Bad Preaching Made Good

Pentecost


As I was exiting a meeting this last week with a group of folks, one person turned to me and said: "so, I know I've been a Christian for twenty-odd years. What is Pentecost again?"

I whipped up a quick answer to what is not a short question--something about undoing Babel. I suppose I could have spoke as well of the Advocate, a kind of lobbyist we have looking out for us in the fabric of reality. Or maybe I could have spoken about the teaching function of the Holy Spirit, how we are promised to continue to learn new things even after Jesus is gone. Or maybe about how Christ's Spirit is still with us, how the church is God the Holy Spirit's dwelling place. And on and on--there are many, many things I could have said.

It reminded me of a problem that arises for me often when I'm preaching, and I think it's probably a problem all share. Here's how I think of it: should we preach Christianity 101, or Christianity 201?

In our faith, there are different layers of questions as people grow in faith. There are the 101 type questions: whether God loves us and how we can experience that love, what forgiveness means, what it means to have gifts and a ministry, and many more. And there are 201 type questions, and these simply reflect deeper on these same questions as people have lived with them a while. How is God's love present in a society with poor healthcare? Not only what does forgiveness mean, but how is reconciliation different? Not only having gifts and ministries, but how do those turn into a vocation?

There's nothing wrong with either type. It has to do with how long we've walked this pilgrimage, and sometimes, a longer walker is delighted to remember some 101 type lessons, and someone who is just beginning can be transformed by far more mature conversations of faith.

But our communities are made up of both types of folks, and 101ers are sometimes lost when they hear 201 preaching, and 201ers can be bored by hashing old ground that truly doesn't speak to the places they've come.

For what it's worth, if you find this kind of division among Christians offensive, both Paul and John seem to take for granted that this division exists. But as I say, there's nothing wrong being early on a pilgrimage or late, but as the preacher, it's a real pain in the ass sometimes to know where we can reach people. BECAUSE, although people seem for odd reasons to doubt this, we preachers want to reach people.

So: how do we know? Is it back to basics, or continuing development? Jesus didn't seem to know. He certainly screws up a similar situation with the Syro-Phoenician woman, thinking he should be 101 when in fact she was way, way down the journey of faith and needed to hear some 201. If Jesus didn't know his audience, so much so that he changes horses in mid-stream, it seems likely that we'll fail to know our audience sometimes, too.

What I wonder, though, is if the Holy Spirit isn't at least as active in those bad sermons. Certainly, even while Christ was stuttering apologetically to the Syro-Phoenician woman, the Spirit was active in telling that challenging story to us. In other words, what looked like failure to Jesus looks like success to us.

I think that the true good news of Pentecost, the true hope at its heart, is revealed in this hope that the Spirit is in bad sermons. The message at Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit can speak good news in any language, any context. Maybe all of our worst sermons, all of our worst ideas, all of our misguided notions of how ought to live--maybe all of these are truly, utterly bad. But because they are so bad, they can be put to good use, become part of a longer preaching of the gospel to an audience we know only dimly.

The gospel at Pentecost is that, perhaps, even bad preaching can become good.

Let's flip for it

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

First, in full disclosure, I feel I should be honest enough to say that I'm very tired of these John readings. I like that gospel, I really do, but this endless lingering over abiding and love and abiding and love and abiding and . . . I just don't find it interesting at the moment. Or perhaps, I found it interesting four weeks ago, the first time we heard it. I would say this doesn't feel like a great lectionary decision: eliminate the Old Testament lesson, and read very slowly the twisting and repetitive rhetoric of John for the whole of Easter.

But, onward to an active idea.

The book of Acts is wacky generally, and this is true for many reasons. Jesus fades out, and Paul becomes the main hero. Everyone thinks that the Roman Empire and civilization will embrace the coming reign of God. Bowels fall out of people. It's a wacky book.

This story is wacky specifically. Imagine: we all get together, you and me and a hundred of our closest friends. We were inspired to start a whole new movement by the life and death of our friend. We used to have a kind of executive board who oversaw the functioning of our group, and with the exit of our friend into the clouds--an awkward moment, that--perhaps we might even say our CEO levitated away. At any rate, the executive board has a vacancy. So, all of us shareholders get together at someone's house--let's say, Joseph of Arimathea's house, because at least it was big--and we talk about who should be elected to the executive board. We don't want to replace the CEO--in fact, we all have this fascinating idea that there will be some kind of oversight from the heavens, and the "spirit" of that CEO will still govern the organization until its fulfilled its mission statement.

But there is a vacancy on the board because on of its members, well, no nice way to put it, went all "Enron" on the organization. Misappropriation of funds, or so John accused him, but the bigger problem came with his defecting from the organization so someone else could buy us out, handing over his shares. This act was apparently so evil that his bowels simply fell out of him and onto the ground, thereby killing him, apparently symbolizing how his body couldn't even take that kind of evil anymore. Some people think their shit don't stink, and others have shit so stinky it just explodes from their abdomen. Totally biblical.

So, to fill that empty post, we decide we'll pick some qualified people, which makes sense. We interview, we listen, we talk amongst ourselves, and we all pretty much agree that we have two leading candidates: Joseph and Matthias. So, how should we choose between them? I know: let's pray, and then flip a coin!

Who would actually do that? Our early church leaders did.

It sounds totally nuts. We don't flip for members of executive boards, or CEOs, or leaders of armies, or presidents. We flip to see who rides shotgun, or who has to be designated driver, or who has to take the dog out. Maybe, best two outta three. But for important things? Definitely not. At the least we'd have them arm wrestle, so maybe the strong one would get it. But nope--they just flip for it, trusting that God will be at work in the random chance of what lot is drawn.

There is a history, here. Ancient Israel used to use the urim and thummim to determine what God wanted--those being fancy names, as far as we can tell, for drawing lots, or flipping a coin, or throwing chicken neck bones on the ground to see what shape they make, or reading tea leaves. We're not exactly sure how it worked--lengths of sticks and lots, or some such. But the priests of ancient Israel took it very seriously. As seriously as the Roman pagans took their bird entrails as speaking of what the gods wanted.

So, they didn't just make this up as a deliberative process. But would we choose a leader this way? Should we? Some Christian denominations still do.

But I think what we might draw from this lesson is something else instead. We don't use the Bible for its geography--we've gotten better at drawing maps, and parts of the Bible were written by people who cared more about names and symbols than cartography. For the same reason, we shouldn't use it for choosing leadership--at least, not directly importing the methods they used for ours.

Instead, perhaps, we should notice the truly wacky thing about this lesson: these people took God seriously. Very seriously. So much so, that they knew that their choices and preferences only mattered so much. God was a working force for them, one who could determine who should be leader.

It's interesting: they take God so seriously that they know that God must be at the heart of what they do. But, on the other hand, they don't expect God to do it for them. They could have waited for God to fix things for them. Instead, they steer a narrow course: God is the reason for the organization's existence, and nothing can happen outside of that. And: God is not expected to do all the work.

What I'd emphasize briefly here that at its beginning, the church remembered something that, two millenia later, we've found it easy to forget. God is the beginning, middle, and end of our work. Nothing we choose, no leader we pick, no snacks chosen for coffee hour, no hymn sung, no ministry engage in, is separate from God. We, being humans, tend to forget that. These people in Acts did not. They built it into the fabric of their first leadership choice.

God is not ancillary to our work. God is not the optional piece at the end. God is not part of the original mission statement. In discerning our leadership, in discerning our direction, we have no agenda but a spiritual one: how can we witness to God's redeeming work in the world? Or, even shorter: how can we witness to God?

Our call is not to create and join church communities that build gyms, or invent answers to hard questions, or encourage us to watch Fox news, or include the wealthiest people in town, or anything like that. Our call is to create communities that both work to tell of God's work in the world and deepen that relationship with God, and we can do this in any way that reflects where God found us: our culture, our location, our language, our politics.

Maybe we shouldn't flip for leadership, but we sure could learn from our ancestor's determination to know who we were serving at every moment.

1st John Is For Lovers

1 John 5:1-6


The NIB commentary this week on this text makes the very novel point that, not only does God love us, but we are called to love God. It probably shouldn't sound like a novel point. But it does. The commentary then takes this point in not very interesting (at least, to me) directions, but I'd like to reflect here on this same idea. We are called to love God (because God loved us first, etc etc).

What does it mean "to love" God? Christian sermons often turn on the loose-goosey connotations of the word 'love' in English, Greek, Hebrew, or Esperanto, for that matter. Love is a fishy thing, squirming this way and that when taken out of its water. It's hard enough to know what we're talking about when we say "God" without throwing what is perhaps the only concept in human interaction that is more ambiguous. What is love? Is it the feeling of stomach dropping? Is it the careful humility of seeing something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves? Is it record-skipping lust, that tears our gaze to look backward down the street? Is it obedient devotion? Is it sibling friendship? Is it some cycle among these things? Is it a verb? A state of being? Is it a goal we work for? Do we fall into it, or does it grow up gradually?

1st John is not especially helpful on this point, either. It walks the obedience line--which is perfectly charming, and I understand why it sounds good. It has the ring of self-sacrifice, the connection to another being, and a sense of radical dependence. But it just doesn't sound like love. I suspect this is because of my upbringing. I had enough experiences with unhealthy adults as a child to know that disobeying them was sometimes the only way to love. To obey, sometimes, is more certainly not to love. If the situation is different with God--because God is always healthy, I suppose--then it is no less confusing, as at least unhealthy adults had the good care to say things to my face for my agreement or dis-. I'm always discerning God's will, never sure if I got it quite right. If obedience alone were love of God, I am inclined to think that surely God would have been more explicit in giving us commandments. "Eat more beef." "Don't throw rocks." That sort of thing.

No, loving God must somehow look a little different. The love of "sleeping beauty" doesn't seem likely to me, either. The feeling of adoration--which I think is most nearly akin to the feeling of being a junior high boy brought out to dance with a beautiful girl for the first time--also strikes me as somehow inadequate. I'm probably a piss poor contemplative for saying that, but it's true. Being lost in an Other in joy is perfectly delightful, and perhaps it is the end of all prayer and likely all art, but if God wanted this alone, God would have been better off making us all flowers. We could stand tall and pretty and praise God's name the whole of our lives, surrendering our anxiety of death and praising while we had strength. But we're not flowers, or at least, not only.

So, although I think obedience and adoration have something to do with loving God, I suppose I have a difference sense of that love. Perhaps it will seem more complicated. To me, it makes more sense.

I think that loving God looks most like this: If "Hope" means that we have a particular vision we desire, and "Faith" means trust in God to work things out for the best, then Hope and Faith are opposites. Hope means we want something to the exclusion of other things, and Faith means we'll accept whatever comes. Love, I think, which strangely mixes hope and faith together, believes Hope and Faith are not opposites, but the same. Love means that somehow both what we desire above all else, and our great willingness to accept whatever comes, are the same thing--even though that should be impossible. Without love, we are all frustrated visionaries or trusting complacents. Love alone connects our hopeful desires and trusting faith. To love means to reach beyond ourselves in desire without lying to ourselves about our finitude. "True love" is, I think, redundant. Love is necessarily true--combining the reality of our limited nature with its stretching beyond.

In other words, if you ask me, I think that to love God is to walk a mobius strip that is at moments obedience (the manifestation of hope), and at moments adoration (the manifestation of trust). Loving God is always one thing or another, but never is merely one thing or another. To love God is to enact that desire and obedience, vision and acceptance, are the same parts of one story.

I think this is why I have trouble preaching about how to love God. I find it to be a far more complicated conversation than most anyone will allow on a Sunday morning.

Ivy

John 15:1-8

Late thoughts on this Sunday.

I have always been interested in the way that we think about things influences/determines/limits/expands/improves/denigrates decisions that we can make. Our imaginative horizons and, even more especially, our metaphors are boundlessly influential in the way that we approach things.

One great example of this comes from the second story in a handy This American Life episode, where it talks about dinosaurs. When you see a dinosaur exhibit, we tend to think that we sit at the cutting edge of science. And yet, dinosaur exhibits more or less reflect the way we think, our metaphors for them, not the way they were. Once museums had their own plastic copies of dinosaur bones, they could arrange them any way they wanted. So, starting in the 1950s, dinosaurs were posed together in scenes of epic combat. It didn't matter who was from what era in history, whether they'd been alive at the same time or not, but they were arranged to gain maximum effect from paying customers. Big dinosaurs were popular--T-Rex, and the like.

In the 1980s, the focus grew to be about the personal prowess of the dinosaurs. If we went to an exhibit, we'd see them lauded for the swift, merciless learning and intelligence. At the same time our culture became crazy about capitalism, the visions we had cutthroat CEOs and their money-making, their adaptability and their predatory instinct, we began to arrange our dinosaurs so put the focus on the dinosaurs we imagined in this way. Think Jurassic Park, either the book or the Steven Spielberg movie. Velociraptors are the star of the show. T-Rex has become a side-show.

By the 1990s, a new metaphor for dinosaurs appeared, one you'll still mostly see if you go to a museum. Now, the emphasis is on the ecosystem, putting all the fossils with other fossils from the era, showing how dinosaurs raised their young, talking about the ecosystem they were all part of.

In short, our metaphors of dinosaurs have determined far more about how we have arranged them, understood them, than anything about the actual dinosaurs themselves.

So, I'd like to focus briefly on our lesson in John, where Jesus gives us an image, a new metaphor for thinking about our communities.

We're all so stuck on Paul, who tells us that our metaphor for the church is a human body. It's a fine metaphor--someone gets to be the eye, we all know people we are pretty sure are the assholes. We all have different parts to play, and we altogether make up the body.

But the metaphor Jesus offers in this gospel is quite different. God is the gardener, Jesus the true vine, and we are the branches on the vine. Think, for a minute, about ivy growing on the ground. Think about the way there are numerous branches, altogether, and we can't tell them apart. If you try to pick up one branch of ivy, you pick up the whole thing.

That's the image Jesus is offering of the church. Not a hierarchical body, but billions of branches, all tied into the true root. All are pruned so that the ivy covers only the parts of teh ground that it should. If one part grows separate from the whole, pulled off, it can't put out its own root.

The Pauline image of the body inevitably limits our choices of understanding how we must function as the church. Everyone has gifts, everyone uses them--a fundamental division of labor.

But here, Jesus challenges that notion. In this metaphor for the church, all are fundamentally equal. It's not about whether hands should say to feet "I have no need of you," but rather than in the vine-vision of the church, you can't actually tell the two apart. You and me are both parts, tied into the true vine, pruned, and encouraged to flower in the process of growing fruit. We don't make one large coordinated whole, guided to move in some direction--instead, we grow quickly, full of life, always pushing forward, offering new fruit moving altogether in every which direction. God sorts out the pruning--we just worry about producing new life, staying connected. So, this vine image is not hte image of extensions cords and a plug strip. It's not about being plugged into God.

It's about the web of life weaved together into a new community, tended by God, rooted in Christ.

What does this mean practically? Perhaps we should be less concerned with committees, those default tools for dividing up labor in the Pauline model, and more concerned with whether or not we're producing life. Perhaps we should remember not that we shouldn't chop off a body part, but that we can't chop off a body part. Perhaps, rather than focusing on the jobs we have, we should remember the being we share: in the end, we all bear the same fruit--fruits of love, trust, forgiveness, good humor, and compassion.

Perhaps our metaphors, like those of the dinosaurs, have reflected and reinforced what we already think, and not what we needed to hear. "The holly and the ivy" bear the crown, as the old carol has it, indeed.