.  It was me who  stayed up until 2am putting the presents together and I don’t feel like a jolly fat white fictional guy should get credit for it!  Can I get an “Amen?”

But our silliness extends far beyond our stories.  It finds its way to our language.  We drive on parkways and park on driveways.  I am a bit of a language nut and I have no idea what weird thing happened in the development of the English language to turn our parkways into driveways and our driveways into parkways but there it is, one of many ridiculous exceptions to the rules that govern our communication!

Our corporations are ridiculous.  They develop identical products and then spend billions of dollars to convince you that they are not identical.  Then when they realize it they sue each other over patent infringement.  That is silly, but not as silly as us consumers who choose sides and go to the internet with our angry twitter hashtags!

We spend millions of dollars making movies whose entire plot consists of blowing things up in slow motion.  Then we pay money to see it and go online and tell everybody how dumb it was, even though we secretly enjoyed it.

We pay athletes millions of dollars to dress up in silly costumes and hit each other, all while trying to get an oblong ball to an end zone.  Then we riot and trash our own town when our team loses.  I can’t even begin to explain why.

The silliness finds our marriages.  A pastor friend told me awhile back about a marriage that was in jeopardy because the wife had purchased over 300 pairs of jeans.  She had bought one a week for six years and refused to get rid of any of them.  The husband was saying pair number 301 was going to be the cause of divorce.  He was filing paperwork over number 301 and I don’t blame him!

 

The most ridiculous thing is that the people who don’t think they are silly at all are the silliest.  You know who I am talking about.  These are the people who are quite adamant about things like the weather.  They are stern and cranky and you better not disagree with their interpretation of how harsh last winter was, because they will show you their wrath!  Do they realize how dumb they are?  I can never figure out.

When these people find me (and they always do) I don’t have the words for silliness.  I don’t know the Bible verses for ridiculous.  I don’t have any cliches memorized that gently convey, “I don’t really care about this opinion your have.”  I know a little about how to deal with tragedy but when people are just being silly, especially when they are being judgmental and passionate in their silliness, I don’t have a clue of what to say.  What I want to say is, “Get over it” but that doesn’t sound very compassionate.  So instead I give them a blank stare and I stammer and say something like, “Well I guess last winter was worse than this year’s.”  Then I kick myself later because I know they are going to their friend to say, “See, Pastor agrees with me.”  And we all know I am right about everything, or not.

But this Christmas when we come again to the manger, as we gather again to marvel at “Emmanuel” who is God with us, I find great comfort that just as God descended into tragedy, God also descended into silliness.

Here in Bethlehem around 4 B.C. in a manger was a God  who took on the entirety of our human condition.  We believe that here in the manger is full God and full human at the same time.  We do not believe that Jesus is half and half.  We used to burn people at the stake for doing that, which was both silly and tragic, but that is how strongly we believe it.  We have always said that here in the manger is all of God taking on all of humanity.

Emmanuel in the manger is God with us in our tragedies.  He is God with us in silliness.  He is God with us in the awkward moments and God with us in the tense situations.  God is with us when our wife buys jeans number 301 and we scream and yell and stomp off to a lawyer.  God is with us when we walk away from a half hour argument about whether the average temperature last winter was 40 degrees or 45 degrees.  Then it suddenly occurs to us, “I don’t really care what the temperature was but I sure cared in the heat of debate!”  God is with us even then.

All of God has taken on all of our goofiness, all of our ridiculousness, all of our stupidity.

God is not intimidated or threatened by any part of the human condition but God is among us.  He is guiding us, calling us, leading us to the place where we can be fully with God, fully aware of his presence in our tragedies, in our sorrows, in our frustrations and yes, even in our silliness.

Merry Christmas Everybody!