Principles for preaching- get ready to be crucified

Bonhoeffer famously said "When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die".

If, as preachers, we are preaching Christ truly, then we are asking our congregations to die. Literally. Like actually do things that could well get them killed. Not necessarily heroically, perhaps obscurely. Not just taking a stand for the truth, but perhaps pouring themselves out in love of the weak.

People, even Christians, don't really like that call.
And so as you get up to preach, you should have some sense of dread
"This sermon could get me fired"
even,
"This sermon could get me lynched"

If you don't have that feeling, are you really asking them to walk with Jesus into the New Creation? Or are you making them comfortable for this world?

*NB By God's grace and Holy Spirit, those sermons where you think people will hate you are often the ones that Christians respond best to. Finally someone has assured them that following Jesus into suffering is in fact the path to resurrection glory!


"The [listener] must approach as they might a surgeon, knowing, of course, that he will not die, but that it is a serious thing and he will not come out of it unscathed...He must be totally convinced that we are capable of making him scream" Antonin Artaud

Love your widow/ers, the world keeps turning

A number of years ago I picked up a second hand copy of the PTC course "New Testament 1". The copy previously belonged to an older man from the early morning congregation.

At the beginning of unit 10, about the betrayal and death of Jesus, the course had an introductory question
"What is the worst loneliness that you can imagine?"
Below, in an older man's small cursive script, he had written
"To be married for 50 years to your best friend and to suddenly lose her"
I knew he wasn't imagining.
There is a bit of a mood in our churches to resent the elderly for their demands on our time and energy. Yet these are the people on the front line with the reality of a broken world.
Death comes early to all the elderly, and possibly worse for those who live longest.
As one man in my church said "My world died decades ago, now there is a different world I don't know and doesn't know me".

Why do they need our prayers and time help and encouragement? I think Tom Waits puts it best
"They always say he marks the sparrows fall, how can anyone believe it all.
Well the band has stopped playing but we keep dancing,
the world keeps turning, the world keeps turning"

In a world of death, love becomes a poison and our good memories betray us.
The good of the world turns sour, however good it is.
We need a resurrection.

Adam Smith and Christian confession

I've been reading some Adam Smith (to try and understand the philosophical underpinning of our society).
It is interesting. Though he is generally pointed to by free-market evangelists, because his focus on self-interest as a force for good, he notices problems and tensions in his own position.
In his final revision of "A Theory of Moral Sentiments", he added a section called 'Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor or mean condition'.
The problem was, this 'disposition' messed with his theory of why people act benevolently. Smith knew that some (much) charity was manipulative and self-serving, and even proposed a kind of 'charity market', where people gave to the poor in order to gain the approval of a third party. But even this was not enough, and so Smith required an internal imaginary observer that benevolent people were trying to please. His system of self interest reduced the capacity (though hopefully the need too!) of people to feel the necessary sympathy for other human beings. (and not just the rich either, he saw that the increasing specialisation of labour reduced the poor and middle classes moral imagination too)
Though Smith advocated for self interest, he expected the wealthy to also have 'self command', to be able to put aside self interest in order to act nobly. There was a tension in his thought however. The conditions that lead to charitable giving were usually financial security, but the conditions that lead to 'self-command' were hardship and struggle. How could a person both be generous (from security) and display self command (from embracing hardship), all in a context of self interest.

As I read through, it all makes me think of James, and the extremely basic christian confession we make each time we have communion.
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again.

Christ has died, and we are called to share in his crucified life, to share, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in his selfless 'self command'
Christ has risen. This self command however is in the context of the abundant generosity of God in raising the dead (chief among his many other blessings). Christians stand in the ultimate place of security and so can be ultimately generous.
Christ will come again. Living generously to the needy is, in the end, in our best interests, because God will give grace to the humble and destroy the proud. Jesus will return as judge to condemn those who have not lived lives of cross and resurrection hope, who have not lived lives of love. Though earthly governments may or may not be wise to legislate beneficence, God does, and we are absolute fools if we disobey him.

Behold the resurrection

Nathaniel over at Behold reflects on Alan Badious take on Paul and the resurrection, especially as it relates to law and subversion.

"this means that idealistic notions of pure materialism or trancendentalism must both be rejected along with all forms that disguise the one within the other. The conviction must hold that Resurrection cannot be laughed out of material significance into the realm of the failed transcendent, nor can it be thrown up into the sky or into an afterlife in rejection of its reality here and now (leading to the acceptance of the status quo). Both of these ways of dealing with the Resurrection make the same mistake. They fail to take it seriously as an ontologically constitutive reality for God, creation, and the subject. They believe in something else, not the Resurrection Event."

Tied into this view is the conviction that it is Jesus, not me, nor my community, that has been raised. I may be raised by connection to him, but I still have some dying to do before that is the case. Therefore I cant project my own understanding of justice (where I am safe and others are not) onto God's resurrection future.
Interesting stuff.
Though I wonder how it explains our agency in 'putting to death' the sins of the body, if all our conceptions of just and right are too tied to the current order.

Robert Jenson The true God occurs as Jesus' resurrection

The true God occurs as Jesus' resurrection. With some oversimplification,
we may say that the two classes of God's attributes are those posited in saying
that anyone is risen, and those posited in saying that it is Jesus who is risen.
Had Nero risen instead of Christ, there would still be an eternal something,
but it would be an eternal malignity. That there is instead an eternal benignity
is what is said by attributions of the second class. And it is the actual content
of Jesus' human life that interprets penultimate hopes and fears to give such
content to eschatological vision. That Jesus' humanity and ours interpret each
other at all depends on his resurrection, but the matter of the interpretation
depends on the specificity of his humanity.
Jenson Christian Dogmatics 184

Williams He really lives so you cant control him

“There is at Easter no Christ who simply seals our righteousness and innocence, no guarantor of our status, and so no ideological cross. Jesus is alive, he is there to be encountered again, and so his personal identity remains; which means that his cross is his, not ours, part of the history of a person who obstinately stands over against us and will not be painlessly assimilated into our own memories.”
–Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland, Oh: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 71-72.

O'Donovan Resurrection and Renewal

“In proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, the apostles proclaimed also the resurrection of mankind in Christ; and in proclaiming the resurrection of mankind, they proclaimed the renewal of all creation with him. The resurrection of Christ in isolation from mankind would not be a gospel message.The resurrection of mankind apart from creation would be a gospel of a sort, but of a purely gnostic and world denying sort which is far from the gospel that the apostles actually preached”
o’donovan Resurrection and moral order 31

Jungel Love absorbs death

“Resurrection means the overcoming of death. But death will cease only when it no longer consumes the life which excludes it, but when life has absorbed death into itself. The victory over death, which is the object of faith’s hope on the basis of God’s identification with the dead Jesus which took place in the death of Jesus, is the transformation of death through its reception into that life which is called eternal life. For that reason the death which was turned around on the cross of Christ is called a ‘Phenomenon of God.’ It is only short-circuited criticism which wants to see here a final triumph of death. Rather, what happens here is that turning around of death into life which is the very essence of love. The issue here is the truth in the profound statement (1 John 3:14): ‘He who does not love abides in death.’ Death is not turned around apart from love, because love alone is able to involve itself with the complete harshness of death.”
–Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 364.

Herbert McCabe Resurrection and Trinity

God comes into the picture for the Christian as ‘He who raised Jesus up from the dead’. The love Jesus offers has its source totally outside history. Jesus, we discover, is not only totally for others, he is also totally of the Father. The spirit he makes available, what I call the friendship that frees men, his own spirit, is the spirit of the Father. The communication he makes possible is a living into the Father’s communication of himself. From one point of view the resurrection is a revelation of the Trinity, we see Jesus and his Spirit in relationship to the Father. For this reason there is no unitarian halfway between atheism and the Trinity. Any worship of the gods other than as revealed in the resurrection of Jesusis idolatry.”
–Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 2003), 124.

Chrysostom Easter Homily

Let all Pious men and all lovers of God rejoice in the splendor of this feast; let the wise servants blissfully enter into the joy of their Lord; let those who have borne the burden of Lent now receive their pay, and those who have toiled since the first hour, let them now receive their due reward; let any who came after the third hour be grateful to join in the feast, and those who may have come after the sixth, let them not be afraid of being too late, for the Lord is gracious and He receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him who comes on the eleventh hour as well as to him who has toiled since the first: yes, He has pity on the last and He serves the first; He rewards the one and is generous to the other; he repays the deed and praises the effort.

Come you all: enter into the joy of your Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you sober and you weaklings, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today. The table is richly loaded: enjoy its royal banquet. The calf is a fatted one: let no one go away hungry. All of you enjoy the banquet of faith; all of you receive the riches of his goodness.

Let no one grieve over his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over his sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free: He has destroyed it by enduring it, He has despoiled Hades by going down into its kingdom, He has angered it by allowing it to taste of his flesh.

When Isaiah foresaw all this, he cried out: "O Hades, you have been angered by encourntering Him in the nether world." Hades is angered because frustrated, it is angered because it has been mocked, it is angered because it has been destroyed, it is angered because it has been reduced to naught, it is angered because it is now captive. It seized a body, and lo! it discovered God; it seized earth, and, behold! it encountered heaven; it seized the visible, and was overcome by the invisible.

O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen and life is freed, Christ is risen and the tomb is emptied of the dead: for Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.

Lockeridge Sundays Comin

It’s Friday
Jesus is praying
Peter’s a sleeping
Judas is betraying
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
Pilate’s struggling
The council is conspiring
The crowd is vilifying
They don’t even know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are running
Like sheep without a shepherd
Mary’s crying
Peter is denying
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s a comin’
It’s Friday
The Romans beat my Jesus
They robe Him in scarlet
They crown him with thorns
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
See Jesus walking to Calvary
His blood dripping
His body stumbling
And His spirit’s burdened
But you see, it’s only Friday
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The world’s winning
People are sinning
And evil’s grinning
It’s Friday
The soldiers nail my Savior’s hands
To the cross
They nail my Savior’s feet
To the cross
And then they raise Him up
Next to criminals
It’s Friday
But let me tell you something
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are questioning
What has happened to their King
And the Pharisees are celebrating
That their scheming
Has been achieved
But they don’t know
It’s only Friday
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
He’s hanging on the cross
Feeling forsaken by His Father
Left alone and dying
Can nobody save Him?
Oh
It’s Friday
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The earth trembles
The sky grows dark
My King yields His spirit
It’s Friday
Hope is lost
Death has won
Sin has conquered
and Satan’s just a laughing
It’s Friday
Jesus is buried
A soldier stands guard
And a rock is rolled into place
But it’s Friday
It is only Friday
Sunday is a comin’!

Edmund Spenser Easter

Easter



MOST glorious Lord of Lyfe! that, on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin;
And, having harrowd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin;
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye,
Being with Thy deare blood clene washt from sin,
May live for ever in felicity!

And that Thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love Thee for the same againe;
And for Thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy,
With love may one another entertayne!
So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought,
--Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
Edmund Spenser

Brueggeman Easter us

Easter us

You God who terrified the waters,
who crashed your thunder,
who shook the earth, and
scared the wits out of chaos.
You God who with strong arm saved your people
by miracle and wonder and majestic act.
You are the same God to whom we turn,
we turn in our days of trouble,
and in our weary nights;
we look for steadfast love and are dismayed,
we wait for your promises, but wait in fatigue,
we ponder your forgetfulness and lack of compassion,
and we grow silent.
Our lives, addressed to you,
have this bitter-sweet taste of
loud-clashing miracles and weak-kneed doubt.
So we come in our bewilderment and wonderment,
deeply trusting, almost afraid to trust much,
passionately insisting, too timid to insist much,
fervently hoping, exhausted for hoping too much.
Look upon us in our deep need,
mark the wounds of our brothers and sisters just here,
notice the turmoil in our lives, and the lives of our families,
credit the incongruity of the rich and the poor in our very city,
and the staggering injustices abroad in our land,
tend to the rage out of control, rage justified by displacement,
rage gone crazy by absence, silence, and deprivation,
measure the suffering,
count the sufferers,
number the wounds.
You tamer of chaos and mender of all tears in the canvas of creation,
we ponder your suffering,
your crown of thorns,
your garment taken in lottery,
your mocked life,
and now we throw upon your suffering humiliation,
the suffering of the world.
You defeater of death, whose power could not hold you,
come in your Easter,
come in your sweeping victory,
come in your glorious new life.
Easter us,
salve wounds,
break injustice,
bring peace,
guarantee neighbor,
Easter us in joy and strength.
Be our God, be your true self, lord of life,
massively turn our life toward your life
and away from our anti-neighbor, anti-self deathliness.
Hear our thankful, grateful, unashamed Hallelujah!
Amen.
Walter Brueggeman

NT Wright Resurrection, fear and failure

And the resurrection of Jesus issues the surprising command: don’t be afraid; because the God who made the world is the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and calls you now to follow him. Believing in the resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a matter of believing that certain things are true about the physical body of Jesus that had been crucified. These truths are vital and nonnegotiable, but they point beyond themselves, to the God who was responsible for them. Believing in this God means believing that it is going to be all right; and this belief is, ultimately, incompatible with fear. As John says in his letter, perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4.18). And the resurrection is the revelation of perfect love, God’s perfect love for us, his human creatures. That’s why, though we may at any stage in our lives grasp the truth that God raised Jesus from the dead, it takes us all our life long to let that belief soak through and permeate the rest of our thinking, feeling, and worrying lives.”

Sometimes this process isn’t just a gradual thing; it may involve sudden crises. There’s a hidden chapter in the life of St Paul, which is usually ignored by those who see him either as the heroic missionary or the profound theologian, or possibly the misguided misogynist. Acts doesn’t mention this hidden chapter, but in our second lesson we heard Paul himself speak of it. At one stage of his work in what he called Asia, and we call Turkey, he says that he went through a horrendous and traumatic experience which seem to destroy him totally. ‘I was so utterly, unbearably crush’, he writes, ‘that I despaired of life itself; indeed, I felt as though I had received the sentence of death’ (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). And a good part of the second letter to Corinth actually grows out of this experience; the brash, proud Corinthian church had wanted Paul to be a success story, and he had to explain to them that being an apostle, and ultimately being a Christian, was not a matter of being a success story, but of living with human failure–and with the God who raises the dead. That’s what following Jesus is likely to involve.” (NT Wright, Following Jesus, 68-69

Geoffrey Bingham Where O Death

Oh death! Where is thy sting?
Dread venom of lowest hell,
Brewed in the bitterness of hatred,
Where is thy sting,
Distilled from violence of rebellion,
Compounded of saddest separation?
This is death’s sting, and yet
Where, oh where, death, is thy sting?

Where does the sting incise,
Where pour out its poison,
Ghastly, grisly, doom-dealing, deadly?
In it the shame and pain of
Fruitless remorse, dull anguish,
Dry tongue cleaving, tears destroyed
In lethal cynicism, passion against God,
Rustlings of memories bringing horror,
And the incoming, ravaging darkness-
This is death’s sting.
Yet where, oh death, is thy sting?

How then the irrevocable loss
Of the holy, heavenly being-
Man brilliantly lit by God,
Pulsing in glory? How, where, is this loss?
Down in the mocking strata of death,
The leering, gaping grin of the grave,
The stench of corruption, glory-failure
And no-being in God. This is the sting.
Yet, oh death, where, where is thy sting?

The sting is in him. Look up
(All ye that pass by). Look and see.
Do not let the divine drama pass over you,
Be over you, be gone. Look up!
There, writhing with the sting. Oh yes,
Human enough to suffer and divine
Enough to bear. Look up and see,
All ye who pass by. See where death’s sting
Was and is no more.

If a man stay and look, he will see.
If he pass by, then in a moment
He will pass by love, and will never see.
He will miss the miracle
Hid in the grim gallows. He will bypass
Love reaching out with cool arms
To embrace the sin-fevered.
He will pass by, not knowing
Where the sting has gone.

Where is death’s sting? In him:
Annulled and made void: nothing.
Its poison absorbed, destroyed.
Death tried to conquer. This it could not.
This sting in man is death, fiery,
Anguish and flame of hell,
But in him-after the suffering-
Exploded myth of destruction.
In him the fire of death
Blazed to expending, and expended.
Then death, where is your sting?

Ask not, ‘Where is the deathly sting?’
For it is destroyed, absorbed into nothingness
By love’s holy power. Now
It is only life, life flowing,
Life in quality replete, surging up
Out of the empty tomb. Christ’s grave,
Empty through grace, is the wide room
Of man’s new spirit. Man is in life.
Man is enthroned in the heavens,
Having entered into his glory
Through man’s suffering. Man is high.
Gone then is death’s sting.
Void in the victory-the ancient
Annulled victory of the grave.
Oh, death, where is thy sting?

Geoffrey Bingham, 1991

William Stringfellow Resurrection and idolatry

The resurrection constitutes freedom for men from all idolatries, whether of race or money or church or whatever. It constitutes freedom from death as a moral power in history, freedom to welcome and honor life as a gift, freedom to live by grace, unburdened by the anxiety for justification which enslaves men to idols.

In this freedom, we can begin to be faithful to our own humanity, and so faithful to God. We can go to work to give back to our various idols their true nature and purpose in relation to human beings and human living: to love our country and try to restore it to a sense of its true vocation in the family of nations; to use money as a medium facilitating equable exchange of goods and services; and try to get it so used in our society and in our world, and so on.

In this freedom, we no longer serve idols in our work or other experiences; we serve the living God. We work in the service of life, for ourselves and our fellow men. We work to re-establish human life in our relationships with ourselves and others and things in our society, anticipating in hope the final restoration when God will be “all in all.”

Thus work takes on the character of worship “in spirit and in truth,” and in our worship we celebrate the life and restoration we are working for. In such freedom, then, the present obvious dichotomy between what Christians do in the sanctuary and what they do in society can be done away with. What is affirmed and enacted in our corporate liturgical worship is what we affirm and work for in our daily lives. In both, we celebrate the gift of life as such by participation in God’s affirmation of life in the face of death.

William Stringfellow Imposters of God(pp. 65–6)

Resurrection post rain

A friend asked me for some readings/ thoughts on the resurrection and easter. I realized I have lots of good stuff. I am going to rain it down on you over the next few weeks.

Starting........now

As a merely historical person he would
long have been forgotten, because his message had already been
contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart
of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he
becomes a mystery and a question for every new age. of the resurrection of the dead',
Jurgen Moltmann The Crucified God
162

Jesus rose early, while it was still dark

Jesus rose early in the morning, while it was still dark.

I got up early this morning (4:30), for no reason, except that my body was ready to get up.
I pottered around the house a bit, the air was stuffy warm with a tinge of bloody freezing radiating off the windows. Made myself a cup of tea and took the opportunity to read some of Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology. I remembered that he is one of my favourite theologians. A lutheran, deeply influenced by the Cappodocians, who gets Thomas and loves Jonathan Edwards. And on top of that he keeps going back to the Bible and especially the resurrection. Beautiful. Today I was reading on God's relationship to time and space, as well as some stuff on sexuality and politics.

I felt particularly alive this morning. Every now and then I get these moments of clarity where I feel alive, normal, energetic. I've been pretty sick the last week or so, fuzzy head, no voice. And realistically, I've been pretty sick the last year or so. But every now and then, I snap out of it, the world seems, well, more real. I feel like a teenager again, I feel in the moment.
Often these moments come after sickness. I get a migraine that knocks me out for almost a day and I wake up feeling wonderful.
When they come, you realised how impoverished your perception of life is at other times.
I wonder if this is what the resurrection will feel like.
More aliveness. Like we have been sick the whole time and only now are well.

Jesus rose early while it was still dark.
True of the resurrection too.
It is still dark.
I have a funeral on Friday. An uncle died of cancer. He was a very lively man. He taught me how to make pizza.
I cant wait for the whole earth to wake up.

Johnny Cash: Look unto the East

The teacher of truth told tales of trouble times that would begin
And the cynical suer sowed the sorrowful seeds of seven sins
The people placed a prize upon the prince of perfect peace
And the one who wooed the world was wounded, look unto the East

The morning moved in mournfully with many moments smart
My brawny beast who beat the beauty, bound and bit and barred
They laid the lash upon him low, his lips moved not the least
Watch him come from where he did go, look unto the East

The devil threw his darts and the dearest dove came droppin’ down
But the spirit slips in soft and sweetly, unseen with no sound
The comforter, the counsellor with us till time is ceased
And the groom will return for his bride, look unto the East

SM Lockridge on evil

It’s Friday
Jesus is praying
Peter’s a sleeping
Judas is betraying
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
Pilate’s struggling
The council is conspiring
The crowd is vilifying
They don’t even know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are running
Like sheep without a shepherd
Mary’s crying
Peter is denying
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s a comin’
It’s Friday
The Romans beat my Jesus
They robe Him in scarlet
They crown him with thorns
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
See Jesus walking to Calvary
His blood dripping
His body stumbling
And His spirit’s burdened
But you see, it’s only Friday
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The world’s winning
People are sinning
And evil’s grinning
It’s Friday
The soldiers nail my Savior’s hands
To the cross
They nail my Savior’s feet
To the cross
And then they raise Him up
Next to criminals
It’s Friday
But let me tell you something
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are questioning
What has happened to their King
And the Pharisees are celebrating
That their scheming
Has been achieved
But they don’t know
It’s only Friday
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
He’s hanging on the cross
Feeling forsaken by His Father
Left alone and dying
Can nobody save Him?
Oh
It’s Friday
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The earth trembles
The sky grows dark
My King yields His spirit
It’s Friday
Hope is lost
Death has won
Sin has conquered
and Satan’s just a laughing
It’s Friday
Jesus is buried
A soldier stands guard
And a rock is rolled into place
But it’s Friday
It is only Friday
Sunday is a comin’!