Category: Sermons

First Sermon on Evangelism

Kyle

This is the first evangelism sermon I’ve ever preached. I’m grateful to David Gortner here at VTS and to so many of my classmates for their help shaping my heart for this ministry.

PDF | Audio | Text:

Our hearts have to go out to Jonah. He’s a tough prophet to admire, but an easy one to love. Who in the Bible can we better relate to than someone one who, a couple chapters earlier, receives “the word of the LORD” …and promptly runs away.1 You may remember that he hops on a boat headed for Tarshish, which means he’s fleeing west when God had sent him east.2 I can think of a few times I’ve tried a similar move. Here too is a prophet who knows what it’s like to have a bad day. Shortly after boarding that westbound ship, he gets thrown from it by a cowardly but discerning crew who want nothing to do with someone trying to flee from the presence of God Almighty. And as you know, that’s where the story truly takes a turn for the bizarre: Jonah is swallowed by a giant fish. But he doesn’t rail against God or pout about this most recent indignity. No, instead, he undergoes what has to be the most distinctive conversion story in the entire Bible: he sings a psalm of thanksgiving “from the belly of the fish,”3 praising God’s name for delivering him from the depths of the sea. And after the fish vomits him out on dry land, the story picks up as we heard it a few moments ago: “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’’’4

What he finds at his destination is “an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across,”5 and we are told he walks a whole days’ worth into it. Keep in mind that he spent his whole trip preaching—not in quiet confines like these but out in the streets. As he walks, he cries out “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! ”6 And then the most remarkable thing of all happens, remarkable at least if we consider the success rate of the biblical prophets. Unlike with so many of his colleagues the people actually listen to Jonah! The citizens of Nineveh declare a fast, put on the garments of mourning, “turn from their evil ways,” and are delivered as God decides not to bring disaster upon them.7

Three chapters, three nights in a fish, and a city three days’ walk across is saved from destruction. I wondered this week about how Jonah could have strength for his assigned task because now we are called to go about ours. The gospel lesson we heard calls it leaving our nets.8 Indeed, as we prayed in this morning’s collect, this week’s readings are about “answer[ing] readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim[ing] to all people the good news of his salvation.”9 Because the Greek for good news is euaggelion (yu-an-ge’-le-on), we call this proclamation, in English, evangelism.

Now, Jonah wasn’t proclaiming the euaggelion of Jesus Christ; he wasn’t an evangelist as we use that word. But as I said at the start, he is a highly relateable prophet, at least for me, and our work as evangelists shares much in common with his prophetic office and his example of service to God.

For starters, the story of Jonah reminds us that we do not need to be perfect to speak the word that God has put in our hearts. Like me, and perhaps like some of you some of the time, Jonah is whiney, self-satisfied, inconsistent, overly dramatic, and seldom sufficiently grateful for what he has been given. Yes, he bravely and tirelessly preaches repentance to a vast and ultimately responsive metropolis. But then he resents their good fortune at being spared and tells God, a few verses after our passage, it would be “better for me to die than to live.”10 So too, then, should we be comfortable being imperfect bearers of the good news. We don’t need to be super-Christians to be good evangelists. Jonah manages to do his God-given work despite a host of flaws and frailties. Talking about our faith, giving an account of our hope in Christ—this task is about honestly naming what we think God is doing in our lives, not about convincing others that we have everything figured out.

If anything, it’s the telling of our faith story that helps us figure things out. I believe this is part of what Episcopal evangelism expert David Gortner is getting at in his book Transforming Evangelism. Early on, he writes,

Evangelism is a spiritual practice: active—and receptive. Just as in prayer, study, and acts of compassion, in evangelism you experience a sense of your movement not being entirely your own. Receptive to the Holy Spirit’s activity within you—and trusting that the Spirit is active in others all around you—you move into action as the Spirit’s partner.11

So just like in prayer, study, or service, in witnessing to Jesus Christ we are gradually transformed by our consistent practice. We become better evangelists each time we seize an opportunity to say, “Hey, that reminds me of something I realized when talking to my spiritual director,” or “Actually, I’m here serving at the shelter because I believe we meet Christ when we serve people in need.” There are any number of ways we show others, and remind ourselves, about the meaning God gives to our lives, about how the Spirit has been moving. So we don’t need to be “advanced in the faith,” to be evangelists. On the contrary, evangelism is one of the practices that helps our faith to grow.

I think there’s a second lesson we should take from the story of Jonah. I believe this short book tells us something really vital about where all our best service to God will come from. Recall that Jonah is most obedient and effective in that moment following his unlikely psalm of thanksgiving. When he accepts the work God has put before him, his decision comes from a place of joy and gratitude. Of course, we will sometimes treat prayer, or study, or evangelism like a duty or divine command—and we will sometimes run away from that command. But these practices are transformed when we find ways to delight in them. Dr. Gortner continues,

Energized by your active and practiced gratitude for all that you have received as gift from God, you enter your public life daily with a readiness to share your gratitude and wonder with others—and to hear their own experiences of God’s abundant goodness. This kind of evangelism, the giving of your delight, returns to you abundantly as you are nurtured and strengthened by listening for and sharing good news.12

I don’t know about you, but I first heard these words as a breath of fresh air: Evangelism can be “the giving of [our] delight.” When we view it in this way, the word evangelism loses all the connotations that many in our tradition tend to recoil against. In this light, heavy-handed attempts to scare or coerce others into Christ seem not so much misguided as sad. What a missed opportunity to celebrate the good news, to grow in one’s faith by daily giving away the love that is “drained in making [others] full” and “bound in setting others free.”13

Now, this has all been a little abstract. What does it look like to, as Gortner writes, “enter [our] public life daily with a readiness to share [our] gratitude and wonder”? If you’re looking to hear some ideas, I suggest you talk to parishioners involved in some of the more formal evangelism efforts at St. Paul’s. They’ve had some practice. Better yet, seek out a chance to hear people who live with great need talk about what God is doing in their lives.

As for my own practice of evangelism, joy and thanksgiving well up most strongly in me when I hear God’s call for compassion and promise of steadfast love. I hear it most clearly in these words by Anglican thinker F. D. Maurice:

The acknowledgment of a God who beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,—who has been long suffering with all His creatures and long-suffering with us,—[that acknowledgment] will make us tremble to deal harshly with the struggles and doubts [and especially] convictions …of our fellow human-beings.14

We should “tremble” to “deal harshly” with others’ doubts and convictions? That sounds like good news to me. So my witness to our compassionate and long-suffering God often comes in the form of a call to civility or the defense of another’s convictions. When opponents in a conflict are demonizing each other, I try to speak up and say that the Christian faith has taught me that no one is beyond the pale and that we are all called to respect the dignity of every human being. In our polarized society, there are a lot of opportunities to share this part of my gospel hope with the people I meet. That’s a lot of opportunities for evangelism, especially during election season, when it’s so easy for us to hold other people’s convictions in contempt.

So what about you? What aspect of the gospel lights a fire in you? How has the Word of God come to you and made your life richer and more joyous? How has the good news of salvation in Christ set you free from the guilt of imperfection and sent you out to share what’s in your broken but healing heart? The more we ask and answer these questions, the easier it will be for us to witness to the grace of God wherever we are—at home, at work or school, at a political debate, in the city of Nineveh, or in the belly of a providential fish sent to deposit us wherever God is calling us to minister.

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation. Amen.

1Jonah 1:1–3.

2See note at 1:3. Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Jonah” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford, 2007): HB 1322

32:1.

43:1–2.

53:3.

6See 3:4.

73:10.

8Mark 1:18.

9BCP, 163 (The Collect of the Day).

104:3.

11David Gortner, Transforming Evangelism (New York: Church Publishing, 2008): 2.

12Gortner, 2.

13W. H. Vanstone, “Morning glory, starlit sky” in The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Publishing, 1985): Hymn 525.

14F. D. Maurice, Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings, ed. Ellen K. Wondra (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 210â“211, emphasis added.

Sermon on Waiting, Proper 28

Kyle 3 Comments

Here’s today’s sermon in PDF form (inspired by my recently encounter with some old Hacker Within pals, I’m back to using LaTeX for sermons–Milad Fatenejad’s “radhydro” package, no less), in audio form, and pasted below (via latex2rtf).

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Waiting is a perilous business. Perhaps you don’t need to be convinced of this. Perhaps you can remember, or indeed are in the midst of, just such a time of waiting—for a new job, for the healing of a loved one, for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for the strength to forgive. And as you are no doubt aware, times of waiting are ripe for many of the most painful experiences we humans must endure, including anxiety, self-doubt, and even paranoia and despair. My own reflections on waiting have been shaped by meeting regularly with incarcerated men at the Alexandria City Jail. I remember one who spoke candidly about how the dread of waiting to be caught by the authorities was as difficult as waiting to be released by them. Another gentleman spoke about the strange interior world he entered during months of twenty-two-hour-per-day solitary confinement.

Waiting is a perilous business. If you still don’t believe me, just ask the least “talented” slave in today’s parable from the Gospel According to Matthew. “Afraid”1 of a master who reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he does not scatter seed,2 the slave buries the money he’s been “entrusted” with3 and waits out the “long time” it takes for his master to return to “settle accounts.”4 Imagine what it would be like for him, watching his colleagues go about their bold business maneuvers and wondering if his choice to play it safe would prove to be wisdom or folly. We can’t help but feel for the guy, especially when we learn that his one measly talent actually amounts to many years’ worth of wages for a day laborer.5 That’s some kind of pressure, and it’s this kind of high stakes that bring out the worst in so many of us waiting to see how things will turn out.

We realize the stakes are high indeed when we recognize the purpose to which Matthew puts this parable.6 It’s not hard to see if we look at where he places the story. Matthew 24 and 25 are an extended reflection on “The Coming Judgment,”7 which culminates, immediately after our parable, in the separation of the sheep from the goats, of those who cared for people in need from those who ignored them.8 And so Matthew uses this parable to comment on the nature of the Christian life: waiting9—waiting for the coming of Christ, waiting for the full realization of his kingdom, and waiting for the perfect justice that his kingdom will establish.

So what do today’s readings have to teach us about the nature of our Christian waiting? What lessons might we sit with as we pass the time before our final deliverance unto and into Christ or while we wait for relief from our own personal crises and unfulfilled longings?

The most obvious lesson, I think, is to cast off fear! The one-talent slave is quite self-aware that it was fear that stifled his creativity and stayed his hand. It paralyzed him, and it led him to misjudge his master’s wishes. It can do the same to us, if we let it. However natural and tempting it may be to act out of fear while we wait, we can hardly expect our best efforts to come from such a place of anxiety. And, on the contrary, when we learn to hold our fears in their proper perspective and ultimately give them up to God, remarkable things can happen.

Think about the demographic of middle-class, American young adults who are coming to be known as the “Boomerang Generation.” They’re so named because the challenges of a stagnant job market are forcing them to move back in to their childhood homes after college or unsuccessful employment. At first, the prospect of moving home seems the ultimate humiliation and defeat, and many would sooner suffer malnutrition or rack up debilitating credit card debt in an attempt to avoid it. The experience of fear in the midst of disappointing fortunes can be very strong, and anxious questions begin to set in: “Was all that studying even worth it? ” “Will I ever be able to support a family? ” and, maybe most importantly, “Will I be stuck in my parents’ basement for the rest of my life? ” But many who conquer their fears and make the move home discover something they didn’t expect. The momentary respite from endless worry about cover letters and grocery bills, and the chance to be re-immersed in unconditional love, creates a space for them to think creatively and optimistically for the first time in months or even years. They get back in touch with the hope that will motivate them to re-launch their journey and the personal strengths that will help bring those hopes to fruition. Waiting is a perilous business, but it’s harder than it needs to be when we face it from alone in the solitary confinement of our own anxious minds.

It’s better to become, as Paul says to us today, “children of light”10 and to remember that our Savior and our loved ones are our greatest weapons against the fear of waiting for whatever end. He writes, “For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ …Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.”11 That’s good advice from an apostle who we sometimes forget was a spiritual master.

OK, so we need to cast off fear: easier said than done, but manageable with God’s help. Another way these passages might speak to our reflections can be summarized in three words. Those three words comprise instructions that I would probably need to hear from my own parents in the days following a boomerang journey home: “Kyle,” they’d say, “Do something useful.” This advice echoes the words of the master in the parable, who says, “You could have at least invested the money with the bankers! All you did was bury it and then twiddle your thumbs! ”12 However excruciating our times of waiting can seem, they are still limited, and this prods us on to action. So Christian waiting is about using the talents we’ve been given in the time we’ve been given. The inclusion of Psalm 90 in our service today is a reminder that that time is short. How can we afford to wait idly when we will soon return “back to the dust,”13 when we will “fade away suddenly like the grass” that withers,14 when God will “sweep us away like a dream”? Listen to that last one again: “You sweep us away like a dream.” What a lovely and terrifying expression. After hearing that, I think we’re quite right to pray with the psalmist that God might “teach us to number our days * that we may apply our hearts to wisdom”15—and indeed to other tasks as well.

Here, too, there are lessons from the Boomerang Generation and from many others suffering from joblessness. I’ve been humbled and inspired by many unemployed friends, both of my age and much older, who have combated the boredom and hopelessness of their waiting by staying active, especially by stepping up their charitable volunteer work. In this way, they witness to the fact that our part in God’s mission in the world is not just to put food on our own plates or even just our families’ but those of every man, woman, and child on God’s green Earth. So however we read today’s texts on waiting, we should remember that they are not just therapeutic but also missional. They offer us comfort and advice but also demand from us the response of action. Waiting is a perilous business, especially if we think that waiting is the only task put before us.

But even action is not the most important aspect of our waiting. No, our highest calling is to wait expectantly and open-endedly, two things that are sometimes hard to do at the same time. Here the lectionary does us a great disservice in omitting the final two verses of today’s psalm, which speak to this very point. The psalmist writes, “Show your servants your works * and your splendor to their children. / May the graciousness of the LORD our God be upon us; * prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork.”16 So first we recognize God’s works, and then the “work of our [own] hands” can be blessed. First we take account of the promises of God and the hope we have in Christ Jesus. Only then should we survey the landscape before us, because only then can we see it with the eyes we need.17

In other words, part of why waiting is so hard is that we get too rigid an idea of what we are waiting for. Our gazes are so fixed on a certain picture of how things should turn out that we miss the way unfolding before us if it doesn’t conform to our parameters. This is certainly true in our own personal circumstances. But I believe it is also true for groups of people who wait, like cultures waiting for boom times to return. It’s perhaps especially true for the Church’s collective waiting for the full fruition of God’s kingdom on Earth. God stubbornly refuses to give us what we expect. Stubbornly, and mercifully. Because I would guess that most of us can point to that time in our lives where things turned out better than we could have hoped precisely because they turned out differently from what we knew to expect. I know what that moment was for me, but no example I can give you will have the power of your own memory of God’s surprisingly generous and creative shaping of your life. I invite you this week to identify and reflect on such a memory and to hold it gently as an almost sacramental token of God’s faithfulness. You’ll need it the next time the waiting gets tough, as it surely will. Waiting is a perilous business, but it’s the business we’re in.


References

Keck, L. E. (Ed.) (1995, June). The New Interpreter’s Bible: Matthew – Mark. Abingdon Press.

Keck, L. E. (Ed.) (1996, January). The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke – John. Abingdon Press.

Moltmann, J. (2010, May). Theology of Hope. SCM Press.

1Matthew 25:25

225:24

325:14

425:19

5Keck (1995), 451

6Luke’s telling of this parable, which portrays the master in an even harsher light, makes our sympathy for the slave explicit; his version includes bystanders who shout “Sir, he already has ten! ” when the master gives away the fearful slave’s dutifully protected sum in Luke 19:25 (NIV). But Luke is using this parable to contrast the free and easy ways of a rich and unjust ruler with the constricting plight of the poor and needy. Keck (1996), 334-335

7Keck (1995), 438

8Matthew 25:40, 45

9Keck (1995), 453

101 Thessalonians 5:5

111 Thessalonians 5:1–11

12It might also remind us of the warning we heard from Zephaniah about the dangers of “rest[ing] complacently on [our] dregs” (Zephaniah 1:12).

13Psalm 90:3

1490:5–6

1590:12

16Psalm 90:16-17

17See also Juergen Moltmann’s opening meditation in Theology of Hope: Moltmann (2010).

Last week’s sermon

Kyle

I keep forgetting to post last week’s sermon. The main text is Ezekiel 18. All in all, the experience of preaching for the first time at St. Paul’s, K Street, was a good one.

Like so many readings from scripture, our lesson from the Book of Ezekiel this morning can be summed up like this: the people are grumbling, and God has had just about enough of it. Now, to be fair, Ezekiel’s contemporaries did have plenty to complain about. They lived in a time of “never-ending crisis,”1 resulting in year after year of “generalized anxiety”2 about the events taking place in the world around them and about what this news meant for their personal and national security. Perhaps this is a familiar feeling to us as we struggle to make sense of an increasingly volatile world. In any event, the people’s exhausted complaint, as described by Ezekiel and also his fellow prophet Jeremiah (13:29), was that their ancestors had gotten them into this mess. “The parents have eaten sour grapes,” went the proverb, “and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (2). “It’s not fair that we’ve been taken into exile in Babylon,” they seem to say. “And it’s unconscionable that God would abandon the temple city of Jerusalem. This can’t be because of something we did. We must be getting stuck with someone else’s punishment.”

And so the the word of the LORD that comes to Ezekiel contains a series of responses to the people’s pessimism, responses that have some bearing, I think, on our own occasional feelings of self-righteous despair during trying times. What we first hear from Ezekiel is a reality check about the relationship between God’s power and divine justice: “Know that all lives are mine,” says the LORD. “The life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (4). In other words, we hear God say through Ezekiel, “Let’s be perfectly clear. I am Lord and Sovereign over all creation and each generation of my children. If my beef was only with your parents, or only with one particular person or group, then I’d have taken it up only with them. Don’t be so quick to assume that you yourselves are without blemish.”3

But notice that, in this particular discourse, the prophet leaves aside the question of how exactly the people’s current problems are a part of God’s judgment. In the verses that the lectionary omits from this reading, Ezekiel speaks in only general terms about righteous living and personal responsibility. He says that a person who is “righteous and does what is lawful and right … shall surely live” (5, 9) and that an unrighteous person “shall not” (13). He gives some examples of righteous and unrighteous behavior, but he doesn’t directly connect them here to what the people of Israel have done. For Ezekiel, all the people need to do going forward is take note of God’s ways. The rest is fruitless speculation and fingerpointing. “Don’t dwell on how we came to be in this situation,” he says. “Rather, turn from your ways in the present and live.” It’s not the last time he will say it.

In the next part of this prophetic discourse, God makes a second point through Ezekiel. “[Y]ou say, ‘The way of the Lord is unfair.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” In this second section, it’s as if God is saying, “But as long as you brought up the subject of fairness and justice, let me say that you have fallen terribly short, O my people.”

As I said, Ezekiel does not get specific in this passage about how Israel has failed, though we can of course piece together the story based on his principles of justice and the transgressions he names in other chapters. But one of Ezekiel’s general admonitions seems particularly poignant in our situation today. In verses 12 and 16, he recites that God’s people are not to “oppress[] the poor and needy” but instead are to “give[] [their] food to the hungry and provide[] clothing for the naked” (12, 16 [NIV]). Over the past several months, we’ve watched with a sense of déjà vu the horrifying consequences of drought and famine in Somalia and throughout the Horn of Africa. On the ground in Somalia, unchallenged militants are engaged in just the kind of oppression Ezekiel names, blocking desperately needed aid from international agencies within the territory they control. Domestic medical officials say the lack of assistance has made things worse than in 1992, when 240,000 people died, with another 110,000 saved by the American-led intervention.4 Meanwhile, on the ground in America today, a weary and cash-strapped nation is reluctant to intervene again. After almost ten years of war, it’s not hard to understand why. But this time the death toll could be even worse, the UN warns perhaps as many as 750,000 Somalis. “Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” How can the global community live into and up to the commandments Ezekiel confronts us with, not just the imperative to feed the hungry but all the demands of God justice? How can we face such immense problems? Such intractable problems. Such heartbreaking problems. God only knows.

Actually, I think “God only knows” is precisely the mantra we might take away from Ezekiel’s advice for living a resurrection life. Let’s review: Ezekiel first assured the people of God’s sovereignty and justice. He then called them out on the basis of their own individual unrighteousness. Finally, in today’s last verses, he extends to them God’s word of hope: “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live” (31-32). The hopelessness that set in for the Israelites in captivity in Babylon and that threatens each one of us in difficult times, this hopelessness ought to be a sign for us. Sometimes God’s commandments are too difficult, and the world’s problems so painful that we change the channel whenever they are talked about—if they are talked about at all. It is in those moments that we most need the word that Ezekiel uses 53 times in 48 chapters: (in Hebrew) שׁוּב, turn. From the depths of despair comes a voice that calls us to turn ourselves in the direction of God. To align our wills to the Lord’s own. To wade deep in the waters of God’s justice and get caught up in the current. To “look not to [our] own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Now, it has been widely observed throughout the course of Christian history that turning is no simple thing to do. Sometimes it seems impossible, this taking on of God’s will and mission as our own, this getting ourselves “a new heart and a new spirit.” Yet I think if it’s true what God says elsewhere, that this life is “not too hard for [us], nor is it too far away” (Deuteronomy 30:11), then it must be that this ability comes to us as St. Paul described in today’s Epistle: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” he says. “[F]or it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12b-13). I believe Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill summarized this idea more succinctly still in a line puzzlingly inserted into one of her journals. It’s a line that carries with it the benefit of two thousand years of Christian argument over exactly what Paul meant, and it never ceases to help me when some ancient or modern-day prophet is calling me to something I feel powerless to undertake. Here’s the expression: “Not grace alone, nor us alone, but [God’s] grace in us.”

We encounter despair in this life when there seems to be no good options available to us, when we seem, like the exiles in Babylon, to have “nowhere to turn to.” But Ezekiel reminds us today that little if any good comes from desperate searches for how we got ourselves into a particular mess or especially how our ways can get us out of it. More importantly, he reminds us, as St. Paul does, that we always have someone to turn to, someone who is already mysteriously at work inside us and will lead us where we could never have imagined, someone whose ways are not our ways. Thanks be to God.

1Von Rad, Gerhard, The Message of the Prophets (San Francisco: Harper, 1968): 229.

2The Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo used this term to describe our post-September 11 world in a sermon at Virginia Theological Seminary on Holy Cross Day, 2011 (Sept. 14).

3To be fair, Ezekiel’s view here makes him a somewhat unusual biblical prophet, especially when compared with earlier prophets. See Von Rad, 229-232.

4See “Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/world/africa/02somalia.html

“The resurrection of the body…”

Kyle 4 Comments

My systematic theology professor recently made a comment about the preaching Christians hear this time of year, to the effect that it was a kind of a shame that few Easter sermons share the power and specificity of your average Good Friday sermon. She continued, that, rather, “Easter needs to be this great truth, and the death is the narrow gate by which we enter into this great hope. So we should reflect on this treatise [Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Soul and Resurrection] in order to read someone seized by that conviction and to become seized by it ourselves.”

This sermon, which I preached yesterday at St. John’s, was basically my attempt to take her, and Nyssa, seriously. It was a bit of a departure for me (very little humor, lots of difficult imagery), but I got the impression that it hit home for a lot of people. “Good sermon–but heavy” was a representative comment. There’s kind of a glaring transitional error in one of the footnotes (where some of the stuff I had to cut for time and cohesion ended up), which error I hope you’ll indulge because I don’t feel like regenerating the PDF.

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Second Sunday in Easter:

Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

Take a minute, if you will, to be aware of your body. Closing your eyes might help. Notice how you’re sitting. Feel the way your legs are crossed, or not. Take a deep breath and imagine your rib cage expanding as you do so. Keep your eyes closed and think of a time when you were glad to have a body, to be a body: Imagine lying in the sun or floating in the ocean or being tickled by a parent or hugged by a friend. It’s OK to think about such things in church. Now think of a time when you felt estranged from your body, when it stopped working properly or caused you great pain or somehow just didn’t feel right. Perhaps you’re feeling this way today. Perhaps you’ve felt this way for a long time. [Pause.] OK, open your eyes as you feel so moved.

This little reflection is an Easter reminder to us all that our bodies are real, and they matter in this life and the next. They are an integral, not an extraneous, part of who we are. I am not, to use one writer’s expression, simply “a ghost in a machine.”i Indeed, one thing our Christian tradition is clear about is that our bodies are part of what it means to be human.

And so I take as my text this morning John 20:25: “So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’”

The apostle Thomas—let’s just call him Thomas, rather than “Doubting Thomas,” that unfair nickname we give him when we read this story each year —Thomas seems to understand all this body stuff profoundly. “If Jesus is really risen,” Thomas says, “he has a body, a distinctive body, a body I will recognize by its wounds and a body I want to see and touch for myself.” If anything, we sophisticated modern types are the ones who should consider adopting the apostle’s moniker. It’s Doubting Kyle who so often ducks out of commenting on the apparent impossibilities of the bodily resurrection. “Show me the marks,” the apostle Thomas says faithfully. “Please don’t even mention the marks,” comes my tepid modern reply.

But I think the real reason we’re afraid to talk about the physical reality of the resurrection has to do with our bodies, not Jesus’ body; with our marks, not his. After all, our profession of the resurrection is nothing more or less than the claim that the God who fashions us can re-fashion us and that in the case of Jesus of Nazareth this refashioning has already occurred. That’s no small article of faith, I grant you, but it’s roughly on par not only with the Doctrine of Creation but with plenty of other things we Christians more readily believe. For instance, we don’t do nearly as much hand-wringing about the Incarnation, the idea that God became vulnerable by being born into the world God created: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”ii Now there’s a passage we can get behind.

No, I think we’d all be keener on the resurrection if we made ourselves a little more available to the realities of bodily human suffering, to the ways we need resurrection. It’s not easy, but I think we owe it to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters to take account of the breadth and depth of our need to be healed, refashioned, perfected, resurrected. If we can’t acknowledge the pain and woundedness in the world and in our very bodies, then of course the Easter message of hope will fall flat in the face of our apparent reality. If we try to pretend we don’t carry this pain, then it’s hard for us to imagine being set free from it. And so I ask us this morning, what and where are the wounds that mark these bodies [gesture] that God promises to raise?

Well, war inflicts such marks with cruel regularity. I watched this week an ABC News clip about the “Wounds of War” in Libya.”iii It was heartbreaking footage from early in the Civil War, taken aboard the first ship carrying wounded rebels to Turkey for treatment. Broken arms and legs were common, and the reporter spoke briefly with an amputee in tears and a wounded and bereaved mother for whom even tears seem finally to have failed. For each of those injured bodies sailing from North Africa, probably hundreds more now lie wounded, or dead, on battlefields and in the streets. And it is the very hopelessness of those persons—of many of the living and of all of the dead—that speaks to the power, the audacity, of our Easter proclamation. We claim that God can in some way, we know not how, make things right in the fulness of time—“bind[ing] up the broken-hearted”iv in this life and raising up the broken-bodied “at the last trumpet.”v It’s almost too foolish to believe. Yet many who have born such marks for themselves do believe it, and some carry this hope precisely because they have born the marks as well.

Other human indignities lead to marks that differ greatly from a bullet wound or amputation. Those who have seen, in person or in images, the distended stomachs of the chronicly malnourished are no more likely to forget the sight for the lack of blood or bandage. And those who have lost their hair during chemotherapy are no less marked by their illness than if the tumors themselves were actually visible. Of course, we could go on bearing witness to these marks, as many in this world and some in this room do each day because they have no other choice. The point is, we are not ourselves so far away from the powers of death and darkness that Jesus descended into to vanquish.

Let me now ask your forgiveness for raising this dread imagery on a Sunday where I, at least, am accustomed to having a light-hearted laugh at Thomas’ expense before going on to revel in the joy of a disciple reunited with his resurrected Lord and God. As I said, I think Thomas is on to something in his insistence that we must behold the wounds before we rejoice in their being overcome. But the good news we acclaim in the Easter season, the very best news our faith has to offer, is that the final word will be that rejoicing. And so we look to the stories—in scripture, and in our lives—of what that hope looks like. These stories can be touchstones for us. They are markers that point to Easter joy when all other hope has drained away.

One such story—no more than a moment really—took place for me earlier this year in the library at Virginia Seminary. I was doing some reading from a book the Episcopal Church publishes for use in ministry with those who are sick or dying. Having lost one grandparent to Parkinson’s Disease with dementia and another to Alzheimer’s, I was drawn to a prayer called “In Loss of Memory.” As many of you know, the marks of dementia are a terror to behold, so bad at times that it seems like the person we know is already gone, changed into someone we scarcely recognize. Working with dementia patients during my summer hospital chaplaincy had recently forced me to confront the memory of these wounds my grandparents carried in their last years. And so I think God had specially prepared me to hear to resurrection hope in the following prayer: “Holy God, you have known me from my mother’s womb, and have been with me throughout my life. Protect me and keep me safe through all the changes that may come. Since I am sealed as Christ’s own, help me to trust that who I am will never be lost to you.”vi I read that prayer, and I just started to cry. The promise that God held in care and would restore these people I love—that the mutations in their brains were, in resurrection hope, temporary conditions—this came as a balm for my wounds as well. Hope for the hopeless—that is the power of the gospel for all of us.

Of course, none of us knows exactly what the resurrection will be like.vii Unlike Thomas, we can only guess, because, unlike Thomas, we don’t get to witness it on this side of our own resurrection. We can’t yet see for ourselves the kind of change that God wrought in Jesus and will bring about in those Libyan amputees, in the victims of the tornadoes down south, in my grandparents, and in each one of us. We can’t yet witness the reforming of our very bodies and the transformation of the marks of our suffering. But we can bear witness to those marks—and to our Easter hope about their fate. In the meantime, “Blessed are [we] who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”viii


iWalker Percy, “The Delta Factor” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, And What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador, 2000): 9.

iiLuke 2:11.

iiiDavid Muir, “Wounds of War Bring Libya Together” on World News with Diane Sawyer (New York: ABC News, 2011): http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/wounds-war-libya-rebels-flee-president-obama-gadhafi-us-13288087 (accessed April 27, 2011).

ivIsaiah 61:1.

v1 Corinthians 15:52.

vi“In Loss of Memory” in Ministry with the Sick or Dying, Burial of a Child (New York: Church Publishing, 2000): 77.

vii Will our wounds, too, be changed but not erased, becoming “mark[s] of honor” as St. Augustine speculated? To be fair, he was talking about the bodies of the martyrs, so I’m being a little presumptuous here. I also like St. Gregory of Nyssa’s image of the “draw[ing] together” of the parts of our former bodies so that “the rope of our body will be braided [together] by the soul,” which evokes in me the further image of the re-coiling and repairing of mutated DNA. I myself like the idea that a resurrection body that still bears marks is no less “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” to borrow those words we heard in 1 Peter. St. Augustine, The City of God: Volume 2, Marcus Dods, ed. (London: T&T Clark, 1871): 514; St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1993): 68.

viiiJohn 20:29b.

Last Sermon for a While

Kyle

I’ve preached three of the last four Sundays, so I’m looking forward to a bit of a homiletical hiatus. Still, it’s been a rewarding month for this preacher-in-training. Here’s what I had to say today on John 4:5-42:

Throughout the centuries, readers of today’s story from John’s gospel have encountered the passage, taken in its many details, marveled at what one expert called this “first full example of [John’s] dramatic ability,”1 and emerged from their careful study with one lingering and important question: “Why does it have to be so long?” Of course I kid, but the designers of our lectionary are not ignorant of our attention spans or of the necessary vocal endurance it will take for deacons throughout the church to belt out this hefty portion of the good news today. So let’s let the question stand. Couldn’t we do justice to the story while shaving off a few verses? Couldn’t we, for instance, have heard only the first half? When this passage came up in the church’s daily lectionary a week ago, that’s exactly how we got it: the encounter with the woman one day, the follow-up with the disciples the next day.

I think if we look closely at what actually happens in this story, the logic of sticking to our full dose will become clear. So, if you can, think back to the beginning. Jesus is fatigued and thirsty after a morning’s travel. He asks for a drink of water from a woman he encounters near a well and, after the initial exchange says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (10). The woman replies, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (11). Jesus tells her that she’s misunderstood him: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (13-14). In other words, the woman has underestimated Jesus’s person and promise. The living, flowing water is not a physical gift that relieves us of the need for our daily H20; it sounds more like a spiritual gift, like his teaching and his sharing of the Spirit.2 Of course, he and the woman say lots of other things, but let’s leave it at this for our gloss of Scene One: the woman and the water.

In the second half of the story, we see Jesus turn his attention to the disciples. As is often the case, they start off scandalized by the company he’s chosen to keep, but then they move on to more immediate midday concerns: “Rabbi, eat something,” they say, and he replies, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Like the woman, they initially miss the point: “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” they say. And as with the woman, Jesus chooses to enlighten them about their misunderstanding: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” So the disciples underestimate him as well. He is sustained not by material food, he says, but by his mission.3 So that’s Scene Two: the disciples and the food.

The importance of these parallels, I believe, is that each scene contains a challenge, and these challenges are related. In Scene Two, the challenge is pretty direct and obvious: it’s to make Jesus’s mission our mission. He says, “I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting” (35). Now, as then, the time is ripe for us to go out and reap what God and other servants have sewn. The time is ripe because the need is great, and without even knowing it we reap God’s harvest as we speak a word of hope to a neighbor or engage in an act of solidarity with a stranger.

Scene One, I think, contains a similar challenge, not about mission this time but about devotion. To say it briefly, we have to choose to drink the water, a choice that will affect us every day of our lives. Like staying hydrated on a hot summer day, “being watered” by our Lord takes discipline; it’s not a lot of work, but we have to remember to do it. Drinking the water is about letting the risen Christ into our lives or—better yet—about taking time to realize that he is already there inside us. There are lots of ways to do this, of course: perhaps prayer, bible study, or just quiet time with God. That a little effort each day can make a lifetime of difference in our relationship with God is surely a sign that the Spirit is active in our lives and working within us to transform our hearts.

So, I said that the challenges Jesus has in store for us in this passage are related, and this is the point I want to really want to make clear. The way they’re related makes a difference, because this is probably the point in the sermon where we all start to feel a little weary. It sounds, I’ll admit, suspiciously like I’m trying to add to our to-do lists, maybe not just for Lent but for the rest of our lives. Perhaps, as it does to me, the very prospect exhausts you.

Well, let’s take a tip from Bishop Sutton for a moment. I loved the point he made toward the end of his sermon when he was with us back in February. He asked us to notice that Jesus didn’t say, “You are the pepper of the earth.” It strikes me that we’ll get a better handle on this morning’s gospel passage if we think about what else Jesus didn’t say. He didn’t say, for instance, “I came that you might have another to-do list, and feel guiltier about it.” He didn’t say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will add to them.” No, what he said was that he has innumerable good gifts to offer us: life abundant, rest for the weary, and, today, food and water for our journey, what John Calvin called “the secret energy by which [God] restores life in us.”4 The way our two challenges this morning are related is that Jesus claims they will sustain us.

So maybe the real challenge is simply to hear that good news—“I have food to eat that you do not know about”; “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”—to hear that good news and believe it. Believe that Jesus’s food, which is to do God’s will, really can nourish our lives. Believe that Jesus’s living water really can quench our spiritual thirst if we but stop and drink. Believe that God alone can sustain us.

This is where I think we can help each other out. Have you ever heard someone talk about a change in their life and seen the incontrovertible signs that this change is bearing fruit for them? Perhaps they light up at the mention of a new outreach project they’ve been participating in, chronicling it for you not because they want to boast, but because all the joyful details just kind of bubble up. Or perhaps they get very quiet and shy as they admit during a small-group conversation that they’ve had a profound experience of God, one they think might stick with them for years to come. They can’t really make sense of it rationally, but neither can they dismiss it and go on as if nothing had ever happened. Does hearing about those experiences ever stir something in you? Does it start to make Jesus’s promises today sound a little less far-fetched?

Let me risk a personal example. I have this inkling that the practice of keeping a journal might be a good idea for me. This is not something I want to do. It sounds exhausting. Seminarians write a lot, much of it under duress, and the thought of adding even just a couple more paragraphs each day was enough to invoke in me something approaching despair. But I had a conversation recently with a friend who has been diligently journaling for years. And when I hear her talk about all that she’s learned about herself in those pages, and how much this record of her struggles and her triumphs has meant to her as the years have passed, I start to believe that keeping a journal could be a source of life for me too, a way of deepening my awareness of how God is working within me. I’m starting to believe, and so far I haven’t been disappointed. It may not stick, of course, but for now it does feel like the kind of blessing Jesus promises us today.

So how about you? How do you need to be sustained by deepening your life of mission and devotion? How have you been sustained by these things in the past? My prayer for us today is that we ask ourselves these questions—and especially that we ask each other. That Christ can sustain us in this way with his food and his living water is such good news that it can be almost impossible for us to believe. In this third week of Lent, let’s try to help each other’s unbelief.

1 Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997): 342.

2 See Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (i–xii) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966): 178-180.

3 Anchor, 181.

4 John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005): 149.

Little Rock…Rocks

Kyle

So, I was in Little Rock this past weekend preaching at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. What a thoroughly lovely parish and a fun experience. If you ever get to Little Rock, definitely check out Whole Hog; it had been far too long since I had real barbecue. Anyway, here’s the sermon I preached on Romans 5:12-19.

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Good morning, my name is Kyle Oliver, and I bring you greetings from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where I’m a second-year divinity student. I’m here thanks to the kind generosity of this parish and especially of Mary and Dean Kumpuris, who sponsor a scholarship for seminarians in memory of their daughter Anne. I am very grateful to be here, and I’m grateful to be your guest preacher this morning, even if it is the First Sunday of Lent.

I’ve gotta tell you, though, that’s the last thing I thought I’d be saying when I first starting preparing this sermon. You see, my mind kept leaping back to an Ash Wednesday sermon I heard several years ago. It was given by a priest who may very well be the sweetest, gentlest man that I know. But you wouldn’t have guessed it sitting in the pews that day. He very starkly laid out the situation for us, starting with words like “We are all here guilty of the sin of idolatry!” And it turned out that he was just getting warmed up. It was a shocking experience, and it has stayed with me as a real landmark sermon for the beginning of Lent. “Uh oh,” I said, “I don’t think a sermon like that would be an advisable way to begin a relationship with people who had just given me money for school.”

Imagine my relief, then, when I got a look at our passage from the fifth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It speaks quite well to our Lenten situation, and it views the problem of our sinfulness in proper proportion. The message here is profoundly upbeat, very much in the spirit of our psalm’s opening line: “Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven * and whose sin is put away” (Psalm 32:1). Of course, that joy comes after several stages of reflection, examination, and confession. The first step is acknowledging that we are among this potentially happy lot. Paul makes no bones about this first point: “death spread to all because all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). And so we are right to face the reality our sins, our weakness, and even our wickedness. Good Protestants that we are, we ground this reflection in scripture. On Ash Wednesday, we take a deep breath and march through a very difficult liturgy, listening as the readings and prayers form for us a list of our transgressions against God’s holy law. We need this list of the charges, because, as Paul writes next, “sin is not reckoned when there is no law” (13). So in the season of Lent, we are first called to wake up to the reality of our situation. We take note of the full extent of the law and our failure to keep it, and this renewed awareness “reckons” to us—points out to us in no uncertain terms—our enslavement to sin in all its weight and inevitability. So that’s step one on our penitential journey: taking stock of our sinful situation.

Now it’s in the next step—perhaps even more so than in all the sinning we’ve been up to previously—that we can go seriously astray. In this next step, we decide, usually without even realizing it, that we’re going to make it all up to God. We’re going to change our ways, put things right, take responsibility for our actions, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in splendidly self-sufficient fashion. We’re good Americans, after all, and we believe in accountability. And so all our well-meaning Lenten disciplines take on a note not just of penance, a means of saying we’re sorry, but of punishment, a means of suffering for and therefore, we hope, atoning for our wrongdoing.

This, Paul says, is precisely the wrong response to our predicament. Death is indeed “exercis[ing] dominion” over us (14), but we cannot flea to freedom through our own efforts. And this is where we get to the good news, which is plentiful. First and foremost, it is the news that we do not need to earn our freedom. It has been earned for us, and it is—Paul says no less than five times in this passage—a free gift. As in really and truly free. No shipping and handling. No mandatory mail-in rebate. Our redemption is a free gift that we need not and indeed cannot earn or pay for.

What’s more, Paul says, the power of this gift is like no other force in the universe. Listen again to what he writes next: “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass [that would be Adam], much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification” (15-16). In other words, the effects of sin spread like a cancer. Adam and Eve eat the apple and—boom—we’re off and running, multiplying transgression upon transgression. But on the other hand, the free gift of God’s grace can and does wipe clean the face of the earth and usher in an era of abundant health and wholeness, of true and abiding rightness with God in Christ. As a very literal translation would render what comes next, “where sin abounded, grace overabounded” (17).

I implied earlier, I hope somewhat provocatively, that this whole “free gift” gospel that Paul preaches in all its power does not sit very well with our American sensibilities. We want so desperately to earn what we have. We want, like Mrs. DuBose in To Kill A Mockingbird, to live in and then depart this world “beholden to no one.” It’s encoded in our national ethos that there is something lazy or shameful about asking for help, about even needing help. By confronting us with our own sinfulness and mortality, Lent seeks to relieve us of this toxic but pernicious thought. This is the second stage of our Lenten reflection, and it will take many of us an awful lot of Lents to get the message—myself, I fear, quite definitely included.

I heard an interview recently with Eugene Peterson, author of the popular paraphrase of the Bible known as The Message. It sounds like Peterson can relate to our plight. When the interviewer asked him if his faith had ever been tested, he talked about a particular time in his life: “Yeah, those early years that I call the Badlands, when my competitive instincts weren’t working anymore. There were six years when nothing seemed to be working.” The interviewer asked, “How did you get over it? Did it just pass, or did you have to really work at it?” Peterson answered, “Well, you see that was the problem. I was used to working at things, and now working at things didn’t make any difference. So I found some people to talk to. I started running … so that became a way of being competitive without being competitive … We started keeping Sabbaths, my wife and I … We just kind of lived into that Sabbath world of rest … So there were a number of things like that. It wasn’t a program. It goes each step an arrival; each thing we did led to something else. After six years, I can’t tell you what happened, but here I was, I was whole. All that stuff had gotten integrated into something which was more like a joyful, obedient life rather than a striving, mastering life.” Listen to that. “Working at it” was part of the problem, he says. Learning to receive was part of the solution. And in the end, he “cant’ really tell [us] what happened … [he] was [just] whole.”

I think we would do well to treat our Lenten journeys, and especially our Lenten disciplines, with the same soft hands Peterson used to receive the wholeness God had in store for him. During this season, and throughout our lives, we can and should say that we’re sorry. We can and should renew our commitment to doing the best we can, and expect that God’s gift of grace in our lives will gradually raise that bar higher and higher. But if our Lenten discipline becomes another venue for trying to earn a free gift that has already been bestowed, then heaven make us free of it. Not to be overdramatic, but such practices are not just pointless, but dangerous. In the words of spiritual writer Martin Smith, if we can’t learn in Lent to accept our creatureliness and imperfection, then we will become a “menace” and not a “grace” to the people we encounter, and to ourselves. It will turn us into self-hating perfectionists and turn our life of faith into a piety contest. And a piety contest, it was recently pointed out to me, is no more likely than a pie-eating contest to win us the peace of God that we seek. Lent, I believe, seeks to teach us to receive that peace as pure gift, not earned by our merits but freely given through the merits of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Sermon Catch-Up

Kyle

It’s been a busy couple of weeks (see forthcoming post), so I’m just now getting around to posting my sermons from the second and third weeks of Advent. They were each shortened a bit on the cutting-room floor, but this ought to give you the gist. Indeed, the Advent 2 sermon was given from the aisle with no notes (a new experience for me, and a surprisingly positive one), so the manuscript is really just what I handed in in homiletics class and was the starting point for my oral prep.

Advent 2
Advent 3

Sermon: “How do we solve the sandwich?”

Kyle

I preached my five-minute sermon on Mark 5:21-43 today in homiletics class. I share it below in case (like at least one person I know) you enjoy reading sermons online at every possible moment. Note that it was written for and preached solely to an academic audience; I understand that the very premise of “solving the sandwich” wouldn’t fly in a congregation (“who cares!”), at least not without a lot more legwork.

My one other word of introduction is that I think I belong (at least for the time being) to the school of homiletical thought that says a sermon should be inductive, allowing the hearer to “problem solve” along with you and arrive at his or her own conclusions as you go. This is apparently the position associated with Fred Craddock and excerpted nicely here in Tom Long’s The Witness of Preaching:

Taken as a whole, then, the sermon form proposed by Craddock is an attempt to organize the flow of the sermon so that it “corresponds to the way people ordinarily experience reality and to the way life’s problem-solving activity goes on naturally and casually.” (125)*

* In this light, I couldn’t help but think about my attraction to exegesis and preaching as looking a lot like my attraction to science and engineering. See Thomas Kuhn’s “Normal Science as Puzzle Solving” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

My way of thinking about this issue is that every sermon is a “teaching sermon” in that every sermon (okay, maybe most sermons) ought to be modeling how we as Christians (indeed, as particular kinds of critically thinking Christians) engage the Biblical text.

So, without further ado…

————————————————————–

“How do we solve the sandwich?” This is the question I always find myself asking in Mark. He includes these “intercalations,” where one story is inserted into another, no less than nine times. In a gospel with so much forward momentum, why all this interruption and doubling back? What do we make of this surely intentional storyteller’s device? Let’s search for some clues about the theological importance of this particular Markan sandwich.

We could start by examining the two main characters, who are a study in contrast. Jairus is named and well-known, male, a religious and community leader (5:22), a person empowered to action. The bleeding woman is anonymous, female, a patient and a victim, almost certainly shunned by the likes of Jairus for her uncleanness (25) and probably taken advantage of by doctors legitimate and otherwise (26). They couldn’t be more different, these two, and yet notice where they end up: in turn, meek and mighty each fall at the feet of Jesus (22, 33). Perhaps the sandwich, then, serves to remind us that “God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11). Both are worthy of Jesus’s mercy.

Another approach might be to look carefully at the role of faith in each story. Despite his relative social empowerment, Jairus is the picture of passivity in the faith department. Before we know it, he’s just part of the crowd, along for the ride as the throng “presses in on” on the healer headed for his home (24). In contrast to the woman, who reaches out to Jesus on her own initiative and receives his healing power as a result of her faith in action (34), Jairus requires a little encouragement: “Do not fear,” Jesus tells him, “only believe” (36). Perhaps the sandwich encourages us to aim for the faith of the woman at its center, but reassures us that, in the end, grace abounds, and those of us with a more marginal faith will nevertheless receive the saving help we need.

Let me propose a third option. Suppose that, at least stylistically, there is no sandwich. What if Mark is constantly interrupting the narrative because that’s just the way things tended to go when Jesus was out among the people? What if the way these two stories comment on one another is to emphasize that Jesus, unlike the disciples, never suffers from tunnel vision? What would that mean for our lives of discipleship?

Well for starters, and this is the hard part, I think it suggests a motto for our lives as ministers. It’s a motto you’ll recognize if you join us for the fourth installment of our Harry Potter marathon on Saturday night. It’s the motto of Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, a hot-shot hunter of evil wizards. The motto is this: “CONSTANT VIGILANCE.” The symbol of his vigilance is his magical left eye, which can rotate a full 360-degrees and see through both walls and the back of his own head. Now, I believe Jesus’s instant awareness “that power had gone forth from him” (30) is suggestive of his own constant vigilance: a caring attention to the needs of those around him. As ministers, our own attempts at a Christ-like constancy should always be open to finding the needs of the world in places we wouldn’t expect and at times that may not be convenient us. A magical eye sure would help.

Now, this sounds like exhausting news at best, and an unachievable standard to live up to. But suppose again that there really is no sandwich, that Mark’s meandering storytelling is simply indicative of God’s alertness and persistence and compassionate concern for the needs of all God’s children. Then the good news for us and for the those we minister to is that the love of Christ cannot be contained. It is effusive, a cup overflowing, a story that cannot help but meander, an all-seeing eye that longingly but tirelessly seeks us out. And though there will be days when our finite attention narrows or our tired eyes droop closed, we can rest assured in the knowledge that God’s never will.

I’m Not A Poet…

Kyle

…but I play one in homiletics class. Here’s my poetic/midrashic take on Mark 5. Was this poem largely an excuse to write something in iambic pentameter? Yes. But I do really wonder about what it must have felt like for the disciples to be constantly thinking narrow-mindedly only to be rebuked (in words or, as in this case, silently) by a Lord who is always several steps ahead of them. Maybe I wonder about it because it’s such a familiar feeling.

A knot between my shoulder blades had inched
Its way from left to right from dawn ’til noon.
And I, for one, the last to disembark,
Had suspected we’d depart again so soon.

It seemed to be our master’s way to wear
Our welcome thin with just a single cure.
At least this time he’d cast away a legion
‘Ere we casted off again for the western shore.

But still, that afternoon of inching back
Did little to improve my state of mind.
Had I known The Way included so much rowing,
I’d suspect I’d not have left my nets behind.

So shoulder strain and pent up irritation
Came with me as I joined the evening’s throng
And jostled just behind the troubled Jairus,
Whose synagogue, en mass, followed along.

En route there was an incident of sorts.
(In hindsight, though, it wasn’t incidental.)
What’s kept that run-in fresh for me years later
Is that I could be so cold, and him, so gentle.

At first he asked the crowd which one had touched him—
I asked him how and why he hoped to know—
And then, in fear and trembling, came a woman
Who for twelve years spent and suffered, with naught to show.

“It’s not good for you to be here,” I’d have shouted,
Since the rules were clear despite her desperate cries.
But before I spoke I glanced in his direction
And glimpsed the sea of mercy in his eyes.

Preacher Man, Part 2

Kyle 2 Comments

Madison was, as always, a delight. (The Twitter feed is probably a good summary of my weekend there, in case you’re interested.) I still remember visiting Madison during my senior year of high school and saying to my girlfriend, “Man, I can’t believe we’re going to get to live here for four years.” It turned out to be seven in my case, and I still can’t believe it. In particular, Madison is an amazing city to run in, and I got my money’s worth on Friday. I also got to catch part of a former colleague’s Ph.D. defense and another’s oral examination practice; turns out I’ve forgotten a lot of nuclear engineering material already. Other than that, Wisconsin micro-brews were consumed, stories were told, and good times were had.

Also, this sermon was preached. Thanks for having me, St. Andrew’s!