Emphasis Preaching Journal

The prophets were not much interested in liturgical reform. They might have yawned if presented a new book of worship. Few arguments in the church are as intense as those about guidelines for worship. Mention "alternative worship" in some congregations and they get nettled; mention "the alternative to alternative worship" in those that have chosen "alternative" forms and they get riled. Not that the worship of the Lord was irrelevant. Prophets, speaking for the Lord, regularly called for "solemn assemblies." But they saw these assemblies in larger perspective.

Nowhere is this perspective seen more clearly than in Isaiah 58, where the Lord speaks through the prophet about goings-on in Israel, a place much like "Christian America." Things do not go well, so the citizens kvetch and whine. They have been fasting, but the Lord does not notice. In fact, the Lord does notice: they fast and get crabby. What good does that do? The Lord is bored by all that.

True worship possibilities were at hand, and still are. Here is a whole agenda, a "Contract with Believers": be just; free the imprisoned; share bread with the hungry; "bring the homeless poor into your house" [which is clearly going too far, God]; take care of your relatives. Surprise: God does care about worship, about such worship. "Then your light shall break forth like the dawn."

1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16)

Whenever I sit down for the first time with a potential writer of a doctoral thesis, to talk about "her book" (my code name for dissertations), I like to paraphrase Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: "One book is about one thing; at least the good ones are." Think about it: War and Peace is; so is the phone book, or Moby Dick. And a good life is about one thing. Think about good lives. And a good homily.

Paul condenses his book, his books; his lives, his life; his messages, his message, into one thing, one line: "For I decided to know nothing about you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified."

There are trillions, even googols of ways to "know" and "tell" about Jesus Christ, and him crucified, so there is no danger of boring anyone, since this telling applies his story to ours and makes ours part of his. It is hard to picture anyone sustaining Christian ministry without Christ crucified. A couple of years ago in a controversy too complex for people as wise as we to enter in, a spokesperson announced that the conferees were not going to get involved with the cross and all that bloody stuff. A megachurch pastor proudly told of his strategy: we display no cross, not wanting to invest so much in one Christian symbol and thus turning off some people who, the market analysts said, would be offended by the cross. If reports of both are accurate, one can only hope they were unthinking. Christ crucified aside, nothing else we say makes sense. Our preaching lives are "about one thing," still.

Matthew 5:13-20

Scholars may argue both about the origins of the Sermon on the Mount -- was it in rabbinic teaching, or in clusters of sayings of Jesus assembled by disciples and editors? -- but such argument only distracts from the tougher one: what to do about the Sermon, the teaching, the sayings.

One sermon or set of sermons this winter cannot settle the arguments and issues. The Sermon is in two gospels, but it is not Gospel in the ordinary sense. I find it hard to find good news in it. Nor can it easily be a guide for ordinary lives. We would all lose heart and fall into despair, the guidelines being so hard, so impossible to follow.

Maybe the Sermon pictures life in the Kingdom, in the new age, being announced and brought by Jesus. Even that idea is hard to condense into homilies. Rescue this notion, then, among others: the Sermon on the Mount depicts something of the character of God. You cannot say that God is half serious and do justice to the biblical disclosures about God. Nor is the Sermon on the Mount the result of 3-0 or 2-1 decisions among the persons of the Trinity, a set of hints or whispers or suggestions.

No: if God is God, then "not one letter, not one stroke of a letter" will pass from the law "until all is accomplished." Jesus announces not the destruction of such a law but its fulfillment in him. Meanwhile, not to take it with utter seriousness is not to take it at all.

The lessons this week are about choosing, and all that goes with it. Most bold is the choice for life. The Lord God speaks to the people and offers them options. Theologians through the centuries debate the issues of predestination or free will. Philosophers second the motions of the theologians. There seem to be no clear winners in the debate, nor is it easy to see what would count for winning. The fact remains that people are told that God is sovereign and foreknowing -- and that people are called to be responsible in making choices in their lives. The storytelling approach, a bit messy, works better on this subject than does the philosophical approach.

The second choice is between taking the law of God very, very, very seriously or only quite seriously. Having taken it seriously, one is left in the path of the one Sermonist on the Mount, who sets forth what Reinhold Neibuhr called "the impossible possibility." And in that path there are stones, potholes, washed away gutters. But whoever chooses it takes comfort from the fact that the speaker is also the forgiver, the one who understands, who embodies love.

Choose your way of love and life? Lesson two: choose the kind of persuasive speech you want to utter and upon which to depend. The one sounds cogent, clear, compelling -- but misses the heart. The other does not tie up all the loose ends, but it points to incidents in the divine interaction with humans, or in the acts that change humans and, in all its messiness, does attract us.


FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Isaiah 58:1-9a

Years ago, when agriculture was still a common way of life, there was an institution common to small towns known as the hired man. Often times the source of a lot of frustration as well as humor, these men sometimes also provided enough work to redeem their hire. In fact, at their best -- which happened often enough -- they became like members of the family.

Those who hired themselves out generally didn't have any alternatives. Almost invariably single, they were surplus in their original situations -- an extra hand, an extra mouth, another person more than their families or their economies could sustain. So they worked out, as it was said, looking for another farm where other help was needed. There the hired man would move in, often times living in the house or having a room in one of the other farm buildings, working for subsistence and whatever cash was available to be included in the deal -- usually not much.

Nostalgia can rosy the memory, but it wasn't the best of all possible worlds. For one thing, being surplus in one situation and an extra in another doesn't do much for an illusion of indispensability. Hired men were often famous for their binges, disappearing for days to turn up without explanation or defense.

Another problem was the work itself. Even with all the machinery, farming takes hard labor -- before technology took over, it was worse. Either way, timing is everything: the seasons don't wait. With no stake in the place, having little to gain and not much more to lose, hired men could drive their employers crazy. Dragging themselves to work, guarding against injustices real or conceived, nursing wounds as though they were investments, extracting concessions, counting the hours and minutes to quitting time, they could make the day into a continuing exercise in frustration.

For all of the stories of difficulty, however, there were also the hired men who became part of the family. Work for hire then became the labor of love as they pitched in, going side by side with the family not only in the fields but around the house. A hired man like that was as good as gold.

In this text, Isaiah draws a contrast between the religion of the hireling, with all of its limits and contrivances arranged to protect the self, and the faith of one gripped to the heart by the promise of God. Such a grip makes all the difference, not only in the quality of the work but in the perception of the worker. Guarding prerogatives, watching warily for every advantage or loss, a hired hand can't see anything but its own end. But when the promise takes hold, a new relationship opens, one in which a person can anticipate good and recognize it when it happens. It is the light of the epiphany again, illumining God's heart as well as our own.