Advent Luke 21 “Uncovered”
Sermons Richard Lischer Sermons Richard Lischer

Advent Luke 21 “Uncovered”

If I told you these words are taken from a sermon, you might say, “That must have been some sermon.” And you would be right! Jesus is the preacher, and he is preaching as he has never preached before. He has come up to Jerusalem to observe Passover—and to die. But for now he is preaching—every morning in the Temple, then every evening he is crossing the Kidron Valley to spend the night on the Mount of Olives. And the people are getting up early every morning to find their place in the Temple to hear this extraordinary preacher.

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Christmas: The Dream of Arrival
Sermons Richard Lischer Sermons Richard Lischer

Christmas: The Dream of Arrival

And now we come to the hardest work of Christmas. What, you thought the hard work was done? You thought the hard work was finished in choosing the gifts, baking the cookies, cleaning the house, watching the diet and otherwise surviving what one journalist calls “our annual ordeal of fun.” You thought the hard work was getting yourself or someone you love through the loneliness of this season that is only magnified by its artificial gayety. You thought the hard work was re-assembling your family like a stubborn jigsaw puzzle in the hope that all the pieces would fit together and stay together if only for two or three days.

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Sunday All the Time
Essay Richard Lischer Essay Richard Lischer

Sunday All the Time

The chapters in this collection originated in several ways. Most were sermons preached in churches or chapels, the names of which I remember with pleasure and list at the end of this introduction. The sermons were accompanied by singing and prayers and in most cases followed by the movement of people toward the altar for communion. In other words, most of the messages in this collection were not isolated from the assembly of worshipers, the responses of attentive listeners, and the fidgeting and fussing of children.

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A Season of Sighs
Sermons Richard Lischer Sermons Richard Lischer

A Season of Sighs

Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh. A voice crying. A mood. And never more deeply felt than in these troubled months. Advent marks both the exhaustion and the hope of God’s people, when the meaning of our lives is expressed in a weary exhalation of ordinary breath and then a sharp intake of something greater.

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Black Lives Matter and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Article Richard Lischer Article Richard Lischer

Black Lives Matter and Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the time of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in 1968, his voice was everywhere. The civil rights movement in America moved to the pulse of his cadences.

Among the many laments after King’s assassination was the poignant realization that we would no longer hear that voice. Moved by that melancholy silence, I set out to write a book about King the preacher.

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            I Saw Satan Fall
Sermons Richard Lischer Sermons Richard Lischer

I Saw Satan Fall

In the last congregation I served, a small group within the church set aside every Monday evening for witnessing in the community. Since we were Lutherans, we gave this practice an innovative, cutting-edge-kind of name. We called it Evangelism Night. It worked something like this. Around 7 P. M. the callers would come into the church kitchen, drink coffee, pray, and go out in teams to visit people who were unchurched, new to the church, or mad at the church. Long about 9:15 the teams would start dribbling back for more coffee and the sharing of stories. There were stories of families still "shopping" for a church home, stories of lonely people, angry people who had forgotten why they were angry, stories of sad and searching people. Nothing spectacular.

I miss Evangelism Night, not so much for the stunning success stories, since “success” was not a prominent part of our vocabulary, but for our growing sense that we were participating in a pattern of ministry that was older and larger than ourselves and not of our own devising.

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        Pandemic: No Time for Idols
Sermons Richard Lischer Sermons Richard Lischer

Pandemic: No Time for Idols

What I have just read is the most famous missionary sermon ever preached. A missionary sermon is by definition a sermon preached to outsiders, people who don’t know the truth and maybe never heard of it. In Acts 17 we are watching as a man, Paul of Tarsus, takes a historic first step out of his comfort zone. God is bringing the gospel from the mid-east and Asia Minor into Europe.

He is a man of the book, the Hebrew scripture, who knows from Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and the one God Yahweh. Now he is speaking to an audience of cultured despisers who know the pagan poets and philosophers, but not Paul’s scripture.

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Sermon Preached in an Empty Church
Sermons Richard Lischer Sermons Richard Lischer

Sermon Preached in an Empty Church

In London’s National Gallery there is a painting by the Renaissance artist Michelangelo Caravaggio. It is called The Supper at Emmaus and portrays the climax of a stranger’s meeting with two travelers on the road to Emmaus. The story is found in the Gospel of Luke. It is Easter evening; the stranger is walking with them, but perhaps because they are distracted by grief, they do not recognize him. We understand. Everything they loved has been taken away from them. Their lives will never be the same. They say (in paraphrase), “Stay with us, for our world is far spent.”

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Holy Saturday in a Time of Plague
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

Holy Saturday in a Time of Plague

Holy Saturday is no one’s favorite religious holiday. It lacks the darkness and the drama of a dying Savior. Nor is it bathed in light to celebrate a risen Lord. Its color is a liminal gray. But it’s where we are, all of us. It’s the season that we are in.

Holy Saturday is a very quiet day. When I was a boy, I was always outraged that so much could be going on in the world while Jesus was resting in his tomb. Today is different. Today, it’s as if the whole world—my world, at least—is observing a regimen of silence in honor of the Lord’s burial. In Wuhan and San Francisco and Atlanta and St. Louis the streets are empty, or at least less traveled. In the rural buffer where I live (a liminal space between a university and surrounding farmland), our road is quieter than usual. No one misses street noise, but it is spring, and I miss the music blasting through our campus, the sounds of laughter and the murmur of learned conversations from tables along the sidewalks.

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Writing the Christian life: The essence of spiritual memoir
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

Writing the Christian life: The essence of spiritual memoir

A sparrow flutters through the window into a banquet hall filled with light, music, and feasting. Then, just as quickly, the bird flies away again into the darkness. The flight of the bird is our life—brief, dramatic, and framed by two immense darknesses. Where has it come from? From what primordial past? Where is it going? Into what unknowable future?

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The Shape of Ashes
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

The Shape of Ashes

Among Christians, marking with ashes first occurred in the early Middle Ages as a sign of sorrow and repentance. Perhaps if we had lived then, with the Visigoths and the bubonic plague bearing down on us, when the slogan of the day was memento mori (“remember, you will die”) and a woman’s average life expectancy was 32 years, we too would have thought it was a splendid idea to show up at church once a year in sackcloth and ashes.

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Letters and Papers from Prison
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

Letters and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison comes under the category of “Books to Be Read on an Annual Basis”—like Augustine’s Confessions, King Lear, or anything by Flannery O’Connor. In general, we read too many books and return to too few. The critic John Ciardi coined the phrases “horizontal audience” and “vertical audience” to describe the reach of a novelist or a poet. It’s a big mistake to return again and again to a book that doesn’t probe the heart or expand the reader’s vision.

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A book’s life: One reader to another
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

A book’s life: One reader to another

Thirty years ago I was browsing a secondhand book sale in the basement of the divinity school where I teach. There was a folding table covered with worn-out books, arranged in no order and at giveaway prices. I was drawn to a devotional book by the British author and preacher Leslie Weatherhead, whose books on faith and psychology had achieved enormous popularity in the decades after World War II. The book was called A Private House of Prayer, and it had a gold cross embossed on the cracked leather cover. The book is a liberal Protestant’s version of Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle. It is divided into seven rooms of devotion, each signifying a distinctive mode of prayer. It begins with affirming the presence of God in room 1 and ends with meditation in room 7 at the top of the house.

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Stripped Bare - Holy Week and the Art of Losing
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

Stripped Bare - Holy Week and the Art of Losing

Undressing another person, or another person's body, is a slow and exquisite work. Whether it's a feeble parent who can't manage the buttons, a child for its bath or an expectant lover, undressing can be an act of love. When a Jew dies, a small group known as chevra kadisha prepares the body for burial. First the body is reverently undressed, and any wounds on it are carefully cleansed. Rings, bracelets and all jewelry are removed. The body is bathed and purified by water, then wrapped in a white sheet and perhaps a prayer cloth and tied with a sash secured by a sacred symbol. Now it is ready to meet the living God.

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Odd Job: The Secret Gift of Ministry
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

Odd Job: The Secret Gift of Ministry

According to new findings in the Pulpit & Pew National Clergy Survey, a solid majority of clergy is deeply satisfied with the pastoral ministry. Seven out of ten of those surveyed report they have never considered abandoning their vocation. In other words, most pastors claim to have found happiness in the ministry.

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King's Dream
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

King's Dream

Forty years ago on a sweltering August day in Washington, the Baptist preacher and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the defining speech of his generation and the most famous oration of the 20th century. Writing in the New York Times the next day, James Reston promptly recognized King’s achievement and predicted, “It will be a long time before [Washington] forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dreams to the multitude.”

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A Week of Signs: The First Seven Days of a Pastor
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

A Week of Signs: The First Seven Days of a Pastor

The first week in my new parish brought a tumble of pastoral duties. Although I had yet to preach my first sermon or celebrate my first public Eucharist, I brought communion to one of my parishioners in the hospital. His name was Alfred Semanns and he was dying of complications resulting from admission to the dingiest American hospital I had ever seen, Prairieview General. Its only ward reminded me of a dorm I had slept in as a boy at summer camp. There were 12 beds, one nurse, and no private or semiprivate rooms.

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We have seen the Lord
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

We have seen the Lord

Why is it so difficult to sit down at a computer and write a piece about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead? Is it because belief in the resurrection and dependence on technology are incompatible? In his famous essay "New Testament and Mythology," Rudolf Bultmann asked how modern people could possibly believe in miracles in the age of the "wireless." Which calls to mind Northrop Frye's comment that whenever an argument is prefaced by the word "modern," as in "modern psychology" or "modern science tells us," we can be sure that what follows will be about 100 years out-of-date.

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Acknowledgment
The Christian Century Richard Lischer The Christian Century Richard Lischer

Acknowledgment

"You can't be born again," I said, "you're a Lutheran. You are the chairman of the board of trustees." He was brimming with joy, but I was sulking. Why? Because spiritual renewal is wonderful as long as it occurs within acceptable, usually mainline, channels and does not threaten my understanding of God.

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