They Smell Like Trouble

I am going today to the Sermon Seminar in Austin. I am supposed to speak at lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday. The speeches are supposed to be, as I understand it, light and humorous with a bit of lurking truth. Sounds like I am about to channel Joel Osteen. 

Actually I welcome the opportunity to speak at lunch. At a lunch I can follow the pattern of my homiletics guru Chris Rock, who preaches a rather strong brand of ethics in a comedic lattice. His language is not great, but you hear a Stoic street preacher if you listen through the profanity. 

Well enough of the cognitive dissonance created by mentioning Osteen and Rock in the same piece. What I am hoping to do in Austin is talk about church members on Tuesday and church leaders on Wednesday and make the point that they both smell like trouble, with apologies to Lynn Anderson and his book, They Smell Like Sheep. The fact is that any casual observation of church life will argue that we are all just a mess. Even the New Testament bears witness to the unusual character of some of the saved. Demas and Euodia raise questions about us all. Even Paul was evidently not exactly plain vanilla. I have given up on the notion that church is about being with all the wonderful people. 

I have decided that church is about being about knee deep in the slop of life with all the others who are knee deep, too. When we run into one another and we're being weird, we should just hug, pray and keep slogging on to glory. Even the best of us, whoever that one is, is a mess. But all we messes are being saved. God loves us. We smell to high heaven, and He loves us. Let us love one another.

Hello Again

I have been blessed lately by misguided souls asking why I hadn't added to this space in a while. I appreciate the thought that anything written here in the past might have been helpful. Elijah has always been one of my heroes not because he confronted Baal, but because he was not a literary prophet. While other prophets might polish their oracles against Edom, Elijah spurned the pen and left time for running and pouting, whining and hiding. Elijah did some pretty wonderful things, but he didn't write about them. Other folks wrote about his exploits and his confrontations with the popular powers.

Now while this may seem to be an apology for laziness, one might at least note the outcomes of the literary prophets versus the outcome of the life of Elijah. Isaiah was sawn into. Jeremiah shuffled off to Egypt with the folks even the Babylonians didn't want. Elijah hops in the chariot of fire and flies off to glory. The one who asked to be allowed to die, wasn't. So…I am thinking that the prophet who leaves no writings may be the superior prophet.

Even on the Mount of Tranfiguration, the Great Non-Literary Prophet gets to meet with Elijah, the one who blazed that inkless trail. Well, Moses was there, too. Chalk one up for the writers.

I will probably write a bit here, since the way it looks I am headed for being sawn in two and not to any meeting with a chariot of fire. But I really admire Elijah.