Sunday’s Coming

For the first five years of my ministry, I served a small church bereft of young children. Christmas presented the perfect opportunity to delve into the mystery of the incarnation; our Christmas Eve services dripped with candle wax and Christology. In my new call as an associate pastor at a large suburban congregation, I'm responsible for the Christmas Eve pageant.

In the Bible, God--or sometimes God's messenger--often implores freaked-out men and women not to be afraid. It's a standard divine greeting, a nicety to allay the pulse-quickening shock of receiving a message from heaven. Frequently the commandment stands alone: Fear not, period. Sometimes it's stitched to an object or person: Do not be afraid of _____.

We typically think of name-calling as trash talk, violent speech, all harm and no good. Often it is. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, I'm well past my quota of derogation and defamation. But not all name-calling is violence.

On a Sunday when John the Baptist's call for repentance roars in our ears, we need reminders of the precedence of gift, the prevenience of grace. For John's sermonic cry to "prepare the way of the Lord" can seem all task and no gift. It calls out the Pelagian in all of us, the voluntarist who wants to build the kingdom. Careless hearing leads us to imagine that if we "make his paths straight," he will come.

Working with this week's apocalyptic Gospel text evokes memories of childhood experiences and teachings in a Mennonite congregation with a fundamentalist understanding of Bible and life. Within that setting, however, my family was solidly Anabaptist in outlook and rooted in social justice concerns. My public school was, for a community in the middle of rural Illinois, a virtual hotbed of ecumenicity, with all the major and many of the minor denominations represented. All this made for some interesting tensions, especially in a family with an ethos of discernment rather than rules.

Reflecting on the Benedictus gives us an opportunity to reflect on the place of memorization and repetition in our formation as people who read the Bible as if our lives depended on it. Ellen Davis calls reading the Bible as if our lives depended on it confessional reading. She does not mean reading the Bible in light of a denominational confession. She means reading the Bible as an "indispensible word."

Second Thessalonians is concerned with encouraging a struggling congregation to stand firm, endure and persevere. Wendell Berry refers to the "art of the commonplace," a phrase that for pastors brings to mind the art, craft and skills by which we cultivate the common everyday life our people are called to live and share--and which will enable them to stand firm. It is about the mundane and about community.

Some years ago, a small group in our church watched the award-winning documentary The Fog of War, in which former secretary of defense Robert McNamara talks about his life, especially the Vietnam War.

The gospel reading for October 31 comes toward the end of what most Lucan scholars call Luke's travel narrative. It begins ten chapters earlier at 9:51, where Luke tells us, "When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem." One would expect to follow Jesus' progress on a map—but the coordinates make no geographical sense.

Words of judgment are difficult to hear. Actually, I have no trouble hearing how they apply to others. And when the preacher gives a logical explanation of how the law applies to me, I understand it and nod my head in agreement. But it often makes little connection with my heart and even less with the way I live.

During college, I taped a religious poster on my dorm room wall. Under a photo of a white country church against a green, timbered hill were the words, "I lift up my eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help." I liked the Bible verse, the scene was pretty, and I enjoyed the peaceful reminder of rural home places. But a friend who was knowledgeable in scripture said the poster was theologically incorrect.

How do you know that God is great? You study the things God has done! You might even call it data-collecting concerning God's salvation.

It's easy—from the comfort of my desk, where I’m healthy, well fed and securely employed—to experience a sense of "enough," as I wrote last week. It’s easy to champion compassion, justice and peace (what's not to like?), even when it puts me at odds with a few biblical texts.

It seems there is no time simply to weep over the wrong of the world. The public’s instinct that we have a share in victims’ suffering doesn’t find a fit way to grieve just for them.

Bruce’s dog intruded on the Easter sunrise service. It had caught a bunny, of all things, and choked while attempting to eat it. This little reminder of nature red in tooth and claw marred the morning’s tranquility. The God emptying the borrowed grave in order to bring life and immortality to light seemed complicit in the routine reality of a dog-eat-bunny creation.

Here in Tidewater, Virginia, we make our way from city to city via a series of tunnels. As we approach each tunnel a series of signs warn us: “No HAZMATS” and “HAZMATS must exit here.” Trucks carrying hazardous materials of one sort or another provide a danger anywhere, but in tunnels the risk is magnified.

“When you give a banquet,” Jesus said, “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” but he didn’t say anything about atheists.