An Avalanche of Fire

SUMMER IS ALMOST HERE, and churches ... slow ... down. Folks are planning for vacation. Staff are away. Pastors are away. It’s as if we take our status as middle-class bourgeoisie more seriously than our baptismal vows.

By contrast, in the summer the biblical texts pick up—in intensity, directness, drive. Pentecost falls on us like an avalanche of fire, teaching us languages we don’t know, names, places, people. The old joke is that war is God’s way of teaching geography to Americans. No, in the church, that would be Pentecost. The descent of the Holy Spirit empowers people to preach who most say shouldn’t (in our texts that includes Arabic-speakers, women, unnamed prophets), and confounds those of us who think we “should.” Then Trinity Sunday, and all three persons of the triune Godhead are on the stage. We now know God as fully as God can be known by mere creatures. What we can’t know is not because God is tragically removed or far away. No—it’s precisely because God has come so unbearably close and is so unimaginably beautiful. That’s why we can’t take all of God in. So we praise instead of merely examine. And then Jesus sends out the disciples in mission to do what he does, or even greater things. Teach. Heal. Exorcise. Baptize. This doesn’t sound like a summer vacation or even a mission trip. It sounds like a new way of being in community for others.

That’s what the church is, in summer or anytime.

[ June 4 ]

Open the Gates

Numbers 11:24-30; Psalm 104:24-35b; Acts 2:1-21; John 7:37-39

Pentecost is not, safe to say, the most beloved of Christian feasts. Marketers haven’t yet figured out how to monetize it. It has no cute baby in the manger; no empty tomb and bunny, no secular holiday nearby to get away for a long weekend. Furthermore, it’s weird. Tongues of flame on everybody’s heads. People speaking in languages they don’t know. To quote the immortal Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, “Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!”

The 20th century may be remembered in history as the time when God reminded us that God is triune. The Holy Spirit is a person of the Trinity not less than the Father and the Son. Upward of 669 million Pentecostals worldwide now show us this. Before 1906 at Azusa Street church in California, there weren’t really any Pentecostals. After several weeks of revival across race and class lines, it seemed as though the Holy Spirit had fallen again, and she hasn’t quit falling on us.

While on the church calendar Pentecost is massively important, lay people may need some help imagining it. So have them speak in tongues: Have folks stand and read the scripture in languages as various as those at the first Pentecost (Acts 2:8-11—extra credit for Arabic!). Plan it, that is, if you don’t trust God to turn up miraculously and have people preach in languages they don’t already know. That first Pentecost was bizarre enough that folks accused the disciples of being drunk. Peter’s answer is not convincing (verse 15 implies we’ll all be drunk later!). No, these are drunk with the Holy Spirit, not wine. It’s the best sort of intoxication there is. It throws open the gates to foreigners from all nations. Folks with names as weird as Medad and Eldad will prophesy (Numbers 11:26). Moses wishes all God’s people would have the Spirit and speak in tongues (11:29).

You have to watch that Spirit. When she gets loose borders open, foreigners preach, “strange” nations are dignified with the Holy Spirit, everybody seems drunk, and people convert by the thousands.

And no baby or bunny is needed.

[ June 11 ]

We Still Doubt

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

Have you noticed that preachers tend to abdicate on Trinity Sunday? A teacher of mine used to say preachers start that day by apologizing for their lack of knowledge on the subject before spending what time is left demonstrating that very lack.

The most important thing about God, first and last, is that we can’t understand God. Who could? Only God can understand. Staggeringly, God has shared some of that self-understanding with us through Mary’s womb and Pentecost’s fire.

Sarah Coakley might be our most important Trinitarian theologian just now. She suggests we start not with doctrine, but through prayer. The more you pray, the more you notice a conversation already in progress. That’s God talking to God—the Spirit’s love-language to God coursing through you, making you and all creation holy. You don’t imagine this teaching by thinking hard. You open yourself up to it by praying hard.

These texts point the way. Genesis 1 has all the elements—wind, a voice, and God whimsically saying “why not?” and making a world. Paul’s letter to the Hebrews interprets Psalm 8 as a description of Christ’s incarnation, becoming “a little lower than the angels.” Paul gives the Corinthians a full-blown Trinitarian doxology. But the jewel in this crown is Jesus’ post-resurrection charge to go and tell. Every missionary on the planet has memorized this verse and taken it to heart. But just before it is this absolute pearl: “but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17).

What?! What more does God have to do? Scramble out of the grave with thunder and lightning and an angel and ... we still doubt. That’s humanity before God. Not just because we’re fickle and weak. But because God is so unutterably amazing.

This can’t be said often enough: Had we seen the Red Sea part, had we witnessed the resurrection with our own eyes, we would be no more faithful than they. And yet the Spirit would still rumble prayers from right underneath our ribs, transfiguring us and all creation into the body of Christ.

[ June 18 ]

Love of Strangers?

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35 - 10:8-23

You may have heard some consternation over refugees and immigrants in the United States. Does the Bible have anything to say to us about this?

Abraham receives three mysterious visitors in the heat of the day (Genesis 18). These three (verse 2) are also one “Lord” (verse 1), leading Christians to see here a glimpse of the Holy Trinity. And Abraham roars into action. He runs (in the desert), prepares the fatted calf, makes a feast fit for kings. He doesn’t know these three. They are strangers. But because he treats them like divine visitors, they are. Abraham is remembered in Judaism as being consumed with philoxenia , the “love of strangers.” He is showing us all how to treat everyone we meet.

But did he check their immigration status first? Their country of origin?

Our age worries about security, for understandable reasons. Does the Bible say anything about this?

Psalm 116 has often been used to commemorate martyrs in Israel and in the church: “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his holy ones” (116:15). Christians’ response to danger is not arming ourselves and kicking out strangers—it is to name the risks, and the rewards, that come from living a courageous life. Paul warns the Romans that they will suffer. They, we, do this because God dies not for good people, but for murderers (Romans 5:8). My wife, Jaylynn, preached this text the Sunday after 9/11, and I still tear up thinking of her bravery. Jesus sends the 12 out with no money, no provisions, nothing other than one another and a burning desire to heal, preach the gospel, and inch the kingdom closer. It won’t be easy—there will be conflict, don’t doubt it for a second (10:21). But those who endure “to the end will be saved” (10:22).

But never mind any of that. In fact, never say anything that matters. Jesus has no opinion on “politics.” Just help coach souls on going to heaven. And ignore these words of welcome to strangers even amid danger. I’m sure God doesn’t mean it.

[ June 25 ]

Blessing Our Enemies

Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39

Preachers tend to avoid morally troubling texts in the Bible. But our hearers know those texts are there. Our avoidance means that when they stumble across them they have no resources with which to read them.

One morally troubling issue in scripture is how Christians relate to the sons and daughters of Ishmael (Genesis 21). I learned this from hearing Debbie Blue preach in Vancouver, British Columbia, recently. Israel tells Ishmael’s story as one of sibling rivalry. Hagar and her child are cast out into the wilderness to die. But like the Israelites’ cries from Egypt centuries later, God hears Ishmael’s cry (Genesis 21:17). God speaks comforting words to Hagar, and promises her (this is staggering) “a great nation” (21:18).

Who tells origin stories of their enemies like this? That God reverses our desire to get rid of them? God hears their cry? God promises to make something unimaginably good from and for them and others? And what Christians are aware of the stories of blessing we have for the children of Hagar, the matriarch of the prophet Muhammed, in our own Bibles?! Genesis shows that God already answers Hagar’s cry before she makes it.

If you preach this, you’ll get in trouble. That should be no surprise. Jesus promises trouble (Matthew10:34-36). If there’s no trouble, then we’re doing it wrong. Everywhere Jesus went, healing and teaching and blessing and creation-restoring broke out. So too did swords, quarrels, hatred, persecution. And Jesus somehow makes it all sound like such a good time.

So I suggest we preach stories about difference, about conflict, about God’s blessing of those we’d rather curse. Folks will lash out at us. We don’t have to lash back. The Romans ask Paul, if grace is so great, why not keep sinning, to get more of it? (This is the sort of question that shows we’re preaching grace with sufficient extravagance.) Simple, Paul says. You’re baptized (6:3). Drowned. Dead people can’t sin. They also can’t lash back.

They can, apparently, preach. So let’s get busy.

"Preaching the Word," Sojourners' online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.