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This is the sermon I preached—it’s a continuation of my last one: Nests, part I. It starts out the same, but I take it a different direction half way through. I think it’s better than the one I didn’t preach. But who knows.
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Title: Hope and Nests, part II
Date: May 4th, 2008
Texts: Ps 68:1-10, 32-35; Ac 1:6-14; I Pet 4:12-14, 5:6-11; Jn 17:1-11.

Nests and hope. That’s what I preached about the last time. I told you about the blue birds who moved into the birdhouse in my front yard near the road. I talked about how they show us what hope looks like in our world today. Despite all the dangers, all the threats to life, those birds still build nests, right smack in the middle of it all.

That’s what birds do; they build nests that provide space for birth, for new life. And that’s what we do. We surround each other with the love of Christ; we sustain each other with the Holy Spirit; we offer one another the embrace of God’s love. We are God’s nests of hope, nests for the birth and re-birth of life, abundant life, life upon life. We show, with our lives, how hope is a verb—it’s something we do through the power of the Spirit. We become a reason for hope.

Well, my neighbor told me this past week that he saw a cat climb up that blue bird house while Katie and I were in France. He scarred the cat away before he left for work. But in the evening, when he got back, he peeked into the bird house and found that all the baby birds were dead. The cat killed them and left them there. The nest of abundant life turned into a grave.

What can I say now? I felt pretty good with my hopeful sermon about nests and abundant life. I felt good about that hope—and you all gave me reason to believe it because of your care for one another. But reality has a tendency to get in the way of hope and rain on our parades. That nest, full of abundant life, gets killed. Reality stinks of death.

So now what? [Read more →]

Here’s sermon I decided not to preach. I think it’s good, but I realized that it’s not necessarily what my church needs to hear—the Holy Spirit led me elsewhere at the last minute (it seems like God always interrupts a good thing). If you’re into politics, it may be interesting for you. The idea for this sermon came to me when a friend gave me a Barack Obama campaign sticker. It’s awesome. But it’s also dangerous…

According to Acts, hope is a people’s movement. As I say at the end, Power and Hope can’t be abstracted through representation—it’s ours.

It will probably make more sense if you read the sermon… Hopefully.

Disclaimer: this isn’t really about Obama in particular. It’s about election politics in general. More importantly, it’s about our true hope. As Nicholas Lash has taught me, Christianity is an iconoclastic movement—that is, we point out how images and icons lead us astray. (Paul Murray’s essay on Lash is a decent place to start.)

Title: Hope—a verb.
Date: May 4th, 2008
Texts: Ps 68:1-10, 32-35; Ac 1:6-14; I Pet 4:12-14, 5:6-11; Jn 17:1-11.

Nests and hope. That’s what I preached about the last time. I told you about the blue birds who moved into the birdhouse in my front yard near the road. I described how they show us what hope looks like in our world today. Despite all the dangers, all the threats to life, those birds still build nests, right smack in the middle of it all. That’s what birds do; they build nests that provide space for the birth of new life. And that’s what we do; we surround each other with the love of Christ, we sustain each other with the Holy Spirit, we offer one another the embrace of God’s love. We are God’s nests of hope, nests for the birth and re-birth of life, abundant life, life upon life. We show, with our lives, how hope is a verb—it’s something we do through the power of the Spirit. We become a reason for hope.

Well, my neighbor told me this past week that he saw a cat climb up that blue bird house in the front yard while Katie and I were in France. Apparently the dangers birds face are more real than I imagined—as real as a cat reaching it’s deadly claws into a nest of baby blue birds. My neighbor scarred the cat away before he left for work. But in the evening, when he got back, he peeked into the bird house and found that all the baby birds were dead. The cat killed them all and left them. The nest of abundant life turned into a grave.

What can I say now? I felt pretty good about my hopeful sermon about nests and abundant life. In fact, in my completely unbiased opinion, I thought it was one of my better sermons over the past few months. I felt good about that hope—and ya’ll gave me reason to believe it because of your care for one another. But, reality has a tendency to get in the way of hope and rain on our parades of hope. That nest, full of abundant life, gets killed. Reality stinks.

So now what? My bird house isn’t a sign of hope anymore. Dead baby blue birds—that’s all I see when I look out my front window. And it’s a lot of what I see when I look at the world; and it’s what I see in the lives of some of my friends—completely hopeless situations.

(pause)

When will hope happen?

Title: Nests
Date: April 13, 2008
Texts: Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; I Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

We have two blue birds living in our front yard. Last fall our neighbor gave Katie and me a bird house, and I put it up near the street this past January. That probably wasn’t the best place to put it. They said to install it as far away from our house as possible—since humans scare them. Well, I did that. And now it’s a couple feet from the street which is probably worse. People walk by with their dogs, and cars speed by. It’s probably the worst spot for the blue birds—a very threatening environment.

Whenever I go out to my car, or walk to the street to pick up the mail, the birds get anxious and fly away. Apparently, I’m dangerous. No matter how cautious I am, how quietly and slowly I walk, once I get within 15 feet of the house, the male blue bird leaves his perch on top of the house and flies to a nearby tree. And if I keep on walking, the female shoots out from the house and into another tree.

But when I go back inside, and after the dog walkers pass by, the blue birds return to their nest inside their birdhouse. They are stubborn with their nest.

This isn’t something necessarily special about the blue birds in the front yard. Birds everywhere build nests in the most precarious places, in the midst of danger: even with predators nearby, like neighborhood cats; or at UNC, in a corner of awning alongside a busy walkway. Nothing will stop them from building nests. And they can build them anywhere, in any corner, no matter how dangerous.

Birds live in a dangerous world, but that doesn’t stop them from building nests in the midst of it all.

Psalm 23 invites us to be like my blue bird neighbors. Psalm 23 tells an honest story about death and darkness—wandering in a valley of darkness. I’ll read a couple verses: “Even though I walk through the darkness valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows” (vv. 4-5).

The Psalmist is a realist. [Read more →]

I’ve started writing short pieces for The Mennonite magazine. My first piece appeared in the April 1st issue: “Blessed are those who mourn.” Here’s an excerpt:

Mourning is worship. Sometimes we worship with our tears. To worship any differently would be dishonest and deny what Paul affirms: We preach Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23). We misunderstand the message of resurrection if we think it means we must always rejoice in our worship. Resurrection doesn’t mean we rush past the wounds of suffering in order to find hope. We too easily forget that the risen Jesus appears to his followers with open wounds. In John 21, Thomas can put his hand into the hole in Jesus’ side. The crucifixion is not erased at resurrection; Easter doesn’t rush past Good Friday. Instead, resurrection remembers forever the wounds of suffering and the pain of death. As Blaise Pascal put it, “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world” (Pensée 919).

A few years ago, someone from our church went to Iraq with the Mennonite Central Committee to work for peace while our country waged war. During the Easter season of 2004, he sent us a letter, a dispatch from the front. Peter Dula wrote to us, “Jesus has indeed risen even if it was a hell of a long time ago and even if there is no evidence of it in Baghdad.”

Peter has written an essay on what it means to celebrate Easter while evil seems to be winning the day. Well worth reading—best essay I’ve read in a few years (but I’m biased). It appears in the March 28th issue of Commonweal Magazine (a Catholic publication—what’s a Mennonite doing talking about the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Mary?). Here’s the link: “Easter in Baghdad: Theology in the Shadow of War.”

Dula leads us into a place where silence is the only possible thing to say—where worship is a political protest against the powers of evil, but one where we cry Maranatha “while our eyes swim with tears,” as Barth put it (CD IV/2: 789). Peter Dula writes,

We do see Jesus-the broken and bloody body of Christ-scattered across the margins of the American empire…. If theology is helpful it is not because it allows us to say anything, but because it pushes us toward silence; it unveils our ignorance and makes it hurt.

Title: Tombs and Gardens
Date: 3.23.08, Easter
Texts: Jn 20:1-18

John 20, verse 1: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.” It was still dark. The night of Good Friday lingered into Easter morning. John doesn’t tell us why Mary goes to the tomb before dawn. We are not told what she hopes to find, what she expects to see. Maybe she couldn’t sleep that night. Her sleep was plagued with images of torture, remembrances of lost friendship, the trauma of extinguished hope.

Or maybe she can do nothing else but return to the tomb. Her life doesn’t make sense anymore; she is not able to forget this man who embodied unimaginable hope; Mary can’t pull off the psychological acrobatics that are required to move on, to forget.

You see, on the cross, with Jesus, Mary Magdalene’s spirit was crucified. They pierced her heart when the soldiers ripped open Jesus’ side with a spear. Now, her love lies dead, buried in a tomb. Part of Mary dies with Jesus.

Despite being a poor historian and textual scholar, Dan Brown, in his book The Da Vinci Code, does us some good to recognize the profound love shared between Jesus and Mary. But, like most modern males, he can only imagine a man’s love for a woman as sexual—so, he says, Jesus’ love for Mary was sexualized. For Dan Brown, Mary is primarily a sexual object—that’s how love must play out between a man and a woman. Why else would Jesus care about a woman, says Dan Brown? [Read more →]

A foot-washing prayer from the Mennonite Hymnal, # 783:

Lord Jesus,  we have knelt before each other as you once knelt before your disciples, washing another’s feet. We have done what words stammer to express. Accept this gesture of love as a pledge of how we mean to live our lives. Bless us, as you promised, with joy and perseverance in the way of the cross.

Title: A Protest of Hope
Date: March 20, 2008: Maundy Thurs.
Texts: John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Jerusalem welcomed Jesus as their king, “Blessed is the king of Israel” (John 12:13). And a few days later, on Maundy Thursday, Jesus is in the valley of darkness. Later this night, he will be arrested and his procession to the cross will begin.

The disciples and Jesus meet under the cover of darkness, in secrecy. We learn in chapter 12 that Jesus is in hiding—“Jesus left and hid himself” (v.36). But at the end of the meal, Judas Iscariot will wander into the night to reveal Jesus’ hiding place to the Roman and Jewish authorities. Jesus dwells in the tension, at the edge of death.

It is night, darkness everywhere. In John 12 Jesus said that the night was coming soon: “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you” (v.35). Now, on Maundy Thursday, there is no more light. It’s too late for hope. Darkness surrounds Jesus and his followers. It’s actually worse than that—with Judas at the table, the night has already pierced the center of Jesus’ kingdom of light. It’s only a matter of time before the last bit of hope flickers and dies. [Read more →]

This is the last of the unedited Lenten reflections I wrote of the Mennonite publication, Leader Magazine. Here are the other ones: Lent 1, Lent 2, Lent 3, Lent 4, Lent 5.
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Lent 6: Matthew 21:1-11; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11.

Jesus has traveled throughout Palestine proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, and it seems the entire people of Israel have come out to rejoice in their new King—another “Son of David” that will save the people from the foreign dominion of Roman occupation. They spread their coats and lay down palm branches as they welcome Jesus into Jerusalem where he will take his rightful place on the throne of his ancestor David. “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matt. 21:9).

But what they do not yet realize is that this Jesus is not the savior they hoped for. This Messiah, this Son of David, will ultimately shatter their hopes and dreams as he is lifted up onto a very different throne: not the glories of Jerusalem’s palaces; instead, Jesus will take his place outside the city, at the place of death, Golgotha, on a cross between two other convicted subversives. The revolutionary hope of the masses of Israel is crushed as Jesus’ body is crushed under the heel of the religious and political powers. And the people are left bewildered at the cross, maybe remembering the promises of the Psalmist: “Let Israel say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever!” (Ps.118:1-2). But how can God’s love that sustains Israel look like that disfigured Messiah on the cross?

The Psalmist continues, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” (v22). How can this be? The apostle Paul helps us unravel the mysteries of the cross: “Although he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8). Our hope is strange; it looks like a cross. But as we walk into the depths of that blood-stained cross, we can begin to see glimpses of a radical hope, a hope too mysterious for words, the hope of Christ’s resurrection.

Lent 5: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45.If there is any single characteristic of Lent, it is that we are humans—and that means we are mortal, we die. During the season of Lent, we contemplate that dark reality because we know that, as Paul says, “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you”… and that means us (Rom. 8:11). This is not a call to think that we can rush into new life and bypass all the death. We must remember that Jesus dies, and so must we die, in order to taste the wonders of Christ’s new life.

Jesus’ deep love for his friend Lazarus beckons him into the depths of death—both Lazarus’ and Jesus’. The cave where Lazarus’ body lay reeks of death. And as Jesus decides to return to Judea, he also heads towards what his disciples are convinced will be his and their deaths. “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” (Jn. 11:7-8). Jesus journeys into the very real possibility of his own death. And the disciples follow, even though they think they will surely die: “Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him’” (v16).

To follow Jesus is to go with him into what may surely lead to our deaths. As Thomas Muntzer said in the sixteenth-century, “Christ…has shown no more winsome love to his elect than this: that he has labored to make them as sheep for the slaughter” (On Counterfeit Faith).
To follow Jesus is to learn how to see a new kind of hope, a hope that crumbles our best dreams in order to create something unspeakably new and wonderful, something that we could never imagine. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida put it, “the hope of redemption must go through renunciation” (God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, p. 182). [Read more →]

Lent 4: I Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41.

The miraculous healing of the blind beggar shocks the people who knew him. They want to know more about what kind of power, and what kind of person, can work such incredible feats. They come to the beggar and ask, “Where is he?” And the man with new eyes responds, “I do not know” (Jn. 9:12). Where is he?... I do not know?

Jesus shows up out of nowhere, heals a blind beggar, then disappears. And now a baffling event challenges the perplexed people: a man born blind can now see. For the rest of the story the characters try to figure out what has happened. The regular people turn to the religious leaders for an explanation. And they end up completely confused. In a brilliant literary twist, John shows how the people who are supposed to know how to see God (i.e., the Pharisees) are the ones who come to suffer blindness: they can’t see a miracle of Jesus when it’s shoved right in front of their face. “Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’” (v39). Surely we are not blind, are we? The Pharisees’ question becomes ours: can we see God’s wondrous presence?

The story of Samuel anointing David is also about how well we can see God’s presence. God doesn’t choose the oldest and most important people in Jesse’s family. No. God chooses the youngest, the least of these. And we, like Samuel, are challenged to learn how to see as God sees: “the Lord does not see as humans see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (I Sam. 6:7). Our trouble is that we are content to look at the surface of things, mere appearances. But God calls us to a way of seeing that is characterized by patience, to have patient eyes—to wait for the least of these, when so many others seem like great options. Rowan Williams talks about how important it is to cultivate patient eyes so we can come to see the Kingdom of God: “Here we are daily, not necessarily attractive and saintly people, along with other not very attractive and saintly people, managing the plain prose of our everyday service, deciding daily to recognize the prose of ourselves and each other as material for something unimaginably greater—the Kingdom of God” (Where God Happens, 119)
While Psalm 23 is usually read to comfort those in the midst of death and despair, in this context it looks like verse 5 makes a demanding claim about the sort of patience to which God calls us—waiting with our enemies for God’s presence! “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Seeking after God’s presence is not about running away from the threatening darkness of our enemies. Not at all. For the Psalmist, God prepares a table for us right in the middle of our darkness, right in front of our enemies. This isn’t a call to embrace death; rather, it’s a call to take seriously how God wants to save our enemies too. We are patient in the midst of death because we believe in the power of resurrection. It’s the reality of Christ’s resurrection that guides the apostle Paul’s call to shine the light of Christ in the midst of darkness: “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!” (Eph. 5:8-14).

To wait. To be patient. To grow dissatisfied with our vision, and give God a chance to show us something new. At the end of the story of the blind beggar who Jesus makes see, everyone tries to makes sense of this incredible event, but they can’t find what they are looking for: the healed beggar says to the Pharisees, “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes” (Jn. 9:30). But the good news is that Jesus comes to those who are cast out: “Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and he found him” (v35).