“It is not for you to know.” It’s hard to hear such a phrase especially in our modern times. We are all the grandchildren of the Enlightenment, the age of reason, fact s, data, science. We are the products of compulsory education, most of us able to read, most of us with access to the internet, the repository of all human knowledge at our fingertips. We even have robots who will find information for us. Want to know how many teaspoons in a cup? Ask Siri. Want to hear Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech? Ask Alexa. Sure, there are more enduring questions that take a bit more research. Questions like, “Why is the sky blue? “What happened to the dinosaurs?” “What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?” A trip to the library, a good book on the subject, maybe a well put-together documentary, and we feel like our question is answered. Unfortunately, we are also seeing the collapse of the idea of expertise, a demotion of education and experience in a given field of study in favor of what can be quickly googled, especially if the answers we get from social media and internet forums give us answers that are more convenient, fit better into our way of thinking, or provide a sense of control over the seeming random chaos of the universe. But then there are those nagging, faith-shaking, heartbreaking questions that Google can’t answer. “Why do some babies just die while the elderly languish in pain and confusion?” “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” “When is Jesus coming back to fix this mess? What is taking so long?” After Jesus’ resurrection, his followers ask, “So, when are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel? When are you going to throw off the shackles of Rome? When are you going to get revenge for what they did to you? For what they do to us?” Jesus says, “It is not for you to know.” I’m sure they wanted to ask, “Why can’t we know?” I know I want to ask that. Jesus says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.” In the original Greek, that word we translated as “witnesses” can also be translated as “martyrs.” Jesus says, “you can’t know when the Kingdom will be restored, but I’ll give you the power to be martyrs.” Worst. Consolation prize. Ever. So much of this life is unknowing. And so much of our time as a species is spent in pursuit of knowing. We want easy answers, or at the very least, some concrete resolution to those deeper questions that linger in our souls like unresolved chords. And we will settle for cliches, like “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God must have needed another angel.” Or we opt for intellectual terminus, like, “You should never question God.” What if we saw Jesus’ answer less as the withholding of information and more as a release from the need to know? What if, instead of trying to find answers, we leaned into the uncertainty? What if we allowed mystery to be mystery? What if this unknowing were a fundamental part of our faith? How can we cultivate patience in the unknowing? What practices can we learn to help us to be witnesses, martyrs, of the unknowing? I think instead of thinking we have, or need, or are entitled to, neat little answers that perfectly resolve all our questions, we can admit that we don’t know. Even that some things are unknowable. We can learn to hear the questions of our friends and family, even the questions of our own hearts, less as an opportunity to be an expert, to be the hero, the fixer, and more as an invitation to bear witness to the grief, pain, confusion, anger— at the heart of the question. We can practice our core values, hospitality, generosity, and solidarity, by welcoming the question, giving our time and attention to the questioner, and living in solidarity with the grief, pain, and uncertainty at the heart of the mystery. We can say, “I don’t know, but…” “I don’t know why babies die or the elderly linger, but I believe in a God who is with us in our suffering, and I will stay with you too.” “I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, but I believe in a God who is bending the arch of the moral universe toward justice, and I will fight alongside you until that justice comes.” “I don’t know when Jesus is coming back to fix the mess the world is in, but I believe in a God who comes to us in our very lives, whether in grief or in celebration, and will give us the power to endure this life with patience while we work toward a better one until Christ comes again.” It is not for us to know. It is for us to trust. It is for us to practice the justice and grace we hope for until the kingdom comes in its fullness. It is for us to be free from having to know, from needing to know, from feeling entitled to know. It is for us to live with wonder and awe. It is for us to embrace the mystery. It is for us to give God the right of expertise, to let God be the One who knows. It is for us to be Spirit-filled witnesses and martyrs of the trustworthiness of God in Christ. But, It is not for us to know. Amen. 

A friend once asked me how and when I got into cigars. When I was in college, my best friend and roommate was a pack-a-day smoker. My dad was the same. I worked in a restaurant that opened its doors at 11pm to cater to the after-the-club crowd, most of whom were smokers. So much so, that by 5am, when the restaurant closed, smoke had filled the room from the 20ft ceiling to about my mid-sternum. I would sit down at some point in the evening to role silverware or just to rest my feet, and when I stood up, I would realize I was walking in a cloud of smoke. If you can’t beat’em, join’em. So, I began to have the occasional cigar. Not the Swisher Sweets or some other gas station refuse, but premium, hand-rolled, imported cigars from Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. I even had a few Cubans on my honeymoon in the Bahamas, but don’t tell the Treasury Department. It’s not something I do every day, but about once a week, I will have a good cigar, and listen to the birds sing the wind shuffle through the trees, and find a sacred moment to just be still and reconnect with myself and with God. This friend who asked me about cigars told me about their similar love for craft beers. It’s not something he can afford all the time, but another friend of his will leave him one in the church fridge from time to time only wanting to know what he thought of it in return. Most often, my friend will share a craft beer with his two adult sons, who now live and go to school elsewhere, and enjoy spending time with their dad when they can. Once, one of his boys brought home a beer that cost $35 per bottle. My friend was dumfounded by the price tag, and could hardly bring himself to open the bottle. But this was a gift from his son, and not something my friend would have ever bought for himself, so he opened it, savored it, and was delighted to find it was the best beer he’d ever had. And it was made all the better by sharing the experience with his son. This story reminded me of all those stories in the Old Testament where the saints of old would find a meeting place with God in a wilderness, in the desert, on a mountain top, and they would pour out costly oil or water, also a precious commodity in the desert, to anoint that place, make a pile of rocks, and give the place a name in Hebrew that meant something like “God met me here” or “God provides” or “God is my deliverer.” These folks, flawed as they were, are known to us as saints precisely because of their ability to look at a pile of rocks, a patch of dirt, at craggy hilltop and recognize the presence of their Creator, hidden in, under, and with the common stuff of earth. Or like the woman in the house of Simon the leper who broke open an alabaster jar filled with nard, a very costly oil, and began to anoint Jesus’ head just days before his death. This woman recognized her God in the spindly, exhausted, dusty body of Jesus. In our first reading, Peter has now joined the ranks of these seers of the Divine. Earlier in the same chapter as our reading for today, Peter has had a vision, of all sorts of unclean animals lowered from Heaven in a sheet. A voice tells him to “Rise, kill, and eat.” But Peter is an observant Jew, and even a voice from heaven wasn’t going to convince him to violate the law of God. It took ol’ hard-headed Peter having the same vision three times and the voice telling him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” to stop arguing with a voice from heaven. And while he is still scratching his head, he gets an invitation to come and preach the gospel to a Roman centurion, Cornelius and his family. At the Spirit’s urging, Peter goes, preaches the gospel, and Cornelius and all his household were baptized. Then in our reading, Peter has preached to other Gentiles in the region, and is dumfounded again to find that these Gentiles already have the Holy Spirit, even without being baptized. So, Peter baptizes them too. Peter, like the woman with the alabaster jar of nard, like Abraham spared from sacrificing Isaac, like Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, Peter has found God in an unexpected place. And God, like the woman, like Abraham, like Jacob, had poured out a sacrifice. God had poured out God’s very self, and Peter had learned to see through the common stuff of earth to the God beneath the God within the God born through what Peter had always thought profane. And Peter’s response was to reply in kind. Peter’s response was to pour out the gift of Holy Baptism, the water and the Word, to call sacred what God had already sanctified. God had already included what Peter didn’t know he had been given the authority to include. God had moved the boarder, expanded the circle, and Peter was just catching up. And God is still moving the borders. Just this week, The United Methodist Church heard that same Spirit that called to Peter, call to them to embrace the LGBTQIA community and they heeded the call. The assembly voted overwhelmingly to remove from their book of discipline the language that forbade same-sex marriage and LGBTQIA clergy. When the church examined the life and faith of Queer Christians, they, like Peter among the Gentiles, discovered that God had already gone beyond them, had already included these faithful disciples and had already poured out the Holy Spirit. All that was left for the Church to do, was to add the signs and symbols of God’s blessing and rejoice in the expansion of God’s reign. This command to love one another, is the call to find these sacred meeting places in the faces of our neighbors. God is already there, removing all the barriers that we have created to keep us apart. And what we are often called to sacrifice is the barrier of our own pride. Like my friend with the $35 beer. His son already knew that this time with his dad was sacred, a holy friendship, a time and a place not promised forever, but a fleeting moment to be savored, enjoyed, and marked with the sacrifice of something precious. His son already knew, and it took my friend a moment to catch up, to recognize it too, and to share in the sacrifice. Beloved, you are this sacred too. You are the stuff of earth into which God has poured God’s very self. You are the meeting place of the sacred and the profane, a saint and a sinner, the dust of earth and the breath of God. And it is on this meeting place that the Church has poured out water and the word, and given you a name. It is in you, in your very body, that the Church is called to find and to remind you of these holy moments of God meeting God until we all have seen the face of Christ, in the mirror and in our neighbor, and knelt to kiss this holy ground. Christ now invites us to this meal, and raises a cup more costly than we can imagine and yet, more freely given than we could dare to hope to share with us this sacred moment that we might know like the saints of old “God met us here.”  Amen.

There’s an age-old truth about folks in the South. We have no idea how to handle the snow. A forecast of even flurries sends folks scrambling for milk, bread, and egg s. Many have tried to make sense of this phenomenon. You’d think there was an old wives’ tale that said if you just make enough French toast you’ll survive the snowstorm. Now, we southerners know that what separates us from our Yankee siblings when it comes to snow is the state and local infrastructure to handle the clearing of roads, and the social infrastructure to equip every home and business with a snowblower and deicer. And being stuck at home without staple food items seems unwise. Much of the way I learned the Christian faith operated by the same mentality. There was a coming catastrophe and you’d better make the necessary transactions to weather the impending storm. “Get right, or get left” the saying went. Make peace with God while there’s still time or you’ll be left behind in the Rapture, and condemned in the judgment. The majority of the theology the hymnody, and the sermons sounded like crazed meteorologists warning of impending doom and pleading with you to take cover by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Sermons on today’s gospel would have focused on the pruning of branches and the burning of branches, a dire warning for those who refused to abide, that is those who did not accept Jesus as their personal savior. Those are the ones God will cut off, gather up, and throw in the fire. So, you’d better turn or burn. In college, I joined an evangelical movement on campus where this fear was more underground, becoming the subtext for evangelism and not the pretext. We didn’t lead with fear, we led with love. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” was the beginning of our pitch. You catch more flies with honey, after all. But. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but… you are sinful, damned by a righteous God to an eternity of conscious torment as punishment for a state of being you inherited from great-grandparents so distant we only know them by myth and legend. We told folks, “God loves you, but you are sinful and cannot know God’s love or plan for your life unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior, and remember, if you don’t, God has a second plan for conscious eternal punishment.” We would have read our first reading from Acts as a blueprint of sorts, studying it after the fact, like a football coach analyzing a winning game for clues on how to replicate the experience. I went to training after training, year after year, long after I was a student at the college, trying to understand how to follow the Spirit’s leading, how to help “unbelievers” understand the scripture, how to explain the “plan of salvation” and why folks needed Jesus to save them. All of my theology was based on fear, fear that time was running out, that some would die without knowing Jesus, that I might be responsible for their unknowing if I didn’t work harder, wasn’t bolder, didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to share God’s love and God’s wrath. But, then I found Luther. Once I started reading Luther, and his explanation of the scriptures, it was our second reading that became the frame of my theology. God is love. That’s it. From this simple yet universal principle, I could reread John 15, and know that we already are branches, and what God prunes from us are the already dead, unhelpful, unfruitful pieces of our lives that keep us from knowing that we are loved and that keep us from loving each other. Jesus’ exhortation to “abide” is an exhortation to give up our fear, the fear for ourselves before God and the fear for others before God, for God IS love, and there is no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear, and God abides in us and we abide in God. Further, we can see that Philip’s obedience to the Spirit didn’t so much win a convert as help someone on the margins of God’s people find a place in the center. This man was a eunach, a third gender in Hebrew thinking and theology, excluded from ritual participation in Jewish life. This man is Black, a Gentile from Ethiopia, not a Hebrew descendant from Judea. Yet, this man had traveled from Ethiopia, to Jerusalem to worship at Passover. This gentile traveled some 1600 miles by chariot, knowing he was not allowed in the temple, happy even to stand outside the gates to worship the God of Abraham. And here he is reading the scroll of Isaiah. the very prophet who promises in chapter 56 that eunuchs and foreigners who hold fast to God’s covenant would be given a name and an inheritance in the house of God. From the frame of Love, this gender-non-conforming Black man, who loved God enough to ride 1600 miles just to be able tailgate at the temple during passover, became the fulfillment of prophesy himself. He couldn’t receive circumcision, for obvious reasons— and if they’re not obvious, ask me after worship and I’ll explain it to you privately— so, despite being a believer in the God of Israel, he could never really be Jewish. But when he sees water and asks Phillip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” the obvious answer is, nothing. Nothing would prevent him from being baptized! This African man from a sexual minority who had been excluded from temple worship and full participation the Jewish life, was already included in the heart and mind of God. He returned home to became the father of the Ethiopian Church, and we still retell his story in ‘the house of God’ to this very day. God is love. We do not have to worry about whether we are abiding in God, because God is abiding in us. We do not have to be afraid because God is love and perfect love casts out fear. We do not have to “accept Jesus as our personal savior” because there is not such thing as a “personal savior” and, as I John tells us, “in this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent God’s Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” We aren’t saved by accepting, believing, trusting that God loves us. Rather, because God is love, we are already included in God’s work of salvation, and all God asks of us is to accept, believe, trust that this is true. In other words, we are to abide. to rest, to relax into the good news that God is love. A love we can give away without proposition without transaction. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. We are freed to share the good news of the Love God is, with no ifs, ands, of buts. We are free to find those folks still on the margins of God’s people and love them right into the center because God first loved us. And Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as Jesus is, so are we in this world. You are already branches of the true vine. You are already loved, because God is love. We can rest assured that there is no coming storm, for which we had better be prepared. We don’t have to get right or get left. All that is left to do is abide, to relax into the Love God is until we become love too. Amen. 

Disclaimer: I am going to say some things that may challenge you. If you have been with me in Christian Conversations, in the Monday Bible Study, or in our Lenten Book Study, you will have heard me say these things before. As always, I view every sermon as an invitation to further conversation. If you have questions, complaints, comments, or would just like to discuss these issues further, I will be happy to join you at lunch, to make an appointment for coffee or a meal, or to sit with you at the time and place of your choosing. I saw a clip this week of an interview with a young man describing his experience of coming out. The experience was very painful, because it meant that he would have to leave his religion, Mormonism, and as a result, it likely also meant leaving his family. When he didn’t hear from his mother for a few weeks, he assumed that he’d been correct. But then his mom reached out to say she was also leaving Mormonism. He was stunned, and when he called her to hear how she had come to this conclusion, she said that she couldn’t be a part of a church where her children weren’t welcome. In this young man’s retelling of the conversation his mother had said to him, “If you’re going to hell, we’re coming with you.” The fear of Hell has long been a tool of many religions, Christianity among them. Teachers and preachers of Hell have used this doctrine to scare folks into good behavior, or at the very least, into submission to the authority of the institution. Mothers don’t have to be taught to love their children. Mothers do have to be taught to reject their children in order to keep their good standing within a religious community. We kept folks in line by keeping them worried that if they don’t think like us, don’t live like us, don’t worship and pray like us, then they cannot be saved— or, even worse, that we will withhold salvation from them. That word, ‘saved,’ sort of begs the question, “From what? Or, for what?” And we have often answered that question in ways that preserved our power. We said God is coming to judge the living and the dead, sending the righteous into everlasting peace and consigning the unrighteous to everlasting damnation, conscious eternal torment, separation from God— in a word, Hell. We have heard preachers and teachers of Hell tell us that verses like Acts 4:12, There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved— we have heard them explain that we have to make some kind of a decision, that we have to opt into salvation or opt out of Hell, like we are signing up for some kind of spiritual insurance policy instead of being invited into a relationship with the Living God. We heard them warn us that only the church has the truth, and only the church can forgive your sins, and outside the church there is no way to be saved. But I have good news. The Hell you fear does not exist. Hell does not exist in the scriptures, except by mistranslation. It did not exist in the imagination of the authors of the New Testament, except by our misunderstanding. It does not now, nor did it then, exist in Jewish theology. And it does not exist in reality, except by our own making— that is, if there is a Hell to be feared, it is the conditions we create or accept for our neighbors and ourselves. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in the Gaza strip, where children survive a war only to be starved to death. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in Ukraine where tens of thousands of children have been shipped off to foster care in Russia; it is in Tigray where rape and starvation are weapons of war, it is in Sudan where civilians are caught in the crossfire between two warring generals. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is in churches where mothers have to choose between loving God and loving their children. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is watching your child suffer through an addiction, or weather a divorce, or fight cancer, or anything else you’re powerless to stop. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is sitting in a cafeteria hungry, the air thick with food and the laughter of peers, while your stomach growls because you have unpaid lunch debt. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is miscarrying the child you very much wanted in the bathroom of the ER because it is illegal to treat you until you’re almost dead. If there is a Hell to be feared, it is sleeping in the car with two kids, because you job can’t pay for both childcare and a place to sleep at night. So, if we are being saved, what are we being saved from and what are we being saved for? Well, instead of ‘saved’ that word is probably better translated as “liberated” or “delivered. The term does not imply an individual inner sense of spiritual freedom, nor is it the promise of heaven hereafter. Rather it is a real, lived experience of liberation from oppressive and repressive circumstances. Those who would use the name of Jesus to promise you a sense of spiritual freedom in the great by and by while allowing you to remain in oppressive circumstances in the here and now, has taken the name of God in vain. Those who would use the Name of Jesus to promise you individual atonement and absolve you of any responsibility for the hell in which you allow others to live has blasphemed the name of Christ and distorted the Gospel. These preachers and teachers of Hell are hired hands and wolves in sheep’s clothing. No doubt some of the preachers and teachers have preached and taught this bad theology in good faith. But that has not blunted the impact of the doctrine of Hell teaching us, as one preacher put it, that we could “pray our way out of a problem we have behaved ourselves into.” Beloved, if the church wants to preach salvation, we have got to get the message right. Jesus has come to save us, not from some future Hell, but from all the hell we create or endure in the present. God in Christ has already secured the future, already won the victory over sin, death, and the devil, already redeemed all our pain and suffering. God has already saved us from an uncertain and terrifying future. And God has saved us for life and love and community in the present. God has saved us for preaching and teaching the good news of God’s universal, liberating love. God has saved us for the work of deliverance and liberation in solidarity with those going through hell in this life. Peter is in the hot seat in Acts precisely because he has saved a man from his illness in the name of Jesus and his response when questioned by the very people profiting from a system of domination was to declare that in the name of Jesus he had been sent to proclaim and enact liberation from systems of domination. First John teaches us that Love is our common calling, asking, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? Little Children let us love, not in words or speech, but in truth and action. And the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Good Shepherd has descended to the dead, has robbed any idea of Hell of its power, and gives us the power and authority in his name to do the same here and now. The Good Shepherd has seen what the world has done to us, the Hell we have created for each other, and says to us, “If you’re going through Hell, I’m coming with you.” This is what we are being saved for, to love our neighbors, not in words or speech, but in reality and in liberation. Let us love in Hospitality, in Generosity, and in Solidarity. The Good News the church should proclaim is not an individual insurance policy against eternal damnation. Let the message of the Church be this; If you’re going through Hell, in Jesus’ name, we’re coming with you. We are coming to rob hell of its power, to liberate you in this life, and to call you toward the next. We are laying down our bad theology, we are laying down our claim to power, we are laying down any doctrines rooted in fear, we are laying down any need to choose between family and faith; we are laying down our lives as individuals to take up our life as a community. We are taking up the name of Jesus to not only preach deliverance but to make deliverance a reality. We are giving up on every version of church where any of God’s children are not welcome. In a word, we have come to love. Love is the beating heart of the gospel. Love is the very nature of God revealed to us in Christ. Love is our origin and love is our destination. The hell we have feared does not exist. But if you’re going through hell in the here and now, we’re coming with you. Amen.

In our increasingly digital world, it is getting harder and harder to avoid being scammed. “You’ve won a brand new car! I just need your Social Security number, a vali d credit card, and your mother’s maiden name to verify your identity.” Or an email from an all-too-official looking address, bearing the seal of a government agency you’ve never heard of, says you have unclaimed property, but they need to have access to your bank account to transfer the money directly to you. We’ve all heard sales pitches, multi-level marketing schemes, and fishing scams to the point that I am genuinely surprised that any of these tactics still work on the general public. One born every minute I guess. As a general rule, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. And maybe that’s what we would have thought, way back in the first century, when someone tried to tell us of the resurrection. Maybe we would have received the good news with a raised eyebrow and suspicious glance at the folks next to us. “Raised from the dead, huh? What do I look like; an easy mark? What’s your angle, anyway? You know they killed him, right? You wanna be next? I don’t!” Each of our lessons for today tell us of the apostles or Jesus himself trying to persuade skeptical onlookers that the resurrection is not some marketing ploy, a publicity stunt, or conspiracy theory. Peter has commanded a disabled man to rise up and walk in the name of Jesus. The crowd is dubious and Peter explains that not only is the healing real, but so is the faith that comes in the name of Jesus, so is the promise of repentance and forgiveness, and they can trust it because they just say it with their own eyes. In I John, we are told that we can call ourselves Children of God, because that is what we are. We are told that we will be righteous when Jesus is revealed, because we will see him as he is— that is, not as we may have imagined, not has we have feared, not in some fantasy, vision, or nightmare, but in reality, flesh and blood reality. Speaking of flesh and blood reality, that is exactly what happens in the gospel; Jesus appears in their midst of those gathered in the upper room, and they are terrified. They saw him crucified, they watched him die. Is this a ghost? “No,” Jesus says, “because ghosts don’t have flesh and bone, like you can see I have. They don’t have empty stomachs, either, for that matter; Y’all got anything to eat around here?” Half scared and half overjoyed, they give him some fish and he eats it. And if we’re being honest, its maybe just as hard to believe all this resurrection business in the 21 st century as it was in the first century. The good news doesn’t seem all that good. It barely sounds like news. The proclamation of the resurrection in our day isn’t met with a “How can this be?” but with a “Who cares?” or “So what?” But the news of the resurrection is real, whether or not we receive it as good. To some folks, even if it is real, it sounds more like bad news than good. Repentance sure seems like bad news if you’re the one being asked to give up the very things that resurrection is bringing to an end, things from which your benefiting in the here and now. Repentance is a call to change our perception of reality and take responsibility for the role we’ve played in making things the way they are. Once Jesus finishes his fish, the gospel says that he explained the scriptures to them opened their minds to understand it, and then called them to preach repentance in his name— that is, to open the hearts and minds of others with this good news and call them to give up all the ways they benefit from the way things are— because they had been witnesses of these things. They had seen these things with their own eyes. They could see reality as it is. With our minds opened and our hearts changed, repentance is simply coming to terms with reality as it is because we can see it as it is. We can call ourselves children of God, because that is what we are. We can grow in our likeness to Jesus because we can see him as he is— because we can see ourselves as we are and through the good news we can see ourselves as we will be. And rightly seeing things as they are, we are called to participate in the making right of the world while we wait for the fullness of justice to come at the resurrection. The good news of the resurrection is not too good to be true. And since the resurrection is true, so is the call to repentance, the call to change our hearts and minds to perceive reality as it is, the call to take responsibility for the way things are, and to participation in God’s remaking of reality into what it will be. The resurrection will confront us before it comforts us. It will scare us to death before it calls us to life. It will raise our eyebrows before it raises our consciousness. The resurrection is not too good to be true. It is not a scam or a conspiracy theory. It is the call to perceive reality as it is and to hope in what it will be. So open your minds and change your hearts and you too will be witnesses of these things. Amen.