Pilgrim Preaching

Rescue, Transfer, Daily Life

Proper 10 | Pentecost 7C

Colossians 1:1-14

With help from Luke 10:25-37

I almost always recommend against trying to preach two biblical texts in one sermon, especially when the two have not been chosen to coordinate with each other, which is the case with these texts even though the Revised Common Lectionary assigns them to be read the same day. Alas, a connection between Col. 1:13-14 and the parable of the Good Samaritan occurred to me, and after I thought of it, I couldn't refrain from working with it. So here I break one of my own rules. —Mary

"Where are we now in life?"

In his book, At a Journal Workshop, Jungian therapist Ira Progoff directs readers to begin to bring their lives into focus by asking, "Where am I now in life?"¹ He notes that "now" will mean different things to different people.

"For one person this present period in his life may reach back three years since he had a car accident and was hospitalized. Because of the changes it brought about, the period of time since that event is the Now in which he is living. For another person this present period may be merely a few weeks since he met a new friend, moved to a different city, began a new job, or underwent some other significant change in his circumstances. Since that time his life has borne the imprint of that event, and it, therefore, is the definitive factor in his present period" (65).

Rescue & Transfer

The sentence that ends the scripture reading from Colossians 1 can be seen as the way the apostle Paul or someone writing in his name attempts to bring the lives of the Colossians into focus. Where are they now in life? The last verses of the reading offer an answer: "God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1:13-14). "Now" for the Colossians began with rescue and transfer.

That man who fell among thieves could tell his story that way too: rescue and transfer. "I was traveling, and well... I don't remember much; they took everything; I must have passed out. I woke up in the ditch; the pain—I was out again; then I wasn't in the ditch anymore. Someone had brought me to an inn." Using theological language to imagine that same movement from ditch to inn, the letter to the Colossians says God "has rescued us from the power of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son."

Rescue and transfer stories are often quite dramatic. Colossians uses the language of power, and it fits: something had hold of us, and then it didn't anymore. Imagine the rage and shame that take hold after a company or a person dumps you. Everyone is sympathetic at first. Everyone expects you to need time. And then, after a while your friends find gentle ways to tell you it is time to move on. Still, you seem to be owned by the anger. This sort of thing can go on for years. When finding a new "now" is easy, we do not need rescue because we can transfer ourselves to a new time or place in our lives. If the man who fell among thieves had not been really hurt, he could have found his own way out of the ditch.

In contrast to "shaking it off," rescue is waking up in bed, in an inn, when the last thing you remember is wondering if you would die in the ditch. Colossians talks about that experience. You come to a new place. From there you see that as bad as the old place was, it is not any longer where you live; it is your past. That realization itself can be incredibly freeing. In fact, some people define the Christian life in terms of this kind of freedom. "I once was lost but now am found," the hymn says, "was blind, but now I see."²

In the text from Colossians, however, the transfer is not the end of the story; it is the beginning. The transfer marks the boundary between past and present. So what about the present? The present features intercession.

Now What?

The prayer here at the beginning of Colossians confirms that the Christian life is not just one dramatic rescue experience after another. Sometimes the Christian life is just daily life, and we need daily help for that. Just as the man who fell among thieves continued to need attention after arriving at the inn, so Christians on the other side of a great rescue need "daily bread." And just as the Samaritan not only paid for the wounded man's first night in the inn but also promised to continue to provide or his healing, so God continues to provide for God's people on the other side of the dramatic transfer from one realm to another.

Paul prays that the Colossians' daily life may be "worthy of the Lord" (Colossians 1:10). The "-ing" words in the New English Translation summarize what such a life looks like. As God answers the prayer, those to whom the letter is written will be:

• "bearing fruit in every good deed,
• growing in the knowledge of God,
• being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for the display of all patience and steadfastness,
• joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the saints' inheritance in the light" (Colossians 1:10b-12, NET).

Over and over again, Colossians will blur the boundary between Christ and members of the church. That kind of blurring is happening here. This prayer is not a "to do" list for individual Christians or congregations. Instead, it is a prayer that God will shape our daily life—at home, at work, at play, at church—so that it will be characterized by those things that characterized the life of Christ: good works on behalf of others, interest in the character of God, power from God (love) that "endures all things" (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:7), and enough awareness of what we've been given that we offer thanksgiving and experience joy.

What would it be like to pray this prayer for your congregation? Is one of the petitions currently more important for the "now" in which you all find yourselves? How might the people in your congregation—or the group of you together—be different as the prayer is answered? A sermon could spend time with questions like these. In whatever way it is proclaimed, this prayer testifies to the fact that on the other side of rescue, even something as mundane as "where we are now in life," can bear witness to the risen life of Jesus Christ.

¹Ira Progoff, At a Journal Workshop (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1975), 65. BACK TO POST

²John Newton, "Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound," in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 779. BACK TO POST

Colossians, Paul

Preaching Paul's Gospel: Initial Hunches and Questions

Many readers of Pilgrim Preaching know that I'm on a year long sabbatical from my teaching post in New Testament at Luther Seminary. My writing project is a book on preaching from Paul's letters. Preaching from the letters is risky: we can lapse into scolding our congregations ("I am Paul; you are the boastful, bigoted, fractured Corinthians"). We can wield a Pauline vice list like a blunt instrument, or present the fruits of the Spirit as a To Do list. Or we can turn everything Paul said into something it isn't: cheap grace.

No wonder preachers in lectionary-based worship choose the gospel reading upwards of 75% of the time! Even so, I want to see if together we can't do a better job of preaching from Paul.

Narrative sermons from Pauline texts?

I started this project thinking that the problem with epistles preaching was that preachers did not use what we know about narrative when we preach Paul. We know that stories draw people in. A story can inspire empathy for another's plight and spark the imagination for something better, both for the other and ourselves. Why not explore preaching Pauline texts with narrative sermon forms? All of Paul's churches had stories to tell; the letters have back stories. Moreover, they participate in the story Paul and his hearers are writing together as they try to live in Christ. I thought my book would document those Pauline stories and encourage narrative preaching from epistles texts.

Some of that original inspiration may still find its way into my work, but the bloom is rather off the rose of "narrative" for me at the moment. Some of it has to do with listening to a significant number of unintelligible narrative sermons in the not-too-distant past. Some of it has to do with not wanting to abandon the letter form and its non-narrative elements before I've explored more carefully how they might come to life in preaching. Some of it just seems beside the point: let's explore the texts before we decide that we should make them something they're not.

The plan is still to work letter by letter through all thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament. The Revised Common Lectionary includes something like 136 distinct texts from Paul's letters. Many of them are assigned in a lectio continua fashion, which means that the lectionary developers chose to stick with a particular letter through several non-festival Sundays. This arrangement of the lectionary is a lucky break for those who might want to sustain engagement with a particular letter through a number of Sunday sermons. If I end up writing what I'm planning, my book will offer initial remarks on each letter, then comment minimally (about 1000 words) on each of the texts from that letter that appear in the lectionary. In either an introduction or a conclusion, I'll add more general observations about themes that emerged during a year of reading Paul toward the task of preaching.

Emerging Themes

Already some themes seem to be occurring in my writing. Already, too, some questions are taking shape that I believe will accompany the work throughout the year. My next posts here will explore these themes and questions in more depth. Here is the list of topics I have so far. I'd be grateful for any you would like to add in the comments here.

We're in this together.

Jesus and us, Jews and gentiles, insiders and outsiders, you and me, Paul and those to whom he writes, strong and weak: the list of possible opposing groups who, according to Paul, are really not opposed seems to go on and on in his letters.

The cross.

Some of the rap on Paul is that he did not know or care as much as he should have about the decades of Jesus' life and the years of his ministry before Good Friday. That criticism is not entirely without merit. I want to look at how the cross defines Paul's understanding of Christ and his work. I also keep seeing the cross in Paul's understanding of what constitutes life "in Christ." I think this will matter for how we preach Paul—just a guess.

Questions

How is the church's story related to Israel's story?

All of my graduate training was focused on exploring how Paul used Israel's scripture, and how he connected the story of Jesus with the story of God's choice of Abraham and his family as those through whom the whole would would be blessed. I wonder, will this theme of continuity between the testaments emerge as I read through the letters, and if it does, what will be its implications for preaching?

How is Paul's vision for the church related to the Empire?

For the last 15 or 20 years, it has been fashionable in my field to read various parts of the New Testament as offering subtle (or not-so-subtle) critiques of Roman imperial power and then to point out how the critique logically extends to American imperialism, or globalization, or some other 21st century principality or power. I am skeptical about the claims (they fit so tidily into our current context and are often articulated by rather privileged "tenured radicals"), but I am also curious with respect to how these themes may be discerned in Paul. I wonder whether the critique of imperialism is present in Paul. Is it represented differently in different letters? How does it relate to other themes present in his theology? I'm curious: What will we find in the letters and, embedded as many of us are in our own Empire, how will we preach what we find?

What of justice and justification?

During my senior year of seminary, I attended a conference on "justice and justification." I do not remember much about the papers presented, but the title has always stuck with me. Almost no one I know can hold these two ideas in their mind at the same time. Can Paul? And if he can, how does he do it, and does his way of doing it give us anything to go on if we want to try to hold such things together in sermons, or in the common life of a congregation and a neighborhood?

Paul

A Love Song for the Vineyard

Proper 15 | Pentecost 12C
Proper 22 | Pentecost 21A

Isaiah 5:1-7

"It’s a love song I’d sing,
And salvation I’d bring
To my people, beloved and strong;
But, can’t do what I would,
For I made them for good,
And somehow they got it all wrong.

Home, home, please come home,
There’s death where you’ve chosen to roam.
I stand and I knock. Can’t you hear the dread clock
Ticking tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock?"

Sometimes a sermon is both so textual and so memorable that you can never again read the Bible passage without thinking of that particular appropriation of the text. Isaiah 5:1-7 and Fred Gaiser's "Love Song for the Vineyard" offer an example of this phenomenon from my own listening life. I came to chapel a bit late that day, walked in, and wondered, "What on earth is going on?" Watch the video (requires RealPlayer) or sing the typescript. The tune is "Home on the Range."

One of the very best things about living and working where I do is regular access to Fred Gaiser's preaching. Check out other Gaiser sermons and hymns here.

Fearlessness Ahead of Time

Proper 14 | Pentecost 11C
Luke 12:32-40

I read through the gospel of Luke yesterday. I recommend this sort of thing when one is preparing to preach, and here in the year of Luke, it had been a while since I made my way in one fell swoop from Zechariah's prayer in the temple to the disciples' praise there 24 chapters later.

A lot happens between the two temple scenes. Two things stood out.

The Reality of Healing

First, I was struck by how much of the way we get to know Jesus in this gospel is through his healing of people. After Jesus comes on the scene as an adult, he talks a little but does a lot. Jesus performs wonder after wonder, usually to the astonishment of many and for the rather inefficient number of one broken person at a time. The most compelling impression offered by the first half of Luke is that people walk away from encounters with Jesus whole.

Exhortations to Fearlessness

Secondly, maybe because one of Jesus' exhortations from this week's gospel ("Have no fear, little flock") was in my mind when I started reading, I was equally struck by how many times fear is mentioned in Luke. Read straight through the gospel, and eight times in the first twelve chapters, you'll hear either an angel or Jesus say, "Do not be afraid." The exhortation comes as something good is about to happen at a time when "good" is not by any means the obvious conclusion from the evidence at hand.

• An angel appears: good news or bad?
• A stranger works a miracle to fill your boat with fish: are you drawn to him or scared out of your wits?
• You learn that even the hairs of your head are numbered: is that level of intimacy between you and God a good thing or a bad one?  

In response to all of these happenings and more, we hear, "Do not be afraid."

This week's "Do not be afraid," is in the context of two sources of anxiety: (1) things staying the same, and (2) things changing.

Fearlessness When Things Stay the Same

On one side of the exhortation is a description of the daily grind: striving to make ends meet. What will you wear? What will you eat? What will you drink? At a time when many of the people we preach to are experiencing economic hardship, some of us preachers are tempted to back off from Jesus' blanket exhortation, "Do not worry." We ask ourselves, "Wouldn't that feel like a slap in the face to people facing foreclosure, or 99+ weeks of unemployment, or just an oh-so-sadly-wiped-out home equity line of credit?" We want to affirm our parishioners' experience, to demonstrate that we are in touch with their real lives, and so we say, "It is natural to be worried in times like these; it means we are paying attention. Here Jesus simply warns us against letting worry guide our lives," or some other silly compromise that offers hearers nothing better than another self-improvement task: "Try to worry less."

Jesus preached to subsistence farmers and fishermen, day laborers, Jewish religious leaders, and a few men and women of economic means. To all of them, he said, "People who do not know Yahweh as their God [that is, 'the gentiles' or 'the nations' of v. 30] strive after stuff and worry about it all the time. You people know better. You know that your God knows the material stuff you need and is eager to provide it: not only daily bread but also a reign—a 'kingdom', as it were—where people are whole."

Worry enthralls us so that quite apart from what we have or do not have, we miss all of that news about God and live as if it were not true. So Jesus says to this followers, as he had said to Peter after that scary big catch of fish, and even as he said to Jairus in the moment that man heard of his little daughter's death, Do not be afraid. "Do not be afraid little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32).

Fearlessness When Things Change

"You must be ready," Jesus says in the same text, "For the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour" (Luke 12:40). How odd: readiness exists in inverse proportion to worry. We might expect it the other way around: "Worry, so that you are ready"; but this is not what we get. One of Hank Shore's favorite Onion news items is a photo captioned, "Suicide bomber reacts poorly to surprise birthday party." The caption gets at the hazards of pairing worry with readiness and then adding surprise to the mix.

There are two surprises in the story Jesus tells about servants waiting for their master. First, the master is delayed. The delay may not be entirely unexpected. After all, you only leave a party early if it is a total dud, so the master's delay is not entirely bad news. It means he will have lots of good stories to tell when he gets back. The second surprise is that the master serves. Luke 12:37: "Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them."

Imagine the scene:

The night wears on. Eventually, the first streaks of light begin to signal the end of the night, and then somebody inside the house hears something. One servant after another elbows one sleepy co-worker after another in the ribs, until by the time the door is opened to that party animal of a master, all of us servants are on our feet, moderately bright-eyed, and ready to sit the master down over a hot cup of coffee to listen to the details on the wedding and the food and the dancing and the party that lasted most of the night.

But instead of things working out that way, the master says, "I feel like cooking. Is anybody hungry?" And the next thing you know, the master is beating eggs and rummaging around for the waffle iron and pouring orange juice into a nice pitcher. "No, no," he says to us. "You sit still. This morning, I'll serve you."

We had waited up, expecting to show our master the hospitality that was his due on his arrival home from the party. Instead, he has brought the party home with him. A wedding feast has spilled over into a late-night, early-morning breakfast with the master serving and the servants being waited upon. It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom, he had said. We need not have napped in our work clothes. We should have dozed in party clothes because when the master arrives, he brings a celebration with him.

This future will arrive as surprisingly as a thief in the night, but notice this: what is coming is not a thief in the night; it is a party in the morning, a party where we who aspire to be servants of the Lord will be served, treated as guests of honor.

With this glimpse into the future, Jesus frees us for fearlessness not just when things stay the same, day after day, year after year, but also when things (abruptly, surprisingly) change. Ahead of such a change, Jesus says, "Just FYI, you're on the lookout for a party here, people." It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

When you know that, all sorts of things are possible that were not before, among them selling possessions and giving alms. Also you might lengthen the fuse on those explosives you have wrapped around your waist all the time. For me, the question of this text this week is, What could you (or y'all) do if you weren't afraid? And without that fear, what that is broken in you (or y'all) might be shown to have been healed?