My Old Sermon Blog

We’ve been, perhaps, a little more conscious of breath this past year, specifically the possibility of the absence of breath. The key symptom and hazard of COVID-19 is shortness of breath and lasting damage to lungs is one of the ongoing effects even if one recovers from the disease. Early on in the pandemic, the hospital use of ventilators to assist breathing came to the forefront of the world’s attention as they were sometimes found in short supply.

We’ve also had to deal with the wearing of masks when in contact with people outside our households. Some people have found that masks make breathing difficult. Again, breath has been very much on our minds.

On a different and more painful front, the slogan “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for protestors after the death of George Floyd. Floyd said those words multiple times before he died with ex-police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck. The chant had already been part of protests against police brutality toward Blacks, its use stemming from the death of Eric Garner who spoke the words 11 times while in a chokehold done by New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014.

The sermon text I’ve selected from the lectionary texts for this Sunday, which is Pentecost, is Psalm 104:24-34, 35b. The overall psalm celebrates God’s providential care toward all His creation. The center of the selected portion connects with Pentecost particularly verses 29 and 30, which remind us that, in the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, the word for breath and the word for spirit are the same word. Verse 29 recognizes that God is the giver of breath, of life, to all creatures. Take away the breath/life He gives, and “they die and return to their dust.”

Verse 30 in the NRSV translation helps us catch the drift of thought when it offers the great hope that the reverse is possible for loss of breath, “When you send forth your spirit (breath) they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.”

We can see the connection with the reading from Ezekiel 37 where God sends spirit/breath into dry bones and they are raised to life, as well as with the Pentecost story of Acts 2 where incredible energy is breathed into to apostolic gathering when the Spirit blows in upon them. Life is renewed.

All these texts may invite us into seeking and perhaps enjoying some sort of spiritual, religious experience of renewal. Reflecting on Jesus’ presence with us via the Holy Spirit may bring us renewed comfort, peace and joy. That’s a fine takeaway from the day of Pentecost. But let’s not forget that organic biblical connection between literal breath and spirit. Let’s not forget that from the beginning God has desired to breathe literal breath and life into His creation and into human beings.

So as we celebrate the invisible, intangible gift of the Spirit this Sunday, let us not forget to thank God for the very, very tangible gift of the air that flows in and out of human lungs. And let us do all we can to preserve and share that gift with our neighbors and the whole world, whether it’s by seeking police reform so that no one need anymore choke out “I can’t breathe,” or by encouraging our relatives, friends, and neighbors to be vaccinated against a breath-stealing disease, or by taking action and making sacrifices so that the air on our earth remains good to breath. Breath and Spirit are intimately connected and we can’t really enjoy the Spirit if we are not offering breath to each other.

Before they were freed, slaves in the field would sing as they worked, “I’ll be all right someday.” In 1901 Charles Albert Tinney, son of a slave and a free black woman, published a hymn entitled “I Will Overcome Someday.” This was the first verse:

This world is one great battlefield,
With forces all arrayed;
If in my heart I do not yield
I’ll overcome some day.
I’ll overcome some day,
I’ll overcome some day;
If in my heart I do not yield
I’ll overcome some day.

That hymn eventually transformed into a protest song that was sung at strikes as early as 1909, “We will overcome someday.” In the late 1940s in the union work of the Highlander Folk School, with a changed tune and words, and perhaps influenced by Pete Seeger, it became “We shall overcome someday.”

“We Shall Overcome” then became the anthem of the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted it in his last sermon before his death. It became part of protest and justice movements around the world. It was sung in Prague during the Velvet Revolution and in Tienanmen Square.

Perhaps the primary biblical source for Tinney’s hymn and the protest song is our text for this week, I John 5:1-8, particularly verses 4 and 5. Both those verses state that it is faith, belief, that leads to victory over the world. In “We Shall Overcome,” that faith might be understood as simply trust in the coming victory, “Oh, deep in my heart I do believe that we shall overcome someday.” But in Tinney’s hymn the faith is more explicitly Christian,

A thousand snares are set for me,
And mountains in my way;
If Jesus will my leader be,
I’ll overcome some day.
I’ll overcome some day,
I’ll overcome some day;
If Jesus will my leader be,
I’ll overcome some day.

Verse 5 of our text says, “Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”

In the Baptist church in which I grew up, we sang another hymn based on this text, “Faith is the Victory.” The chorus went,

Faith is the victory!
Faith is the victory!
O glorious victory,
That overcomes the world.

All this talk of overcoming and victory might feel a little daunting in these days when protest and political conflict seems so prone to violence. I chose not to use my usual choice of Bible translation, the NRSV, this time because it translates the Greek word for “overcome” or “victory” as “conquer,” which seems even more unfortunate as we wrestle with ugly European history around the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Yet the text does in fact speak to overcoming, to victory, even to conquest. We just have to be careful to understand how John means us to understand that.

The way this Christian idea of overcoming appears in the Civil Rights movement, particularly in its prevalent non-violent form led by Martin Luther King Jr., is a good clue to the meaning of the biblical text. The victory promised by John in these verses is in no way a violent trampling of others in order to achieve domination. Verses 1 and 2 start out the whole train of thought, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.”

As we have noted a couple of times this spring, much of the burden of John’s first letter is to call the Christian community to love for each other which reflects the love of God for them. Any “overcoming” of the world will clearly not be by force, but by the love which comes to us from God through Jesus Christ.

Our text makes that emphasis on conquering by love even clearer when it ends in verses 6 to 8 by pointing us to the sacrificial life and death of Jesus, epitomized in “water and blood,” His baptism and death on the Cross. And we participate in that same sacrificial love by participating in the Spirit’s testimony to us, through the water of baptism and the blood of Holy Communion, that is, the Christian sacraments.

Even in that fairly militant sounding “Faith is the Victory” hymn we sang in my youth, overcoming via love rather than force was clearly understood. Lines from the hymn say,

His banner over us is love

and

Then onward from the hills of light,
Our hearts with love aflame,
We’ll vanquish all the hosts of night,
In Jesus’ conqu’ring name.

Let’s be unafraid to take up that song and that hope and that promise of God’s Word that by faith in Christ and reflection of His sacrificial love we may truly overcome the world. There’s plenty of wrong and hatred that needs to be overcome. Let’s listen to and receive the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and be ready to march ahead in Jesus’ name.

There were three men cast away on a desert island. After many months of waiting for any sign of rescue, a bottle floated up on the beach. As they all gathered around, one of them picked it up and rubbed off the sand. Lo and behold, as he rubbed, a genie appeared! The genie was extremely grateful to be released from the bottle and announced that, as usual, he had three wishes to grant. Because there were three of them stranded on the island, they could each have one wish. The man holding the bottle immediately spoke up, “I am sick of this island. I miss my family and my friends. I want to go home.” Poof! He was gone, home to his wife and children. One of the other men said, “I feel exactly the same way. It has been too long. Please send me home.” Poof! He also was gone, home once again. The third man was left alone with the genie. He was, you might say, the slowest of the three. He looked around at the island for awhile, and then said, “You know, it sure is lonely here without my two friends. I wish they were back.”

In our Gospel text for this Sunday, John 15:1-8, Jesus says to His disciples in verse 7, “ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” Prosperity gospel preachers have done a booming business telling people that those words, lifted out of context, can be taken at face value and that they must just be clever in their wishing (praying?), more clever than the third man on that desert island. Yet it’s easy to see that one must include the first part of the verse: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish…”

Many of us may escape the crass materialism of prosperity “gospel” and not make our wishes about wealth or power. Yet we may still fail to meet the condition Jesus made. By focusing mostly solely on ourselves in what we ask of God, whether on our own physical or emotional health or even on our personal spiritual well-being, we may fail to “abide” in our Lord. That’s why the lead in to this promise of “whatever you wish” is both preceded and followed by the image of a grape vine.

To abide in Jesus, He says in verse 5, is to be branches of the main stem which is His own life and being. Thus to abide in Him, we must not just offer praise and love toward Jesus or focus on our personal salvation in Him. To abide in Jesus, we must be extensions of what He does, of His concerns. We cannot be, like the third man on the island, only interested in our own wishes, but also in the wishes and needs of others, just as Jesus is.

Of course, to abide in Jesus in such a way is not a simple or brief transformation of how we usually think or live. We may be more clever in deferring or sublimating those desires which are aimed at our own benefit, but even when we genuinely wish to be concerned for others our wishes for ourselves often play a part. Coming to abide in Jesus in such a way that whatever we wish for is so much in tune with His own wishes, so much a genuine branch of His own Spirit, that of course the prayer for those wishes will be granted, is a long and likely difficult process which can take a lifetime… or more.

Our aim, then, is for a way of life which will bring us into the sort of relationship with Jesus which will transform our desires, our wishes, to align with His. It’s not a direct process of simply changing what we wish for. I can’t simply decide to want something different from what I want, anymore than I can just decide to believe something different from what I believe. But I can enter into a long course of action which will change what I think and feel over time. That’s what it will take to learn to abide in Jesus and then get whatever we wish.

“I’m just an old lump of goal, but I’m gonna be a diamond someday,” sings John Anderson in an old cover of a Billy Joe Shaver song. The same sentiment appears in much more exalted verse by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,  patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Hopkins is (and possibly Shaver too) referring to verse 2 of our text for this week from I John 3:1-7. John writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” It’s an assurance that whatever we are now, which is at the least beloved children of God, we will one day be like Christ. In other words, pure, “just as he is pure” as it says in verse 3.

That hope for some great future as yet mostly undefined is familiar to most parents looking at their children, especially infants. It’s also becoming known to us as grandparents as we watch via twice-weekly Skype calls our new grandson grow and begin to exhibit his own personality and delight in the world around him. We occasionally wonder if he will grow up interested in obscure academic matters like his parents and grandparents, or if he will strike out in a direction of his own and become a rock musician or a soccer (“football” in England) player.

The “comfort of the resurrection,” as Hopkins puts it, is that all of us, no matter how old and worn, marred or broken, like a potsherd, God is planning to make something pure and good out of us in and with Christ. The challenge of that comfort and hope is what John moves too in the second part of the text beginning in verse 3, “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” The rest of the text is the disconcerting suggestion that those who hope in Jesus ought not to be sinning, now, they should be moving toward that ultimate diamondhood, that purity like His.

It’s a disconcerting word when we like Shaver or Hopkins put our present self up against what we hope to be, dirty coal or potsherd against the clear diamond. Yet how else ought we to live? If such purity is our future, how can we not want to strive for it now? Without some measure of progress in purity, how can we do as Jesus commanded in our Gospel lesson in Luke 24:48, be “witnesses to these thing?” Won’t our witness simply be laughed off if those who hear us find our moral status no better or even worse than their own?

Even Shaver said that if he was going to be that “diamond someday,” he would have to “kneel and pray every day” and “spit and polish my old rough-edged self.” We have a glorious future that calls us to a hopeful yet diligent life in the present. May we start polishing a few of those rough places today.

We recently bought my wife a new desk lamp. She had been having trouble reading and thought she needed new glasses. But she came home from the eye doctor with the news that she has the beginning of cataracts and a change in glasses wouldn’t help. But a brighter, higher Kelvin light would. So her new lamp shines a white, white 6000K beam on her books or artwork.

The new light helps because the cataracts cast a yellowish tinge on everything and diminishes contrast between black letters on the white background of most books. The colder, brighter light increases the contrast and helps her make out the letters. Our epistle lesson for this week, I John 1:1 – 2:2, offers several different images, but the central one figures in verse 5, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” What John has to say about “walking in the light” tells us that God’s light creates a huge contrast between accepting the “word of life,” which is Jesus (verses 1-3) and being in fellowship with God through Him, and the life of sin, which still unfortunately is part of our experience.

Like that bright light aiding my wife to read despite her developing cataracts, the light of God in Jesus Christ invites us into a fellowship with God which is available despite the way sin dims our perception of spiritual things. As verse 7 says, “if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

Cataracts are typically a problem of those who are older, but John makes clear here that sin is a problem for us all, even when we know Jesus. So verse 10 tells us, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” In a bit of a paradoxical twist, we are not really seeing the light unless it lets us see the contrast between it and the darkness in us.

Our text concludes with the solution to the sin and darkness in which even Christians still find themselves. Chapter 2 verse 1 tells us that when we sin we have an “advocate” in Jesus, who, like an advocate in court, stands with us in the piercing light God shines into our lives. The NRSV translates verse 2, “and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins,” but it’s better read using the theological term, “the expiation for our sins.” Jesus brings a light which not only reveals our sins, but removes them from us. It’s as if that desk lamp could not only help Beth read, but also somehow remove her cataracts. Thanks be to God for the light of Jesus.

In a bit of delicious irony, I turned to Wikipedia to read about the origin of the term “crowdsource.” Wikipedia is, of course, one of the largest and most visible crowdsourced projects on the Internet. Its articles are written, contributed, critiqued and edited by a huge number of volunteers, with their work being harnessed and harmonized by Wikipedia’s algorithms and staff.

My own blog here itself was meant, although I wasn’t thinking of the term, to be a kind of crowdsourcing of sermon preparation. It hasn’t panned out, but I had hoped for readers’ comments and questions regarding my initial thoughts about a text to aid and hone the final work I did in preparing to preach. The reality is that comments (other than a load of immediately trashed spam from blog bots) are rare and only come from one or two people. But I digress.

I’m having a little fun this Palm Sunday by viewing Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as a bit of dominical crowdsourcing, with Jesus pulling together resources contributed by a crowd of volunteers in order to create an acted parable and time of worship focused on who He is and what He has come to do. It appears in all four Gospels, but this year we will hear about Palm Sunday from John 12:12-19.

Surprisingly, John is the only Gospel which specifically mentions palm branches, providing the popular name for the day in the church calendar. Matthew and Mark simply mention branches being laid in the road, while all three synoptics say that faithful disciples laid their cloaks in the road for Jesus to ride over. Thus some the trappings of the procession were crowdsourced both by Jesus’ immediate circle of followers and by the crowd which joined them that day.

Likewise, only told in Matthew, Mark and Luke, the donkey(s) upon which Jesus rode, was(were) procured by disciples following Jesus’ directions to have it(them) volunteered by the owner.

The praise itself, including that iconic word for the day, “Hosanna!” is also a voluntary product of the crowd. It appears that Jesus in no way directed or arranged for what was said about Him, yet the ancient, perhaps not even wholly understood, cry of “Save us!” and “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord–the king of Israel!” are accurate and prophetic depictions of the One one who was riding into Jerusalem.

Which all, I will muse, suggests the possibility that Jesus still desires to “crowdsource” our worship of Him. Scripture offers us no complete liturgy, even for a Jewish service of worship. Instead we receive tantalizing glimpses of great moments of praise offered to God and to His Son. Some of them, at least, incorporate parts that utilize what people have at hand to offer, be it palm branches, words from Scripture, musical instrumentation, or bodily expression like standing or bowing before the Lord.

Our own congregation has discovered that even our recorded on-line worship services are enhanced when crowdsourced in some way, by including more faces and voices than simply the pastor and the song leaders. So we seek a variety of Scripture readers, offerings of devotional thoughts, reports from missionaries, and brief words of praise or thanksgiving on special occasions. All of it comes together a bit like Wikipedia or some piece of open-source software, and like the first Palm Sunday: beautiful but functional, highly participatory yet unified in aim, glorious in being so good while incorporating both the great and the less-than-perfect in the whole.

So I’d suggest that our Lord invented crowdsourcing long before we thought of it, and that it is actually His own plan for the creation of His kingdom on this earth. As we are saying also about the diversity of that kingdom, it’s a grand mosaic, with each of us in the crowd bringing and offering a piece to fit into the holy design.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s only a few years ago that Beth and I discovered the beauty in and around the Cape Perpetua Scenic Area on the Oregon Coast. Part of that discovery was a hike I’ve now taken several times to the giant spruce tree that soars above the forest there. One of the incredible aspects of the tree is a gap at the bottom through which a child (or a younger, more spry adult than I am currently) could crawl.

A helpful sign near the tree explains that the gap is the result of the tree’s start in life growing upon a nurse (or nursery) log. The seed fell upon a decaying downed tree and found the nutrients needed to begin life. As the new tree continued to grow, the nurse log completely decayed and disappeared, leaving the gap at the bottom. One can view younger trees and nurse logs in action in the same area and in other parts of the Pacific Northwest.

As I thought about Jesus’ words in our text today from John 12:20-33, about His being glorified pictured in the metaphor of a seed falling to the ground and “dying” so that it could grow and rise again producing much fruit, those nurse logs came to mind. When Jesus talks about His glorification in John, He is talking about His death on the Cross. In much the same way a fallen giant of the forest is “glorified” by the new trees which arise from it, Jesus is glorified in the giving of His life so that others following Him and His example might keep their lives “for eternal life,” as He says in verse 25.

The whole text is at first glance a strange patchwork of non-sequitur. Philip and Andrew bring news to Jesus of some foreigners, Greeks, who wish to see Him. Jesus in no way acknowledges His visitors, nor do we hear if He ever met them. Instead, Jesus responds with the announcement that His hour to be glorified is at hand, followed by the image of the seed falling into the ground and dying. And of course the natural science isn’t even quite correct, since seeds that end up sprouting and bearing fruit, as Jesus pictures, don’t really die. Then comes a spiritual paradox Jesus repeats in different ways and which lies at the heart of the Gospel: love and hold onto your life and you will lose it; disregard and let go of your life and you will save it.

The non-sequiturs continue in verse 27 as Jesus then announces that His “soul is troubled,” and that He’d like to be saved from this “hour,” presumably the hour of His death. The context of the passage just after Palm Sunday helps us remember that the Cross is imminent. Nonetheless, Jesus calls not for His own glorification but for the Father to glorify the Father’s own name. A thunderous voice from heaven announces that is just what the Father intends to do. Jesus then announces to the disciples that the voice was for their benefit and that He has come so that “now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” He finally concludes with the same description of His death we heard last week in John 3, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,” followed by “will draw all people to myself.” Which means that after a seemingly disconnected train of thought, the last phrase brilliantly connects us back to those Greeks at the beginning. Jesus needs to “fall into the ground,” “lose His life,” “be lifted up,” all to address that need they had to see Him, the need all people on earth have to see Jesus and find life in Him.

And those fallen nurse logs in the damp forests of our region are beautiful images of how the lifted-up-then-fallen Savior of the world becomes the source of life for all who will affix their lives to Him. They in turn, like that giant tree there at Cape Perpetua, will one day fall and give their own lives to nurture others. Such is the way of the Tree which we call the Cross. Such is the way of glory.

Snakes often like sunlight. Rattlesnakes across North America, though less active in winter, will come out on sunny days to bask in sunshine. Studies of timber rattlers in the east show that they need open space in wooded areas where their bodies can find enough sunlight to reach a temperature suitable for gestation.

Maybe that affinity for light was part of the reason Jesus compared Himself to a snake in our text for this week, John 3:14-21. Of course the snake to which He referred was the bronze image of a snake made by Moses as a vehicle for God to heal rebellious Israelites of snake bites. In that case the culprits were probably saw scale vipers, also called carpet vipers, which are reddish in color.

In any case, the more than familiar words of John 3:16 are introduced by Jesus with the allusion to and comparison with Moses lifting up the bronze viper on a pole. That same familiar verse is followed by a discussion of God’s salvation versus His condemnation using the metaphor of people who love light versus those who prefer darkness.

It’s fascinating that the snake already portrayed as a sign of healing and salvation comes out well in the light-darkness imaging. In the wild, sunlight can be a necessity for snakes to maintain body temperature. Their “basking” is not just for comfort but for survival.

Likewise in verses 19-21, people need to come into the light to avoid judgment. Those who wish to keep their deeds hidden in the dark are judged as evil and will be condemned.

The recent minor media furor over the Harry and Meghan interview with Opra is a case in point. It seems fairly clear that the couple dared to name in public some behavior and comments that the British royal family would have preferred to keep out of the public eye. It’s fascinating how even some Americans, without anything really at stake, have either praised or condemned Harry and Meghan for their candor, with some even questioning the veracity of what they said.

Harry and Meghan’s experience is of course just a particularly noticeable example of debates over the MeToo movement and “cancel culture.” Without weighing in on whether those whose wrong words and deeds are exposed should be “canceled,” I will say that what Jesus says here seems to be on the side of evil being brought to light rather than hidden. To take up another story recently in the media, it tells against the Ravi Zacharias ministry organization which until recently had functioned to ignore and keep hidden various complaints and warnings which might have exposed his sexual wrongdoing before he died.

Verse 19 says, “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world…” And we already know from John’s first chapter that Jesus is that light. Put together with verse 14, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” and we get the implication that Jesus coming into the world and dying on the Cross is the ultimate light which exposes the deeds of darkness, exposes our sin.

One of the ways in which the Cross exposes sin is by its sheer horror. That the remedy for sin had to be that speaks volumes about its pervasiveness and seriousness. We also see sin exposed in the fact that the One who died on the Cross was innocent of sin.

I’m not talking just about the fact that the vast majority of humanity fails abjectly in any moral comparison with Jesus. It’s certainly true that if you hold any of us up to the light of His perfect goodness and love and we naturally want to crawl for some dark hole in which to hide. But I’m also thinking about the Atonement theology of Rene Girard. Girard suggests that at the root of human sin and violence toward each other is the aim to create a scapegoat for all the resentment and envy we feel toward one another. Such scapegoating is certainly at the heart of at least some of our racism and enmity toward those from other countries.

According to Girard, Jesus came into our human system of justifying our violent sin by identifying scapegoats and dies as a victim who is obviously and clearly innocent. His death on the Cross thus revealed human violence for the injustice that it is, evil toward those who do not deserve it. His innocence is the light which exposes the darkness of violence.

Fortunately the exposure of sin is not the end of the story. When Jesus is raised from the dead, the light of His risen life becomes the illumination in which we are to go on living. By the power of His death and resurrection, we become people who learn to love the light, who want to live in it, so that as verse 21 says, “it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

Perhaps one lesson is that rather than maligning and decrying “cancel culture,” we ought to strive more to live our salvation symbolized by a snake lifted out into the sunlight. Let us be the kind of people who in Christ need not fear exposure to light, need not worry about our deeds being found out. Come holy light and shine on us snakes.

Next Monday it will have been a whole year since our church gathered together in-person in our sanctuary. God has been good to us, we’ve gotten fairly proficient at offering worship on-line, and we’ve even been able to have a couple of outdoor gatherings on the church property. But we still deeply miss being in that place on Sunday mornings. It’s a feeling of loss so great that at least one of my pastor colleagues is planning a service of lament to recognize that church’s own year apart from their sanctuary.

That sense of longing for a sacred space can help inform how we read the Gospel text for this week, John 2:13-22, Jesus “cleansing” the Temple. Unless we can sympathize with the respect and love Jesus (and Jewish people in general) felt for that particular building and its environs, we won’t really quite get what is going on in this text.

To begin with, there’s a problem of Gospel harmony here. Matthew, Mark, and Luke put the cleansing of the Temple in Holy Week, perhaps the Monday following Palm Sunday. Yet John puts it here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, at least a couple of years before the events of Holy Week and the death and resurrection of Jesus. A tiny handful of scholars suggest it happened twice, while most suggest that John tells the story earlier in his narrative for theological reasons (another small minority suggest that it is the other three Gospel writers who have shifted the time of the event).

I’ll go with the majority of interpreters and say that John put this account of an angry Jesus in the Temple early on because, unlike especially Mark who wished to make Jesus’ divinity a big reveal at the end of his book, John wrote to set forth at the outset who Jesus is and then show how that worked out in His interactions with others.

So John is more concerned with where this event took place than with the exactly chronology of when it took place, although John still makes it clear in verse 13 that it happened just before Passover. In this focus on place, John is somewhat like Native American and other indigenous story tellers in that a particular place is tied to the story and that the identities of those in the story and of those who hear it are connected to that place.

Modern interpretations of this story tend to lift it out of its literal setting in the Temple in Jerusalem (I’ve done it myself). It’s suggested that the anger and action of Jesus is aimed at a spiritual error of which the livestock sellers and money changers were guilty. They were letting business get in the way of faith and devotion to God. That’s not a bad lesson to get from the text, but it misses some of what is there.

We should first note Jesus’ zeal, His passion for that sacred building, His identification of it as His “Father’s house” in verse 16. To try and make a metaphor out of that passion, to make it concern only for the spiritual practices which should have been happening in the Temple, is to miss the sacredness of the “house” itself. Just as it would be missing something to simply toss off our grief over being out of church building for the past twelve months by suggesting it is only what we do there that really matters.

Americans have never been very good at understanding sacred space and place. From the beginnings of the nation during which we displaced both this land’s indigenous people and African people from their own land, to current disregard for Native American sacred places like Monument Mountain which was devastated last year for building a piece of border wall, we’ve not really grasped even our own attachment to and identification with place.

That’s why we have to work to not misunderstand the last part of the text in verses 18-22, when Jesus’ authority for cleansing the temple is challenged. In verse 19 He responds with an image that, again, the other Gospels place toward the end of the story. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” When His hearers are incredulous, John helpfully explains in verse 21, “But he was speaking to them of the temple of his body.”

At least one commentator calls those last verses the “replacement” of the Temple by Jesus. Instead of a particular geographic location for God’s presence, God now becomes present in the world in Christ. Again, that’s not a bad lesson from this passage, but it misses something. It misses the prior importance of the literal Temple, of the place itself. If that place, that building, had not first been understood to be sacred, even by Jesus Himself, it would hardly be significant to identify Jesus as the new Temple.

We may also want to note that John’s comment in verse 21 identifies the new “Temple” not as some cosmic, spiritualized form of Christ, but very concretely as “his body.” The new Temple still had material form, still had place in the world.

All of this suggests that if we want to understand and follow this Jesus who identified Himself by identifying with a place, much as many people still do in the world today, we will need to cultivate the imagination to appreciate such identification. This may take the form of recognizing our own attachment to sacred space, but also definitely means learning to recognize the even deeper attachment of people around us, whether Native Americans or Palestinians driven from ancestral homes or refugees forced to flee fighting in various parts of the world. Jesus identified with them by identifying with a building which would also be destroyed by hostile, foreign invaders.

So before we set about “cleansing our hearts” or “making our souls a house for God” or any other spiritual activity based on this text, maybe we should contemplate for a while the sacredness of places in the world our Father created (Psalm 19 from the lectionary this week is one place to start). Perhaps in that way we may grow closer to a Savior who died and rose to save all the people of this world and the places in which they live and find their identities.

54 years ago, when I was eleven, I put on an ill-fitting canvas backpack and followed a line of other boys up a trail into Kings Canyon National Park in California. I had enjoyed the outdoors before, fishing along a creek in Arizona, a few car camping trips and day hikes with my Scout troop before this trek, but I was about to plunge into genuine wilderness for five full days. There were no cars, no restrooms, no shelter, no other “services” for miles and miles. There were just pine forest, wildly rushing streams to cross, patches of snow, and granite rocks everywhere. I discovered that I loved it.

There were, of course, things I didn’t love about the experience. At various points along the way we heard the buzz of rattlesnakes and once came upon one right in the middle of the trail. Going “number 2” was more difficult than I’d ever experienced. And with only a thin foam mat and a cheap sleeping bag between me and the ground, I was colder and more uncomfortable at night than I wanted to be. But I still loved it, loved the “wilderness.”

I was far from alone in my generation that made REI, Eddie Bauer, North Face and other esoteric backpacker’s brands into household names. But our modern love for wilderness makes it a bit harder to get at the meaning of our text for this Sunday, Mark 1:9-15. It’s placed in the lectionary on this first Sunday of Lent particularly because of the brief narrative in verses 12 and 13 of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

The word “wilderness” in the biblical text is both like and unlike what we might mean by it. Versions that translate it “desert” are unfortunate except that the word does mean a “deserted place,” one with no human habitation or presence. Yet “desert” does connote some of the dryness of most wilderness there in Palestine, albeit not the empty stretches of sand which “desert” conjures up for us.

That the place of Jesus’ temptation was not totally arid rock and sand is seen in the further mention that “he was with the wild beasts.” Animals have their own needs for water, vegetation, etc.

We might be tempted to skip over further pondering on “wilderness” to focus on the number of days Jesus was there, forty. That number has called to mind for Christians the forty years in the wilderness of the children of Israel (Deuteronomy 8:2), Moses’ forty days on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 34:28), and Elijah’s forty days journey to Mt. Horeb (I Kings 19:8).

The final phrase of verse 13 about angels ministering to Jesus there in the wilderness may recall the experience of Israel being cared for by God in the wilderness, with manna, water, healing, etc. Yet if we hold that forty years of what was often human failure in the wilderness up against Jesus’ forty days of successful resisting of Satan’s temptations, then the Savior’s time there represents a fresh new start of human encounter with the challenges and temptations of wilderness.

Another way to read that bit about the wild beasts, unique to Mark, is as, rather than an indication of the dangers of Jesus’ situation, the sign of a return to a paradise-like state of harmony with the animal world. One thinks of Isaiah 11’s promise of a “peaceable kingdom” in which the lion lies down with the lamb. Jesus here displays the coming shalom of God’s kingdom by being with wild beasts and yet safe.

All of this should ask us to struggle a little with what form “wilderness” may take for us. An image of a camping or backpack trip today may be too fraught with excitement and its own form of comfort in escaping noise, pollution, work, etc. for us to really “get” what spiritual retreat to wilderness was about for Jesus. It might be better to focus on the isolation, hardships, and spiritual battles of the past year’s pandemic as a kind of “wilderness” of our own time.

However we construe wilderness for ourselves, the message here is that Jesus triumphed over it, successfully overcoming the temptations found there, and found His Father’s comfort and help. Perhaps trying to discover both those aspects in our own spiritual wildernesses, strength to overcome accompanied by comforting help, is the best we can do with this text today.

I’ve only watched, as far as I can remember, two Super Bowls in my whole life. I did not watch the most recent one. But, because I found Facebook friends talking about it, I watched one of the advertisements that was aired along with the game this year: a Jeep ad featuring Bruce Springsteen. Because I am, just as I am for football, fairly oblivious to pop culture, I did not even know it was Springsteen in the ad until I read more about it later.

However, what prompted me to watch was a brief image from the 2 minute video that I found deeply offensive to me as a Christian. It was a chapel at the front of which was the silhouette of a  map of the United States overlaid with the stars and stripes of the American flag with a cross hung on top of it. While others found the ad’s call for the nation to come together “in the middle” appealing, I was repelled by the juxtaposition of the symbol of the Savior with the symbol of an earthly nation.

Our Gospel text for this Sunday is Mark 9:2-9. In it, Jesus is transfigured on a mountaintop and there meets Moses and Elijah while Peter, James and John look on. Peter’s somewhat reasonable response is to try and capture and prolong the moment by building three shelters, one for each of the august spiritual giants who stood before him. But then a cloud envelopes them, and a voice speaks of only one of the three, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!” The transfiguration narrative concludes in verse 8, “Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.”

That text about Peter’s proposal and how it ended speaks to me of what it means to build tabernacles, shrines, or chapels in which something or someone is held up or portrayed in a seemingly equal role alongside Jesus. God tells us to listen to His beloved Son, and when the clouds are dispelled, only He is there for us. It’s a mistake to attempt to live or portray the situation otherwise.

Yes, there was overlap between the Law and the Prophets and the work that Jesus the Son of God came to do. That’s what the holy conversation between Jesus and His Jewish predecessors demonstrated. As a book by J. R. Briggs, The Sacred Overlap, points out, there are many ways in which God’s people live in overlapping spaces between what may be perceived as competing realms, grace and law, grace and truth, joy and suffering, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. That’s a helpful reminder not to be fooled into the fallacy of false dichotomy, of either/or thinking which excludes and drives away the very people for whom Jesus came into the world.

Yet when the overlap becomes an overlay, so that two different realms, two different masters, as Jesus put it, become conflated and confused, then something is amiss. Our commitment to “only Jesus” is in danger. In chapter XXV of The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has his senior devil encourage his junior to tempt his “client,” who has become a Christian, toward “Christianity And.” “You know–,” says Screwtape, “Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform.” The hope of the devils is that by allying faith in Jesus with some other cause or person–and giving the two equal importance–that faith will be watered down and eviscerated of any real power.

So I think of God the Father’s call to listen to His beloved Son, and the simple statement that when it came down to it the disciples were left with “only Jesus.” Then I think of all the ways I am tempted to water down my own faith by making secondary commitments and allegiances into primary ones, to make them equal to my commitment to Jesus. And I pray that I may learn to be content with “only Jesus.”

I looked at various paintings and icons based on the first part of this week’s Gospel lesson, Mark 1:29-39, verses 29-31, the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. I was struck, especially among the Orthodox icon representations, with the resemblance between the action depicted as “Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up” (verse 31) and that shown in the classic Orthodox icon of the Resurrection, where Jesus appears grasping Adam and Eve by their hands and raising them from their graves.

The Greek word Mark uses for Jesus’ act of raising Mary is from the same word the angel uses at the end of Mark (16:6) to inform the women who came to the tomb that Jesus had been “raised.”

Following that healing of Peter’s relative in his home, there are many more healings there that evening in verses 32-34, as “they brought to him all who were sick or demon-possessed” and the whole city gathers at the door. That plethora of healing was a sign that Jesus had come to for all people what would be done for Him after His death on the Cross, to raise up all people to life in Him.

Jesus’ actions in the final section of the text, verses 35 to 39, are a clue both to the deeper import of His mission and to its universality. Mark only shows us Jesus praying three times, and this is the first of them. Jesus retreats to be alone and gather spiritual strength for a spiritual mission. When the disciples come looking, complaining that “Everyone is searching for you,” He makes it clear that healing physical ailments is not the whole of what He came to do. He says in verse 38, “Let us go on to neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” Jesus has come not just with short-term solutions to physical distress. He has come with a message that will raise up forever those who believe it.

A couple lessons might be drawn. First, there is Jesus’ own seamless integration of what we often separate into “spiritual” and “social” ministries, the saving of souls and the care and healing of bodies. Jesus insists on keeping those together. He preaches Good News and demonstrates that it is true by healing those He encounters.

Second, there is response of the woman healed first in the passage, the mother of Peter’s wife. Though nameless, she stands out for the fact that her first thought upon rising from her bed is to serve Jesus and His disciples, presumably a meal. In effect, she becomes perhaps the first female follower of Jesus, other than His own mother. We would do well to imitate her example of receiving the blessings of God in Christ, only to offer them back in faithful service. To do so is to be truly raised to new life in Him.

In grad school Beth and I had a friend who wrote horror novels. He was a Christian and would say that his fiction was “a portrayal of the darkness in the world, the conflict between good and evil.” Honestly, I didn’t much like his earliest books, which seemed fascinated with blood and gore and graphic violence, as well as the demonic perpetrators of all that.

I probably should also say that I do not much care for the “horror” genre in general. I’ve never seen “The Exorcist” or the many supernatural thrillers and frightfests it spawned. Yet as I turn to our text for this week, Mark 1:21-28, I’m reminded of all of that, a widespread cultural obsession with the evil side of the supernatural.

Even in the horror films and stories in which the “good,” sometimes in Christian form, comes to the rescue and exorcises or in some way defeats the evil forces, I am uncomfortable that evil seems to have center stage. That feels completely different from the Gospel story. The demon definitely has a prominent role, but Jesus is always firmly at the center of the narrative and in control.

The Gospel way of telling demon stories is a model for Christian life in responsive to pervasive evil in the world. The evil cannot be ignored, but power of Jesus Christ standing over and above it, and able to save from it, is where our attention is to be centered. I heartily commend words from C. S. Lewis’s original preface to The Screwtape Letters, words which have probably shaped my thinking about these things for fifty years: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to be believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

Other than my natural squeamishness and distaste for deliberately setting out to be frightened, I take Lewis’s advice to heart in regard to stories which dwell on and seemingly relish explicating and displaying supernatural forces of evil, believing such tales to be examples of falling prey to the second error Lewis named in regard to devils. But I also recognize that both my squeamishness and affinity for viewing the world “rationally” may make me incline to the first error. Unless confronted with a text like this week’s Gospel reading, I’m not very apt to take the demonic into consideration as a factor in most of what happens around me, even in my work as a pastor.

Honestly, I don’t exactly know how to connect what Jesus did for the man there in the synagogue in Capernaum with the spiritual and emotional struggles I see people facing today. And, while I believe that there is much blatant evil afoot in the world today, with racism especially seemingly willing to appear more candidly, I am also reluctant to surmise that there is an “unclean spirit” out there at work in a particular white supremacist or, say, in a perpetrator of sexual abuse.

Here again, though, I find Lewis helpful in a lesser quoted passage from an other preface to Screwtape, a later edition. Talking about some of the images he used to portray the devilish community as a sort of modern bureaucracy, he says that it “enabled me to get rid of the absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil…” Instead, Screwtape, his uncle and Lewis’s other fictional fiends are motivated by two things: fear and greed. The first is primarily fear of each other in the vicious diabolic pecking order, and the second is a kind of insatiable hunger to possess and control others. Put in those terms, it is easier to recognize truly diabolic motivation in many of the bad actors (and I must say systemic structures) of our world.

Yet recognizing those “diabolic” motivations of fear and greed in those whom I might be inclined to simply call “evil,” offers another point of view that goes back to the text. They, and I truly must and should say “We” and “I,” are/am represented in and by the man in the text. He is portrayed as so captive to the force within him that he cannot even speak with his own voice. It is the demon who talks to Jesus. The man himself is simply waiting for his deliverance, for Jesus to speak the words of salvation which will exorcise the demon and set him free. The Gospel invites us to sympathize with and root for the one possessed, to rejoice in his freedom when Jesus achieves it. It’s a viewpoint that we Christians may need to strive for a bit more in these times.

At the small Christian college where my wife teaches, a primary part of the mission statement declares the school’s intent to “develop emerging leaders.” My guess is that many schools, whether Christian or not, would echo that aim of developing leaders in their mission statements. But Beth and I sometimes wonder aloud that if the goal is to develop every Christian student into a leader, where are those who will follow them?

It feels unfitting and self-serving for a pastor (a church leader) to dwell too much on a gripe that a current emphasis on leadership development in both church and secular education may have effects as negative as any “leadership crisis” regarding a lack of leaders. So I will simply focus on the fact that in the call of the first Christians in our text this week, Mark 1:14-20, with parallels in all four Gospels, the operative words used by Jesus were about following rather leading.

The Gospels tell this story in different ways. Matthew and Mark make it a short, abrupt narrative. They suggest that Jesus suddenly approached two pairs of fishermen brothers, told them to follow, and they just got up and went. Luke builds in an explanatory fishing miracle, which would have given them some reason to believe Jesus was worth following. John’s telling seems to pull us in at a point further back in time than the other Gospels introduce the fishermen disciples, suggesting that perhaps there was some prior acquaintance with Jesus that prepared the men for the call that came in this week’s reading.

John’s Gospel (as well as a recent lectionary reading from Acts 19), by showing us that John the Baptist also had disciples, helps reveal for us the fact that master/disciple relationship was a common feature of Jewish religious life in Jesus’ time. Many rabbis, Jewish teachers, gathered disciples and instructed them over a course of time. Again, then, Jesus’ call to Peter and Andrew, James and John was not “out of the blue” in any cultural sense.

However, Jesus’ call to follow Him was different both from much modern education to which I alluded at the beginning here, and from the common practice of rabbinic discipleship in the first century. To begin with the latter, disciples often chose their master, applying to and requesting discipleship from a rabbi, like one might apply to a college today. Jesus, on the other hand, took the initiative to choose His disciples and call them to follow. And, as I’ve already pointed out, Jesus’ primary instruction was to follow Him, rather than to encourage some form of leadership training. Instead of promising to make them rabbis like Himself, He acknowledged and blessed the trade they practiced as commercial fishermen and promised to make them “fishers of people.” Notice that is “fishers” not “leaders.”

As I ruminate on all this, I wonder if this text is not a call to present generations of believers to recognize and return to the primary call to follow Jesus, rather than to pursue leadership quite so ardently. I will hazard expressing the question whether going after leadership passionately is not a form of seeking power in a way that is expressly contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

To all that, I will add that while the Lord’s purpose to make His followers “fishers of people” in this text might be understood as a kind of empowering for leadership, it can be seen in other terms, related to the actual practice of fishing. The line fisherman aims to attract and draw fish in, rather than to coerce. The net fisherman (as it appears the disciples mostly were) is seeking to gather. A process of attractively gathering people together around Jesus seems like something different from seeking status and positions of leadership in society. Or at least so it seems to this fishing pastor.