Emphasis Preaching Journal

Karl Barth liked to talk about "the strange world of the Bible." By that he meant that we can forget how removed is its revelation, how different are its disclosures, from the world we learn to know in our day-to-day existence. Because we have sung about this so often, we have seen representations in stained glass, have had believable people assert things about it, we have made it ordinary. We stop thinking about how extraordinary, in its own way upsetting, biblical witness is. When we stretch our imaginations or remain open to hearing the difference, we also hear words that save us.

Today is one of those days for stretching. We look into the skies and, if we are lucky, can still have awe and wonder about the vast distances, the darkness and the light. But we do not see heavens opened and a figure sitting at another's right hand. Yet the witness of Stephen helps us enlarge our imagination and our witness; we see the glory of God where it had gone unnoticed.

Just as the world around us seems drab before we sense the glory of God, so the people around us and we ourselves look drab and boring, careworn and weary, purposeless. Then we are to notice that we are the ones through whom God wants the glory of his light to shine.

And in the Gospel there is another startling prod to our imagination. We know Jesus. We hear stories about him. We look at him and think we have begun to get lessons in seeing what, or Who, stands behind him. We think we can then pursue our search. The startling word comes: if we have seen him, we already have access to the full vision of God. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." That needs realizing. Today.

Grist For The Mill

Acts 7:55-60

"He gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God." The writer of Luke-Acts reports on Stephen's vision as if he were Stephen. True, he can report on half the phrase by reporting on what Stephen says he saw: Jesus, "the Son of Man, standing at the right hand of God." But that he saw the "glory of God" is a line that belongs to what literary critics call "the omniscient author" or "the omniscient other." You know the sort: a novelist tells exactly what someone was thinking at the moment of her death, which means when she could not report on what she was seeing. You are welcome, of course, to say that the author "knew" this because he was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and was "told" this.

No problem, either way. We are not dealing here with the literally literal, with an actual opening of the skies above Jerusalem. Instead, we deal with a mind opening: the mind of the first Christian martyr, as we think of Stephen. He "saw" with the eyes of faith; he had revealed to him what ordinary day-to-day existence tends to veil. He could make the transit from life to death because he was seeing the glory of God.

What preaching value is there in this for those of us who are not likely to get into such a fix that we will be martyred? For those of us who have dimmed eyes, dull imaginations? Nothing has happened since Stephen's day to take away the "glory of God" in which Jesus stands. Still -- and this the inspiring Holy Spirit "tells" us is our vision whenever and wherever we encounter God in Christ, encounter Jesus -- in the midst of a dim-dull world. The gospel says that we get to help brighten it.

1 Peter 2:2-10

On the same day that we celebrate a lonely person of courage, a witness or preacher and thus martyr of individual integrity, we also celebrate a company that is just growing into faith; a stumbling, mumbling, only half-courageous but now worldwide company, who also get to see "the glory of God." This time the glory of God is revealed as Christ connected with another metaphor: the stone. He is a "living stone," a "stone," a "cornerstone," a "rejected stone," and much more. Those who prefer economy in literary art would probably say: "Enough! We get it! Don't pile on! We won't forget it!"

But just as this text says high and mighty things about Jesus Christ, so it balances this by talking about us, as "newborn infants" in the faith. But, surprise: look how we get addressed. There are those who worry about self-esteem and Christian self-esteem: do we not humiliate and denigrate sinners too much? Hardly. Without having done anything Stephen-like to draw attention or to prove our mettle, we get talked about as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." Dangerous language. Peoples, races, ethnic groups, and nations have caused endless trouble by arrogating to themselves such concepts of their chosenness. Rivers of blood have flowed.

1 Peter 2, however, has very different outcomes in mind when talking of chosenness. He is a pragmatist, a utilitarian, who sees these things about believers and then says these things with one simple purpose in view. To get them, us to see that we are called "to proclaim the mighty acts of God who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light." In the Stephen story we wondered about where we could see the glory. Here it is: wherever God's light shines in our dark world. And wherever we help bring
that light.

John 14:1-14

According to Time magazine a third of a century ago, there was a "Death of God" movement that lasted a half year and numbered three or four people. When asked to explain what they had written that would occasion a magazine cover announcing their announcement of the death of God, they came up with various explanations. One was only reporting on how the culture acted about God. Another "meant" it, but meant it so obscurely no one could check out what he meant. Still another said only that
philosophers cannot empirically check out language about what went beyond the empirical. A fourth said he was only doing what Jesus did: witnessing to a Jesus religion in which all that we are to know about reality we get by looking at the figure of Jesus.

The favored text was from John 14: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." What you see in Jesus is what you get. It is all you get. It is all you need. It is all that makes sense in our human world. But those who do not isolate this verse know that much else comes with it. Because elsewhere Jesus is quoted as having said that whoever believes in him, believes not in Jesus but in the one who sent him. Christian faith must work hard to keep the realities connected. The "glory of God" that Stephen sees, the "marvelous light" that believers bring to the world in their witness -- these are seen in the face of Jesus Christ. But Jesus is credible because he is, in a way, transparent to the
things of the one who sent him.

So: we focus on Jesus, the way and the truth and the life, assured that in seeing him and telling stories about him we are, indeed, seeing, through and beyond him, "the Father," the one who sent him, all the reality there is.

FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Acts 17:1-15 (Lutheran text)

Thessalonika, the Greek city remembered by Christians for the recipients of one of Paul's letters, now has another memory attached to it, one of horror.

Before the second world war, there were some cities in Eastern Europe that had become cultural centers of Judaism. One was Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital portrayed in Barbra Streisand's movie Yentl. Another was Salonika, a port on the Aegean Sea that carries forward the name of the Thessalonians. Intellectually vibrant, religiously vital, artistically engaged, these towns were hubs of Jewish life.

Both Vilnius and Salonika became targets in the holocaust, but the ancient Greek community took it with terrifying force. With all the precision of the war machine, train after train arrived to carry Jews northward to camps, the names of which have become synonymous with extermination: Bergen Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz and the rest. After the war, only a handful of Jews were left -- a remainder which had escaped the scrutinous eye of the death dealers.

Against the background of such a memory, the story of the early mission and the subsequent conflicts between Jews and Christians in Thessalonika takes on a different appearance.

It is not as though there was something unusual about the difficulty, at least not at this time. Arriving in the city, Paul and Barnabas sought out their accustomed location of activity, the synagogue. There were gathered both Jews of the diaspora, the "God-fearers," Gentiles who had associated themselves with the Jews but who could not, for reasons of blood, become full participants in the Jewish community. Many of the God-fearers became Christians.

But not without trouble. Whether in Thessalonika or the neighboring community of Beroea, the Christian missionaries came under attack for disturbing the established order. They were those "... turning the world upside down ...." Steps were taken against them, as they have been taken against missionaries as well as representatives of other world religions since.

Thus once more the power of the resurrection appears under the sign of conflict, to such an extent that the conflict itself becomes the issue. A death-preoccupied world will do to the Jew what it did to Jesus. Such a joining of fates may be the only hope, at least within current limits -- a possibility suggested by Elie Wiesel in the preface to his novel, Night. Only a hope that registers the brutal realities of places such as Salonika can qualify as something more than an illusion. But Christians have an additional word, a pulsing expectancy born of Easter: that in death, the crucified one is also the risen one, the "first fruits" of the new creation, one in whom death has lost
its dominion.