Mystery Without Rhyme or Reason: Poetic Reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary

By Michael Coffey and Walter Brueggemann

This collection of poetic reflections is a rich resource for a faithful imagination. Michael Coffey's poems explore the deep questions and joyful affirmations of Christian faith. Never settling for easy answers or straight-forward interpretations, Coffey's writing invites the reader into new spiritual territory where the strange and unexpected, the beautiful and painful, become an encounter with the holy.

Anyone preparing to preach or teach on biblical texts will find here words that inspire, challenge, and create new inroads for faith. Anyone seeking meditative or devotional readings of Scripture will find a companion for thoughtful reflection and prayer. Covering most of the Sundays and primary festivals of the church's liturgical year, these writings will enrich all who plan, prepare, and participate in worship that spans the vast themes of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and the ordinary Sundays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498220910

Michael Coffey

Michael Coffey is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, currently serving as pastor of First English Lutheran Church in Austin, TX. He has previously served parishes in Burnet, TX and San Antonio, TX. He is a contributing writer for Sundays and Seasons and Sundays and Seasons: Preaching; and Classical Considerations: Useful Wisdom from Greece and Rome (2006).

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Lectionary Year A

Hope Is a Blue Note

This Advent

Quiet Dismissal

Sympathy for the Emperor at Christmastime

The Meaning of God

Openings and Obfuscations

Unbearable Lightness of Myself

Chef

Outside Inside Out

Edges

Devouring Fire

Gracious Ritual of Ashes

Adam and Eve Again

Airstream

Aquavit

If Jesus Were Blind

Sympathy for Lazarus

Kenosis

Impatience for Imposters

New Moon over Emmaus

Signs and Wonders

Show Us

Groping

Trinity Is a Poem

Sentinels

Abacus

It Was a Good Day for God

The Third Yes

Architecture

Ready to Party

Tattoo

Grief on a Hallowed Eve

You Are Late

Lectionary Year B

Hidden Face

Wild Man John

Fluo•res•cence

No Angel Came

In the Night

Training to See Stars

Melt

Samuel Sleeping in the Temple

Have You Not Known, Grasshopper

When My Time Comes for Ashes and Dust

Jesus Naked in a Sacred Circle

Occupy Temple

Sacred Wound Lifted Up

What to Do with Your One Grain of Wheat

Passiontide

The Resurrection Theater of the Absurd

We Know Love by This

Friending

Ascension

Pentecost Spiked Punch

God’s Bathrobe

Institutionalized Jesus

Automatic Earth

What Job Meant to Say Had He Girded Up His Loins

The Bread that Satisfies

Sense of Wisdom

If Only We Had Better Options

Jesus: Cardiologist

Lose Yourself Along the Way

Jesus and the Boys

About that Plucking Out the Eye Thing

And He Took Them Up in His Arms

Calling All Jerks

Do for Us Whatever We Ask

Art of Reformation

Lazarus Acrostic

The Widow and the Cross

Rumors

Calling All Kings

Lectionary Year C

You Said Meet You by the Fig Tree

The Messenger

Gaudete

Magnifying Glass

Epiphany One Way or Another

On Taking the Watery Plunge

Today

Oh Boy Jeremiah

Hidden in Plain Sight

Ash Thursday

The Wanderer

Deep and Terrifying Darkness in which Covenant Comes

Yours Not Mine (Unless with Yours)

When the Manna Ran Out

Spikenard

Palm or Passion, Wave or Particle

Mimetic Jesus

Living Jesus

Order of St. Thomas

Oh, to Be as Bad as Paul

Suspense

Glory Comes in Love

Did You Dream Tonight

Unity Complex

God Stuck Her Tongue Out

Ease of Mystery

Worthy

Oil and Wine

Little Stranger Cakes

Shuttered Doors and Detours

Count the Stars

Near and Far, I’m Afraid

Another Kind of Raising Up

Parable of the Dinner Party

The Terms of Peace

Watson and Crick and Moses and Us

Helium

Numb

How Not to Be Thanked

Trickster Savior

Limp

The Dead

Iron Pen

Reign on Me

9781498220903.kindle.jpg

Mystery without Rhyme or Reason

Poetic Reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary

Michael Coffey

Foreword by Walter Brueggemann

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Mystery without rhyme or reason

Poetic Reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary

Copyright © 2015 Michael Coffey. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2090-3

hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2092-7

ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2091-0

All Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright

1989

, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Kathryn, Colin, and Liam

my epiphanies, my signs and wonders

With many thanks to Dale Griffith

With deep gratitude to Walter Brueggemann

Foreword

I have not read anything in a very long time that so amused me, astonished me, convicted me and satisfied me. I had such an experience in reading Michael Coffey’s compelling words that I had to find (for me) a new word to characterize it. The word is quotidian! It means simply commonplace, ordinary, routine. That is what his work is: quotidian! It speaks of the concrete, the specific, the most specific, the stuff right in front of us. We hear about food and sleep and bathrobes and grasshoppers and breakfast, the daily stuff that constitutes our life.

For that reason, this poetic exposition should be familiar and commonplace. But of course it is anything but that because Michael has mobilized his pastoral imagination and has transposed ordinary and familiar texts into disclosures that are indeed revelatory. The result is that every text on which he comments takes on a fresh dimension, and a new angle about which I had not thought before. There are those among us who think that the faith attested in the Bible is too old-fashioned, too predictable, too rigorous, or too out of touch to grab attention in a world of rush. But Michael shows otherwise in his words that violate all of our preconceptions in showing us the surprise that awaits us in the text.

At work here is the daring sensibility of a poet who twists and turns us to a new angle. But also at work here is a pastoral theologian who is so well grounded in the tradition that he can explore and probe with ease and with confidence. While so much conventional faith is busy restricting, confining, and limiting, Michael keeps offering new vistas for us and drawing us out beyond where we are. When the lines end, the world is different and the earth has moved under our feet.

My favorite is God’s bathrobe, a riff on the divine train that follows God’s holiness in the temple vision of Isaiah 6 that frills the entire space. That train (now read as bathrobe), by the time Michael finishes, fills the entire earth and puts down holy presence here and there well beyond the temple, Michael leads us to wonder why God has on a bathrobe. Perhaps it is Sabbath for coziness for God. Perhaps God had just been through the chaotic waters that were tamed for a bath. Perhaps God is wanting to decode and demystify the high liturgy of the temple, making it less formal and more accessible. I do not know why and Michael does not tell us why. But I do know that I will never read the text of the temple vision with its three-times holy the same way again. Nor will the earth ever be the same again, because it is now seen to be God-occupied; the evidence of the divine bathrobe is everywhere, once the poet shows us how to look.

Michael refuses to let us know for sure what the text might mean; he gives us probes, not arguments or explanations or conclusions. The text, in his hands, will not sit still long enough to have one meaning. His words are not unlike Pentecost. Indeed it is Pentecost every time . . . many tongues, many images, many possibilities that set us off in new freedom. We may be grateful for the tongues in which Michael speaks and writes. This is indeed practical theology as a great form of art. It refuses to dispel the mystery; rather it works to enhance and deepen the mystery of divine presence and purpose by showing us that in the mundane and the quotidian the reality of God comes bodied in ways we can handle and parse. When we finish one of his daring testimonies, we need time to linger and reflect and receive. We are surprised at a cognitive level. But in an affective way we are transformed. The Fourth Gospel concludes, These things are written in order that you may believe . . . (John 20:31). Surely that is why Michael has taken such great care to get it right. He writes his poetic abundance in order to generate faith, that is, that we may believe. But the believing to which he invites us is not conventional. He rather hopes that faith will come alive among us in daring, irreverent, impish ways, that the world may be kept open for the coming of Messiah. The cunning with which Michael addresses us corresponds to the cunning of the Gospel narratives themselves. We have learned all too well to flatten out that gospel cunning by dogma and by criticism