Two Quiet Josephs
March 31, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 27:57–61, Matthew 28:1–10
When you come to the end of all four Gospels, no matter what Gospel you’re reading, you’re going to see an obscure, minor actor with a walk-on part who appears out of nowhere, disappears just as quickly, and is never heard from again. His name is Joseph of Arimathea, and he is the guy who talked Pilate into handing over Jesus’ bruised, beaten, battered, bloodied body from the cross and then loaned him his own personal grave so that Jesus could have a proper burial. I say ‘loaned’ rather than ‘gave’ because as it turns out, Jesus wouldn’t need his borrowed grave for long. Now who is this Joseph of Arimathea and what makes him more important in all four Gospels than the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Magi, the Shepherds, and Zacchaeus? Joseph appears quadruple the number of times as those other events. Who is he and where did he come from? Where is Arimathea? But that’s just the point—no one knows. There are some educated guesses, but no one’s sure. This cryptic character comes out of nowhere and is never heard from again.
God's Odd Benedictions VI: The Unalloyed
March 17, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 5:1–8
The word for ‘pure’ that Jesus uses here in the sixth beatitude means in Greek just what it means in English, as when we say, “Her heart was pure gold.” We mean that her essence is unalloyed, not contaminated with traces of zinc, iron, lead, or whatever it is that makes gold less than 24-karat. Her heart is unadulterated, free from any hint of other color or substance, untarnished by any fleck of stain. There is only one thing in there, and nothing else, nothing else at all. No alloys, additives, preservatives, contaminants; nothing shameful, nothing false, nothing unclean. She is like Dany Targaryen’s troops: The Unsullied.
God's Odd Benedictions, IV: The Hungry
March 3, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 5:1–6
This is the most sensible and least odd of "God’s Odd Benedictions". We get this one. Of course Jesus would love the righteous. Of course God would bless them. But that’s not exactly what Jesus says. He doesn’t say, “Blessed are the righteous.” He says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. It’s not enough to be righteous. You have to be desperate for it. You have to ache for it. Without righteousness, these kinds of folk have a visceral and existential, almost carnal, emptiness in the pit of their stomach.
God's Odd Benedictions, III: The Meek
February 25, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 5:1–5
The poor says Jesus, will receive the kingdom. The sad will be consoled. And the meek—what do they get? They get everything. The meek will inherit the earth. Eugene Peterson translates this beatitude like this: “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.”#_ftn1 Everything that can’t be bought. Is Jesus right about that? #_ftnref1Eugene Peterson in his Bible translation The Message.
God's Odd Benedictions, II: The Sad
February 18, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 5:1–4
Said one Jewish scholar, “It is frustration and sorrow that are our passports to fellowship and sympathy. Life teaches us at every turn how insufferable are those who have never suffered.”#_ftn1 Yes? Have you experienced the insufferability of the unsuffering: the frozen face, the unmoved affect, the narcotic numbness of the unsuffering? When Katie Lancaster and Melanie Flynn train our Stephen Ministers, they know that one of the greatest obstacles they have to overcome is a stubborn lack of self-confidence. “I can’t do this,” they think. “I didn’t go to seminary. I don’t have the skills.” #_ftnref1Slightly adapted from Robert Gordis, Book of God and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 114.
Jesus' Grandmothers, IV: Bathsheba
January 28, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • 2 Samuel 2:18, 2 Samuel 11:1–17, 2 Samuel 11:26–27, 2 Samuel 12:15
Maybe on the simplest and most transparent level it’s nothing more than a morality tale. Maybe Matthew alludes so subtly in his Jesus genealogy to the story of David and Bathsheba to remind us that every illicit union is a fatal attraction, quite literally. Maybe nobody dies most of the time, at least not literally, but something always dies. Love dies, trust dies, your self-respect will be gone forever; it is unlikely to experience any resurrection whatsoever.
Jesus’ Grandmothers, I: A Royal but Checkered Pedigree
January 7, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Matthew 1:17
Perhaps part of Matthew’s point in giving us this royal but checkered pedigree is to show us that God can use anything, anything at all, to bring about God’s purposes in God’s story on God’s green earth. History happens at this coincidence, this coherence, this meeting, of twisted human connivance and stealthy divine providence, so that despite all the turns and meanderings and dead ends of human history, God comes up with Jesus, the most perfect life that’s ever been lived. God uses what is mixed and fixes what is broken and heals what is sick and points the lost in the right direction.
Snow
December 31, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • Psalm 8
It’s a wonderfully enriching experience to read a book in its own unique geography, the live oaks, the marsh grasses, the armored gators, the heavy southern air, the coastal dialects, the centrality of Clemson football, the shrimp boats bobbing on the waves off the beaches, the salt-and-mud smell which brings you back to the beginning of time when primordial life crawled out of the sea. You don’t just read the story; you can almost live it.
The New O Antiphons, VI: O Lord of every path and passage way…
December 24, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • Luke 2:1–20
It’s possible that Luke’s congregation was filled with blue collar people and Uber drivers and day laborers from the gig economy. Luke wanted his congregation to know that Jesus came for them too, in fact came primarily for them. Bible scholars are fond of talking about St. Luke’s pronounced, powerful, persistent, pervasive, peculiar preference for the poor, the pitiful, and the persecuted.
The New O Antiphons IV: O God of words and music, we give thanks…
December 10, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • Luke 1:46–55
O God of words and music. They are the two integral components of divine worship. We couldn’t choir the proper praise if one or the other were missing: words and music, sermon and song. It’s Lisa’s job to make sure that you can hear the words within the music. She has her choirs ENUNCIATE! “And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly host praising God...” If it’s Lisa’s job to make sure that you hear the words within the music, it’s my job to make sure you hear the music within the words. Because words can sing, can’t they?
The New O Antiphons, III: O Prince of Life, Bridegroom to the Bride
December 3, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • John 2:1–12
Now listen to this. We learn so much about the dynamics between a 45-year-old mother and her 30-year-old son. Mary hunts down Jesus among the other 150 wedding guests and says, without explanation, “They’ve run out of wine.” Now, Mary is not the MOB. This is not her party. Why does she think this is her problem to solve, and then why does she hand it off to Jesus? Maybe as a favor to the MOB and the FOB, she just wants him to go down to the local Binnie’s and come back with six more cases of wine. Or more likely, maybe Mary knows better than anybody else that Jesus, coming straight from God, is a chip off the old block and has God-like power, which by the way, turns water into wine every autumn on the hillsides of Burgundy and Sonoma.
The New O Antiphons, II: O Lord, who thought up kangaroos and cacti…
November 26, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • Job 12:7–8, Colossians 1:15–20
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite said in the sixth century that in every creature, from dragonfly to behemoth, something of God’s inexhaustible nature is revealed, something that would not be revealed if that creature did not exist. At creation, God’s overflowing nature spills out of its bounds and out into every creature. Every living creature tells us something unique about God, so that in man and woman, for example, we see God’s very face and God’s vast intelligence; in the smiling chimpanzee we see something of God’s smirking sense of humor; in the wolverine we see something of God’s startling ferocity...;
The New O Antiphons: I: O Loud and Lavish Lover of the awkward…
November 19, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • Mark 1:1–8
Maybe Jesus was so deft at handling the awkward and the socially inept because he grew up with them. One of the harshest questions you can hurl at a person is this one: “What’s the matter with you? Were you brought up in a barn?” When people asked Jesus that question, he always said, “Well, yeah! As a matter of fact, I was!”
The Greatest of These X: Immortality
November 12, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • 1 Corinthians 13:7–13
It is our greatest joy and our greatest regret, our greatest meaning, our greatest purpose, our greatest goal. It is what we crave more than anything else in life. Paul knows this, so in I Corinthians 13, he dissects the common concept of love into its constituent parts to tell us why it is life’s greatest gift. Love is patient, he says. Love is kind, he says. Love is never envious or arrogant or boastful or rude, he says. But he saves the best for last. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things endures all things. Love never ends. Most of all, love is so precious because it is immortal.
The Greatest Of These, VIII: Unselfishness
October 29, 2023 • William A. Evertsberg • 1 Corinthians 13:5, John 3:1–18
All those translations get the point across, but they’re all negatives. They only tell us what Love is NOT. Let’s turn that negative into a positive: “Love is selfless,” or “Love is generous.” Paul doesn’t quite say this, but almost: it is impossible to be self-centered and loving at the same time. A loving person never celebrates a pinched and mean sufficiency, but always a lavish, overflowing extravagance.