Pilgrim Preaching

Passion Sunday

Luke's Triumphal (?) Entry

Luke 19:28-40

I am probably a redaction critic at heart, by which I mean that I have the most fun with the scriptures when I am looking at how one author has changed (or edited, or if you like, redacted) another's work. Take, for instance, what we call "the triumphal entry" into Jerusalem. The texts are Matt 21:1-9, Mark 1:-10, Luke 19:28-40 and John 12:12-19. It's pericope #269 if you have an Aland synopsis; if you want to make your own synopsis of the gospels on this or another text, check out The Five Gospel Parallels. With the help of Preaching through the Christian Year C (PCY), here's a short list of things that set Luke's version of the story apart from the way most of us are used to thinking of the story.

1. We have heard Jerusalem mentioned a few times in Luke, most often in connection with Jesus having "set his face" to go there. Now he's there. After his entry into the city, he will weep over it (Luke 19:41ff). This scene, #270 in your synopsis, is unique to Luke.
2. There are no "Hosannas" and no one is trimming palm branches and laying them in Jesus' path. The PCY authors comment, "Because those [displays] belonged commonly to nationalistic demonstration and parades, perhaps Luke wants this event to carry no such implication" (166). In any case, it is a quieter scene than the one I have running through my mind on Palm Sunday.
3. The disciples are the main audience for Jesus' entry, rather than a festival crowd of adoring fans. Matthew and Mark talk about a large crowd in the city for Passover watching this "triumphal entry." John speaks of a crowd, too, who have gathered to see the one who raised Lazarus from the dead. By contrast, Luke says Jesus is received by his disciples (see esp. Luke 19:35-37). This "is not the group, says Luke, that later called for Jesus' crucifixion. To be sure, Jesus' followers did not understand him or the nature of his messiahship, but neither are they persons who sing praise and scream death within the same week" (PCY, 166). (Hmm... there goes at least one sermon I've preached a time or two, not to mention some memorable hymn texts.)
4. Luke makes no reference in this scene to David or Davidic images of the messiah. Maybe this is Luke's intentional soft-pedaling of the political implications of Jesus' ministry ("Really, we're not a threat to the status quo!"), maybe not. Either way, if we think of the triumphal entry and think, "The people turned on Jesus because they wanted a political messiah king and he wasn't one," we have to look somewhere else besides Luke's account of things to conclude that is what people wanted.

Preaching and Redaction Criticism

So, this is interesting stuff. Will it preach? If so, how?

I hesitate in any sermon to say things like, "Luke's Jesus says _____." Or "In Luke, there are no palm branches." The first makes it sound like there are/were four (at least) Jesuses, as if each evangelist had his own personal pet named Jesus. Just "Jesus says _____" is enough. As for pointing out differences in the gospel accounts within a sermon, I have heard this done well a few times, but I try not to make a habit of it. Why? (1) It can make Bible reading into a parlor game. We're playing "Where's Waldo?" by another name ("Where are the palm branches?"). (2) It emphasizes the gospel writers at the expense of their message; we start caring more about Luke than about Jesus and what happened in the text.

So the short answer is, "No, this stuff won't preach," or "Preaching this stuff will make you sound bookish, out of touch and concerned about something besides the 'one thing needful'." However, read on.

I would not try to build a sermon around the insights provided by our redaction critical dive into Luke 19, but I would use them to get the tone of the day right. By "right" I mean that when the text is from Luke's gospel, I would try to have the sermon and service feel subdued yet hopeful, rather than "triumphal" and characterized by "Cameron craziness." (Cameron is the name of Duke's basketball arena.) I would not announce my findings or intentions to people ("Welcome to worship. Today our service will be subdued yet hopeful."). I would just try to craft something like that, and I would know to craft something like that because I had done a little redaction criticism as I studied the Gospel text.

Ain't biblical studies grand?

The Cross and the World

Theology of the Cross

I've not yet written a review of Mel Gibson's movie. I'm not sure I will now. Yet I have been thinking of what I might say differently about the sacrifice of Christ and its meaning for us today. I recently got some help in this effort from two articles in The Lutheran. Douglas John Hall has written on the theology of the cross in "The 'difference' of Luther and the ambivalence of life," and "Beyond the cross of Calvary."

The second piece is particularly helpful as we focus this week and next on what it means to proclaim Christ and him crucified. Is it just that Jesus died so I don't have to (Mel's apparent theology of the cross)? I don't reject a substitutionary atonement (which is not to say that I understand it exactly, either), but I think the cross's implications are much broader than "Jesus paid the price." Hall describes a theology of the cross as:

• A theology of faith, not sight.
• A theology of hope, not finality or consummation.
• A theology of love, not power.

In a short article, he shows how each of these has direct implications for North Americans and their congregations today. Faith (not sight) leads to a "modest theology" that knows, if it sees "something ultimate, absolute, it is only 'through a glass darkly' (1 Corinthians 13:12)" (15). This stance makes it harder to kill people who don't see what we see, or even to regard them as lost in darkness.

Hall explains what he means by "hope, not finality or consummation," by saying "God, who brought Jesus from the dead, is at work in the world to fulfill the promise of creation, appearances to the contrary." Such a theology means that we do not have to "turn away from all seemingly hopeless things that occur" in order to sustain our hope" (17). We can admit how messed up things are and roll up our sleeves, rather than having to escape from harsh reality by means of spiritualism or materialism, or by denying that anything is "still wrong" with the world since the victory has been won in Christ.

When he talks about "love not power," Hall addresses everything from wanting to do evangelism as a numbers game to Christian groups who, in the search for power in the current system of things, "eagerly lend their support to a government that no longer pretends to hide but openly flaunts it imperial ambitions" (18). The alternative is suffering love, love that hears the natural order's groaning in travail (Romans 8:22) and responds.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

5 Lent C (2004)
John 12:1-8

Richard Burridge (Four Gospels, One Jesus? [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994]) and other commentators talk about the Markan sandwich, "where one story provides the 'filling' between two pieces of 'bread'" (39).  Looking at this week's gospel, I notice a Johannine sandwich.

Look at what happens just before the dinner-and-anointing scene: the authorities plot to kill Jesus. And after: the same authorities plot to kill Lazarus. There is danger on every side now, so that "Jesus no longer walked openly" (11:54). There is danger, too, within the inner circle, as we find out from the parenthetical comment about Judas in 12:5.

In the context of all this plotting and imminent betrayal, Mary, Martha and Lazarus invite Jesus and his friends to dinner. In the parable of the prodigal son, the father said to his elder son, "We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found" (Luke 15:32). Here is another brother, back from the dead. This time, the brother and his sisters are celebrating.

But who would sandwich a party between so much that is going so wrong? How can you celebrate in the midst of all that danger? The first answer that pops into the minds of pop psychologists is "denial." "They just don't get it," we might say. "They are fooling themselves; they are in denial." I think that's the wrong answer. It is not denial that fuels the celebration. Jesus is clear on the fate that awaits him (cf. John 12:8). He talks about his burial and he says that Mary understands that he is about to die. Jesus is not in denial about the danger. He just doesn't fear it.

"God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear..." (1 John 4:16b-18a) The author of 1 John is talking here about not fearing punishment from God because God abides in us and loves us. Yet the love of God does even more than just allay our fear of a righteous God. It banishes fear of other threats, whether they come from enemies like cancer, or terrorists, or (as in the case of Jesus) your own government.

In a sermon preached at Duke Divinity School chapel in 1996 or so, homiletics professor Richard Lischer told this story.

“   ”   “   ”

"Our friend had already done two full courses of chemotherapy and through it all had somehow managed to complete a doctoral dissertation at U. Va. She had done it. To celebrate she and her husband rented a VFW hall, hired a band, and threw one of the biggest parties I've ever seen for the whole church and half the community. Two days before graduation her doctors confirmed that the cancer was back. The experimental treatments would begin the day after graduation. Only a few of us knew it, and my guess is we would have limped through the ceremony and canceled the party. "But she had the party. And I tell you I have never heard the gospel of God's Yes preached more powerfully than I saw it danced on the floor of the VFW. An outsider would have seen only the vintage 1960s, arthritic gyrations that we were all doing, but this was a woman of faith and she danced her Yes in the grip of the No. And that's the way we do it. The best celebrating is done in the face of the enemy, the best dancing on the devil's dance floor. "You can't always separate the Yes from the No but at least one person has done it definitively. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, we trust that there is this distinction, and that it holds true for us." Richard Lischer, sermon on 2 Cor. 1:15-22, privately printed.

Martha who served, Lazarus who came out of the tomb and then to dinner when called, Mary who spent a year's salary on the best party favor ever, Jesus who loved them all, along with loving the rest of us—this is what they know: The best dancing is done on the devil's dance floor.  Perfect love casts out fear.  It does so by offering a security that all the carefulness in the world cannot match.

Texts for 5 Lent C

I am going to be out of town and away from a computer for more than three days starting tomorrow morning. I'll be back Wednesday night, and I'm preaching Sunday, so I will definitely be doing some thinking about the texts. I'll post on Thursday, but if you want to give me any ideas before then, comment here. Thanks in advance!

Texts for Sunday, March 28
Isaiah 43:16-21
Ps. 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

Wherever You Are

Luke 5:1-3, 11b-32.

In 1993, sociologist of religion Marsha G. Witten published All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism. She wanted to know how American Protestantism was responding to the increasingly privatized, pluralistic and rationalistic society of the 1980s, and she investigated this question by soliciting and analyzing sermons from Southern Baptists and Presbyterians preached between 1986 and 1988. The text on which she asked for sermons was the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Some reviewers of Witten's work—as well was Witten herself—wonder whether the text choice itself colored her findings. This is a story of unconditional forgiveness, after all. Even so, Witten reports finding a "daddy" God, a blunting of the scandal of sin, and an individualized experience of forgiveness. In her conclusion, she asks these questions:

1. "What … of the immensely potent Protestant doctrine of grace, which appears eviscerated in much of the speech as speakers fail to acknowledge notions of human depravity and separation from a transcendent God?
2. "What of the ability of religious speech to deal with concerns of theodicy, if it declines to contend with issues of human suffering and evil?
3. "What of the the possibilities for creating and sustaining stable, binding communities of faith, if incentives to congregation are based purely on mutable perceptions of self-interest?

"If it loses these features and capacities, I think, Protestantism loses it essential identity" (All Is Forgiven, 140).

Borrowing from Witten's conclusions, I am fashioning a challenge for those who are thinking of preaching on Luke 15 this Sunday. Are there elements in this text—or elsewhere in our tradition—that make it possible to be faithful to Jesus' story here and still (1) take sin and its relationship-breaking, pain-inflicting consequences seriously and (2) proclaim that forgiveness is never an isolated, individual experience, but instead is precisely the only reality that eliminates isolation and makes true community possible?

Here's a start.

When we were tired of being "It" in Hide and Seek and having no luck finding the hidden ones, we would yell, "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" I thought of this phrase in connection with the way the father of the parable responds to both of his sons. Maybe the goal of the father's love is not that the younger son will see the error of his ways and find his way home (that's important, but not the goal here), or that the father will see him in the distance and run to him in joy (important too, but the story is not over yet). Instead, the climax of the story is something not in the story yet at all: the climax of the story is the community that will be formed when the two brothers are together again. Anything less than this is just same old, same old: little brother, isolated from big brother, thoughtlessly partying while big brother feels isolated by his own sense of responsibility and all the work that needs to be done. This outcome to the story is the theological equivalent of little bro saying, "I like to sin. God likes to forgive. What could be better?" which is (you heard it here first) not the gospel.

God hates sin so much not because God is a peevish scorekeeper, but because sin harms those that God loves: namely, you and your neighbor. It is testimony to just how devastating little brother's actions have been that the father needs to find the older son and try to convince him that reconciliation does not mean, "No harm, no foul" and that the old, unfair relationship between the brothers is not the only possible future for the two. Little bro's sin started a long time before he spent all that money in "dissolute living." He made a hash of his relationship with his brother, and he let his father know he couldn't wait for the old man to kick before he got his mitts on the inheritance.

What makes reconciliation between brothers possible? The father says to the older son, "This brother of yours was dead and has come to life" (Luke 15:32). The past is not the only factor shaping the future of the two brothers. That could be a definition of forgiveness: the past does not have all the power in this relationship. If the past were defining things, little brother would still be dead to his family and maybe not so far from really dead from starvation or HIV or the violence that so often accompanies life in the fast lane.  The father says to the older son, "We have a different present and future than anything in the past has led us to expect, one in which we are all together without the old patterns of harm inflicted and endured over and over. This is the reason for the party."

Repent or Perish

3 Lent C (2004)
Luke 13:1-9

Preaching Through the Christian Year is exceptionally good on this week's gospel reading. I can't present the whole 900 words of the piece here since it's copyrighted, but if you have the book, take a look at pp. 152-53. If you don't have the book, read on. I'll steal most of my points here from the piece!

Urgency

Those who were killed and then whose bodies were desecrated by Pilate, as well as those on whom the tower fell, are not as much examples of divine retribution from which to derive comfort ("Whew! At least I know I'm not sinful enough for something like that to happen to me.") as they are lessons on how all of us are living on borrowed time. From Jesus: "Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did" (Luke 13:3).

By the way, I haven't read this anywhere, but it occurs to me that 13:10-17 is also connected to the urgency spoken of in 13:1-9. Jesus heals on the Sabbath for the same reason that you give a donkey water on the sabbath: there isn't time to wait!

Repentance

Preaching Through the Christian Year calls repentance, "a turning from sin and a reformation of action and attitude" (152). Lutherans love to talk about reformation, but when we do we are usually talking about someone or something else, a legalistic medieval Catholicism, or an old-fashioned traditional style of music in worship. Is there anything closer to home that needs reformation in your life, or the lives of people you (if you are a preacher) will be preaching to?

In October of 2002, OT Professor Fred Gaiser preached a sermon at Luther Seminary chapel on Isaiah 5 (sermon video here). The sermon's refrain was, "Come home. Come home. There's death where you've chosen to roam." Retribution is out as a way of explaining (1) natural disaster like the tower falling, or (2) man's inhumanity to man, as evidenced by Pilate. But that does not mean repentance is out too!

Why Them? Why Us? Why Me?

Jesus rejects retribution and yet calls for repentance. The fact that some of us (I speak for myself here) find our brains taxed when we try to hold these two thoughts together may indicate just how tied into retribution we still are. "If punishment is not directly related to sin, then—explain it to me again—why should I repent?" Luke might say simply, "It is necessary." The authors of Preaching Through the Christian Year engage the question this way:

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The question, Why this to these particular people? is as old as the human race. The Book of Job, Psalm 37, and Psalm 73 ask the question. The disciples asked Jesus, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" The question assumed that there was a direct correlation between sin and suffering. To those disciples (John 9:3) and in today's lection Jesus denied that direct correlation. But still the idea persists: illness, poverty, disease, loneliness, and death are the punishment for sins known or unknown. For Christians, the fatal blow to the idea that suffering and death are the lot of the guilty came at Golgotha. The One without sin suffered and died on the cross; some present took that as proof that he was not the Son of God (Matt. 27:39-43). But Jesus' disciples are forever freed from the ancient notion that prosperity and good health are evidence of divine favor, whereas poverty and suffering are clear sings of divine wrath…. Jesus rejects such attempts at calculation, not simply because they are futile, but because they direct attention from the primary issue—the obligation of every person to live in penitence and trust before God without linking one's loyalty to God to life's sorrows or joys. All are to repent or perish. Source: Fred Craddock, et al., Preaching Through the Christian Year C (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 152-3.

Wide Open Are Your Arms

2 Lent C
Luke 13:31-35

A thought experiment: read through the gospel text substituting the name of your town for "Jerusalem" wherever it appears. (You could try "Washington" too, but the US government feels so distant from most of us that it might not have the desired effect.) Does anything about that reading ring true?

In her commentary on Luke, Sharon Ringe writes, "When God's gracious will is thwarted by human refusal to accept it, Jesus' proclamation turns into lament" (192). True. We can see that lament in the story we'll be tracing throughout Lent. Humans reject things like "casting out demons and performing cures" (Luke 13:32) as well as the rest of what Jesus has to do and say. And we misread the story if it only functions to blame someone else for that rejection ("those stubborn, corrupt Jewish leaders" or "that fox, Herod and all establishment power like him" or "those mindless crowds, fueled solely by emotion, who could say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord' one day and 'Crucify him!' the next").

This is one time when we are not hearing the story correctly if we hear in it only someone else's problem. Biblical scholars usually want us all to remember that the scriptures are not just God's word to us, but to all people across centuries. "It's not always about you" is a good reminder for all sorts of things in our lives, Bible-reading included. Yet so-called critical distance with this text creates the problem of blaming someone else for the rejection of God's own servant, Jesus. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, "Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces" (here's the whole poem). If this is true, then perhaps those ten thousand Christs are traveling to ten thousand Jerusalems and hoping to gather their inhabitants the way a hen gathers her chicks.

It might not work to preach this, of course. (I'm reminded of former colleague Steve Ramp's comment that sometimes you just have to say about a sermon idea, "That dog won't hunt.") The twin dangers of "prophetic preaching" are that (1) the preacher looks like a self-righteous know-it-all and (2) the hearers are not inspired to repentance but just to annoyance, or to a vague feeling of guilt that lasts only long enough to spoil an otherwise perfectly good brunch. Still, I like the idea of working on the question, "Where/how is Jesus trying to gather us closer to him, and where/how are we scurrying out from under those wings and off to danger?" Borrowing some guiding words from the work of Concordia Seminary Homiletics Professor Richard Caemmerer, a sermon like this might make these points:

Goal: to find rest under those wings.
Malady: whatever keeps us scurrying about.
Means: Christ's open arms, widening to gather chicks rather than closing in protect himself. (Maybe Luke's preoccupation with Jerusalem in the gospel and Acts is a way of saying that Jesus is not willing to take "No" for an answer on this gathering thing.)

By the way, the connection between a hen's open wings and the open arms posture of crucifixion is made in a Christian Century piece by Barbara Brown Taylor. Probably six years ago now, she wrote about how a hen's heart and other vital organs are completely exposed to the fox when her wings are open. This is the posture Jesus takes figuratively, even as he is warned about "that fox," Herod. He will eventually take such a posture literally, arms wide open to gather all people to himself.

Glory, Kingdom, Power

First Sunday of Lent
Luke 4:1-13

I saw Mel Gibson's movie this week. Today's text is an example of why I like the book so much better than any movie I have seen about its subject. First of all, in the book, the devil is not some skinny boy-toy with a black hood and worms going up his nose. (What the heck was that?) But I'll write about the movie elsewhere.

Here's a character study of the devil, courtesy of Luke's temptation account:

The Devil & His Temptations

1. He arrives when Jesus is hungry, with an idea for how to get food. If this were all we knew about the devil, we could imagine him as anyone's mother or grandmother. "Look, you gotta eat." Or, more diabolically, those people who keep trying to convince us that we need three-course meals at Applebee's, or something from the late night menu at Wendy's. Put more into yourself, more fatty foods, more purchases, more horsepower, more.

2. In Jesus Christ Superstar, Simon the Zealot shares this advice with Jesus as they both look over the crowd Jesus has gathered.

There must be over fifty thousand
Screaming love and more for you.
And everyone of fifty thousand
Would do whatever you asked them to.
Keep them yelling their devotion,
But add a touch of hate at Rome.
You will rise to a greater power.
We will win ourselves a home.
You'll get the power and the glory
For ever and ever and ever
You'll get the power and the glory
For ever and ever and ever
You'll get the power and the glory
For ever and ever and ever
You'll get the power and the glory
For ever and ever and ever
Forever Amen! Amen! Amen!

"Add a touch of hate at Rome. You will rise to a greater power. We will win ourselves a home." The devil makes a similar pitch to Jesus. All the kingdoms of the world are his; he can give them to whomever he chooses. He offers a name, a place, enough power that no one can hurt you again, whether you are a peasant in an occupied state, or a kid ridiculed at school, or someone the boss calls stupid. The devil knows kingdom, power, glory.

Or does he? Hearing Simon's advice, Jesus replies,

Neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand,
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews,
Nor Judas, nor the twelve
Nor the priests, nor the scribes,
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself
Understand what power is,
Understand what glory is,
Understand at all,
Understand at all.
If you knew all that I knew, my poor Jerusalem,
You'd see the truth, but you close your eyes.
But you close your eyes.
While you live, your troubles are many, poor Jerusalem.
To conquer death, you only have to die.
You only have to die.

3. Like all others who are preoccupied with God, the devil can quote scripture to his purpose. Neither acquisition, nor power, nor even piety can provide a safe haven from the evil one. In this text, the devil quotes what has become a favorite funeral hymn (though for some reason, not a favorite of mine). "God can bail you out of anything," the devil tells Jesus. Jesus does not dispute this, but merely says, "Just because God can bail me out of anything, that doesn't mean I should make it necessary," or words to that effect.

From the Devil to Jesus

1. Jesus loves to eat. He especially loves to eat in Luke's gospel, if the number of table scenes is any indication. But "life is more than food and the body more than clothing" (Luke 2:23). Refusing the first temptation is a way that Jesus says, "My life will point to the truth of the "more" that life is than bread alone.

2. Kingdom, power, glory: Whose are these? What do they look like? When Jesus moves from the temptation to his ministry beyond the wilderness, what will he teach about these?

• Kingdom | That "it is among you" (Luke 17:21) and that "it is God's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32).
• Power | That the "power from on high" (Luke 24:49) that clothes Jesus' little band of disciples will give them the courage not to take up arms against Rome, but to be witnesses of Jesus' kingdom, power and glory "to the ends of the earth."
• Glory | That there is more glory in a day lily than in Solomon or any of the rest of us all dolled up (cf. Luke 12:27).

3. As much as Jesus loves to eat, he also loves to pray, especially in Luke's gospel. Piety is not the problem. Jesus will give his disciples parables about prayer. He will teach them the Lord's prayer. He will ask them to stay away and pray. Nonetheless, he will not cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple and hope for the best. Quoting scripture and praying is not a complicated way of ringing for a cosmic bellhop. It is a way of being in a relationship with One whom we do not need to "put to the test."