This Gospel seems to raise one of the Big Questions: If God is good, why do terrible things happen? There’s a fancy name for that question: Theodicy – from the Greek words for God’s justice. Theodicy asks: Can we understand tragedies as manifestations of God’s righteous judgment – and thus as making terrible sense? 

Some things can’t be explained and resolved in a 15 minute sermon. The question of suffering is one of them. But this year, I have found some new ways into this challenging Gospel text. One important step for me was translating it into our time. Listen. 

There were some present who told Jesus about the people from Missouri who were killed by tornados. He asked them, “Do you think that because these people suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Southerners? No, I tell you; but unless you change your heart, you will all perish as they did. Or the people who were killed at Abundant Life School – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Madison? No, I tell you; but unless you change your heart, you will all perish just as they did.”

What do I get from this exercise? Well, first, it brings us into the conversation. I’ve read a lot of commentaries over the years that say, “Well, people back then had this ignorant belief that bad things only happen to people who deserve it.” 

Listen: WE THINK THAT TOO. We may be careful about when and where and to whom we say that stuff. But I have heard all kinds of folks of general goodwill and good conscience, INCLUDING myself, express schadenfreude in the face of situations where it seems like people are getting what they have coming to them. It’s more or less what FAFO stands for. (Ask someone under 30 if you’ve never heard the word FAFO.)  It’s more or less what “I never thought leopards would eat my face” is all about. And I think about those leopards a lot, y’all. 

We are in this picture even if we don’t like it. People who absolutely know better will say, They should have voted differently; or, Why did they choose to live there; or, You should have vaccinated your kids. We also tend to blame victims.

Notice the social and moral geographies of this little scene in our Gospel. Jesus is in Judea right now, not far from Jerusalem; this is the same scene as last week’s Gospel. Jesus is FROM Galilee, a region north of Judea. Judeans did not think much of Galileans! They were seen as poor, backwards, and not very good Jews. 

The bystanders, here – presumably Judean – ask Jesus about some kind of massacre of Galileans. Jesus responds sharply: Of course this tragedy doesn’t mean those were the worst Galileans. Then he offers them another example of random tragedy – this time featuring some people in Jerusalem, which as I mentioned last week was more or less the center of the world! Jesus hints that folks may be more ready to assume people deserve their misfortune when those people are stigmatized outsiders. 

That’s why, when I translated this story to our times, I started with tornadoes in Missouri. It could have been the Texas measles epidemic; it could have been the flooding after Hurricane Helene. As someone who lived in the South for over a decade, and came to deeply love and respect many amazing Southerners, I notice how ready Midwesterners can be to write off the South. Whatever happens down there – they probably brought it on themselves. But when flooding or disease or violence claim lives in our own city … it might feel a little harder to explain away. 

Presbyterian Bible scholar Mark Davis writes, “[In these verses] I see Jesus addressing not theodicy but hypocrisy.” 

Not theodicy but hypocrisy! 

Davis says that Jesus’ answer here is basically, “Do you suppose a causal relationship between morality and tragedy?”… and then, Don’t kid yourself; “you have more in common than different with those victims.” Who are we to place blame, or offer easy justifications? 

It’s complicated, right? Actions and choices do have consequences. But there’s not a straight line between the act or choice, and the consequence. 

Suffering is not a form of punishment. We can’t look at who is suffering to know who to blame. Jesus is very clear about that, here and elsewhere. 

So. Having, reluctantly, found myself in this text, what else do I find here? The second thing I find here is a call to enlarge my concept of repentance. Jesus says this hard, strange thing twice: “No, I tell you; but unless you change your hearts, you will all perish just as they did.” 

Our usual Bible translation says “unless you repent.” I swapped in another translation that’s closer to the Greek: “change your heart.” The Greek word there, as in most places where we usually see repent or repentance, is metanoia, meaning a transformative change of heart and mind. I think a lot about how different that is, how much bigger and more interesting, than the concept of repentance as the church usually offers it: think of a bad thing you did, tell God you’re sorry, don’t do it again. 

When I read this Gospel conversation into our modern context, it pushes me to think of repentance as more expansive, collective, and transformational. This is not about an individual making amends for their sin and doing better going forward. That might be good for that person and those they interact with, but it doesn’t change the bigger picture. Also: All the “you”s here in this passage are plural in Greek. Unless all y’all change y’all’s hearts…  

Biblical scholar David Lose writes, “Just because suffering is not punishment doesn’t mean that it is disconnected entirely from sin. Pilate’s murderous acts of terror – as well as those horrific actions of today’s tyrants that we read about in the news – are sinful… There are all kinds of bad behaviors that contribute too much of the misery in the world, and the more we can confront that sin the less suffering there will be.”

We need metanoia, y’all. Large scale, communal, transformative metanoia. The kind of collective change of hearts that leads to changing the world. 

The people of Jesus’ time needed to be saved from violent repression and poor civil engineering. The people of our time need to be saved from the human causes of increasingly dangerous weather, from the over-availability of guns, from poverty and isolation and fear and the corrosive lies that feed mistrust of systems built to help us and violence towards our neighbors. 

The great filmmaker David Lynch died in January. In the wake of his death I learned about a line from the 2017 reprise of his famous TV show Twin Peaks. Lynch himself, playing a fictional FBI official, tells Agent Denise Bryan, a transgender woman: “When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

Fix your hearts or die. It’s become almost a rallying cry for some in the transgender community and their allies, especially in a season when they’re under almost daily attack by the federal government and many state governments. 

I won’t venture to try to say what this line means for trans folks. To me it means something like: My loved ones are real, and they matter, and they belong, and they’re not going anywhere. So, fix your heart. Open your mind. Grow your idea of the world until it has room for them in it. 

Fix your hearts or die. 

Unless you change your hearts, you will all perish just as they did. 

The hard part is the “or die” part, right? The “or perish as they did” part? It’s pretty easy to be in favor of metanoia. But where does death come into this call to renewal of life? 

We can be clear that it’s not a threat. We have JUST covered the fact that suffering is not punishment. We can’t look at who’s suffering to find the bad people, or look at who’s comfortable to find the good people. That’s the “NO, I tell you” part of Jesus’ saying. 

But what does the “perish as they did” part mean, if it’s not a threat?

I don’t claim to understand it fully! But I think that for one thing, it’s kind of a statement of fact. In a world without some kind of collective metanoia, a lot of bad stuff is going to keep on happening. Somebody said, In the era of climate change, it’s all watching phone videos of disaster until you’re the one holding the phone. 

Not all deaths are preventable. But deaths due to political violence and bad infrastructure and hunger and diseases that we can vaccinate against… it doesn’t have to be this way. 

I think, though, that the “or die” part of Jesus’ and Lynch’s teaching here is not only or even primarily about actual death. 

I think it’s also about the seriousness and urgency of the call to change. The stakes may not be literal, physical death – Jesus is prone to hyperbole – but there are stakes. 

You will miss something, if you don’t change your heart. 

You will be left behind… while big, beautiful, important, holy things are happening. 

You won’t step into whatever world is becoming possible. 

A loss to you, and to those you could be standing beside. 

Which brings us to this little parable Jesus tells. “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ The gardener replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

There’s a tendency to assume that any authority figure in a parable – a king, a rich man, a landowner – is a stand-in for God. But that only sometimes seems to be true. I don’t think it’s true here. This parable builds on the conversation about whether sudden, tragic deaths tell us something about God and judgment. Jesus’ answer is, God does not strike people down. 

So let’s take it as a given that God doesn’t strike trees down, either. Luke’s Gospel is full of images of God as loving, yearning, and seeking. Next week we’ll hear the parable of the Prodigal Son, coming up soon in Luke’s Gospel. 

David Lose writes, “Given Luke’s [Jesus’s] consistent picture of God’s reaction to sin, then perhaps the landowner is representative of our own sense of how the world should work…. We want things to be “fair” and we define “fair” as receiving rewards for doing good and punishment for doing evil [especially for other people]… So perhaps the gardener is God, the one who consistently raises a contrary voice to suggest that the ultimate answer to sin isn’t punishment – not even in the name of justice – but rather mercy, reconciliation, and new life.” 

Lisle Garrity of Sanctified Art offers a beautiful description of the work of that holy gardener: “Where the landowner sees waste, the gardener perceives possibility that lies fallow. The gardener has learned from the land that life flows in cycles—budding, flourishing, pruning, death…. 

And so [she] requests one more year. Cutting the earth with a shovel, [she] loosens the clots that have settled like stone so that when water comes, the earth with receive it like a soft kiss. [She] blankets the roots with manure so that growth can be steadied by hope. And then [she] lets go.”

Our Old Testament text, the call of Moses, is actually kind of a good case study. If you’ve heard of Moses at all, you know he’s a great leader of God’s people in the time long before Jesus. One of the top Old Testament guys. But at this point in his story, he’s kind of hit bottom. He was born to an enslaved family, and grew up in foster care with a wealthy family, which gave him opportunities but also kind of messed him up. One day as a young man he sees one of his birth people being beaten by someone from his adoptive people. He kills the aggressor, and hides the body. Word gets out about what he did; he runs away to the wilderness to avoid arrest. All that potential: blown. 

It’s not so bad, though; he meets a young woman there and falls in love, and settles in to tend his father-in-law’s goats for the rest of his life. So be it.

But God has other plans. 

God says this fig tree isn’t finished yet. 

Jesus’ parables are teaching tools, meant to stay with us, puzzle us, push us to rethink and reframe. 

In our attitudes towards other people – the hypocrisy and judgmentalism Jesus addresses here, and that I recognize in myself at times, if I’m honest – I think Jesus wants us to hear that God is not in a hurry to chop anybody down, and neither should we be. Mark Davis writes, “Jesus offers a parable that invites digging, cultivating, [fertilizing], and doing everything one can to give a fig tree a chance to bloom. It is a plan of action to assist the one who is failing, not a passive hope that they get what’s coming to them.”

And I think there’s something to take on board here not just for how we think about others, but how we think about ourselves, on our own journeys of becoming. Alongside last week’s image of Jesus Christ the loving mother hen, plant the image of Christ the patient gardener. 

Lisle Garrity writes, “What happens to the fig tree? Does it live? Does it die? Does it bear any fruit? We don’t know. And so, if we can’t read the end of this story, then we must write it with our own lives. Because we know what it feels like to be the fig tree, to be deemed worthless, to be weary enough to believe that we don’t deserve to be well. And perhaps we also know what it’s like to see the world through the eyes of the landowner—calculating worth based on what we produce, what we accomplish, what we provide. Can we cultivate the vision of the Great Gardener, the One who sees you for what you are becoming? The one who tends and prunes, nourishes and lets go?” 

SOURCES

Mark Davis, at Left Behind & Loving It: https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2013/02/theodicy-or-hypocrisy.html

Lisle Garrity for Sanctified Art, purchased here: 

https://sanctifiedart.org/videos/the-wisdom-of-the-fig-tree-worship-film

David Lose’s commentary: https://www.davidlose.net/2016/02/lent-3-c-suffering-the-cross-and-the-promise-of-love/

This is the shortest Gospel in the season of Lent. Yet in just five verses, it contains quite a cast of characters.  Let’s start with King Herod – who wants to kill Jesus. 

This was Herod Antipas, the son of the King Herod of the Christmas Gospel.  At this time Judea and this whole region were part of the Roman Empire, under a system of indirect rule – meaning that there was a local ruler, but he was hand-picked and closely overseen by the Roman Empire. Herod Antipas had close ties to Rome; he was educated there; he traveled to Rome to be appointed to his role by the Emperor Augustus; and later named his new capital city after Emperor Tiberius. 

Herod’s path to power was not straightforward. His father had two older sons whom he had favored… but then had them strangled after yet another brother convinced him they were plotting against him. Then that brother was executed, on the same suspicion.  Augustus once remarked, “It is better to be [King] Herod’s pig than his son.”

There’s a good deal more to the story but suffice it to say that Herod Antipas probably never felt safe on his throne, adding to the pressure of governing a region made unstable by poverty and political and religious extremism. Insecure leaders are often reactive, cruel leaders. 

For example, when John the Baptist, an itinerant rabbi who gathered crowds with his teachings, starts criticizing Herod’s marriage, Herod has him arrested – and eventually John’s head ends up on a platter. 

So that’s King Herod… whom Jesus immediately calls a fox. That’s our second character. What does Jesus mean by calling Herod a fox? For a long time I assumed it meant that Herod was clever, sneaky, and lethal. Those are the meanings attached to foxes in Western folklore. 

A few years ago, I found an article that explores what “fox” would have meant to Jesus, based on other texts from roughly that time and place. Sneaky and lethal were part of it, but the author, Randall Buth, says there’s another layer: Foxes and lions were often used as a way to contrast not-so-great men with great men. There’s n ancient saying, “Be a tail to lions rather than a head to foxes.” – meaning, Better to be a lesser person among great people, than a leader among good-for-nothings.

So when Jesus calls Herod a fox, there’s a lot wrapped up in that word: Sly and cruel, yes. But also: inept. Unworthy. A small man who only thinks he’s a great man. A poser, a pretender. Jesus is being even more insulting than we realized – and speaking publicly against a fox who has already shown that he’s willing to murder inconvenient rabbis. 

Our next character is Jerusalem – a city whom Jesus refers to here as if she were a person: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” 

Richard Swanson’s commentary on this Gospel for WorkingPreacher begins, “The first thing to understand is that Jerusalem was the center of the world.” Jerusalem was the heart of political and religious power in Judea – a place of kings, high priests, and generals. The Temple was the place where God’s finger touched the earth. According to Luke, Jesus grew up in a family of observant Jews who visited Jerusalem and the Great Temple regularly. 

Swanson writes, “Remember that Jesus is not like you. He is a Jew of the first century, and Jerusalem is, for him, the center of the world… [Here] he is grieving for a city that he loves. [And Luke as the Gospel writer] is grieving for the city that was destroyed in 70 CE when Rome crushed the First Jewish Revolt.” There is real love, real anguish, real grief, here, for the great city, holy and violent. 

Who are these prophets whom Jesus mentions, the ones that Jerusalem kills? (By the way: Stoning was a means of public, mob execution – everybody just throws stones at somebody until they’re dead.) The Old Testament records two prophets who were killed in Jerusalem by kings who did not appreciate their messages. In addition, Queen Jezebel is said to have killed a large number of prophets, because they were speaking out against King Ahab’s worship of other gods and cruel acts. 

By Jesus’ time, it seems there were also some non-canonical stories circulating that more famous prophets had also been killed in Jerusalem. For example, Isaiah is said to have been sawn in half by a king possessed by a demon.

For Jews, including Jesus and his first followers, these tales of the murder of prophets in Jerusalem were part of the story of their people – a story which includes many kings who were charged with keeping God’s ways of holiness, righteousness, and mercy, but who found God’s demands – spoken by the prophets – to be inconvenient. 

Jesus’ arrest and execution will fit that pattern. 

It is important for us as Christian readers to understand that what Jesus says here is not a prophecy against the Jewish people, but a chilling and timeless reminder that humans often react harshly to calls to give up privilege and affluence for the sake of justice and mercy. 

Kings, foxes, a personified city, murdered prophets… and a chicken. 

A hen, specifically.  

Here she is, the Holy Chicken, in a photo of a mosaic on the altar of a tiny church on a hillside near Jerusalem, which commemorates the spot where Jesus is said to have spoken these words. The church is called “Domine Flevit,” or “The Lord Wept.”

In a sermon on this text, Tim Fleck says, “The lowly hen doesn’t have much of a biblical pedigree… God and the prophets are compared to eagles, to leopards, to lions: to tough, macho animals. But this scripture and its parallel in the Gospel of Matthew are the only places in the canonical scriptures that even mention the chicken.”

Chickens are not strong, or fierce, or beautiful. They’re neither clever nor wise. They’re close to the bottom of the food chain. They can’t even really fly. When a fox meets a chicken, we know who’s going to walk away from the encounter – with feathers on his snout. 

The smart money is always on the fox. 

But in this text, Jesus sides with the chicken: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” 

All the chicken has going for her is what you see, right here: her protective love. A love so strong that she will put her own body between her chicks and the teeth or claws of a predator. If someone wants to get to her children, they’re going to have to go through her, literally. That won’t deter most predators much;  her beak and claws are no match for a fox, hawk, or raccoon. 

But given the choice between abandoning her chicks as tasty snacks and making a getaway, or sacrificing herself in the hope of saving them, she chooses the latter. In an essay on this text, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them.”

I should say, here, that I know very little about the nobility and self-sacrificial tendencies of actual chickens. Jesus is alluding to what chickens are said to do – just as the images of pelicans, found in many churches, including ours, show a mother pelican feeding her young with her own blood, nourishing them at the cost of her own life. It’s a symbolic image that has nothing to do with actual pelican behavior.

Jesus identifies with this allegorical chicken. He sees the danger that surrounds Jerusalem, that stalks God’s children: Grinding poverty; the oppression of greedy and ruthless rulers; disease, division, and instability; the kill-or-be-killed mentality that develops when nobody has enough and nobody trusts their neighbors. 

Forty years from this moment, Jerusalem will lie in smoking ruins, the great Temple torn down, not one stone left upon another. Jesus sees this future; he sees present suffering and struggle; and his heart aches for God’s people Israel, who have lost so much, and have yet more to lose. But like the hen, all he has to offer is his stubborn, risky love.  

Pause and hold this image of Jesus in your mind: Christ the mother hen, wings outstretched over her helpless fluffy babies. 

Let’s turn from one strange image in today’s Scripture to another, a flaming fire-bowl moving on its own among cut-up animals. We find God’s self-giving love here too. This action, cutting up the animals, is strange and disturbing to us, but would have made sense to Abraham. This was how you sealed (or cut) a covenant, in those times, using the sacred power of blood. 

But usually, a covenant is mutual; both sides have to make reciprocal commitments. Both parties walk between the dead animals, as a symbol of those mutual commitments. But here, only God, symbolized by the firebowl, moves among the sacrifices, while Abraham looks on. A one-sided covenant! – it’s almost nonsense. 

There will be a human side to the covenant. Abram’s descendants will be called to live in distinctive and demanding ways, as the holy people of a holy God. But here, at the beginning, the relationship between God and humanity is fundamentally asymmetrical. 

God always loves us more than we love back. 

God always gives us more than we give back. 

God always begins the conversation. 

When I’ve preached on this text before, I’ve landed there – with what Jesus’ words here tell us about the heart of God. Jesus’ tenderness, anger and anguish here touch me deeply; they are part of how I understand the Divine, made known to us in Jesus Christ. 

But this year Richard Swanson’s commentary helped me notice something new. Let’s talk about the last group in the cast of characters of this Gospel passage – the first mentioned in the text: these Pharisees with a warning for Jesus: “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you!”

Jesus has been wandering around villages in Judea, teaching and healing, and working his way towards Jerusalem, where he knows the next chapter of this story must unfold. So the Pharisees say, Go back to Galilee. Go to Samaria. Anywhere. You are too close to the center of power to get away with saying the kinds of things you’ve been saying.

Why are these Pharisees helping Jesus? Aren’t they his enemies? Well, yes and no. Out of all the Gospels, Luke may do the best job of showing the ambiguity of Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees. Besides this passage, Luke mentions three times when Jesus eats in the home of a Pharisee. He may end up arguing with his hosts, but arguing over Scripture is a sign of engagement, not enmity. 

The Pharisees were a reform movement in first-century Judaism. They were concerned that the Jewish people had lapsed in both belief and practice, and wanted to encourage re-engagement and renewal. 

They wanted people to have their own relationships with God, and not feel dependent on the elite religious leadership of the Temple. They wanted synagogues in every village, as local centers of religious study. 

So Jesus and the Pharisees had a lot in common. Some scholars even see Jesus as a kind of rogue Pharisee. 

In the Gospels I think we see the Pharisees trying to figure out if Jesus’ message and movement can advance their goals, or if it’s just too different. Their biggest division seems to be that the Pharisees put a lot of weight on keeping the many ritual practices of Old Testament Judaism, as a way to orient daily life towards God; while Jesus can be pretty dismissive of those practices. 

Christians tend to understand Pharisees as practicing a hypocritical, superficial piety. But we need to be careful. Our New Testament texts are often negative about Jewish groups because they were written in a time when relations between Jews and Christians were bad. But Jesus WAS a Jew, and arguing with other Jews about how to be Jews is one of the most Jewish things he does. 

Swanson points out that even though Jesus has a core group of followers, there are also sympathizers, supporters, seekers, and allies who crop up all through the story – even Roman soldiers, tax collectors, and Temple leaders. These Pharisees pass on a warning for Jesus because they feel some kinship with his movement and message. 

And it’s not that they’re in on Herod’s plotting. Pharisees were not in the halls of power at this time. It was likely just the word on the street that Herod was getting fed up with the obnoxious prophet from Nazareth. I’m sure it wasn’t really news to Jesus, either. 

Swanson writes that the Pharisees’ warning was an “act of allyship.” What does it mean to be an ally? 

We hear the word a lot with reference to the LGBTQ+ community – meaning someone who is straight and cisgender, whose inner sense of gender is aligned with their biological sex assigned at birth, but who chooses to support, stand with, and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. The term shows up in conversation about anti-racism work, too, and in other contexts.  

Often when we talk about allies, we’re talking about a member of a dominant group who chooses to speak and act in solidarity with members of a marginalized group. But alliances among marginalized groups have also often been powerful and important. 

Have you ever heard the expression “divide and conquer”? It’s said to go all the way back to the father of Alexander the Great of Greece, who created one of the largest empires in human history, 300 years before Jesus. “Divide and conquer,” or “divide and rule,” means that if you can sow discord and suspicion, and keep the groups you’re trying to control fighting with each other, then it’s much easier for you to stay in power. When members of different groups are able to work through their differences and help each other, it starts to get harder for the Herods and Alexanders of the world to pursue their agendas unhindered. There are so many situations in which Who am I willing to stand with? and Who is willing to stand with me? might be important questions – even holy questions.

Turn back for a moment to Chicken Jesus. I learned recently that some hens steal eggs – then sit on them, hatch and raise them. I saw a video of one hen who had spread her fluffy body over twenty or more eggs, from at least three different kinds of chickens; there were several big greenish duck eggs under there too.

Imagine Christ the Mother Hen surrounded by a gaggle of mismatched babies – chicks of all different shapes and sizes, and that one is DEFINITELY a duckling. Standing together, under those loving outstretched wings. 

Swanson writes, “The Messiah has more allies than you might imagine. So do you. Recognizing that is how you prepare to welcome the one coming in the Name of the God Whose Name Is Mercy.” 

 

 

This sermon owes much to a sermon on the Holy Chicken by the Rev. Tim Fleck. 

Richard Swanson’s commentary: 

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-luke-1331-35-6

Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” (March 11, 2001), accessed at www.textweek.com March 3, 2007; quoted in Tim’s sermon. 

Randall Buth, That Small-fry Herod Antipas, or When a Fox Is Not a Fox, https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/2667/

Gabriel Said Reynolds, “ON THE QUR’ĀN AND THE THEME OF JEWS AS “KILLERS OF THE PROPHETS,”

https://www3.nd.edu/~reynolds/index_files/jews%20as%20killers%20of%20the%20prophets%20final.pdf

It’s the last Sunday in Epiphany, the last Sunday before we begin a new church season – the season of Lent, when we prepare for the mystery of Easter. And our Sunday calendar of readings, the lectionary, always gives us this story on this Sunday – the gospel of the Transfiguration, the church’s word for this moment when some of Jesus’ disciples catch a glimpse of divine glory shining forth from their friend. They also see him having a friendly chat with Moses and Elijah – which impresses them because Moses, the great leader and liberator of God’s people, lived 1300 years or so before Jesus, and Elijah, the great prophet, whom we met in our Scripture drama last week, lived about 800 years before Jesus. A Voice says, This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him! And then… suddenly the sun is shining and they’re just standing there on a rocky hillside with their friend Jesus, whose face and clothes are once again ordinary, familiar. 

And then… they walk down the mountain, straight into a bit of a situation. Our Gospel today is Luke’s version of the story. Luke used the Gospel of Mark, the earliest-written of the four Gospels, as one of his sources. Mark is famously the shortest Gospel, and is quite spare in its prose much of the time. But there are a couple of healing stories where Mark offers a lot of beautiful detail… too much detail, in Luke’s opinion! [On the back of your Sunday Supplement you can compare their two versions and see that Luke cut down Mark’s prose a LOT.] The Sunday lectionary never gives us Mark’s version, but we’re going to talk about it today. 

In Luke’s Gospel, the Transfiguration and the healing story aren’t particularly connected. One thing happens, and then another thing happens. But as Mark tells it, this is all one story. Jesus, James, Peter, and John head down the mountain to rejoin the rest of their group. As they go, they talk a little about what happened. The disciples have a question about Elijah that I’d be happy to explain at coffee hour. 

And then they find the rest of the disciples – who are in the middle of a big kerfuffle. While Jesus and the other three were away, someone has come to the disciples looking for help, and that situation has kind of spun out of control. A big crowd has gathered; some religious leaders have shown up to argue with the disciples; it’s chaos. And when Jesus shows up, all the chaos immediately gathers around HIM.

So he asks, What are y’all arguing about? And someone in the crowd answers: “Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.”

I’m sure some of you have seen a person or a pet have a seizure. Our dog Kip has seizures sometimes. It sure sounds like that’s what this father is talking about. Many readers of Scripture over the centuries have read this description and thought: This child has epilepsy. It’s a brain disorder that causes people to have seizures. 50 million people have it, and it’s been around for a very long time. Today we can treat it and help most people have few or no seizures, but that wasn’t true in Jesus’ time. 

Then Jesus says something strange: “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” Who is he talking to, and why does he sound so mad? I think we can be clear that he’s not talking to this dad. When he says “you,” here, as in “put up with you,” that’s a PLURAL “you” – he’s talking to a group, the “faithless generation.” So, he’s not mad at the dad. He’s mad at the crowd, and the situation. I wonder if that moment on the mountaintop was actually pretty significant for Jesus himself, and he was hoping for a little time to reflect on it, instead of finding himself in the middle of a worked-up crowd.

And I think he’s angry that that this child’s illness has become the pretext for this whole hullabaloo. That this mob has gathered, half of them hungry for the spectacle of a miraculous healing and half of them watching him like hawks to see if he does anything that they can use against him. I think Jesus would like very much to have a private moment with this father and child, to talk with them and help them, and he’s frustrated that that’s not possible. 

But he does his best. He tells the father, “Bring him to me.” And they bring the boy to him. And under the stress of the moment, the child has a seizure. Mark’s text says, “When the spirit saw [Jesus], immediately it threw the boy into convulsions, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth.” 

Mark assumes that this is the work of an evil spirit. The Gospel writers saw a distinction between physical illnesses or injuries, and difficulties caused by evil spirits, which tend afflict the mind and spirit – things that today we might identify as epilepsy, or a mental illness, things like that. During his earthly ministry as told in the Gospels, Jesus both heals physical illnesses, and casts out evil spirits. I wonder whether Jesus – who is both a human being and also God – looks at this child and knows what’s really going on. That this is no demon, but an electrical storm in the brain. He treats it an an exorcism, not a healing, but that might be for the sake of the crowd. I wonder! 

Jesus asks the father, ‘How long has this been happening to him?’ And he answers, ‘From childhood. It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.’ Jesus replies, ‘If you are able!—All things can be done for the one who believes.’ And immediately – Mark uses that word a lot! – immediately, the father of the child cries out, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ 

Other translations say, “I have faith; help my lack of faith!” 

This cry is a prayer, a heartfelt, spontaneous, simple prayer, and I love it. I pray it now and then; I commend it to you. I appreciate the acknowledgement that faith, belief, is not an all or nothing deal. I’m pretty sure most of us are somewhere on a continuum. Some part of us is able to believe that there’s a Love that enfolds the universe, works for good even in the most difficult circumstances that humanity creates for ourselves, and knows our names and deepest longings…. We’re able to believe that up to a point. And maybe there’s some other part of us that finds all that completely implausible. And there might be a big part of us that very much wants to have faith, to be able to trust in that Love and live accordingly. “I have faith; help my lack of faith!” is a beautifully concise and honest prayer for those moments when we yearn to trust that God’s goodness is at work in our lives and our world, nevertheless; and yet can’t, quite. 

That little conversation – that true, important moment of prayer – might be the real heart of this story. (And Luke edits it out…!) 

The crowd is growing, more people are running to see what’s happening, and Jesus decides to move things along. He commands the “spirit” to leave the boy. The boy’s seizure ends, and he lies as if lifeless. People start to holler, “He’s dead!” But Jesus takes him by the hand and helps him stand up. 

Mark, our storyteller, believes the demon has been driven out. I want to believe that Jesus has healed this child’s brain – that in the absence of modern medicine, Jesus has freed him from the ongoing distress, danger, and stigma of his illness. 

Afterwards the disciples ask: Why couldn’t we cast out that demon, Jesus? And Jesus can’t tell them, It wasn’t a demon, it was a chronic brain disorder, so he tells them, This kind of demon comes out only through prayer. 

I know that the healing stories and other miracles in the Gospels can be a stretch for some folks who want to believe. I understand. They don’t bother me terribly, but I think that’s more of a personality thing than a faith thing. I majored in anthropology, you know? I can believe six impossible things before breakfast. 

In his book on faith Unapologetic, Francis Spufford offers a beautiful account of why, perhaps, Jesus could heal, during his earthly life: “Impossibilities occur. Blind eyes suddenly see. Severed nerve cells re-connect. Legs straighten, infections recede, pain fades, horrified minds quieten… Perhaps this momentary suspension of the laws of the universe can happen because the maker of all things is now no longer outside them, impartially sustaining them, holding everything but touching nothing in particular. Now, instead, the maker is within as well, and he has hands that can reach, he has a local address in space and time from which to act.” 

Why don’t miraculous cures and healings happen now? Well, sometimes they do, for no apparent reason – certainly not because somebody had the most or best people praying for them. Sometimes – often! – genuinely miraculous cures happen through the holy gift of medical science. Which is why slashing funding to medical research is a sin. 

And sometimes healing doesn’t happen. Sometimes stuff doesn’t get better. Bodies, minds, lives, are changed for good. 

I know people who are gracefully and wisely wrestling with the diminishments of age. I know people who can tell me with clear eyes and a steady gaze that they don’t fear death. But human infirmity often does not follow the track of gentle and gradual decline. Even Scripture acknowledges that aging peacefully towards death is a blessing and privilege. 

There are many struggles of body, mind, and spirit that are harder to accept as part of the order of things. The anguish of this father in our Gospel story! – it hurts when someone you love is ill, in ways that diminish their access to life’s ordinary opportunities and joys; in ways that cause them pain or grief, that make us fear we’ll lose them entirely. It hurts to be that someone: grieving possibilities, managing pain; preoccupied by needs and costs; waiting for the next flare-up or follow-up; watching life pass by. 

Today epilepsy is categorized as a disability. I heard someone say recently that the disabled are the largest minority in the world, and the only minority that anyone can join at any time. When we consider the disabilities folks were living with in Jesus’ time and the intervening two thousand years, there are some we can simply prevent now, and some that we can cure. There are many we can manage, to reduce their impact on someone’s daily life. 

But it is still commonplace for disability or chronic illness to change the shape and course of people’s lives. 

In the Gospels we see Jesus healing the blind, the lame, the epileptic, the troubled of mind. Do those healing acts commit us to the conviction that “perfect” physical and mental health is the necessary fulfillment of God’s intentions for us? It’s complicated!

We have learned to appreciate the gifts of human difference in many ways – the body doesn’t function very well if it’s all ears, right? But we still tend to treat disability and chronic illness as a falling-short, a failure. A departure from what ought to be. 

That mindset gets pushback, sometimes, from folks living with disabilities and differences. For example, many in the Deaf community are concerned that new technologies that make hearing possible for many with congenital deafness threaten to eradicate a vital and beautiful Deaf culture. 

A longtime member here, Jerry Bever, once told me, I don’t regret my blindness. I met my wife because I’m blind. I loved my job helping other blind people. A friend living with bipolar disorder told me, years ago: This is part of who I am, not something that could be peeled off of my “real” self. Disability activists refuse the idea that to be disabled is inherently to be some lessened version of your proper self. They say, The issue isn’t us; it’s that the world isn’t configured for us to be easily able to participate and thrive. 

At the same time: being disabled in a not very accommodating world is hard! And there are plenty of people who would be glad of a cure, glad to renounce their membership in that minority group. This is nuanced, tender, difficult, deeply personal and ambiguous stuff, and I know there’s a lot that I don’t understand. That’s why, this Lent, I’m committing to read the book My body is not a prayer request: Disability justice and the church –  and inviting you to read along with me. 

Just as our culture struggles with the idea that disability is more than a problem to be solved, so does the church. Churches struggle to accommodate and support members with disability or chronic illness – physical or mental. Churches balk at the costs of accessibility upgrades, or the ongoing work of online worship. People mutter about the names that stay on the prayer list indefinitely. We can organize ourselves to offer extra support to a person or household for a few weeks… but forever? I’m talking about churches in general here; I think St. Dunstan’s does a little better than average – but there’s room for growth here too. 

The prayers in our prayer book betray this failure. There’s a whole section of ‘prayers for the sick’… and they all either point towards complete cure in the foreseeable future, or death. So many times, I’ve paged through the book desperate for a prayer that speaks to the real, lived situation of the person I’m praying with. 

Instead they say things like, “that his sickness may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy,” or “that her weakness may be banished and her strength restored,” or, “grant that he may be restored to that perfect health which it is yours alone to give,”  or “restored to usefulness in your world with a thankful heart.” All of these prayers, to my ears, reflect a deep discomfort with the reality of human suffering and an unseemly eagerness to move on. Perfect health! Restored strength! Usefulness! Let’s go!!

We can pray for whatever we want, of course; God is wise and kind enough to hear our imperfect prayers. But I think praying words like these in situations where short-term, complete cure is not on the table is damaging in a couple of different ways. First: it bears false witness to the fulness of our humanity by measuring people against some arbitrary yardstick, some predetermined vision of health and completeness. Second: it bears false witness to God by implying that God’s presence and care is only expressed when we see a person fully restored to some semblance of that ideal of wellness. 

And this is not a just a semantic matter in an era when Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are at risk, and people will say out loud in public that maybe some kinds of people are just too much of a drain on our shared resources and should be allowed to die. 

My desire for wiser, kinder, more apt ways to pray in and for and through disability, chronic illness, and long-term serious illness, is why, this Lent, I’m committing to read the book “Irreverent Prayers: Talking to God when you’re seriously sick,” and inviting you to read along with me. 

What if we believed that someone could be whole and worthy and beloved even as they live with multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy or bipolar disorder or disabling long Covid or addiction? What if we prayed and acted and lived and loved and churched as if that were true? Because it is. It’s true. It’s true. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus burns with God’s glory on a mountaintop, then comes down to find himself faced by a crowd hungry for spectacle, and a father hungry for healing. What I have heard, dwelling with this text this week, is a call to respond to God’s glory and Christ’s compassion by committing to deepen my understanding of and my empathy for those beloved ones living with disability and chronic illness – because, to borrow some wording from a recent statement by leaders in the Episcopal Church in Europe, “we welcome [the marginalized] not just in the room but at the very center of our discerning God’s purpose, because we take with joyful seriousness Christ’s teaching us that from such siblings we will learn the designs of the kingdom of heaven.”

I hope our Lenten reading group will share out what we learn from our reading and conversation. I hope we’ll wonder and wrestle together, as a church, with bigger and bolder concepts of human wholeness and human worth, as held in God’s all-encompassing love. I hope we’ll keep developing our words and practices of prayer and mutual care. May the Holy Spirit bless and guide our work and our wondering. Amen. 

I wrote a little about those Prayer Book prayers a while ago… https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/the-comfortable-we-of-prayer-book-liturgy

Today is the Feast of the Presentation of Christ – February 2. What else falls on February 2nd? …  (Groundhog Day.)

There IS a reason for that convergence – a planetary reason, rooted in the tilt and turn of the earth. February 2 falls more or less at the halfway point between the winter solstice – the longest night of the year – and the spring equinox, when night and day are equal in length. After that, the days start to be longer than the nights again. So February 2 is a turn in the planetary year, a half-twist towards light and spring. It’s a natural time of year for some kind of festival of light, especially here in the northern hemisphere. That’s reflected in the other name for this feast – Candlemas – and the old custom of blessing candles on this day. 

Light is one of the big themes of the season of Epiphany. It’s all over the core Scripture texts of this time of year. For example, Isaiah chapter 60, long used by the church as a song of faith, canticle 11: Arise, shine, for your light has come! For behold, darkness covers the land, deep gloom enshrouds the peoples… 

We’re also trying out an old Episcopal custom of reading the first verses of John’s Gospel at the end of the service: The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. 

Back in Advent we heard the Benedictus, Zechariah’s holy song from Luke chapter 1, often used in Morning Prayer: By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death…  One Advent prayer calls us to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. And there are many hymns and prayers that draw on this language and these images, in Epiphany and beyond.

The power of light and dark imagery has deep roots in human experience. As animals, as a species, we rely heavily on eyesight; it may be our strongest sense. 

So darkness – literal darkness – takes away our primary way of knowing where we are, finding resources, and avoiding danger. It’s natural that at a deep-seated level, dark makes us feel vulnerable and frightened, and that we welcome the return of light. 

But over millennia of human culture, literature, and politics, the realities of light and dark have been layered with additional meanings, becoming a set of overlapping binaries: 

Light – Dark

Good – Bad

Holy – Profane

Safety – Danger

Knowledge – Ignorance 

Civilization – Barbarity 

Light becomes shorthand for everything in that first column – and darkness a shorthand for everything in the second column. A powerful set of dualisms – a word which here means that humans have used our thoughts and our words to divide a whole complex range of ideas and experiences into two big, opposing categories. 

Those metaphors and meanings are deep and powerful. You may not be aware of the way they’re lurking in these ordinary words, but that doesn’t drive them away. It would be a fool’s game to try to expunge several thousand years of cultural word association. But I would like to try to call it to our awareness – and complicate the way we use the vocabulary and imagery of light and dark. 

A spiritual writer I follow, Jen Cobble Willhoite, wrote recently about the fires in Los Angeles, a place she loves. 

In it she grapples with how our familiar light and dark imagery sits askew in a season of wildfires. She writes, “Dawn approaches. Things look promising when we’re halfway out of the dark. But everything feels unnatural in smoke and haze. The growing light that crests [the horizon] is not the one that embraces us at the end of a long pilgrimage [through night]. It is [an approaching wildfire,] something we have to run away from. It feels terrible to be afraid of the coming light.”

Light isn’t always welcome. Light can be glaring, blinding, uncomfortable. Even dangerous. 

So many of the things we find beautiful are actually an interplay of light and dark. Christmas lights, candlelight, starlight. Dawn and twilight. Fireworks and lighting bugs. Light and dark are most beautiful when they’re dancing together. 

Hear me: I am not saying that life is better when it has some periods of difficulty, danger or sorrow in it. That’s the metaphor speaking. People do sometimes become stronger, wiser, or kinder through suffering, but that’s not a reason to wish suffering on anyone, or take unnecessary suffering as a blessing in disguise. 

I’m saying, rather, that even at its roots in human sensory and aesthetic experience, the dualism of light as good and dark as bad overstates, simplifies and distorts. 

I understand the power of our Scriptural images, and I try not to edit the Bible. Much. But for several years I’ve been trying, slowly and imperfectly, to move away from using “dark” as a shorthand for all the things “dark” is often shorthand for, in my own speaking and writing. You might hear me talk about things being heavy – another metaphor that makes sense to me. I can feel the weight of things sometimes, can’t you? I can see it on other people:  the way public events or personal griefs are like physical burdens, pulling down our shoulders, draining our energy. 

So, I might say, These are heavy times. Or I might just say what I mean: these are frightening times, or difficult times. I’m trying not to say, These are dark times. I won’t judge you if you do! That language is everywhere, including all through this liturgy! I just increasingly find it an unhelpful metaphor, for myself. 

Why does this matter? Why worry about words, in such heavy times? Maybe it is just me. But here are a few reasons that come to mind. The first is that allowing darkness to remain an unexamined shorthand for everything evil, immoral, or lacking, aligns with the ideology of white supremacy. Over the past several centuries, these ideas about darkness have become woven into our racial thinking in dangerous and dehumanizing ways. When white Europeans talked about Africa as “the Dark Continent,” for example, they were more or less intentionally tying people’s skin color to all those other meanings I named earlier… with dire and lasting consequences. 

Pausing to notice what we mean, and the unintentional overtones, when we talk about darkness or blackness as intrinsically or obviously negative, is actually a small but important step in anti-racism work.

The second reason I’d like to complicate the language and meanings of light and dark in church and everyday talk is that refusing stark dualisms keeps us human. 

At its roots, our human propensity for categorization is a matter of cognitive efficiency. We don’t have the brain resources to analyze all the information with each and every thing that comes before us. So we chunk up reality, and, importantly, other human beings, into categories and types. Safe, dangerous. Good, bad. Kin; stranger. 

Those categories in turn become catchalls for a whole lot of other stuff. For example, we don’t have to have our own opinions about lots of things because we can just believe what our people believe. Everybody does this, to a greater or lesser extent! 

And in times of high stress and anxiety, the pressure towards polarization, towards dualistic thinking, is even more intense. When somebody is demonizing me or my loved ones, Lordy, it is easy to demonize them right back. 

The us/them mentality has a powerful pull, and the light-and-dark, good-and-evil stuff comes right along with it. 

But some the fiercest, boldest people I know are also the most compassionate. People who carry a strong ethical commitment to the humanity of their enemies. People who not only resist dualistic  and demonizing thinking themselves, but who try to understand why someone else’s anxiety and resentment is driving them towards that kind of thinking. 

And, pragmatically speaking, if I want you to care about my child’s well-being, then it’s probably incumbent on me to care about yours.

 Hear me: This is not “can’t we all just get along.” This is facing the truth that we are, in fact, all in this together. 

Let’s be very, very clear what and who we stand for – what and who we will work, march, give, vote, and fight for – but that doesn’t have to mean going deeper and deeper into polarized thinking, into us/them mentalities that ultimately may be counterproductive for our goals – and that dehumanize us as much as those we regard as our opponents. 

This is not something I have mastered, friends.  But it is something that I believe.

The third reason I’d like us to take the light/dark imagery, and all the other ideas tucked away inside that dualism in our Scriptures, and hold it up and think about it a little, is that sometimes the dark has gifts that we need. 

Remember the old Louis Armstrong song “What a wonderful world”? I love the lyric “The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night.” The dark is sacred sometimes, isn’t it? Dark can be gracious, comforting, safe. And light can be glaring, painful, dangerous. 

The Underground Railroad, and the work to protect Jews and others at risk in Nazi Germany, often took place by night. Think about the phrase “under cover of darkness.” Dark like a blanket, offering shelter. And when such work took place in daylight, there was still the metaphorical darkness of secrecy, silence, and subterfuge. 

The darkness out there may have ways to bless us; so may the darkness within. Seeking to understand our own more difficult or obscure inner depths is important and holy work. There may be something we need to work through and release; something we need to grapple with and transform. Something we need to mine, to tap into, as a source of power. We might not know until we venture into our inner shadows. 

When we sing or say,  Behold, darkness covers the land, deep gloom enshrouds the peoples; Arise, shine, for your light has come! … When I read from John’s Gospel at the end of our Eucharistic services: The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it… I need those words, friends. I need the comfort and courage they offer. 

But I’m working on seeking the comfort and courage that hides in the dark, too. The dark can be frightening, no question about it; but it has its own gifts to offer. In Advent we sang a song about it, composed by African-American musician Lea Morris: “Honor the dark as you do the light…receive the gifts that come to us by day and by night. I choose to honor the dark, uncertainty and change; deliver us from fear until only love remains.” 

Now I’m going to read you a book that I love, The Dark by Lemony Snicket…

This is an interesting pair of readings! We have two speeches – or, sermons. In our text from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the Torah – the Law of Moses – is being read aloud to the residents of Jerusalem. It’s easy for the stuff in the Old Testament to all just seem like “a long time ago” to us, but whoever the historical Moses was, he probably lived about a thousand years before this scene. This is a people being called back to their origins, their heritage – after many centuries of change, and also after a generation or two in exile, after Judea and Jerusalem were conquered by the empire of Babylon in 587 BCE, and most of the population were taken away from their homeland to live among strangers. 

When a kinder, gentler empire took over, many were eager to return and rebuild. Nehemiah was an official in the Persian court who asked permission to back to Judea and help rebuild Jerusalem. This scene happens after the city’s walls are rebuilt, as part of a moment of recommitment and rededication. 

Ezra, the priest, reads the Law aloud to the people. There are some details here that I really love! Notice that the crowd includes both men and women – that’s not a modern addition to make it inclusive; it’s in the Hebrew. The crowd also includes “all who could hear with understanding” – which I’m pretty sure means there were kids there too, anyone old enough to listen and understand. And I love the sentence “They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Ezra and the other leaders don’t just read the Law; they pause and explain, to make sure everyone is following. 

And I love that when the people are weeping, because hearing the Law makes them realize how far they have drifted from God’s intentions, the leaders tell them, This is a holy time; don’t weep! Prepare a special meal; share with the hungry; celebrate. Don’t waste time on shame or regret. Just recommit, with joy and purpose, to being the people God calls you to be. 

And then there’s our Gospel. In Luke’s telling, this is how Jesus begins his public ministry. He reads aloud from the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor… to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he announces that this 500-year-old prophecy of hope and restoration is coming true, today. In him. 

The reading ends there but… Jesus’ words are not as well received as Ezra and Nehemiah’s! At first everyone is amazed at his gracious words. They’re saying to each other, Isn’t this Joseph’s boy? Apparently Jesus already has a reputation for being able to heal people and work other wonders, and people want to see more of the same. But he tells them, “No prophet is accepted in that prophet’s hometown,” and suggests that his ministry lies elsewhere. That makes everybody mad – so angry that they drive him out of town and try to throw him off a cliff! But he escapes and continues his travels and his mission. 

Now, a pastor has to be careful about comparing herself to Jesus – even on a bad day – or even to a random Old Testament leader like Nehemiah or Ezra. But here I am, standing before you, on Annual Meeting Sunday, to talk about how I think we’re called to live, and where I think God is at work among us and around us. 

Will my words stir up our hearts together, or will you try to throw me off a cliff? Let’s find out!

This is a hard time to be church; but it’s not necessarily a bad time to be church. The fact that it’s no longer culturally normative to go to church, and hasn’t been for decades, forces us to re-examine what we’re about, and to re-engage our neighbors in fresh ways, from a posture of humility and curiosity. The political, social and ecological landscape is troubling to downright frightening in a lot of ways. But I am glad to see people here thinking and talking about how to be real community for each other, to get past Midwest Nice and friendly acquaintanceship. 

I think that’s really important and holy, and it’s what we’ve always needed and been called to build. There’s an opportunity, too, in a time like this, to get serious and strategic about our values, what we understand as our way of living the way of Jesus here and now – things like creation care, the full dignity and belovedness of LGBTQ+ people, deepening our commitment to antiracism, nurture and care for our young ones and elders, generosity towards and advocacy for our neighbors. 

In thinking and praying about 2025, I think I see two main tracks, two big directions that need my particular energy and attention, this year – and perhaps yours too. 

The first track is tending this community – for real. I’ve been thinking a lot about something my godmother Myra Marx Ferree, an esteemed sociologist and a faithful Episcopalian, said a couple of months ago. She said: Where your community is thin, thicken it. There’s so much we could share with one another, friends. In our recent parish survey, I was reminded how many fascinating skills and knowledges y’all hold – many of which speak directly to the big questions of how to live in these times. 

I want to make opportunities to just learn from each other. 

The survey also reinforced how much we want a community that sees and knows us. One question asked: “It would help me feel safe and supported if I knew that my church community was well informed about…” The strongest responses included diversity in sexuality and gender expression; neurodiversity; mental illness and mental health; and addiction and recovery. People had other suggestions too – experiences and struggles they’re willing to share, to help us all build understanding, compassion, and connection… and just know that we’re not alone, with any of this. 

Thickening our community in 2025 also means strengthening our commitment to supporting our LGBTQ+ members and households. We’ve started an informal network of people who identify as LGBTQ+, and immediate family, to share resources, needs, and experiences – and ask for support from the wider parish, when needed. If you’re in that category and want to be looped in, let me know. We also plan an ally gathering soon, though we know that may include most of the parish! With governmental attacks on LGBTQ+ folks at both the state and federal level, we know we need to get real about looking out for each other; it’s not just rainbow sticker season anymore.

While welcoming, celebrating, and sheltering LGBTQ+ folks is an important part of who we are, here, we are mindful that there are others among us who may face new difficulties in this season. White nationalism is on the rise, and our members and friends who are people of color and perhaps have ties to immigrant communities are feeling rightly uneasy. That’s one reason some of us are reading the Episcopal Church’s Racial Justice Audit – to refresh our commitment to being an antiracist church, including the Biblical call to hospitality for our immigrant neighbors. 

I know there are folks who just want to come worship, and don’t feel like they need all this. That is fine! Truly! I also know there are folks who’ve been coming for a while and still don’t really feel connected, and I want to work on that. Let’s talk about it. 

And: I know some folks may feel a little resistance to this community-thickening project because it feels inward focused, and their sense of church is oriented out, towards neighbors and the wider world. 

But, friends: People literally show up here every couple of weeks looking for a community that’s doing what we’re trying to do. This work is not inward focused as long as we keep welcoming new folks into it. Working towards being a true community of mutual support, that actively cares for each other and stands with each other, is a witness to the wider world, and draws people in. And that’s important not because of the proverbial church focus on getting butts into pews, but because people need community, y’all. This work matters. 

Okay – that’s track one. That would be plenty. But there’s another important direction for our continued work: taking steps towards the longer-term financial stability of this church. Developing additional sources of income, in addition to the holy gift of our members’ pledges, so that we can start to move beyond this season of deficit budgets. 

This could feel like a big step away from the heart and purpose stuff I’ve just been talking about – but the Good Futures Accelerator process has helped me start to see this as heart and purpose work, too. For the visitors – because all the members read that report, right? – the Good Futures Accelerator is a curriculum to help a team from a church start to think in fresh ways about how under-used church buildings and/or land can be used to respond to community needs and generate some income to help sustain the church. We had a great team do that work in 2024, and now we’re starting to talk about next steps and follow through. Let me be clear, this is not a 2025 project; this is quite possibly a 2025 through 2030 project. But we’ve taken some important first steps and we owe it to our future to keep walking. 

It’s really important that that work, that whole approach, is not just about rustling up more income. It’s about deepening our understanding of the challenges and needs of the neighborhoods that surround the church – and seeking, with holy curiosity, how we might be able to deploy our resources in response. 

One of speakers in the Good Futures videos said something like this – I wrote it down: “Think of your [potential] project as sitting in the ache of the gap between the status quo, and what’s actually needed for human and ecological flourishing.” I’m excited about this work because it feels like a path towards sustainability that’s aligned with our values and hopes, here. God is in this work, I’m sure of it, and I’m really curious to see where it leads us next. We’ll say a little more about this in the Annual Meeting later this morning, but if you’d like to get involved with this as it continues to take shape, I’d love to talk about that. 

(By the way: I hope you also read about the Neighborly Spaces project! That’s its own little thing but it’s also a way to start listening to our non-church neighbors, which may serve our larger Good Futures work.) 

The last couple of Sundays, our Epistles have come from the apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. He’s been talking about how a church – how any community – needs a variety of gifts and skills for its health and effectiveness, and how we should celebrate the way the Holy Spirit activates all those different gifts and skills for the common good. Our reading last week – the body part one! – ended with these words: “But strive for the greater gifts.” That’s half a sentence, though! Here’s what it cuts off: “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” I love that! Doesn’t it make you curious? 

What is Paul’s still more excellent way? Love. It’s love. The next passage is one of the most famous in the Bible: “Love is patient; love is kind…. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things… Now, faith, hope, and love abide; and the greatest of these is love.”

The greatest of these is love. A still more excellent way. Love is the heart of it all. Our call as individual followers of Christ; our work of being Christ’s body, together, the church. 

These two big tracks – thickening our community here, and continued exploration of where our assets and our neighbors’ needs might intersect – could feel like they pull in different directions. But they are both fundamentally about love. Love for one another; love for this church; love for our neighbors and our world. A still more excellent way. 

As I said earlier: These are the directions that I am discerning, for where to put my particular energy and attention, this year and beyond. My discernment could be wrong, or incomplete. I don’t run this place; God does, and we do together. Wonder with me, friends. And if these are the right directions – they are definitely not stuff that I can do on my own. I will need partners, collaborators, shared leadership. Some of that is in place, and more is emerging; I’m grateful. But there’s still plenty of room! … 

These overarching projects or priorities won’t replace or take away all the other things we do: youth group, book studies, gathering for worship, creation care, and more. But how we do those things might sometimes be shaped by these priorities, in the months ahead. And there will be things I choose not to do, to make room for what is mine to do, here. 

2025 may be a difficult year for our country and our world, for a whole host of reasons. But our faith-ancestors teach us that in seasons like this, it’s all the more important to be God’s people together, to join Isaiah and Jesus in proclaiming and striving for freedom, healing, and hope. So let us hear Nehemiah’s kind words as spoken to us, across the millennia: Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

Amen. 

Our Gospel today is the first part of the second chapter of the Gospel of John. And I’d like to begin by recalling some of the things that are said in the FIRST chapter of the Gospel of John, about Jesus, his cosmic significance, and his mission in the world. 

Will someone read quote 1? … 

1. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

2. “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

3. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!… I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

4. “We have found the Messiah!” “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

So, we have all that. And then: this happens. Immediately. As Jesus’ FIRST act of power, almost his first public appearance, in John’s Gospel, he steps in to save a faltering party. 

Contrast this with Luke’s Gospel. After Jesus is baptized, he takes some alone time in the wilderness. 

Then he goes to the synagogue in Nazareth, reads from the prophet Isaiah – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives,… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” – and then, with everyone staring at him, announces, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 

In many ways that would be a much more suitable follow up to the first chapter of John than what actually happens here! Instead, Jesus’ first semi-public miracle in John’s Gospel is almost trivial.

He’s at a wedding, and they’re running short on wine, and HEAVEN FORFEND that everyone should just stop drinking, or go home! So… 

There’s definitely a juxtaposition between the big, prophecy-fulfilling, cosmos-redeeming expectations of Jesus in chapter 1, and this story. What does John want us to notice or think about the Messiah he introduces here? 

Our Sunday readings follow a calendar called the Revised Common Lectionary. It’s a three year cycle, and each year our Gospel readings mostly come from one of the Gospels, the books of the Bible that focus on the life of Jesus. But there are FOUR Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each get a year; John is sort of scattered randomly around. And that’s not great – you may have heard me complain about it before! – because John is the most different of the four Gospels, and in some ways the most difficult. And getting his Gospel in little random chunks makes it hard for us to get familiar with his distinctive voice and witness. 

We might gather that John’s Gospel is cosmic – In the beginning was the Word – and profound, and sometimes hard to understand. 

But we might miss, for example, that John’s Gospel is often funny. It’s hard to peel away our preconceptions and hear the humor! 

But there are many parts of John’s Gospel that I’m quite certain are intentionally funny. And this is one of them. Let’s talk through the story… 

Soon after Jesus starts to gather disciples, followers, there’s a wedding in a nearby town, in Cana. Jesus’ mother was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. So, presumably the couple has already been married, and this is essentially the reception – everyone’s eating and drinking and celebrating together. Then the wine gives out. Did the hosts miscalculate – or try to scrimp? Anyone who’s planned a wedding knows that the alcohol budget can be a big issue! 

Wine was a common drink in the ancient Near East. Water wasn’t really safe to drink, and people probably just didn’t really drink water. (I’ve had friends from Africa who think it’s kind of an amusing quirk that Americans drink water all the time!) In the biblical context, wine had various symbolic and ritual uses and meanings, but it was also just kind of what people drank, with a meal or at a celebration. The Bible also talks about drunkenness and bad choices made under the influence of alcohol; people understood the pitfalls, to some extent, though it’s hard to find our modern understandings of addiction and recovery, here. 

Anyway: there’s a wedding reception, and the wine gives out. It’s like if the chocolate fountain ran dry, or the shrimp canapé tray was empty! It threatens to cut the celebration short – no party food, no party. And it reflects badly on the hosts. It might make them seem either poor or stingy, and nobody wants that reputation.

Jesus’ mother – John doesn’t use her name, but we know her as Mary – gets wind of the situation, and she goes to find Jesus. She tells him, “They have no wine.”  

There’s a lot we could unpack from those four words. Why does she come to him with this problem? He’s just a guest at the party, like her. One amusing possibility is that she blames him and his friends for the situation. The text says Jesus and his disciples were invited, but maybe the hosts didn’t really expect Jesus to show up with this scraggly pack of hangers-on. And maybe Jesus and his crew are drinking more than their share. There are hints in several of the Gospels that Jesus took some criticism for enjoying a good meal and a fine wine – not being ascetic as befit a wandering radical rabbi. You’re supposed to, like, subsist on locusts and wild honey and acai berries, or something. 

So Maybe Mary thinks Jesus owes it to the host to help out, here. But regardless of whether that’s the case: she knows he could help if he wanted to. There’s a clear implication here that she has seen him do various lesser miracles over the years as his mother. Wouldn’t you love to know more? We have one story from an early Christian document called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, probably written in the mid-second century: Jesus as a little boy is sculpting birds out of mud from a puddle. But it’s the Sabbath and this art project violates the practices of Sabbath-keeping. His father scolds him, and Jesus claps his hands; the birds come to life and fly away. This story is later than John’s Gospel, and not part of the Bible. But Mary’s confidence that Jesus could help, if he wanted to, invites us to imagine scenes like that. 

Jesus doesn’t really want to. He says, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Let’s talk briefly about how Jesus addresses his mother! 

Translator David Hart says the word used here is a perfectly respectful way to address a married woman and mother. Jesus uses the same word when he speaks to his mother from the cross, and when he addresses Mary Magdalene in the garden after his resurrection, times when we might assume he’s speaking with tenderness and care. So that “Woman!” doesn’t carry the implications it would if you were to call your mom “Woman!” 

That said: Jesus sounds grumpy, here. He doesn’t want to be drawn into this. He suggests that Mary is being a busybody by making this their problem: “What concern is that to you or to me?” And he also says, “My hour has not yet come.”  In John’s Gospel, Jesus talks a lot about his hour. It seems to mean his crucifixion and death, as a kind of completion of his earthly work. He’s saying that it’s just not time for him to do this kind of thing yet – to start doing public acts of power that will draw attention and, soon, opposition. 

But Mary completely ignores his objections – which is very funny, although possibly also a little triggering for anyone with a manipulative parent. Imagine it on a screen! – “Jesus, they’re out of wine.” “Mother! That’s not your problem, and it’s certainly not my problem. And it’s not my time yet.” [Mom grabs a passing servant:] “Do whatever he tells you.”  

She knows he’ll do it. And he does. 

There are six stone jars nearby, each holding twenty or thirty gallons of water. These were used for Jewish ritual washing – handwashing before meals and so on, an important part of Jewish daily practice. Later, type “stone workshop Cana archaeology” into your search engine and read about the discovery, in 2017, of an ancient stone jar factory near Cana. It’s from around the time of Jesus, during the Roman occupation of Judea and Galilee. 

In Jewish law, pottery vessels could become ritually unclean and then had to be broken, but stone vessels were always ritually clean. So even though they were more expensive, they had some practical advantages. Archaeology shows that around the time of Jesus, a lot of Jewish households were using stone jars carved from a local soft white sandstone called chalkstone. So we can get a pretty good idea what those stone jars would have looked like, and even how they were made! 

Jesus tells the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they do. He says, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward” – presumably the servant who’s overseeing the party and the refreshments. So a servant takes some of the water-now-wine to the chief steward, and he tastes it. Then he goes to the groom, and says to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 

This is the second intentionally funny bit of this story! I wonder how the steward says this line? Is he delighted? – hey, I thought wine was running low, but it turns out there’s still some good stuff in the back? Or is he indignant? He has responsibility for this party, and it’s a waste if the best wine has been held back until people are not really at their most discerning! Either way, I think John is playing this for laughs. 

The story concludes: Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. This wasn’t really a public miracle; even the steward and the groom, let alone the other guests, don’t know what happened. The witnesses were Mary, Jesus’ disciples, and a few servants. But it made a big impression on the disciples who were there, reinforcing their belief that Jesus was somebody special, and their intention to follow him and learn from him. 

What does John want us to notice or think about the Messiah he introduces here? What is he telling us about Jesus? This sermon took shape in conversation with Father Tom McAlpine, who noted the contrast between this story and the preceding chapter. And with Father John Rasmus, who suggested that this story shows that Jesus’ ministry and message is about abundance, not scarcity. Instead of drying up and shutting down, there is holy plenty, and the party goes on and on. And it’s true: Abundance is a theme, in John’s Gospel. Jesus talks about living water that bubbles up inside you like a fresh spring, so that you’ll never go thirsty; about bread from heaven, so nourishing that you’ll never be hungry. About a God who SO LOVES the world as to give Their only-begotten son, inviting us all into abundant life. 

That wine, good or bad, isn’t really the point, is it? The wine is just the thing that makes it feel like people are celebrating together, in that setting. It could be that chocolate fountain, or those shrimp canapés. I have a birthday soon and I’m thinking about a party with good cheese and bread, and olives, and maybe those fancy Swedish gummy candies that are all over social media. What makes it feel like a party, a banquet, a special occasion? When Jesus is invited, he’ll make sure there’s enough of that. 

Which leads me to another thought about what John’s Gospel wants us to notice about Jesus, here: Jesus cares about joy. I think we see that, too, in the funny moments throughout John’s Gospel. Laughter matters. Celebration matters. Joy matters. And I think that’s something for us to take to heart, right now.  

There are a lot of reasons to be fearful, and angry, and weary. This is a heavy season of the world. And I’m not talking about denial or toxic positivity or forced gratitude. You can’t force joy. 

But when a moment of joy finds you, beloveds – when something makes you laugh out loud – or you stumble into a simple moment of comfort and contentment – don’t push it away. I talk a lot about how Jesus wants us to be companions in the holy work of justice, peace, and mercy, and there will be plenty to say about that in the days ahead. But Jesus also wants our joy. So when joy shows up: welcome it. Savor it. Let it feed you. Cultivate joy, share joy, if you can. The kingdom of God is a party… and we’re all invited. Amen. 

We are a week ahead of the Revised Common Lectionary with our Epistle. Read it here.

This Gospel is one of the rare moments in the Bible when we see all three Persons of the Trinity in one scene. The Trinity is a core teaching of Christianity – the idea that God is somehow both One, and Three. Those Three Persons are distinct, not just one God wearing different outfits, but also somehow deeply and truly One: God the Creator and Source who Jesus calls Father; Jesus Christ himself, in his earthly life and in his resurrected life beyond his time on earth; And the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, Comforter, and Giver of Life.  Three in One and One in Three. 

Here we see Jesus, still soaking wet from his baptism in the Jordan River; the Holy Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a Voice from heaven, the voice of God, Creator and Father, saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” 

Of the three Persons of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is maybe the hardest to describe or explain, but paradoxically I think she’s also the most frequently or most easily encountered. She is the Aspect of God that empowers and inspires, guides and nudges, comforts and clarifies. 

Jesus teaches his disciples that the Holy Spirit will be kind of the caretaker of the church through the ages, helping it deepen and discern: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, [They] will guide you into all the truth… [They] will declare to you the things that are to come.” (John 16:12-14) 

And in today’s Epistle, Saint Paul also has a lot to say about the activity of the Holy Spirit in the church. 

I want to spend some time with this Epistle. I love today’s Isaiah text about God’s tender and restoring love; I love this Psalm, about God’s glory seen in the awe-inspiring powers of Nature. 

But this Epistle is really important for my ecclesiology, a word which here means what I think “church” is supposed to be and do. So let’s dwell with this text a little. 

We’ll be hearing readings from the first letter to the Corinthians for a few weeks here, off and on, so it’s worthwhile to introduce the book. This is one of the Epistles, which means it’s one of the letters recording the teachings, experiences, and struggles of Christians in the first few decades of the faith. This one was written by the Apostle Paul, to the church in Corinth (now in Greece). It was probably written around the year 54, just about 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Paul’s letters are some of our earliest Christian texts!

Paul had helped found the church in Corinth, several years earlier. It was a mostly Gentile congregation – meaning its members weren’t grounded in Jewish faith, teaching, practice. And they were probably diverse in their backgrounds, in terms of culture, language, and class. 

Paul seems to be responding to a letter from the church asking for clarification about various matters of faith. But he’s also responding to reports of conflict and disorder within the church: rivalries, flagrant immorality, and disrespectful treatment of the poorer members. 

Today’s text, and the one we’ll hear next week, a continuation of the same passage, are a great example of the thing Paul does sometimes where his frustration and urgency to teach and correct turns into some of his most eloquent and beautiful writing. I really love these passages – and it is easy to forget how MAD Paul is, here!  

For a little context, let’s duck into the preceding chapter, chapter 11, which for some reason doesn’t come up in the Sunday lectionary. Paul writes: 

“Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. 

When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!” 

It’s an important passage because he goes on to offer us one of the earliest descriptions of Eucharist as a church practice: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

So, because the Corinthians were doing Eucharist wrong and Paul was mad about it, we have this really important look at Eucharist in the first decades of Christianity, which tells us that the way WE practice Eucharist is part of this ancient sacramental tradition! Pretty cool. But also, again: Paul is not happy. 

So that’s kind of the vibe Paul is bringing into chapter 12, here. He’s not just talking about the variety of spiritual gifts in the church because it’s *nice*. He’s talking about it because he has heard that some people think their particular spiritual gifts make them better than everybody else. Specifically, some people seem to think that speaking in tongues is the spiritual gift that demonstrates the greatest holiness – and thus presumably gives you the highest standing in the community. 

Speaking in tongues, or glossolalia to use the scholarly term, is a spiritual practice in which people utter speech-like sounds. Sometimes it’s believed that these sounds are another human language, or an angelic language. Glossolalia is an ecstatic practice – something people do when worship and emotion and perhaps the Holy Spirit have brought them to an altered state of consciousness. It’s a core spiritual practice in Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. 

Speaking in tongues may seem strange to most of us. But it is an ancient Christian practice. It’s clear that Paul did it, and saw it as a true spiritual gift. He just didn’t think it was THE spiritual gift that set someone apart as the holiest and best. 

Instead, he says something really important here. We heard it a few minutes ago; let me read it again from the Message Bible paraphrase, which sometimes helps us hear something with fresh ears: “God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but Godself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is. Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! …

The variety is wonderful: wise counsel; clear understanding; simple trust; healing the sick; miraculous acts; proclamation; distinguishing between spirits; speaking in tongues; interpretation of tongues. All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. The Spirit decides who gets what, and when.”

Next week we’ll hear Paul use the human body as a metaphor to explore the value of a variety of skills and functions.  

A few days ago I talked about this passage with a couple of members of this congregation, both women a little older than me, and we discovered that they BOTH had an issue with this text, because they BOTH, at some point, had being given some sort of evaluation to help identify your spiritual gifts. I’m envisioning this thing as one of those quizzes from Cosmopolitan magazine, where you tally up the columns to find out if you’re a Wise Counsel or a Discerning of Spirits! 

And for both of my conversation partners, everybody else in their small group found a spiritual gift, using this Cosmo quiz, and they did not;  and it was still kind of bothering them, decades later. This is funny but also tragic! I know both of these people well and there is no doubt in my mind that they are both people of profound spiritual gifts. 

So it’s important to say: This list of spiritual gifts Paul offers here is NOT meant to be the exhaustive, comprehensive list of ALL THE POTENTIAL SPIRITUAL GIFTS. He’s just giving some examples to flesh out his point, which is that the Spirit gifts people for the common good in a lot of different ways! (In fact, a few chapters earlier, Paul refers to celibacy – a lack of desire for physical intimacy – as a spiritual gift. Bet that wasn’t on that quiz!) 

When I say that this passage is really important for my ecclesiology, what do I mean? One thing I mean is that I really love discovering people’s charisms. Charism is the Greek word that’s translated as gift in our passage today, as in “a variety of gifts.” I think of a charism as something somebody is good at – it could be a natural talent, it could be a skill you’ve learned; lots of things are some of both. In my experience, everybody is good at a few things, and it’s really interesting to find out what those things are! 

But a charism in the sense of this passage, and in the sense in which I think about it, isn’t just something you’re good at; it’s something you’re good at that can be used for the greater good. Paul says: To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. The Greek word there is symphero, which comes from words that mean “to carry together.” By extension, it means what is beneficial or helpful to the group, to the whole. There’s a sense in the word of both coming together, and of helping or improving. So I think “for the common good” is a pretty good translation. 

We all have things we’re good at. But some of the things we’re good at may be particularly useful to the common good – skills or talents we can use for the benefit of our family, or our friend group, or our workplace or church or city or country. It’s really interesting to explore how somebody’s gifts and skills could also be charisms, something they can do for the greater good! Sometimes that’s obvious and sometimes it’s not. 

It’s not just that I love discovering people’s charisms – whether that’s in conversation with a new member, or with someone I’ve known for years who I just found out is also a glassblower, or something. It’s not just that those conversations are fun and interesting for me, though they are. 

It’s that discovering the charisms of the people of this congregation is one way that the Holy Spirit guides me, and us. That’s why we do things like ask you all, every few years, about your skills and talents, the things you’re good at and the things you love to do! Because I really really believe that God steers this church by the gifts and skills of the people who gather here. 

In our most recent such survey, we discovered, again, that mental health, creation care, making stuff, and diversity in gender expression and sexual orientation are big commitments of this congregation. I was struck by the range with respect to creation care – we have people who are knowledgeable about everything from groundwater contamination to native plants and pollinators to freshwater mollusks to bicycling and solar power and permaculture, and more! So many directions to keep exploring together. 

We also have a lot of bakers – which is part of why we were able to raise $800 with our youth bake sale in December. Being a skilled and generous baker is 100% a spiritual gift. 

Here are some of the other charisms people named on that survey – or that I know as manifestations of the Holy Spirit within this congregation: Being able to talk about recovery and addition, neurodiversity, and mental health. Being good at scheduling meetings and organizing a group; Lord, you cannot imagine what a blessing people like that are to me. Fixing stuff. Dramatic reading. Various aspects of theater and stagecraft. Many musical gifts and skills. Tech support. Editing, graphic design, strategic communications. Being a good listener, a good connector, a wise asker of good questions. Thanking and affirming. Welcoming. Sharing your story. Inviting others into sacred silence. [Being the person who so, so lovingly curates and tends that holy time after 10AM worship when we can stand around with a cup of coffee and a piece of cheese and talk. You NEVER have to apologize, Janet!] 

Please notice that these do not all involve doing something! I hear from folks sometimes who, due to age or disability or other reasons, feel like they can’t do much – and thus don’t have anything to contribute. That’s so, so far from the truth. I wish I had words for all the ways people who don’t “do” anything at church right now, contribute to the warmth and mutual kindness and holy curiosity and courage and hope of this community. 

Having my ecclesiology, my sense of church, shaped by Paul’s words, Paul’s insight, here, means that I’m eager to welcome people as their whole selves, and make space for folks to share their charisms as they feel so moved – for the common good. Listening to what people want to offer is a really important piece of my work as pastor. It’s not about twisting arms, but it is often about connecting and inviting and exploring possibilities. There are questions of capacity and availability, but in general, it feels good to be able to share our gifts, our skills, ourselves; that’s an important element of human wellbeing. Places where people feel like they don’t have anything to contribute, where our presence or absence doesn’t really matter, are rarely our favorite places. 

With the apostle Paul, I absolutely believe that God places among us – that the Holy Spirit stirs up among us – the gifts and skills, the charisms, that we need, to be the church God means us to be. And it’s a joyful adventure to keep discovering what that means, here at St. Dunstan’s. Thanks be to God! 

Invite kids up… 

Some of you looked at this Bible story in Sunday school a few weeks ago. It’s a scary story, isn’t it? With the bad king who wants to kill babies, because he’s afraid? … Why would we tell kids a scary story like that? … Well, I have some good news: It probably didn’t really happen! Does anybody remember another important person from the Bible, named Moses? Moses led God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and through the wilderness; and he told them how to live in God’s holy ways.  Now, before Moses was born, Moses’ people were slaves and had to work for the Egyptians. And the king of Egypt, Pharaoh, got afraid that they might get strong and rise up and refuse to be slaves anymore. So Pharaoh said that all the baby boys of Moses’ people should be killed! Just like in the Gospel story today! 

Who remembers how baby Moses was saved? … Yes, his mother and his sister put him in a basket in the river, and Pharaoh’s grown-up daughter found him and decided to adopt him! 

Now, King Herod did some bad stuff. He was not a great person. But nobody who was writing down what happened, back in Jesus’ time, says that King Herod ever killed a bunch of babies. Our Gospel story today wants us to remember baby Moses, and to think about how Jesus is like Moses – a leader chosen by God to lead his people to freedom and holiness. And the story also wants us to remember that very powerful grown-ups can sometimes be afraid of little kids, because even very small people can be powerful and important when you stand up for something good and true! Right? … 

When we hear a scary story, it might also important to remind you that the people who love you will always do everything they can – everything we can – to keep you safe. Okay? 

Okay! Now I’m going to send you out with Io and Max. We have prepared a little New Year’s party for you in the meeting room!… 

Kids leave.

Tradition has a name for these children, the murdered babies of Bethlehem from Matthew’s Gospel. They’re called the Holy Innocents. 

This story doesn’t come to us every year. But when it does, I always tell the kids: It’s OK.  This story isn’t true.  And the people who love you will keep you safe. 

It’s a lie. We all know it. The truth is: we cannot protect our children.

I’m usually thinking ahead several weeks in the lectionary. I already had some thoughts about preaching this Gospel simmering on my mental back burner when I went to a concert on Saturday, December 14 – the concert of the Wisconsin Chamber Choir, in which our vestry co-chair Andi sings. 

They sang a setting of the Coventry Carol, a 16th century English carol that is a lullaby to the children doomed by Herod’s anger and fear. Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child… Herod the king in his raging, charged he hath this day, his men of might in his own sight all young children to slay… Then woe is me, poor child, for thee! By by, lully, lullay.. 

Then the choir sang a piece by Jean Belmont Ford, written in response to the Parkland school shooting in 2018. Ford draws on the Coventry Carol – lully, lullay – as part of a song of grief and anger and a plea for more kindness in the world. Be the one who knows what must be done, she writes. 

That Saturday I listened with tears in my eyes. 

Two days later, a 15-year-old girl brought a gun to school at Abundant Life Christian School, on the east side of Madison, where she killed two people and wounded six others before completing suicide. 

We can’t protect our children. 

I checked in with a few other parents of school-aged kids, that week, to see how the kids were handling it.  And we noticed, together, how little the kids seemed to react. I’m sure some kids showed signs of big grief, big fear. But a lot of them didn’t. 

We realized: They’ve been training for this, since they were four or five years old. Lock the door. Crowd into the corner. Practice being very, very quiet. Of course they’re not surprised or shocked when it actually happens.

But I think there’s more to it. It’s not that they take it in stride, exactly. It’s not that they’re not afraid. But they’ve had to lock up their fear – lock down their fear! – because there’s no alternative.

There’s no way to opt out.  Because we can’t protect them.  We teach them that with every Code Red drill. 

We grownups have had to lock down our grief and rage, too. Friend of the parish Jonathan Melton posted to Facebook a couple of days after the Abundant Life shooting.  Jonathan used to be the chaplain at St Francis House over on campus, and he served here on Sundays during my 2018 sabbatical. He lives in Texas now with his family. 

Jonathan’s words captured some of what I was feeling – or struggling to feel. He wrote, “Right now, I’m trying to feel more than empty grief… My grief has no legs today. There’s no surprise, even at the close to home-ness of it all. On one level, the closeness to our hearts and lives, for each one of us, is just an inevitably of math. Columbine was a quarter century ago. I was a senior in high school. My daughter is a sophomore now. It surprised us then. Through subsequent headlines and intervening years l’ve been alternately outraged and gutted and thoughtful and hopeful and determined and convinced by my own “if only”s. I’ve shared vigils and tears and swear words and prayers. But just now my grief doesn’t have any legs.” 

Numb.

Helpless.

Overwhelmed. 

Despairing. 

Grief without legs. 

What do we do with this fucking horrible truth? That we cannot protect our children?  That’s a big question. Let me narrow it slightly. What do we do, theologically, with the fact that we can’t keep our children safe? How do we grapple with it as people of faith? 

I know there are adults hearing this sermon who also feel at risk and face big challenges, too. I’m focusing on kids, today, because we just read the Gospel of the Holy Innocents. And because most of the time, any risk or challenge an adult faces is even more dangerous for a child or teen. And because it’s our responsibility, as the grownups, to try… to try to protect and help. 

One thing we can do is insist on not letting the horrible truth that we cannot protect our kids drive us apart. Separate us. 

Within hours of the Abundant Life shooting, people were fighting in the comments of the local community Facebook group about whether we should be talking about gun regulation or mental health support. As if we had to choose! As if we could not, collectively, decide to prioritize both commonsense gun safety laws, well enforced, AND a robust mental health care system accessible for everyone! 

Blame-shifting, scapegoating, anger – these are ways people try to handle their grief and fear. Releasing the negative feelings that threaten to overwhelm or consume. It’s not great, but I get it. 

Another way we try to protect ourselves – and end up separating ourselves! – is by deciding which children matter. Not consciously, of course – but we all do it. My friend Betsy is the rabbi at one of the synagogues in town, the Beth Israel Center. We’ve talked about how hard it has been for her to hold onto the truth that all children deserve to be safe. To keep insisting that Israeli children matter AND Gazan children matter. Yes, the terrorist attack in October 2023 was *genuinely* horrific in ways that many of us don’t even know, because the media we consume shielded us from some of the worst details. And yes, the continued crushing violence against Gazan civilians is ALSO horrific. And you have to care about BOTH. You can’t belong to the God of Abraham and Moses and Isaiah, and care about the wellbeing of one kind of child and not another kind of child. We are not free to do that. 

Activist Glennon Doyle puts it this way: There is no such thing as other people’s children. 

Facing the truth that we can’t keep our kids safe brings us into solidarity with the rest of humanity. We can’t protect our children, just like parents in Gaza or Ukraine can’t protect their kids from missiles and bombs, or death from exposure to the elements as winter deepens. Just like undocumented immigrants can’t protect their children from the possibility that their US-born kids will come home from school one day to an empty house. 

I’m not saying we should tear our hearts open, feel every death. We can’t function that way. But we need to commit to the idea that there’s no such thing as other people’s children. To resist the false solace of caring about some children, but not others. To resist letting terrible things drive us into fruitless squabbling instead of the work of care and change. 

The reality that we can’t keep our children safe draws us into solidarity with the rest of humanity. It also should draw us into solidarity with God. 

One of my favorite authors, Francis Spufford, talks about the thwarted tenderness of God (Unapologetic, page 109). Thwarted tenderness. Tenderness, because God actually really, really loves us and wants good for us. Thwarted, because we humans get in the way of the good and holy, in so many ways. We turn away from what’s true and life-giving. We hurt each other. We hurt ourselves. 

And it’s all built up, over millennia, into deeply entrenched patterns of division and inequality and struggle. 

Jesus, looking out over Jerusalem, cries out: How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! It’s one of the most powerful expressions of God’s thwarted tenderness in Scripture. 

But there are so many other places, especially in the books of the prophets, where we hear God yearning for us to return, to come home, to accept the love God offers us, to make amends and set things right and be made whole. 

God is a Parent who can’t protect us. Because She lets us be free, as every parent has to let their children be free. And because we have used our freedom, individually and collectively, to make some very bad choices. 

That helpless heartache we feel when we watch a young person we love walk out the door, knowing that we can’t guarantee their safety of body, mind, or spirit… that’s what God feels for us. All of us. All the time. 

God is aching with us, yearning with us, raging with us. 

The fact that we can’t keep our kids safe should draw us closer to each other, and closer to God. It should also – perhaps needless to say! – drive us towards action. Here are Jonathan’s words again: “Just now… I will let it be enough for my soul today to say to myself what we all already know, as an articulation of a hope still capable of grief: it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Our children are SAFER than they used to be. Thanks to improvements in maternal and infant health care, and vaccines that have controlled illnesses that used to kill and disable millions. Thanks to government regulation of things like the environment, food, medicine, cars, and toys. We can’t create a perfect world for the young people we love. but we can improve on it, if enough of us are loud enough long enough. 

And we can choose to be the proverbial village – the one that helps raise a child. 

A couple of days after the Abundant Life shooting, I shared on Facebook that I was feeling some complicated grief towards the perpetrator. Some of my favorite people in the world are fifteen-year-old girls, and I can’t help thinking how deeply things must have gone wrong for this young woman to lead her to this lethal violence against self and others. 

One of the gifts of our new, larger diocese for me has been getting to know Amy Heimerl, who serves Ascension Episcopal Church in Merrill, Wisconsin. She also served for many years as a chaplain at Lincoln Hills, Wisconsin’s juvenile detention center. In response to my post, Amy wrote, “When I worked at Lincoln Hills, I worked closely with thousands of kids who had done horrible, awful things—even killing others… Most of the kids I worked with carried so much pain and trauma that they had become almost numb in order to be able to do what they did. [The problem isn’t] just mental health or just access to guns (although fixing both would help). It’s that we only want to be a village when something bad happens. What we need is to act like a village SO THAT nothing bad happens.”

It may be a cliche but it’s true: Kids do need a village. Parents do, too. Being the village for the young people of this congregation (including the ones who just come to youth group!) is a significant and holy part of our common life and work as God’s people, here. 

If you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t have kids, or, I don’t have young kids… look around, when they come back, in a few minutes. Yes, you do.

If you think you don’t have gay or trans kids, who face new governmental assaults on their freedom and sense of self-worth – yes, you do. 

If you’ve been around here long enough to attend a baptism or a confirmation, you have made some very specific promises to support the young people of this parish in their lives in Christ.

The baptized children and youth of this parish include gay, trans, and nonbinary kids; neurodiverse kids; disabled kids; brown kids; and more. You’re in it, friends. This is your family. And your care – our care – for them, matters. It matters to them. It matters to the world they’ll help shape.

In a few minutes, when the kids come back, after the Prayers of the People, we’re going to bless them and pray for their protection. This is a tradition, a custom, for the feast of the Holy Innocents – praying over the children of the church, together. I’ll invite you, if you want, to come forward and gather around – or you can stay in your seat and extend your hands, as a way to participate in the blessing. For now, let’s pray the Episcopal Church’s prayer for the Feast of the Holy Innocents. 

Prayer for the Feast of the Holy Innocents

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

BLESSING

I call today upon our God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity, 

in unity of love,

to bless our children among us. 

I call upon God’s power to guide you,

God’s might to uphold you,

God’s Wisdom to teach you,

God’s Eye to watch over you,

God’s Ear to hear you,

God’s Hand to guide you, 

God’s Shield to shelter you,

God’s Way to lie before you.

Christ be with you, Christ within you, 

Christ behind you, Christ before you,

Christ beneath you, Christ above you,

Christ in hearts of all that love you.

Dear ones, may you grow in wisdom as in stature,

and in divine and human favor. 

And the blessing of God the Holy and Undivided Trinity be upon you, body, mind, and spirit, this day and forever more. 

And let the people say AMEN. 

Reading: All of the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. 

 

How many of you have seen Wicked?… 

I’m sure it’s not a new thought, but it occurred to me for the first time this year that the first chapter and a half of Luke’s Gospel is a musical. People keep pausing the action and bursting into song, to reflect on the significance of what’s happening and to express what they’re feeling. [10AM: And the Bystanders in the story are kind of like the chorus in a musical, reacting to what’s going on with the main characters!] 

Let’s look at the musical songs First and most familiar, there’s the Magnificat, Mary’s song of fierce hope. You could describe it as what musical theater people call an “I Want” song! John Kenrick, a scholar of musical theater, explains: “The main “I Want” Song comes early in the first act, with one or more of the main characters singing about the key motivating desire that will propel everyone (including the audience) through the remainder of the show.” Yep, that’s the Magnificat! 

Then there’s Zechariah’s prophetic song on the birth of his late-in-life son – called the Benedictus, Latin for the first word, Blessed. Part of the beauty of the Benedictus is the way it ties the very specific and human joy at the birth of a much-wanted child to big cosmic themes and possibilities. That’s great songwriting! 

If we continued on into chapter 2, there’s the song of the angels: “‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favours!” It’s much shorter than the others, but still unmistakably a musical number!

And then when Jesus is eight days old, his parents take him to the Temple to make a thank-offering to God for his safe birth, and there they meet Simeon – an old man who is righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel. God has told Simeon that he will not die until he sees God’s Messiah, the one sent to save God’s people. When Simeon sees the newborn baby Jesus, he takes him in his arms and says – or sings! – words that are familiar to folks who say Compline often: 

“O God, you now have set your servant free 

to go in peace as you have promised;

For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, 

whom you have prepared for all the world to see:

A Light to enlighten the nations, 

and the glory of your people Israel.”

This song of faith is known as the Nunc Dimittis – from the Latin for “Now dismiss.” 

These three poems or songs have been recognized as beautiful texts of faith for a long long time, and have been used in worship apart from their narrative context here in Luke’s Gospel. The Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, each have their own place and life and voice in the prayers of the church over the millennia. That’s partly why I think it’s valuable, once in a while, to read through Luke’s narrative and remind ourselves where they come from. These are texts that speak far beyond their place in this story, but they should also point us back towards this story! 

Where did the songs come from? I’m certain there’s been plenty of scholarly debate about this. They certainly don’t come out of nowhere; they draw on patterns and images from the Psalms and other Old Testament songs of faith. But they aren’t just quoting those sources. They are new compositions. They are, in fact, early Christian hymns, likely used in worship. But did Luke compose them – or collect them, transcribing songs that were already being sung in the early church communities? 

Here’s what Luke says about his sources and his process, in the first few verses of his Gospel: “Many people have already applied themselves to the task of compiling an account of the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used what the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed down to us. Now, after having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, I have also decided to write a carefully ordered account…” 

So, Luke tells us that he’s done some research! He’s writing his version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the basis of as many sources as he can find. But he’s also clearly not just stitching things together; he’s an artful writer with his own understanding of Jesus’ life and mission. 

So, maybe these songs of faith were already in use, perhaps even passed down from their original sources – Mary, Zechariah, Simeon. Or maybe Luke felt like the story needed some poetry. Or maybe Luke gathered bits of early hymns and filled them out into the beautiful texts we receive. 

It’s interesting to think about, but I don’t find that my faith, or my appreciation of these songs, gets hung up on these questions… partly because what Luke offers us in these first two chapters makes such a beautiful whole. Whether he composed, collected, or some of each, he did an amazing job. 

Why the musical numbers? What do they do? It’s a question for any musical, not just the Gospel of Luke. In listening to people talking about Wicked, I’ve been reminded that some people really don’t like musicals. They find the singing and dancing an annoying interruption. Why tell a story this way? I’m sure there are experts with a lot to say on this subject! And there are people in this congregation who know much more about musicals than I do! I’d love to hear your thoughts, later. 

It seems to me that the songs do at least three things. One, they invite us to pause at significant events or moments, and just dwell with them a little bit more instead of rushing onward. Two, they give us a window into the characters’ inner lives and feelings. Biblical narrative often doesn’t offer us that kind of inner view or insight, which is one of the reasons these songs are so special and lovely. Three, music adds an additional channel, besides the words themselves, to communicate emotion. I wish we could know how these holy songs were sung, two thousand years ago! 

Luke chapter 1 is a musical. So instead of just being told that Mary is confused and a little scared, we get the Magnificat, which tells us so much about how she’s thinking and feeling about this surprising pregnancy. “Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored, because the Mighty One has done great things for me! God has cast down the mighty from their thrones!” “Something has changed within me, something is not the same; I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game!”  

There’s one more question I think is interesting: Why do the songs stop? After the Nunc Dimittis, the Gospel of Luke stops having a musical number every thirty verses. It’s kind of a shame! I don’t know the answer to this; nobody living does. But I have one observation. All of the Gospels are weighted towards Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s a tremendously important part of the Gospel story, and once Jesus starts his public ministry at the age of around thirty, many moments and interactions point or push him towards the cross. Luke’s playful, joyful origin story for Jesus helps us pause on how it all began, and the meanings and hopes that surrounded him from birth. The songs add depth and energy and weight to the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, thereby giving us a more complete and powerful story overall. 

Thanks again to our readers! Maybe next time we should have you SING the songs!… 

The first Sunday in Advent is the church’s New Year’s Day, so we just started a new church year last week! Each year of the church’s three-year cycle of readings primarily uses one of the Gospels in our Sunday readings. This year, it’s the Gospel of Luke; I’ll say more about Luke next week. Today’s Luke reading introduces a figure who appears in all of the Gospels: John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness outside Jerusalem, calling people to repentance and transformation of life. 

As our song of faith today we read the Song of Zechariah. Zechariah is John’s daddy, who sings this prophetic song of joy at the birth of his son. Zechariah describes John’s calling as one who will go before the Lord (meaning, here, Jesus) to prepare the way for him. That language echoes our Old Testament reading from the tiny little prophetic book of Malachi: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.” It’s not entirely clear who Malachi thinks he’s talking about; but Zechariah, and Luke, and centuries of Christian tradition, have read his words as pointing towards John the Baptist, and his role gathering seekers and proclaiming Jesus before Jesus began his public ministry. 

So that’s how some of our readings fit together! But what do they have to say to us?… 

Last week we heard Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointing out our tendency, in Advent and Christmas, to focus on the “pleasant and agreeable,” and not the “shiver of fear” that we should feel when we consider the idea that “the God of the [cosmos] draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.” But our Advent readings – this year, and most years – don’t shy away from the fearful!… 

In the weeks leading up to Advent and in last week’s Gospel, we have heard Jesus talking about challenging times ahead for his followers and the world: signs in the heavens, wars and rumors of wars, floods, earthquakes, birds and snakes and aeroplanes… and so on. 

Today, Malachi talks about God’s people being purified like silver in a furnace – which is an uncomfortable process for the silver! – or like a fleece, wool fresh off the sheep, filthy and greasy, that is violently scrubbed with harsh soap to make it, eventually, clean and white. And then there’s John the Baptist and his “good news”: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” 

Later on we’ll sing the lovely Advent hymn “Comfort, comfort ye, my people,” but these are not comforting images! 

Or are they? I love Advent; it’s my favorite church season, and I know I’m not alone in that. Many years – and this year – I do find a strange kind of comfort in Advent’s apocalypticism, its insistence that everything will change and everything will end, the things we love as well as the things we dread or despise. Advent confronts us with both the fear and grief of things passing away, and the fierce assurance that God still reigns, that God’s love can and will break through into our broken world. That, yes, there is a crack in everything – and that’s how the light gets in. 

But acknowledging the precarity of existence, the transience of any given order of things, does not tell us how to deal with it in the day to day. How do we live? … beyond listening to ourselves churn?

Father Tom McAlpine and I were chatting about this year’s Advent readings a couple of weeks ago, and he called my attention to a word in these readings that I hadn’t really noticed. 

It’s a word that’s central not just in our Advent Scriptures but throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike; but we don’t necessarily use it much in our faith talk or daily lives. That word is righteous. Or the noun form: righteousness. 

One way we use that word is in the phrase self-righteous. That means an assurance of one’s own correctness and superiority. It’s not a quality that we admire! But even when we drop the “self” and just say “righteous,” I think it’s a word that carries some ambiguity and discomfort for many folks. It tends to show up hand in hand with other words, like righteous anger or righteous zeal. It suggests that even when someone is on the right side of things, maybe they’re so sure of themselves that they’re a little bit scary, a little bit dangerous. There’s a sense of inflexibility and intensity.

I’m sure there’s an interesting history to how “righteous” became an uncomfortable word for many today. But it’s a very positive and important word in Scripture! There’s a deep and rich well of Jewish commentary on the Hebrew word that’s translated as righteous, Tzedek. The word has a close kinship to justice (mishpat in Hebrew). One modern translator (Fox) renders tzedek into English as “equity.” Tzedek means fairness and compassion. It means truth and integrity. It means caring for the socially and economically vulnerable, neighbor and stranger alike – and building a society in which people have what they need and don’t have to depend on charity. 

Tzedek is a characteristic of God. It’s also a call on God’s people; those who belong to God are called to be righteous, individually and together. But righteousness is also understood as a manifestation of God’s presence among God’s people. A gift, something we can tap into. Something that just happens when we’re grounded in God. 

The words righteous or righteousness, translated from Hebrew or Greek, appears 630 times in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. We’ve had six of those occurrences just in last Sunday and this Sunday’s readings!… 

Last Sunday, we read Jeremiah chapter 33: “In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land…And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’” It’s a prophecy about a just and righteous ruler who will one day lead God’s people and help them become a people known for their holy righteousness. 

In our Malachi reading today, we heard about God’s people – specifically, the priestly leaders who interacted with God on behalf of the people – being purified “until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.” You weren’t supposed to enter the Temple to do the holy work of that place if you were in a state of sin or ritual impurity! It was a much more hardcore version of what’s embedded in our pattern of worship, in which we confess our sins and speak peace to our neighbors before approaching the Eucharistic table. 

This is a complex little passage, but one thing it’s expressing is that God’s desire for God’s people – past and present – is not just to say and do the things they’re supposed to say and do, but to be people of righteousness, in some deep sense. 

The Song of Zechariah, from Luke’s Gospel, seems to be riffing on this Malachi text. It takes that idea and gives it an interesting little twist. Within this song of praise, Zechariah reminds God of God’s promises to God’s people: to set them free from their enemies – “free to worship You without fear, holy and righteous in Your sight.” 

Once again righteous worship is the goal, but Zechariah says: it’s hard for us to offer the worship God desires when we’re bound by our enemies, subject to powers that oppress our people and don’t respect our faith. Liberate us for righteousness, God! … 

Out of four Scriptures today, our Gospel text is the only one that doesn’t use the word righteous. But John the Baptist is absolutely talking about righteousness. He uses these frightening, urgent images, drawn from the agricultural practices of the time: there’s an axe ready to cut down a tree that won’t bear fruit, wasting space in the orchard; there’s a winnowing fork ready to separate wheat from chaff, and burn the useless chaff in eternal fire. 

I know some folks are very sensitive to anything that suggests hell or damnation. Let me say that both John the Baptist, and Jesus, do not want people to choose good out of fear. We only get a little of John’s preaching in the Gospels, but his core message is a call to metanoia – a word often translated as repentance, but really meaning something like, a renewed way of knowing. I like to translate it as a changed mind that bears fruit in a changed life. 

And it’s very clear in Jesus’ teaching that he wants his followers to become people who operate from love – love of neighbor, love of the world, love of God; people who fundamentally aren’t driven by fear, because fear tends to shut us down and close us off. 

Over and over again, God or God’s messengers tell us, “Don’t be afraid!” So, yeah, John says some stuff about unquenchable fire. He’s that kind of preacher. Don’t take it to heart. 

I think the conversation between John and the crowd is so interesting! People ask him, What should we do? How do we show this metanoia in our lives? And John’s responses are honestly so basic! If you have an extra coat, give it to somebody who’s cold. I bet half the people hearing this have done that, one way or another. 

Same with having extra food; give it to someone who needs it. By the way, our food drive for WayForward Resources starts today!… 

John’s not talking to people who have more than enough consumer goods, as many of us do. He’s talking to people who don’t have much, and might be tempted to hold on to extra. In our lives of relative plenty, it may be important for us to dwell with what’s enough and what’s extra. 

Then some soldiers and tax collectors ask John, Well, what should we do? These are people who are part of the structure of oppression in this time and place. The soldiers are in some direct or indirect way part of the occupation – the domination of Judea by the Roman Empire. And the tax collectors, likewise, serve the government by, well, collecting taxes – which were punishingly high. And again, John’s advice seems so minimal! He doesn’t say, Drive a spoke into the wheel of the machine of unjust government! He says: Do your job honestly. Don’t take more money than you’re supposed to. Don’t threaten people; don’t be a bully. Be satisfied with your wages. 

Times were hard and things were uncertain. Just like holding on to an extra coat, taking a little extra money in the course of your duties was a rational choice. It meant you could do a little more for your own family, or hide something away just in case. These small corruptions weren’t the acts of bad people, but of ordinary people. But John tells them: Don’t deepen other people’s misery. If you want to align yourself with God, be honest. Be just. Be righteous. 

I think John would say that giving away a coat or not taking a bribe is the beginning of metanoia and the path of righteousness, not the fulfillment. Square one. You can’t start down the path of love of God and neighbor, when you’re cheating them both. 

I love what the apostle Paul says about righteousness, in our epistle today. He prays for this community, the church in Philippi, that their love for one another may overflow more and more, with knowledge and full insight.  What a powerful, important idea: that love can lead us to knowledge and insight! And that knowledge and insight in turn will help them determine what is best to do. How to be honest and just. How to share. How to do good, when things are bad. And that process – love leading to understanding leading to discernment of right action – that’s what will make Jesus proud of them, as people who have produced the harvest of righteousness. 

A couple of days ago, on December 6, the church honored the feast of St. Nicholas. St. Nicholas is a cousin of sorts to Santa Claus, who is famous for giving gifts to nice children and coal to naughty children. I’m not sure how “nice” and “naughty” in this context relate to righteousness, exactly! 

Nicholas the saint was a bishop in the port city of Myra, in the fourth century, in what is now part of Turkey. He became beloved during his lifetime, and honored as a saint after his death, because he was righteous. 

Some of the stories about Nicholas may feel more like folklore than history, like the one where an evil innkeeper kills some traveling students and makes them into stew, and Nicholas by holy magic reassembles them and brings them back to life. 

But other stories have the ring of truth. That Nicholas secretly gave gifts – bags of gold coins tossed in a window or down a chimney – that allowed poor families to care for their children. That he would buy a big bag of bread, then go out at night and leave loaves beside the unhoused, sleeping on the streets. 

That he was friendly with the sailors and dock workers of the port, and prayed with and for them, in their dangerous jobs. That when a rich man’s son killed someone, and a corrupt judge was paid off to pin the crime on others, Nicholas showed up to pray with that judge until he changed his mind. That despite the comfort and privilege that could have kept him apart from the ordinary people of Myra, Nicholas chose to be among them, and to be for them. That he let love overflow and lead to understanding, and then to knowing what to do. 

How do we live, in cold, hard seasons? How shall we live, when the times are strange and frightening, and many are fearful, or struggling, or at risk? I expect we’ll be spending a lot of time with those questions. But one old, bold, hopeful answer offered by our faith and our faith-ancestors is: Strive for God’s righteousness. 

I wonder if we could reclaim righteousness as part of our core values and vocabulary. Righteousness as integrity and compassion. Righteousness as choosing kindness, choosing truth, even when it’s hard. Righteousness as what bubbles up at the fierce fruitful places where our joy intersects with our anger. Righteousness as the manifestation of God’s presence among us. Righteousness as deepening love that leads us towards understanding and into action.