Of all the Christmas cards I’ve ever seen, I have never seen one featuring a wild-eyed desert mystic wearing animal skins, honey in his beard and a bug leg stuck in his teeth, yelling, “You brood of vipers!!” It’s the second Sunday of Advent. If you’ve been around for Advent before, you may have braced yourself for John the Baptist - an apocalyptic street preacher whose “good news” sound more like a dire warning. Maybe he missed the “Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem” part of Isaiah’s prophetic poetry. The curmudgeonly prophet raises his voice and lets us have it: "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance." If you’re looking for a soft, comfortable entry into the season before Christmas, John is not your guy. There’s nothing “lowly and mild” about child of promise. The Gospel of Matthew makes a point of telling us that John both appears and cries out in the wilderness, in a landscape that is desolate and barren. Why the wilderness? Why the lonely desert for our Advent reflections? Well, if you have any experience with real estate, you know the mantra: “Location location location.” Location is key. The place where we stand, the terrain we occupy, the space from which we speak — these things matter. While it’s unlikely you’ve ever seen John the Baptist featured in an Advent calendar or on a Christmas greeting card, all four Gospels place him front and center in Jesus’s origin story. John’s austerity is the only gateway we have to the swaddling clothes, angel's wings, and fleecy lambs we hold dear each December. And as baffling as it may seem, the holy drama of the season depends on the disheveled baptizer’s opening act. But why the wilderness? Wouldn’t John be more successful yelling in the center of town - at the gate of the emperor? Well, let’s look at the scene Matthew is setting. John comes from the wilderness to the Jordan. The crowds, including the Pharisees and Sadducees, come from Roman occupied Judea, from civilization. On one side of the river is the wilderness, a place of vulnerability, risk, and powerlessness. In the wilderness, there is no safety net, no Plan B, no rainy-day savings account, no quick fix, and no 24hr grocery store, which means if all you can find to eat are locusts and wild honey, you’re having sweet grasshoppers for dinner. In the wilderness, life is raw and unsettled, and illusions of self-sufficiency shatter very quickly. On the other side of the river is Judea, Jerusalem, and imperial oppression. When these city folk come to the river, they find themselves on the outskirts of the peace through strength offered by Rome. It is a place where the soft neediness of our common humanity is exposed. In the wilderness, people have no choice but to wait and watch as if their lives depend on God showing up, because quite frankly, they do. It is into this environment so far removed from safety, an environment so formless, so void that the Word of God speaks, and what we learn about ourselves in this environment will be as hard to swallow as honeyed insects. John cries from the wilderness, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” Crowds stream out of the cities and towns, out of the jurisdictions of Herod and Caesar, out of the promised land to its threshold. This river, the wilderness on one side and the land of milk and honey on the other, is the way to freedom. Slaves and wanderers waded in and the redeemed people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob walked out. John now calls this redeemed people back, back to the wilderness, back to the doorway, back to the waters of salvation. Repentance is the path of return, to meet the wander in the waters and to walk out redeemed. These words, “sin” and “repentance” are quite loaded, even avoided in modern Christian circles. If you, like me, grew up in a fundamentalist circle, the word “sin” and its association with shame, guilt, and condemnation likely bring a good amount of discomfort. Many of us also distrust the word of scripture because we've seen how easily it can be manipulated to justify one moralistic agenda over another. Yet Advent begins with an honest, wilderness-style reckoning with sin and we can’t get to the manger unless we go through John the Baptist, and John is all about repentance. Does all this talk of wilderness and repentance mean there is no room for comfort at all? If we’re able to get past being triggered by John’s words to follow him out into the wilderness, perhaps what we’ll find is comfort - comfort in the fact that something more profound is at stake in our souls than personal moral failure and private reconciliation. Perhaps what ails us is something deeper, grimmer, and far more consequential. Growing up, I was taught that sin was "breaking God's laws," "missing the mark," "committing immoral acts," or “anything that separated me from God.” These definitions aren't wrong. They’re just incomplete. They don’t go far enough. They don't name the fullness of all we struggle with. Sin, at its heart, is a broken relationship to reality itself. It's anything that interferes with the opening up of our whole hearts to God, to others, to creation, to our very selves. Sin is estrangement, disconnection, disharmony. It's the sludge that slows us down, that says, "Quit. Stop trying. Give up. Change is impossible. I’m not responsible for my actions. You’re not my problem." In other words, sin is apathy, care-less-ness, the frightened resistance to an engaged life. It is the opposite of creativity, the opposite of abundance, the opposite of flourishing. Sin is a walking death. And it is easier to spot, name, and confess a walking death in the wilderness than anywhere else. We have to be confronted before we can be comforted. This is why John underscores his message of repentance with a harrowing description of the coming Messiah: "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." If you weren’t squirming before, I bet you are now. How in the world is this good news, this portrait of a Jesus with pitchfork and fire who judges, sorts, and burns? In Malachi 3, the Lord says, “I will draw near to judge you.” Often, we equate judgment with condemnation. But what if God was saying “I will draw near so I can see you better.” What if John is saying that the coming Messiah really sees us? That he knows us at our very core? That the winnowing fork is an instrument of deep love, patiently wielded by One who wants to separate from us all the dried-up husk that we once used to protect the precious seed within? Perhaps then, it's in offering God every piece of our lives that we give God permission to "clear" us — to separate all that's no longer useful from all that is good, beautiful, and worthy. John calls us to return, to come back to the water, to the threshold, to re-enter civilization, no longer a slave or a wanderer, but as citizens, neighbors, in a promised society. God calls us to the water to make peace by making justice, with God, within ourselves, among each other. When this happens, the wilderness and our lives, become a place where we can see the landscape as a whole and participate in God’s great work of leveling inequality and oppression. “Prepare the way of the Lord,” John cries, quoting the prophet Isaiah. “Make his paths straight.” We prepare for the coming of Jesus by becoming accountable individuals within a just society. We are called by our baptism to accountability and responsibility for the way of the world. Accountability and responsibility make justice. Justice makes peace. Peace prepares the way to a better world. Amen. 

When I was in middle school, my grammar teacher was terrifying. He was the sort of teacher who commanded silence by his very presence. I do not ever remember there being a disruption in his class. He taught from a desk in the front of the class room, which he had modified to contain an overhead projector, which he used instead of the white board. He was then able to sit facing the classroom, never turning his back to us. Day after day, we were all subjected to lesson after lesson on grammar; syntax, diagramming, punctuation; I learned all of the helping verbs by heart to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In” so I would never use the past tense of a verb when I should have used the past participle. But then I became one of those people. One of those people who correct people’s grammar. More precisely, I became a 12-year-old who corrected the grammar of adults. I couldn’t believe how many of the adults in my life didn’t know or didn’t care that they were using the wrong verb tenses all the time. I also couldn’t believe how many of the adults in my life didn’t appreciate being corrected. Didn’t they want to speak English correctly? I mean, language needs to be precise. It is one thing to say, “I seen a deer this morning.” But the stakes are a bit higher if you forget the comma in the sentence, “Let’s eat, Grandma.” Because, “Let’s eat Grandma” means something a bit more sinister. With mastery, language can give us control. Grammar and dialect can expose our education and socio-economic status. Mastery of the rules about what is vulgar or profane and what is polite or elegant becomes mastery over those whose language makes them vulgar or profane. This mastery can remove ambiguity, making it easier to convey instructions, commands, ideas, emotions, even over great distances. Even over centuries. Mastery of the languages of the Bible— Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin— have given interpreters a great sense of confidence that they are conveying the ideas of the original languages to us in their translations. We can hear the metaphors of Jeremiah as he describes these bad shepherds and how God will gather the scattered sheep from all the places they’d been driven. We can hear the esoteric cosmology of the author of Colossians as he tells us that Christ is firstborn of Creation and of the dead. And we can imagine the historical scene described to us in the Gospel of Luke, vivid in the horror of what it describes, and yet pallid in its sanitized familiarity. Making meaning of these readings in hard. We want to be able to skim the surface of these texts and understand their meaning like mining for diamonds with a boom and dustpan. But where we want mastery the texts often give us only mystery. Here in this passage from Luke, Jesus speaks to those crucified with him. Jesus says to the one who asks to be remembered, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” In an attempt at mastery, the translators have added a comma. The original Greek doesn’t have commas. The original Greek doesn’t even have punctuation, not even spaces between the words. The original Greek leaves us with an uncomfortable ambiguity. Does Jesus say, “Truly I tell you, Today you will be with me in paradise?” Or does Jesus say, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise?” Where we want mastery, to know exactly what Jesus meant, the text gives us only mystery. My inner 12yo loves knowing the right answer, especially when others do not, especially when it allows me to think of myself as better, or brighter, or in control. But the reign of Christ is not about mastery. In the reign of Christ, I am not in control. In the reign of Christ, I don’t have to be better or brighter. In the reign of Christ, I don’t have to know where all the commas go. In the reign of Christ, God is calling us to ministry instead of mastery. I don’t have to have mastery over the cosmos, over theology, over the syntax of sin and salvation, or even over my own life. In the reign of Christ, we can embrace the sacred mystery, the great unknowing. We can take a deep sigh of relief at not having to have all the answers. Where we want mastery, Christ gives us mystery and the call to ministry. God is not some terrifying grammarian teaching us the rules and grading our homework, modifying our native dialects and polishing our heart tongues until the empire can see its own reflection. God is often nonverbal, humming tunes in vagal tones we only understand by being held close. God’s love is not bound to syntax and structure, but is free and syncopated, speaking in image and analogy, silence and epiphany, instead of imperative and exclamation. In the reign of Christ, there are no kings, no bad shepherds who divide the flock to keep control, no thrones or rulers or dominions or powers. The reign of Christ has come, Beloved, without punctuation, without even a space between this age and the one to come. Amen.

Well, what an uplifting set of readings! In the first reading we get the coming of a day burning like an oven that will consume all the arrogant and evildoers, leaving not a trace behind. On to the second letter to the Thessalonians, where we are admonished against idleness, warning that those unwilling to work should not eat. And finally, Jesus gives us a cheery picture of the future, filled with false teachers, wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, portents in the heavens, arrest, imprisonment, beatings, martyrdom, and the destruction of the center of Jewish life and worship. If you came to church today to feel better, how am I doing so far? Probably about as well as your favorite news source. Jesus could have pulled this list from the headlines on CNN.com. There is ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as in Sudan. There is a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, which Israel has already violated, and the whole of the Gaza strip has been leveled, tens of thousands killed, humanitarian aid blocked, and a manmade famine killing thousands more. Our own national politics has caused quite a bit of hunger here at home, with SNAP benefits in jeopardy and food banks inundated with furloughed or unpaid federal workers and those without their SNAP disbursements. Rising inflation has sent food prices and rents soaring. The looming specter of AI and the voracious data centers needed to sustain it has sent utility prices to dizzying heights. The global climate crisis continues to worsen, threatening widespread global chaos. And while we aren’t facing arrest or imprisonment in Jesus’ name and our house of worship is still standing, it feels like everywhere we turn there are stories and studies of the church in decline, dwindling worship attendance, and folks turning their backs on the faith. What if Jesus wasn’t foretelling the end of things, but describing the reality that things end? What if Jesus was just describing the way things are, have always been, always will be? Jesus tells the disciples that the temple they admired would be destroyed. In fact, this is already the second temple, because the first one was destroyed. The second one was desecrated by the Greek occupiers and had to be reconsecrated. And by the time Luke’s audience was hearing this Gospel, the second temple had been destroyed too. Tragedy is inevitable. There will be war and famine, fires and floods. There will be plagues and hurricanes; we will act in ways that bring destruction. Tectonic plates will shift, mountains will rise and fall. And none of this will be the end of all things. Instead of growing weary, instead of cowering in fear, instead of paths that lead to destruction, Jesus invites us on a path that leads through destruction, through calamity, through death. This path leads to a promised future in which the sun of righteousness will rise on the just, with healing in its wings. This path leads to a promised future in which God’s judgment looks like steadfast love and faithfulness. Jesus is calling us to move forward along this path, with our history in one hand and our hope in the other. Jesus is calling us to move forward along this path, to not grow weary in doing what is right, but to set our eyes on the cross of Christ knowing that the cross is the nature of the path. It will pierce us. It will bruise us. It will even kill us. But it will not destroy us. We, with Christ, will rise with scars in our hands and feet, with splinters in our backs, with sweat and blood dried to our brow. The cross will not have the final say. Love will have the final say. Because our hope is in a God who is Love. Because our history is the triumph of love over loss. The path will be long, and difficult, and wounding. The path will be fraught with grief, with injustice, with war and famine and plague, with disasters of our own making, and seismic shifts to level the mountains and fill in the valleys. But God in Christ is on this path with us. God will not abandon us, even in death. Because the path is not the destination. The path leads us through the valley of the shadow of death to the green pastures where our soul may dwell in the house of the Lord forever. So in the meantime, do not grow weary in doing what is right. Work for the good of others, allow the path to change you and the world around you. Discipleship ain’t for punks. God is using the path to transform us to redeem us, to evolve us, to save us. And in the end of all things, when we have come to the end of the path, when we can see the first light of the dawn of righteousness, when judgement comes with steadfast love and faithfulness— in the end of all things, Love will be all there is. Amen.

Sheesh. After reading the passages this week I came away with one central question; Why does the Revised Common Lectionary hate preachers? At this point in the lectionary, we are turning our attention toward the reign of Christ and the beginning of a new liturgical year in Advent. We see some of this in the talk of resurrection in the Gospel, in the coming of the Day of the Lord in II Thessalonians, and Job’s hope that he will see his redeemer in the flesh. But none of these passages are about what appears on the surface. Job seems to be about the resurrection, but that would be impossible. Job is the oldest text in the Bible, written in a time before the Hebrew people began to articulate a theology of resurrection. Eventually, as generations died in captivity to Babylon and Assyria, and Persia, and Greece, Hebrew theology had to contend with the fact that if justice didn’t come before death, then either God is not Just, or there must be existence beyond this life in which God’s people will experience justice. At the time of the writing of Job, one lived on in the legacy of one’s heirs. And Job has lost all of his. Job’s defiant hope that after his skin is destroyed, in his flesh he will see God is his hope that he will experience God’s vindication before death. The story of Job continues, and that is exactly what Job experiences. In II Thessalonians, the church in that city seems to have heard a rumor that they have missed the second coming. The writer advises their readers they should not pay any attention to hearsay or letters that pretend to be from Paul and his companions but are not from Paul and his companions. Here’s the kicker: II Thessalonians is almost certainly not from Paul and his companions. Where does that leave a preacher? Then there is the Gospel reading, where the Sadducees give Jesus a parable about marriage to try to trap him. The Sadducees hold what we might call an originalist interpretation of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Hebrew Scripture. This is Genesis, Exodus, and the books of the Law, wherein there is no mention of resurrection. Like Job, the Sadducees believe that there is nothing after death, so they use the Law to try to trap Jesus, trying to prove that Moses gave this rule about Levarite marriage— marrying the widow to her brother-in-law to try to produce offspring for the deceased— as proof that there is no resurrection. Jesus response to this legal inference is to say something like “Marriage-schmarriage. in the age to follow the resurrection there will be no such thing as marriage.” What is going on here? Job, the Thessalonians, and the Sadducees are all waiting on the coming of Justice, the fulfillment of God’s promise. Job has lost everything and is waiting for God’s vindication. The Thessalonians want to make sure the day of the Lord has not already passed. The Sadducees’ rigid adherence to the plain meaning of the Torah has made them incredulous toward the idea of a resurrection. While it still feels like the selection of this week’s readings followed one-too many drinks and someone saying, “Come on guys, we can knock out one more week before we call it a night!” I still see some signs of hope, maybe even some good news. Like Job, we have all experienced loss, change, grief and the need to hope that all of it hasn’t been for nothing. Like these Thessalonians, we are inundated with late-night televangelists, influencers peddling rapture survival kits, predicted dates, and Kirk Cameron promising us that the Day of the Lord is just around the corner, and we could miss it if we aren’t careful. Who knows what to believe about the second coming anymore? And when we have big, cosmic questions about how to cope and what to believe, like the Sadducees, we want to turn to the Scriptures, we expect that they will speak to us plainly and that they will never change. But looking closer, we see that, when pushed to his limits, Job’s hope is beyond the scope of his theology. The mystery writer of II Thessalonians honors the legacy of Paul with a sort of fanfiction to assure the church that they haven’t missed the second coming. And Jesus takes the Torah seriously even as he broadens the interpretative lens to see in the resurrection an end to exploitation. You see, it was the men who took a woman to marry, and it was the women who were taken. It is this exploitative, entrapping, misogynist taking and being taken that Jesus promises will end in the age to come. Your marriage now and ancient near-eastern marriages then are two totally different things. And yet, then as now, marriage will not be defined by the rigid legalism of a tiny group of self-styled traditionalists who’s love for some old document prevents them from loving their neighbors. If these scriptures and their promises really come to us from God, then this God must be bigger than, greater than, and sovereign over these scriptures and these promises. God is not bound to the scriptures or the traditions we have created to hold them sacred, or the theological frameworks we have devised to make them make sense. And when these ways of reading, keeping, thinking through, and believing no longer work, God is still faithful and calls us to reinterpret the promises for the present age. DISCLAIMER: The following statement is intended for spiritually mature audiences only! Hearer discretion is advised. The Bible is not the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible contains and our worship proclaims the Word of God, that is Jesus Christ. We are not called to be defenders of the Scriptures, of tradition, of theological heritage; much less are we called to be defenders of God. We are called to be followers of Jesus, to love God and each other. If and when the circumstances of this life force us to choose between our neighbors and defending the scriptures, our traditions, or our theological heritage, we are to choose our neighbor EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Ok, so maybe the Revised Common Lectionary isn’t so bad after all. Maybe this preacher just wished that the meaning was a little plainer. But having dug a little deeper, having wrestled a little more, I am glad we hung in to find this deeper meaning. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, contained in Scripture and proclaimed in our worship.  Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word. Amen.

History is complicated. When I first entered college 25 years ago, I was a history major. I took many fascinating classes, and learned a lot of information about a number of things. The most eye-opening course however, was Historiography. Historiography is the study of how to write history. The study of History itself can take two different tracks; one is the exploration, recovery, and recording of historical events in chronological order, a bare statement of facts and figures, a bit like retroactive journalism. This is the stuff of archeology, anthropology, paleontology, even theoretical physics as it explores the universe to better understand how this universe came to be. It is largely a scientific pursuit. It relies on empiricism, verifiability, evidence, hypotheses and testing hypotheses, until a reliable record of events can be reviewed by one’s academic peers and broadly accepted as the facts about a given subject. Every attempt is made at neutrality, writing as unbiased a record as possible in hopes of leaving future generations as clear a picture as possible of events as they happened. The other track is interpretation of the facts. These historians take the facts and make meaning from the bare record, writing the story of a time, a place, a person or a people, to help us understand not just what happened and how, but why it happened, and what it means for us now, how we might avoid the same mistakes or repeat the same triumphs. These narratives become part of who we are, how we understand ourselves and our place in the world, how we justify or make amends for our actions in the past, how we explain ourselves to others and to ourselves. And this is where history gets complicated. The first type of history can change. As new evidence comes to light, archeological discoveries are made, and new technologies produce more capacity to extract and examine more information, the historical record can change, replacing misunderstanding and misinformation with better understanding and better information. Most Americans know the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, when as a child, George uses his new axe to chop down the prized tree. When confronted by his parents, George fesses up, famously saying, axe in one hand, the other over his heart, “I cannot tell a lie.” Thus, Washington looms large in our hearts as the epitome of the ever elusive “honest politician.” So, it is of little note and almost no consequence that there is zero evidence that this event ever transpired, meaning that though the story is factually false, it still contains some sort of truth we felt we needed. We needed a truth that bare facts could not supply. And we don’t tend to like it when facts get in the way of the meaning we have made. Today, we celebrate All Saints’ Day, a day set aside to remember our history. A day to honor those faithful believers who have gone before us to show us the way of grace and truth. We remember those sainted dead, those holy foremothers and fathers, who lived this life of faith before us and whose stories tell us who we are. We recall grandparents and parents aunts and uncles, siblings, friends, pastors and Sunday School teachers, camp counselors and Bible study leaders, campus ministers and youth group leaders, spouses, colleagues, and acquaintances who loved us into the Kingdom of God and have now shuffled loose this mortal coil, existing just beyond our grasp. And as we recall these fond memories it’s often not the facts that we recall, but the stories, the tales of meaning that have endeared these saints to our memory and knit their lives into our very identity, and our very identities into the life of God. But when we recall the stories without an ear to the facts we often diminish the truth and weaken the story. We have not come to this point in the history of the world or the history of the church “standing on the shoulders of giants” as we like to imagine. Rather, we have come here upon a hill of skulls a mountain of death and sin, and pain, upon the Cross of Christ. There are no saints who were not first sinners. There are no saints who were not first redeemed. There are no saints who have not come through the great ordeal and washed their robes in the blood of the lamb. When we tell the stories without the facts we deceive ourselves into thinking that we might be able to live this life without pain. That we might escape misfortune, suffering, death. That those saints were somehow spiritual superheroes, or that life was less complicated back then. But Jesus tells us otherwise. Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” Jesus does not say “Cursed are the poor.” Jesus does not say, “If you really believe in me, you won’t be poor.” Jesus doesn’t say, “It is God’s will that you should be poor.” No, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” Blessed are the hungry; Blessed are those who weep; Blessed are the rejected.” AND “Woe to the rich, woe to those who are satisfied, woe to those laughing now, woe to those with good reputations.” Jesus says that life in this world will bring poverty and wealth, hunger and satisfaction, weeping and laughing, with rejection and good repute. Jesus is laying out the facts, giving us the evidence, giving us an accurate picture of the way of the world. But Jesus, like a good historian, is also giving us a story, making meaning of the facts. Jesus tells us that the bare facts will not define us, nor will the grand sweep of history consume us. Neither poverty nor wealth, hunger nor fullness, weeping nor laughing will last forever. This life is filled with tragedy and celebration, pain and pleasure, loss and leisure, suffering and satisfaction, death and resurrection. And God is making meaning of it all. God is telling a story, a truth that takes the facts seriously and is yet bigger than the sum of its parts, a truth that makes meaning of all the suffering and sorrow, a truth that makes saints out of sinners, a truth that brings life out of death. We are living in a historic moment. Today is day 33 of a government shutdown, leaving federal workers unpaid and relying on food banks to eat. These already strained food banks are now the primary source of food for some 42 million neighbors who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP— formerly food stamps— to eat and feed their families. Jesus’ advice to his followers in light of the facts of life, the blessings and woes, is that we should treat others the way we want to be treated. As we look back at the saints who brought us here, we must also look in the mirror, at the saints God is calling us to be. The hungry are blessed because Jesus calls us to be a blessing. The late Pope Francis said, “First you pray for the hungry, then you feed them, because that’s how prayer works.” Beloved, we are the saints. We have come through blessing and woe, hunger and fullness, weeping and laughing, to possess this kingdom of God in this very life. This is what made those who went before us saints, and this is what will make those who come after us saints, that by the Love of God, in spite of all the facts, God is making meaning of all life’s blessings and woes, turning us toward each other in Love, in goodness and prayer, in nonviolence and generosity. God is making meaning of the facts of this life by making saints of each of us, so that, with the eyes of our heart enlightened, we may perceive what is the hope to which we have been called, the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints, and the immeasurable greatness of God’s power in Christ for us who trust in the truth according to the working of his great power. So, give to the poor, feed the hungry, comfort the weeping, and let your reputation be that of a redeemed sinner in this life. This is a life with meaning. Amen.