Note: the video begins with a dramatic reading of John 9 and concludes with the Lord’s Supper, with the words of institution; the sermon begins around 5:56.
The lectionary this morning brings us to John 9, in a season when we are looking at God’s word through the lens of calling and mission. Left to my own devices I would probably never have put these two things together; but I was not left to my own devices. It’s a great gift to have good colleagues, and this year I’ve been pondering the words of one of the wise pastors I know. Those words were in the back of my mind as I began preparing this message, and they quickly became my guide to see John 9 from a new angle. Let me show you:
[play sermon snippet, Emily Cash, VSF, 1/29/23]
When we talk about the ways God calls us to be and do what he wills, we have to face the fact that his calling is rarely obvious or explicitly spelled out. Given that reality, there are two profoundly important truths in Emily’s words.Read more→
Roughly seventeen years and two churches ago, I started off with a five-week series on this passage. Since it was the beginning of the year, one of those services included the ordination and installation of a new elder. That got me thinking about Jesus as a human leader of a group of oddly-assorted people on a trying journey through challenging circumstances. It’s not a new idea, to be sure, but it wasn’t an angle I had spent a lot of time considering; and the more I thought about it in the light of Matthew 4, the more I came to think that if we want to learn about leadership from Jesus, our passage this morning is where we must begin.
When I say that, you might be looking back down at the text and wondering where I’m getting that, and the answer is: not in the text. It’s in the context. Look what comes next in this chapter. First, John the Baptist gets thrown in prison, prompting Jesus to move to the cities around the Sea of Galilee, start his preaching career, and recruit his first disciples. Then we see the early success—at least as those disciples probably saw it—of Jesus’ preaching career, as he starts drawing large, adoring crowds. That is followed in turn by the first great act of leadership of Jesus’ career, the Sermon on the Mount, which is designed in part to force those adoring crowds to make a choice: either follow Jesus as committed disciples, or abandon him. People following him for the sake of the stuff he’s doing doesn’t serve his purpose at all.Read more→
The calling to preach the word of God is a series of opportunities to get yourself into trouble. On the one hand, there is the recurring invitation from the Spirit of God to, as the late Representative John Lewis put it, “get into good trouble”; on the other, there are myriad chances to put your foot in your mouth and start chewing on your ankle. This is one reason why the wise preacher goes forth only with much prayer, in a spirit of dependence. Let’s pray.
As many of you know, we came to Indiana from Colorado, where I pastored a church in a small mountain resort community. The church was pretty thin on the ground in the county, but I had a few colleagues whom I really appreciated. One was Doug Stevenson, a New Zealander who had come to the US a few years before to pastor an independent congregation out in Kremmling, in the western part of the county. One day, somewhat pensively, Doug told our pastors’ group his daughter was coming to visit from New Zealand. He and his wife Ethel were eager to see her, but there was a complicating factor: she was bringing her girlfriend along. Unsure how to respond to the situation, he had reached out to a friend for guidance. His friend listened, then told Doug to put a double bed in his daughter’s room, set everything up as nicely as he could, and leave chocolates on the pillows. “Make your daughter welcome,” was the message, which meant making her girlfriend welcome too.
I learned at Regent to take hospitality seriously, both from the way the Regent community valued it and from my introduction to the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who taught me the great importance of hospitality in the world in which Jesus lived; but I still saw it primarily in practical terms, as one of the small graces in which and by which we’re called to live. That conversation with Doug widened my perspective, because his friend wasn’t talking about hospitality as a practical response to human need but as a theological response to the human condition.Read more→
Does it seem to you that Western culture is growing increasingly merciless and unforgiving? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you think the opposite is true, given the rate at which behaviors traditionally understood as wrong are being normalized—but that has nothing to do with mercy or forgiveness. Actually, that trend underscores my point; given the increasingly pharisaical tenor of Western society, true toleration of behavior is disappearing into polarization, leaving only approval and anathematization as options.
I wrote that five and a half years ago; if anything, I think it’s truer now than when I wrote it. Contemporary Western culture has rejected Christianity as legalistic in the service of a harsher legalism. It has condemned the historic Christian faith for believing in sin, and in the process has lost the understanding of grace. As it has rushed to caricature and demonize the Puritans, it has become puritanical in the worst sense of the word (a sense which, ironically, would not actually apply to the historical Puritans).
Lin-Manuel Miranda is a blessing for the USA for which I am truly grateful. I suspect that my reasons for saying that are somewhat different from those which his high-profile fans, supporters, and friends would offer, but I’m no less serious for all that. Of all my reasons, the most important—if we could learn to listen—might be this: he offers our death-denying culture a model for lament.
The novelist and publisher Carolyn Givens wrote beautifully about this in an essay posted on The Rabbit Room a couple months ago called “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hopeful Grief.” Givens reflects on “Alabanza” from In the Heights and “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton, which she calls “two of the most beautiful and hopeful expressions of grief I’ve ever heard.”Read more→
This is one of my favorite worship songs. I say that advisedly, knowing the reaction that statement will get from a lot of people: “That’s not a worship song! It doesn’t end with praise!” In fact, according to an interview the men of Tenth Avenue North gave a few years ago, a lot of Christian-music stations refused to play this song for just that reason: it doesn’t end with everything resolved and God having made everything good again.
But this is a worship song. If you don’t believe me, just ask the Psalmist.
These are a couple by Rend Collective that I’ve been singing lately; they have something to say that I need to hear, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
