We Preach Christ Crucified

Such is the title of a book by Kenneth Leech, a classic evangelical Anglican priest, theologically conservative and a worker among the poor. It’s a somewhat difficult but excellent book, especially for Lent, as one might expect from its title, borrowed from Paul’s first letter to Corinth. The Corinthians were looking for signs or wisdom, but Paul wasn’t about to give them what they wanted. “We preach Christ crucified,” he wrote – a stumbling block instead of a sign, foolishness instead of wisdom. Indeed, the “scandal of the cross” remains a stumbling block for many, as Leech points out.

Paul is pretty hard on wisdom in this letter, no doubt because the Corinthians thought they were hot stuff. Paul knew he was even better. He wasn’t shy about pointing out how learned he was, advancing “beyond many among my people of the same age” because he was “far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” Later in life, his defense of himself was so spirited that the Roman governor told him that too much learning was driving him insane. Even the second letter of Peter commented that Paul’s letters have “some things in them hard to understand.” There’s an understatement!

Yet all of his learning Paul counts as nothing before the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ. I’m reminded of another great theological mind, Thomas Aquinas. A few years after finishing his massive Summa Theologica, he had a mystical experience that led him to describe all of his works as “so much straw.” Wisdom is important, yes. But it is not the highest good. The most erudite writing about God does not compare with the direct experience of God.

That’s why there’s hope for us. “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters,” Paul writes, “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” And yet God chose us just the same. That’s the real foolishness of God. As Paul points out, it removes any reason we have to boast about ourselves. It also removes any reason for us to think that we are beneath God’s notice, that somehow we are not good enough for God. God chooses us anyway, knowing who we are – or rather, knowing who we can become.

This Sunday we’ll have the Annual Meeting at church. Some clergy give a “State of the Church” on that day. (Now where do you suppose they get that idea?) I’m one who thinks that the lessons preempt whatever else is going on, or more accurately, that Scripture interprets life, rather than the other way around. “We preach Christ crucified” is central to our faith. It doesn’t make sense to the ways of the world – but then, neither does going to church on Sunday morning, nor using one’s time and money to help others. Churches are, or should be, fundamentally counter-cultural. Sometimes they get caught up in the worries of the world, like paying for a new roof. But there’s always that call back to the love of God revealed to us through Jesus Christ. That’s the foolishness of God, wiser than any wisdom of this world. I’ll take that any day.

[Epiphany 4: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31. This is a Sunday of riches, for we also have Micah 6:1-8 and the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), but one can’t preach for that long in an Episcopal church!]

If Only

When I was young I would sometimes play the “if only” game with my faith. “If only I were alive at the time of Jesus, my faith would be stronger. If only I could see him, I would truly believe.” Just think of the questions I could ask! “Do you really have brothers and sisters? What was your childhood like? What happened to Joseph? What’s it like being the Son of God?” And the question that Jesus apparently was asked, “What kind of sign can you give me to show that you really are the Son of God?”

That last question revealed my true insecurity. I had to face the fact that even had I been alive in the time of Jesus, my faith might not have been all that different. Jesus didn’t go around performing miracles to prove his divinity. He responded to human need. Then, as now, one had to have the eyes of faith first in order to see that what he did was divine.

And yet, there was that personal invitation: “Follow me.” Something must have been compelling about Jesus to make four fishermen immediately get out of their boats, leave livelihood and family behind, and follow him. Some writers insist that this must not have been their first encounter with Jesus. They would have the fishermen act more like us, deliberately, rationally, weighing the consequences, and then make a decision.

Jesus’ abrupt command to follow challenges that slow approach. This isn’t about deciding who to support in an upcoming election; this is an invitation from God! And only by treating it as such is the depth of faith revealed. St. Paul knew that. He castigated the notoriously factional Corinthians for claiming to be followers of various apostles. Paul rightly redirects the focus on Jesus Christ, the only one who died for them and in whose name they were baptized. (I’d love to hear this preached in a parish where people are nostalgic for BFRs – Beloved Former Rectors!) Paul and all of us are merely instruments of God, who through the grace of God point toward Jesus Christ rather than ourselves.

It’s like an image used by Thomas Merton: we are to be windows through which others see Jesus. Rarely does one focus on the window itself; rather, one looks through to what is revealed beyond. And just as a dirty window can obscure the view, so our sin can obscure the God who dwells within.

As I grew older, I realized that “if only” is not a very profitable game. Seeking proof is not the way to go. If you want to have faith, do what you would do if you did have faith, and then your faith will grow. Over time you will find that you have become a more transparent window through which the love of God shines. Even better, it will become easier to see Jesus in others. And at some point, you will realize that you have responded to that invitation: “Follow me.”

[Epiphany 3: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23.]

God is Faithful

It’s always hard to get back in the groove after the Christmas/New Year’s break. Like Holy Week in the church, there is a flurry of preparation for extra services, attendance by people who only show up on major holidays (who are all those faces, anyway?), and the weariness that comes from staying up too late. For R and me, there’s also trying to keep up with N’s schedule when he’s home. It all shows up in the dog: she’s exhausted. And so Christmas, Epiphany, and the Baptism of Jesus have come and gone before I get around to writing another blog entry. Great subjects to write about – someday. By now we have returned to seven weeks of green “ordinary time.”

Yet even ordinary time is blessed by God. “The Lord called me before I was born,” Isaiah writes, “while I was still in my mother’s womb he named me.” Well, you may say, that’s true for a great prophet like Isaiah, but it doesn’t include the likes of us. Unfortunately, we don’t get off that easily. St. Paul, also “called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God,” extends God’s call to everyone who receives his letter: “to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.”

“God is faithful,” Paul writes; “by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” The Gospel of John gives a very literal example of that. Two disciples of John the Baptist were hanging around him one day, when a man named Jesus walked by. “Behold, the Lamb of God!” John said, and that got their attention. They took off after Jesus, who heard the commotion, turned around, and asked them what they were looking for. Too embarrassed to say “Uh, you?” they simply asked him where he was staying. He replied, “Come and see,” and they followed along. One of the disciples was Andrew, who went to get his brother Simon. Jesus took one look at Simon and gave him a new name. “You are to be called Cephas [=Peter].”

Simon Peter was lucky that his brother was looking out for him. How many people are waiting for an invitation from us to come and see Jesus? “There’s a place I go that changes my whole week, and just might change my whole life. Come and see.” God calls us; God calls everyone. It’s best to be aware of it. Then we aren’t spending our lives seeking God where God is not to be found, living lives that are not fulfilling, not being the person God knows us to be.

We can no longer follow Jesus literally, as Andrew and Peter did. The way is not so obvious. Yet it helps to remember that even those who lived in the presence of Jesus stumbled along. Even Isaiah, so sure of his call, could write: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” Yet Isaiah knew that God is faithful, for he immediately added: “yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”

That’s the key, isn’t it? God is faithful. Even when I walk the other way, when I think that I cannot be the person God has known me to be since before I was born, God is still there, patiently waiting for me to return. And so I turn back. May you, too, remember the faithfulness of God and turn back. God will be there.

Epiphany 2: Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42. For those who like words, “rock” is Cephas in Aramaic and Petros (Peter) in Greek. This isn’t the last time Jesus will play on Simon’s new name.

Grace Upon Grace

The first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John, known as the Prologue, have been near and dear to my heart for a long time. They were the first sentences I ever translated from Greek into English, way back in high school. They are so full of meaning, so mystical, that if I spend the rest of my life studying them I will still only have begun to plumb their depths.

They always show up on the first Sunday after Christmas, and fittingly so. Once the cultural frenzy of Christmas itself has passed, there is time for people of faith to stop and reflect on what it all means. That’s what John does for us. He places a particular birth in a particular time within the context of eternity, and so helps us place our own particular place and time within God’s unending time.

“In the beginning” – right back to the first words of the Bible, John takes us, before creation itself. “Was” – the Greek verb expresses ongoing time, continuing action. “The Word” – all of the multivalent meanings of “Logos” in Greek are brought to bear: thought, reason, what goes on inwardly as well as the outward expression of inner thought through speech. God’s thought is God’s speech is God’s action. That’s what the doctrine of the Trinity is all about. God the Father speaks through God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit. John gets all of that meaning in just the first few verses.

Because the Word arises from the heart of God, speaking what God thinks, I am used to saying that Jesus Christ is God’s most complete self-revelation to humanity. That’s part of what makes me a Christian. But the fourteenth-century mystic Johannes Tauler takes that concept even further. In uttering the Word, Tauler says, God also comprehends himself. The implication is that without begetting the eternal Word, God the Father would not be able to know himself.

Yet the Prologue doesn’t remain in the realm of the eternal. John soon switches to punctiliar verbs, ones that place an action at a particular point in time. John the Baptist is born (“happened” in the Greek). And remarkably enough, so was the eternal Word, born in the flesh.

Every time I get to the verse, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” my spine starts tingling. If I’m reading it out loud, I have to stop and collect myself. That’s the absolute center of our faith. God in all of God’s fullness, the eternal Word through whom all things came into being, emptied himself and became a finite human being. “God became human that humans might become God,” as St. Athanasius put it. The enormity of that, the utter grace of it, gets me every time.

Through Jesus Christ, who is the Word become flesh, we all receive grace upon grace, grace freely given to us out of the fullness of the eternal God. It is a grace that is totally unmerited. By many it is not even accepted, as John well knew. Yet God offers it nonetheless. How could God do anything else? For it is the very nature of God to speak the Word, to reveal God’s self, to enter the particularity of time and place so that we, too, might witness to that eternal conversation of love that is God.


Christmas 1: John 1:1-18. For those who keep track of such things, the actual quotation from Tauler is: “In this pure act of self-comprehension [the Father] utters Himself completely by a Word; and the Word is His Son. And the act whereby He knows Himself is the generation of the Son in eternity.” Johannes Tauler: Sermons, p. 36 (Paulist Press).

Christmas Bird Count

This Saturday I will be going on my first Christmas Bird Count in many years. Except for the Christmas part, it’s just what it sounds like: a count of birds over a 24-hour period within a 15-mile-diameter area. The National Audubon Society has been sponsoring Christmas Bird Counts nationwide since 1900. In spite of the vagaries of weather and variation in observers, CBCs have actually provided useful long-term data about changes in bird populations.

I last participated in a count when I was in graduate school at Duke. For a while I was the compiler for the Durham CBC – organizing groups of birders, collecting the numbers, investigating unusual sightings, sending it all on to the Audubon Society. I was young enough to get up in the middle of the night to listen for owls and then wander around the North Carolina woods all day with my birding buddies. Fortunately for me (and for R, who still remembers the alarm clock going off at 3 a.m.), Saturday’s meeting time is a more civilized 7:00.

Do Christmas Bird Counts have any theological significance? Probably not. Yet I do enjoy spending hours outdoors in the midst of creation, searching distant shores for eagles perched in tall trees, listening for the high pitch of chickadees or cedar waxwings. Our first assignment upon gathering will be to find the peregrine falcon that frequents a Mississippi River bridge. Birding is like that: you look for things where you have seen them in the past while keeping your eyes and ears open for the unusual.

That kind of expectant anticipation makes birding a bit like Advent. Like Advent, we think we know what or who is coming. But do we really? Jesus never seemed to do what was expected, even before he was born. Joseph certainly didn’t know what he was getting into when he decided to quietly divorce his suddenly pregnant fiancée. The only assurance he had was from dreams, and how can one be sure that a dream has come from God? Righteous and faithful, Joseph did believe, and accepted this Child that was not really his, naming him as his own, naming him Jesus, for he would be one who saves.

Names are important. Even bird names. There’s actually an organization that gives birds their official English names, changing them from time to time for various reasons. I expect that I will show my birding rustiness by not calling something its new name – saying marsh hawk instead of northern harrier, for instance. I hope I am amused when I’m corrected. Now that I no longer teach, I don’t have to be right any more, at least about names. One thing I am still sure about, however. Thanks to that baby of Mary and Joseph, that Immanu-el, God is with us and will remain with us now and always. It doesn’t take a pair of binoculars to see that.

Advent 4: Matthew 1:18-25.

The Desert Shall Rejoice and Blossom

When I first started teaching at St. Ambrose University, a colleague and I spent a term break at Big Bend National Park in southern Texas. It was my first experience in a desert, and I shall never forget it. Big Bend covers a huge area where the Rio Grande River makes a wide arc as it separates the U.S. and Mexico. The park is large enough to contain the entire Chisos Mountain range as well as a good deal of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Like most real deserts, Big Bend is stony, not sandy, and trackless. What look like paths are actually dry watercourses. If you follow one, you are likely to end up in a canyon with high walls – not the place to be if there’s a thunderstorm nearby. The water will come rushing down in a torrent, as large stones washed onto high ledges attest.

Deserts are usually dry places, of course. In some areas it may not rain for years. But when it does rain, really rain, the plants are ready. Some have waited as seeds; others as dry branches surviving under the scorching sun. When the rain finally comes, they burst into bloom. The seeds sprout, grow, flower, and create new seeds within a few weeks.

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” Isaiah writes,” the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.” To see a dry desert break forth into blossom is like watching a miracle unfold – as miraculous as the eyes of the blind being opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, and the lame leaping like a deer.

For millennia, people have gone to the desert to encounter God. John the Baptist was one of them. Yet the God John encountered was not the one he was expecting. He didn’t think that God’s chosen one would turn out to be his younger cousin, Jesus. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John asked through his disciples. In reply, Jesus told them, look at what I am doing. See what happens to the people who come to me. Then remember what the desert is like when the rains come, and you will know the finger of God when you see it.

It was a chilly January when I went to Big Bend, so I didn’t see any rain or flowers. But I did get to hear the remarkable silence, like the "sound of sheer silence" as one translator described God’s appearance to Elijah on Mount Horeb. It is a silence one can almost touch. Out of that desert silence, that midnight silence, God speaks. Out of that silence one winter’s night God spoke in the cry of a newborn baby, a baby who became a man that caused the desert to rejoice and the lame to leap for joy. Thanks be to God for the gift of that Child.

A Shoot Shall Come Forth

A shoot shall come forth out of Jesse,
And a bud shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of life shall be with him,
The spirit of wisdom and truth.

The prophet Isaiah was full of words of hope to a people who faced one crisis after another. Threatened by foreign invasion and weak leadership, they did not know which way to turn. Return to the Lord, Isaiah said, for he will raise up a new ruler for you from the descendants of King David, the son of Jesse. He will lead in wisdom and truth, and bring peace to the earth.

Then the lamb shall lie down with the leopard,
And the lion eat straw with the ox,
For the hand of a Child shall lead them,
To the peaceable kingdom of God.

Early Christians saw Isaiah’s prophecy of David’s descendant fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It was this Child who would usher in a new Eden, a place where animals would neither eat one another nor harm anyone. It’s like the painting of “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks, in which people and animals look out as though the viewer has disturbed their tranquility.

From out of the wells of salvation
Will he draw us the water of life;
His waist shall be girdled with justice,
The heart of his heart shall be Love.

My brother Richard Horn wrote these words many years ago and set them to music for a Christmas card. Words and music were subsequently published and have been sung during Advent ever since, especially on the second Sunday of Advent in liturgical Year A, when we hear the reading from Isaiah on which the text is based.

He’ll come from the end of his heaven,
And the earth shall be torn from its place;
Our lives shall be filled with his radiance
As floodwaters cover the sea.

In Advent we wait for the return of Christ, even as we prepare to celebrate that first appearance at Christmas. The Bible portrays the Second Coming in cosmic terms, as though the earth will be torn from its place. Our lives will be totally up-ended. And yet the One whose heart is Love will fill us with his radiance, with joy irresistibly flowing everywhere, like floodwaters covering the sea. God’s love will be all-encompassing.

Then the lamb shall lie down with the leopard,
And the lion eat straw with the ox,
For the hand of a Child shall lead them,
To the peaceable kingdom of God.

What wonderful yearning there is in Isaiah’s vision! This is not "pie in the sky by and by," but rather a hope and a promise that this life is not the end, that there is more than what we see now. A time will come when all things will be reconciled to God and to one another. That is the promise God gives us through Jesus Christ. Knowing that such a time will come, we can begin now, in all of our weak and broken humanity, to work for the coming of that peaceable kingdom. It will come in God's time, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not. Wouldn't it better to work with God for the coming of the kingdom, rather than simply wait?

Advent 2: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12.