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Thursday, November 29, 2007
A Severe Mercy
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 1:68-79
What joker would put the words "severe" and "mercy" together?
That great stand-up comic C. S. Lewis is who.
Well, actually, Lewis was a highly regarded scholar in medieval literature, first at Oxford University and later at Cambridge. He was also well known for his mid-20th century ministry of Christian apologetics. Sort of an apostle to intellectuals, he combined sharp wit and pointed wisdom, disarming skeptics and persuading thousands of serious seekers to devote their lives to Christ.
The term "severe mercy" showed up in a letter from C. S. Lewis to an American professor of literature named Sheldon Van Auken. Lewis had been Van's mentor at Oxford for a season. The two men and Van's wife Davy became fast friends there, and in time Lewis was instrumental in the couple's conversion to Christian faith. After that, until Lewis's death (on the same day John F. Kennedy was assasinated), the two men exchanged numerous letters across the Atlantic Ocean.
So, what about that "severe mercy"?
Van and Davy's life together was a classical fairy tale romance. Their love affair seemed charmed from the beginning, and their marriage became a sort of fortified sanctuary from every kind of distraction and danger. And then came a sudden, mysterious, deadly disease. And Davy died -- all too young and all too innocent.
Van wrote to Lewis in his grief. Repeatedly, he wrote. He poured out his heart, laying bare all his conflicted thoughts and feelings. And Lewis responded with understanding, occasional advice, and always great affection.
And then he finally nailed Van's besetting problem. "One way or another," he wrote, "the thing [romantic love] had to die. Perpetual springtime is not allowed. You were not cutting the wood of life according to the grain. There are various possible ways in which it could have died though both the parties went on living. You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see... that you were jealous of God."
And from there, he continued, Van needed still to let God reorganize his affections if Davy's death was to serve any purpose at all in his lonely life.
"So from US you have been led back to US AND GOD; it remains to go on to GOD AND US. She was further on than you, and she can help you more where she now is than she could have done on earth. You must go on."
Okay. What does any of that have to do with Jeremiah's prophetic warnings or Luke' story about John the Baptist's aged daddy predicting great things yet to come?
There's just one good way to find out...
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
2:20 PM
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
With Eternity's Values In View
Isaiah 12:1-6; Luke 21:1-8
On Sunday morning, I just had to talk in my sermon about Saturday morning's Presbytery meeting. I brought in everything from the weather to the worship, to starving pastors, to an all too brief conversation. All those pieces fit together so well, you'd think God had something to do with it.
The weather: Fog so heavy in the air that I walked a long block through a soft spray of mist all the way back to my car.
The worship: Glorious music (there's nothing quite like a couple hundred ministers and elders singing their hearts out!); good gospel words from the guest preacher; a soul-stirring hour together with God and with each other.
The starving pastors: The offering went to two special funds that supply grants to ministers and churches when financial emergencies threaten a pastor's pocketbook; we gave gladly and generously, grateful for our own relative bounty.
The conversation: My friend and colleague, Rev. Glenda Hope of San Francisco Network Ministries, thanked me (again!) for our suburban church's timely help years ago to a new graduate from their outreach to prostitutes who want to re-enter mainstream life; the punchline was that the woman now has a key staff position in the ministry that turned her life around way back then!
When Glenda began her "thank you" comments (again), I instinctively wanted to say, "Well gee, we really didn't do that much." But that's not so. What we did was have a couple of deacons step up with some money, some savvy, and some sanctified errand running, to make sure the woman and her kids had the bare necessities for a good new life. As Thanksgiving and Christmas approached. Our modest help gave that little family some stability, some hope, some strength to take the next steps into their good new future.
This jumble of Saturday impressions fed nicely into my Sunday sermon. About Jesus' praise for a woman he noticed at the Temple, whose modest offering far outweighed all the other offerings combined that day. What she put in the plate was two of the smallest coins in existence. What she gave in that offering turned out to be everything she had.
Still curious about how my monkey mind put all those pieces together?
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
5:38 PM
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Thine Is The Glory
Exodus 33:17-23; John 12:20-32
Say "Glory of God" and what comes to mind?
Well, in some of the more dramatic stories of the Hebrew scriptures, you get things like:
- Bright shining light
- Dark clouds and flashing lightning
- Earthquakes
- Thick smoke and eerie voices
- Holiness -- whatever that is
- Creative energy
- Infinite, eternal, unchangeable all-of-the-above
Think, for example, of... Moses' spiritual smack-down match with the Egyptian king, priests, and wizards... The Israelites crossing the Red Sea unscathed, even unbathed, when the waters miraculously parted and rushed back together once they reached the other shore... All the special effects when Moses met with God up on Mt. Sinai for 40 days of consultation....
But, glorious as all that is, the passages for this week's message pack a glorious surprise. Each one says God's greatest glory is much more modest. And much more wonderful by far.
Listen to the GODcast!
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Each of the four Gospels has a dramatic turning point, each one told differently. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke the difference is slight -- rightly so, for they share the same basic outline.
John's version differs greatly. Rightly so, again -- for his whole Gospel tells Jesus' story from a totally different point of view.
All along the way, John has Jesus saying here and there, "My hour has not yet come." And that primes the reader to wonder, "What hour? Hour for what, exactly? When will it come, then? And how will we know it when it does come?"
And then you get to chapter 12. And here it comes. "Now," says Jesus, "This is my hour. The time has come."
So, what exactly has happened?
Some Greeks have asked his disciples for an audience with Jesus.
Greeks! In Jerusalem, the Jewish holy city. At the Passover festival. Who are these guys? And why are they there of all places, now of all times?
They might simply be Jewish pilgrims who live in Greece, thus not your "Best of Jerusalem" A-list guests at the hometown religious party.
Or maybe they're Greek converts who found the light in their neighborhood synagogue, submitted to the rabbi's instruction, and were warmly welcomed into the fold.
I like William Barclay's suggestion (in The Daily Study Bible) that they might have been well-to-do Greek tourists, taking in the sights and sounds of the Passover as a means of self-improvement. Like an elderhostel outing, or a self-directed inspirational vacation.
In any case, there they are. And they want to meet Jesus.
And he says that's it. It is now high time. For his glory to be revealed.
No more mere glimpses, flashes, hints, and clues. Now who and what he is will be seen in all its holy beauty. Whatever that is.
Now God's great Good News in Christ will be clearly read by anyone whose spiritual eyes are open to receive it.
As usual, my patron saint Frederick Buechner has something good to say about all this...
What is both Good and New about the Good News [Gospel] is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves us even in our wickedness and folly and wants us to love each other the same way and to love him too, but that if we will let him, God will actually bring about this unprecedented transformation of our hearts himself.
What is both Good and New about the Good News is the mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.
Thus the Gospel is not only Good and New but, if you take it seriously, a Holy Terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed from a slob into a human being was going to be a Sunday School picnic. On the contrary. Childbirth may occasionally be painless, but rebirth never. (Wishful Thinking, Harper San Francisco, 1973: page 33) The glory of God revealed in Christ, then, turns out to be what the old familiar song calls "amazing grace." God's free gift that we could never earn, generously handed to us simply because God is good and has good in mind for us.
Jesus' arms spread wide on the cross form God's wide-open embrace of the whole wide world. Freely offered, freely to be accepted. But that glorious gift comes, just as it did for Jesus, at the cost of everything you've got.
And it's absolutely worth it!
posted by Jack Buckley at
5:27 PM
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Deliver Us From Evil
Genesis 3:1-7; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
This Sunday my message focused on the line in the Lord's Prayer: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." I find that couplet more than a little bit curious.
I mean, why would God ever lead us into temptation? That would be just downright nasty. It's hard to believe Jesus really wants us to ask God every day, "Please, don't set me up!" Instead, these two lines are another example of Hebraic parallelism, which says the same basic thing two different ways, back to back... As in, "Lead us far away from temptation; protect us from evil."
In my sermon I told how author Anne Lamott once asked me out of the blue, "Do you believe in the Devil?" Caught off guard, and wanting to seem very intelligent, I started to beat about the theological bush. She interrupted, saying, "I sure do. I've met him in person!"
If you'd like to know more about that conversation and its significance for my sermon -- or how I of all people ever got to talk with such a literary superstar -- then you'd better...
Listen to the GODcast!
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Last week the San Francisco bay area was shaken by an earthquake that registered 5.6 on the Richter scale, our biggest one since the murderous Loma Prieta quake in October 1989. Unlike that one, this shaker did little damage and nobody died. I sat in a meeting while it happened, silently counting off the seconds while it vibrated underfoot, and we all sighed in relief when it ended without a violent lurch.
The following Sunday my message traced another kind of fault line, poking around in our human tendency to toy with temptation. My Anne Lamott story fit nicely into all that, and it went over just as effectively as I'd hoped. Every preacher loves when that kind of thing happens, not nearly as often as we would hope.
All well and good. Today I finally looked up a passage in Annie's first best-selling book, Operating Instructions (Pantheon Books, 1993), which I flagged years ago in study notes on this part of the Lord's Prayer.
It's her confession of just how easily enticement to evil worms its way into our hearts and minds and spiritual cores. It's set on the evening of that 1989 earthquake.
Listen to her story...
There was a huge earthquake in the Bay Area yesterday. I came in from the kitchen to check on Sam [her baby], who was sleeping and who has a cold, and suddenly the whole house was swaying and there was a low roar. Everything was shaking, and I actually thought at first that John and Julie, who live in the flat above us, were using an industrial floor waxer. Then I realized what was going on, and I looked over at where Sam lay asleep in his bassinet, right beneath the built-in bookcases, and I was immobilized. All of the big heavy books could have fallen down onto him and crushed him, and I couldn't move. Like a nightmare. It felt like it lasted about fifteen seconds, and when it was over I rushed to the bassinet and picked up the baby. He continued to sleep. Then Julie came running down to make sure we were okay, and we turned on the TV. At first there was no reception, but then finally there was a picture, and the first reports made it sound like San Francisco looked like Nagasaki, like the whole city was on fire. A section of the Bay Bridge was down, and there was total pandemonium and also immediate acts of heroism and bravery. Julie and I both voiced huge, concerned, compassionate thoughts about what was going on, feeling really awful and impotent. One small difference in our reaction was that Julie, near tears, sat staring at the set, wondering out loud if her husband was still alive, while I was rather horrified to discover that I was worried about how this would affect sales of the book. This made me feel just great about myself, as you can imagine. So did my other main concern, which was that if the World Series had to be postponed, it would completely ruin my life, and when I got up to make Julie a cup of tea, I limped to the kitchen feeling like a medieval dwarf with a lot of small broken teeth. Well... She does have a way with words.
A few lines later she caps off the story with a gentle reference to our all too common "self-centered, petty, envious, conniving mule-stupid side." You could call it sin: our deep indifference to avoiding temptation -- just this once, right here, right now.
No wonder, then, that Jesus tells us to pray, "Keep us safe from the Devil, of course; and from ourselves as well!"
posted by Jack Buckley at
5:22 PM
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Forgive Us
Psalm 103; Matthew 6:7-15
On Saturday night our church threw its annual Halloween spooktacular musical event, "Pipe Screams." It's a huge talent show and costume party, drawing well over 200 people from the church and community into our eerily decorated Sanctuary. After the show our youth group put on a Haunted House in the church parlor. And, of course, some pretty scary snack treats were devoured by souls brave or foolish enough to sink their fangs in.
My get-up for the evening was an "O Brother Where Art Thou" striped convict suit, complete with that weird little hat. When I sang my one solo line in Tom Lehrer's "Irish Ballad" about a sweet young murderous lass, it brought down the house -- "And lying, she knew, was a sin!" Go figure.
After the show, one church member reacted to my costume with, "Well, Jack, I knew it was just a matter of time." Another suggested I might wear it again the next morning, in keeping with my sermon topic -- "Forgive us our debts"!
I decided to go with my dark suit and spiffy tie instead.
I'll make you a deal: Visualize me either way... Your call... Just make sure that you...
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:37 PM
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