Advent 3, Year A, December 14, 2025

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.

Today, we mark the 508 th anniversary of the events we now call the Reformation. We call ourselves Lutherans, a name chosen for us by our detractors, because we admire and hold as true much of the writing and thinking of Martin Luther, an Augustinian Monk and accidental change agent, who wrote prolifically, polemically, and sometimes transformatively. What Luther intended to be an academic critique of the corruption and heterodoxy of the Roman Church became instead the underpinning of a new Church, proclaiming justification by grace alone through faith alone. While we do not celebrate schism— praying alongside our Catholic siblings for the unity Jesus prayed for on the night of his betrayal and arrest— we commemorate these events as a movement of the Holy Spirit to renew and enliven the Church to proclaim the Gospel of God’s love. This remembering is important. We see in our first reading from Jeremiah the price of forgetting. The weeping prophet extols the people of God to remember when God took them by the hand and led them out of slavery in Egypt; to remember when they abandoned the covenant, to remember their infidelity to God despite their intimate, spousal relationship with God. God promises an unbreakable covenant, a law inscribed on the hearts of God’s people. They won’t have to remind each other, because everyone will already be acutely aware of who they are and Whose they are. In our Gospel lesson, Jesus says, if you continue in my word, you will be my true disciples and you will be free.” But the people of Judea are forgetful, preferring to remember themselves as the promised children of Abraham instead of the rescued slaves of Pharoah. “We’ve never been slaves to anyone,” said these Hebrew people, whose central, generative, defining national story is being lead out of slavery in Egypt… and out of bondage to the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, and the Persians, and the Greeks, and now they are occupied by the Romans. Jesus says that they are still slaves to the sin that has insnared them, and the Greco-Roman culture that has enthralled them, and if they would just remember the truth, they would be free indeed. We, too, are a forgetful people. This is why we commemorate the Reformation. This is why the liturgical calendar is a circle, repeated on a three-year cycle. Because we forget, again and again, and need to be reminded, again and again. We look back at history as a static reality, firm and immovable events that tell us who we are. Thing A happened, therefore Thing B happened, and so we can draw Meaning X as our conclusion. So mark your calendars, and we will commemorate Meaning X every year, just like this, forever and ever, Amen. But I think we have missed the whole point. I think history itself and the meanings we infer, can teach us a much larger story. Instead of focusing on individual events and drawing universal and immutable conclusions, we should see that the whole of history is itself a repeating pattern of order, disorder, and reorder. There is ‘the way things were,’ a change occurs, and this is the way things are now. To use our own story, the pattern is life, death, and resurrection. We are invited less to believe that these things happened, more to recognize our own experience in this story, and to remember that resurrection is always coming, and to trust in that fact. This is faith: God is faithful and invites us to trust this is true. Knowing this truth, experiencing this truth, recognizing this truth, is faith that justifies, because it is this trust that draws us close to the very heart of God. History is not a bare repetition of events, anymore than the Creeds are an invitation to see how many seemingly impossible things we can force ourselves to believe. History is remembering that life and death and resurrection is the pattern of the cosmos, the very nature of reality. The reformation was not a singular event. The reformation is the eternal work of the Holy Spirit, who is always making things new. God is forming, we are breaking, and the Spirit is re-forming, again and again. The call to faith, is better understood as a call to faithfulness, a call to fidelity, to trust that God’s re-forming work in the Spirit will repair all we have broken, and we are free to stop doing all this breaking. If we want to be Jesus’s disciples, we will not have to muster up some deep and abiding belief in the promises of God. If we want to be Jesus’s disciples, we will have to remain in Jesus’ word— that is, we will have to remember all the times we have lived the pattern of life, death, and resurrection; we will have to trust that God is faithful, even when we are not. And if life, death, and resurrection is the pattern of the cosmos, then the path of discipleship is the work of grief, the work of remaining committed to reality as it is, not as we wish it was, not as it used to be, but AS. IT. IS. And the world as it is needs committed disciples of Jesus. The world does not need us to pine for former glories, to hang on tooth and nail to bygone eras of greater influence, overflowing Sunday School rooms, and programming 7 nights a week. The world does not need us to fight our corner of a theological debate, to build a Christian Nation, or mandate school prayer. But the world does need people who know the truth and can set us free. The world needs people who remember who and Whose they are. The world needs disciples committed to grieve, committed to bearing witness to each other’s grief, and committed to letting go of all the things we use to avoid our grief. We need disciples who will make a new path by walking it. We need seers who can feel the sacred energy in rocks and trees and earth, because they found it first in water and bread and wine, and recognizing it here, can teach us that the whole cosmos is the incarnation of God’s very self and must be cared for as a sacred trust. We need folks who can see a neighbor in need and become a neighbor in return. We need the spiritual-but-not-religious ones to teach these religious-but-not-often-spiritual ones how to love the world as it is until we are united in a spiritual community. We need mystics and mothers, we need farmers and poets; we need lovers and fighters, advocates and accomplices. We need to let the world know that God is not mad at any of us, but that God invites us all to both know better and do better. We need folks who know— who remember, who have been around the cycle of life, death, and resurrection a few times and can remind the rest of us to hang on until resurrection comes again. Reformation is not our past, as though it were behind us. Reformation is the nature of reality, the calling of discipleship, the eternal work of the Holy Spirit. We are made right with God because God is love and grace is how love behaves. We are made right with God because God is faithful even when we are not. So, If we would be disciples of Jesus, if we would be children of the Reformation; let us learn to grieve, learn to remember, and become the Love and Grace we seek, because the world needs dying and rising disciples who will speak the truth and set us free. Amen. 

Have you ever had one of those days where you can’t find your glasses, or your phone, or your keys, and despite all your frantic searching, turning purses inside-out, going through the junk drawer twice, and checking all the pockets of all the clothes in the hamper, you’re still empty handed? And then someone, a spouse, a child, a roommate finally seems to notice that you’ve turned the couch upside-down and all the cushions are in a pile and says, “What are you looking for?” before pointing out that your glasses are on your head, or the flashlight your using is your phone, or your keys are in your other hand? Yeah. Who hasn’t been there. My aunt once found her keys in the refrigerator, dropped there when she was putting away groceries. I knew a lady who had driven all over town retracing the steps of her busy day to find her phone, only to be flagged down by a fellow driver who wanted to tell her that her phone was stuck to the roof of her car by the magnetic charging strip. I myself have spent a good amount of time looking for my glasses only to discover that I was wearing them. And such a moment of realization, is a mix of emotions: relief at finding the “lost” object, embarrassment at how obtuse you’d been, exhaustion from the physical act of searching and the re-regulation of cortisol, dopamine serotonin and oxytocin. Often, we end up in this state as a result of some other stress. We are looking for our glasses because we need to focus our attention on something hard to see. We are looking for our phone because we need some information or some connection and conversation. We are searching for our keys because we need to leave to get where we are going on time. Similarly, it is often moments of internal and external stress that drive us to search for God. In moments of anxiety, we search for a God who will prevent negative outcomes. In moments of anger, we search for a God who will punish our enemies and vindicate us. In moments of grief, we want a God who will bargain with us, who will help us find some way to avoid this sense of loss. And in these moments of great stress God proves as hard to find as any pair of glasses, phone, or set of keys. Each of our readings today focus on a hidden God and the struggle to find them. Jacob and his whole household are on the run from his guilty conscience. After defrauding his older brother of their father’s blessing and inheritance, he’s convinced that Esau is out to get him. Sending his family on ahead of him, Jacob wrestles all night with what the reading calls “a man.” It is only it is only 7 verses later that we are able to infer that Jacob has wrestled with God all night long when he names the place something like, “The place I met God face-to-face.” Jacob’s struggle lands him a new name, “wrestles with God,” Or “Israel” in Hebrew, a name later taken by the whole people of God. Jacob had to wrestle, to struggle, to grapple, to refuse to let go of this hidden and unnamed God to find the peace he was looking for. Jacob walked away with a new perspective on God, and limping from the fight. In II Timothy, the author is writing to a community beset by persecution, in need of some kind of guidance, experiencing big changes in the Church, and hoping to hear from God just how they should proceed. The author, who is almost certainly not the Apostle Paul, but borrowing the authority of Paul and his relationship to Timothy to address these concerns with a pastor’s heart and the apostle’s gravitas, hopes to both encourage and instruct the covert community. The author tells them to remember what they learned— the gospel— and from whom they learned it— the Apostle Paul. Then he points them to the Scriptures, which he describes as “inspired”, “in-spirited,” or “God-breathed.” The Greek word used here is a sort of portmanteau, a combination of the word for a “god” and the word that variously means breath, wind, spirit. Other writers of the time use the world to mean “life-giving.” We might see this passage, then, as telling us that God is hidden in the scriptures. Luther taught that the scriptures contain the Word of God like the manger held the infant Christ; it is full of both the Word and so much straw. It takes a bit of sorting to cling to the Word and let go of the straw. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a parable instead of just making his point directly. And in his parable, there is not a character who is easily identifiable as God. He has a persistent widow— on the bottom of the social ladder— and an unjust judge— conversely, having cheated his way to very near the top of that same ladder. The widow persists until this judge grants justice as an acquiescence for his own convenience. Each of these passages is about struggle, wrestling, making a defense, debate, reproof, rebuke, persistence, resilience, endurance. Jacob wrestles with God, The epistle encourages the reader to endure suffering, and the parable commends the widow’s perseverance. If we misunderstand faith to be simply belief, then there is no room for struggle, for wrestling, for grappling. Any disbelief is too much. Reality, rather than revealing God to us, becomes proof that there is no good and loving God. If there is any God, he— always a ‘he’ in this estimation— is like this unjust judge, granting justice only infrequently and only when cajoled or forced into it. But the collective witness of these readings gives us a God who is hidden in the depths of reality, in the wisdom of Scriptures, and in the slant-rhyme of parables that land on our ears as an approximation of deeper truth. Jesus comes to show us a faith beyond belief— a lived experience of the good news of the gospel truth. You don’t need to be persuaded of a truth you have experienced for yourself. The mystery of faith, “Christ has died. Christ is Risen. Christ will come again.” sounds like wishful thinking, a mantra we hope to manifest by our positive affirmation, until you realize that the Truth we are searching for was in our hands the whole time. This mystery of faith should be a reminder that we have all been living inside the cycle of Life, and Death, and Resurrection this whole time. Paula D’Arcy tells us that “God comes to us disguised as our lives.” The God for which we have been searching is showing up all the time. God is showing up in the struggle, in the wrestling, in the sorting of Word and straw, in the persistence, in the waiting, in our dying and rising, in all our hopes and fears, trust and disbelief. The Gospel, the good news, is that God loves us, has saved us, is redeeming the world, even when we can’t see it right in front of us. So, when that is hard to believe, stay in the fight, wrestle, struggle, endure. Keep searching. Remember all the times you have experienced the cycle of life, death, and resurrection, return to the places and people that help you remember, and dare to hope, to trust, that it will happen again. The God we have been searching for has been near us, in the font, on the table and on our lips this whole time. Remaining committed to the struggle, wrestling, enduring, persevering, this is faithfulness— this is faith. Christ has died in you. Christ is risen in you. Christ will come again in you. And when the Son of Man returns, will he find faithfulness in us? Amen.

‘Tis a gift to be simple ‘tis a gift to be free ‘tis a gift to come round where we ought to be and when we find ourselves in the place just right ‘twill be in the valley of love and delight. This well-known hymn comes from the Shaker tradition, a group of Christian ascetics founded in New England just before the Revolutionary War. Ann Lee— or Mother Ann, as the Shakers would call her— was born the daughter of a factory worker in Manchester England, In 1770, Ann had a vision of Jesus that changed her life. A Quaker, Ann told her story and her views to the Society of Friends in Manchester, and she was summarily rejected. Ann and those who adopted her views came to New England in 1774, and founded a community in the midst of the First Great Awakening. Her community practiced ecstatic dances, leading the worshipers to convulse in beatific rapture, and they became known as the Shaking Quakers, and later the Shakers. They were defined by their dancing, by belief in racial and gender equality, by the practice of celibacy, and by their craftsmanship. With her “hands to work and heart to God,” Mother Ann told the community to “Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you would die tomorrow.” One writer of the time described the Shakers this way, “[their way of life] was simple, the way the gospel of Christ was simple.” When I read through the lectionary for this week, I couldn’t help but think of the Shakers and this hymn. I’ve hummed it all week. In II Kings, Namaan comes to see the prophet in Israel. He comes with an entourage, in robes and finery, at the invitation of a King. Namaan has leprosy, and he’s desperate for a cure. When he arrives at the gates of the prophet’s home, he isn’t met in kind. Instead of a red carpet and regal pageantry he’s met by a servant with a message. “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and you will be clean.” Namaan goes from state visit to a state of shock. Insulted and incredulous, Namaan turns the whole caravan around to head home instead of wading in the muddy Jordan seven times. But one of his servants approaches Namaan to ask why he won’t comply with such a simple request. When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we will not be ashamed. Against his better judgement, Namaan complies, and to his great surprise, he is healed of his disease. Then he turns back again, bringing gifts and his gratitude to the prophet. To turn, turn then will be our delight, ‘til by turning, turning we come round right. We see a similar story in the Gospel. Ten lepers cry out, “Jesus, Master; have mercy on us!” Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priest. As they turn, they are healed, and off they go. But one of them, the foreigner, turns back again, making his way to Jesus and giving his thanks. ‘til by turning, turning we come round right. Namaan wanted something a little more flashy, something that looked like it was worth the trip, something to tell folks back home. He couldn’t accept that the healing he sought could be so simple. Or maybe, he couldn’t believe that something that had plagued him so long could be so easily discarded. The ten lepers in our Gospel, didn’t even dare approach Jesus. They yell their prayer over a distance, and Jesus yells his instructions back. Only the Samaritan now-former-leper turns back, covers the distance between them, and bows to show his gratitude. When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we will not be ashamed. Like Namaan, the world we live in, the zeitgeist that haunts our media landscape and our newsfeeds and For You pages, seem too complicated, too urgent and important, too long endured to be washed away in muddy water. Surely our times are too sophisticated, too educated, too curated and wi-fi enabled to find the cure for what ails us in something so simple as the gospel of Jesus Christ. Long before the Shakers, as the Church and the Roman Empire began to merge into a single entity and newly empowered bishops began “wrangling over words” and jockeying for ecclesial power, mystics hoping for a simple way to follow Jesus walked into the deserts on the outskirts of the Empire and devoted themselves to solitude, to silence, and to prayer. Their prayer was derived from this very Gospel text— among many others— “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” This short prayer, easily memorized and often repeated, became a simple way to follow Jesus in a pre-literate culture, and has remained a primary spiritual devotion of Eastern Christians, both monastics and laity. Writing of this prayer, Swedish theologian Per-Olof Sjögren says, It is a summary of the whole gospel; God sent [the] son to be a redemption for the sins of [humanity]. [God] let him die and rise again so that today he lives and reigns eternally as Lord over the living and the dead. If we go through the Creed attentively and thoughtfully, we find a summary of the whole content of the Bible. Similarly, those who pray the Jesus Prayer thoughtfully find the same: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. Every word is heavy with meaning. Every word gives the richest associations to those who know their Bible. Besides being a direct prayer to Jesus, it contains also teaching about him about his work of redemption his dignity as king, his deity, and his loving mercy. Mystics and mothers, monks and millworkers, priests and peasants have prayed this simple prayer. The repetition of it is one thing, but focused attention on it is another. Contemplation is the practice of sustained attention on the presence of God. To invoke the Name of Jesus is to acknowledge the presence of Jesus. When our attention wanders away, we are to turn again toward the ever-present Jesus. And when it wanders again, we turn again. ‘til by turning, turning, we come round right. Both the Shakers and the desert mystics knew that if they remained attached to, enthralled by, the overly complicated ways of empires they could not devote themselves to the simple way of Jesus. They did not see the gospel as a calling to change the world. They saw the gospel as a promise that they would be transformed by the simplicity of the way of Jesus. And Jesus would change the world. The reluctant obedience of Namaan transformed him and filled him with gratitude, turning his heart toward the God of Israel. The lepers’ obedience to Jesus’ instructions helped the Samaritan leper recognize mercy when he received it. Similarly, our faithfulness to the simple way of Jesus transforms us in mercy to be merciful in a merciless world. When we find our attention has been stolen by the constant barrage of our overly complicated world, turn again. When the simple way of Jesus seems too simple to be effective, turn to the water anyway. When the healing power of God’s mercy meets you on the road, let it stop you in your tracks and turn you back to Jesus. When others are wrangling over words, remember the whole of the gospel is summed up in this simple prayer— Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me— and let it turn your heart to the heart of God in Christ Jesus. We cannot be responsible for the whole world. But we can turn toward the gospel and turn toward our neighbor. We can turn toward Jesus. And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘twill be in the valley of Love and Delight. Amen.

There is a lot of suffering in the world right now. There is still war raging in Ukraine and threatening to spill over into NATO territory triggering WWIII. The Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed tens of thousands, orchestrated food shortages, and has been condemned as genocide the world over. Decades, if not centuries, of social and political turmoil in Central and South America— as well as many other parts of the world— has driven desperate people from their homes to make a dangerous voyage, often on foot, through uninhabitable deserts and tropical forests, pleading safe passage from marauding gangs and larcenous ‘coyotes’ looking to profit from their desperation, all for the mere hope of a better life in the US. And now a government formed in our name has made a scapegoat of these people and is using gestapo tactics to harass and intimidate, to disappear and incarcerate them. Our outreach ministries here have centered around addressing widespread hunger, worsened by the pandemic, and the rising cost of food and housing. It might be easy to share Habakkuk’s frustration. “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack, and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous—therefore judgment comes forth perverted.” And yet, some take a different tack. Some look at all the violence, poverty, destruction, and tragedy, in the world and thank God that they have been spared. #Blessed. Trusting that they have escaped by their innocence, and that in the end, God will deliver believers from the ultimate destruction of all this anyway. Some look at the world and ask, Why do bad things happen to good people? Others look at the same world and their own lives and conclude that bad things don’t happen to good people. These other folks might pray like these apostles in our gospel reading. Give us more faith, make us more righteous, protect us even more from all the evil in the world. Both the stressed and the #Blessed believe that God has the power to transform the world, to end all suffering, to rescue and redeem. One person wonders what’s taking so long, and the other wants an extra helping. But the response that the scriptures give for both requests is the same. In our reading in Habakkuk, there is a mistranslation at the end of verse 4. In the original Hebrew that verse reads more like “the person of integrity will live because of their faithfulness.” The righteous do not live because of their faith but those with integrity live because of their fidelity. Their faithfulness to the law and the prophets creates the world they yearn for. In our Gospel reading Jesus responds to the request for more faith with a pair of parables. Faithfulness the size of a mustard seed has miraculous power, and you won’t get extra credit for obeying a commandment. Jesus’ responds, “Your fidelity is more than enough to impact the world around you; so, get busy.” Both Jesus’ response to these apostles and God’s response to Habakkuk remind me of a quote from Abdu’l-Bahá, the founder of the Baha’i faith. Abdu’l-Bahá said, “Sometimes I want to ask God why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he can do something about it, but I’m afraid he just might ask me the same question.” What good is our faith if it doesn’t make us more faithful? What good is our belief if our lives make the gospel unbelievable? What good is our trust if our neighbors can’t trust us? What good is our hope for salvation if it means the world’s destruction? God is standing in solidarity with the poor, with the hungry, with the victims of injustice and asking us, “What is taking you so long?” “How long, O Church, shall I cry out for help and you will not listen? Or cry ‘Violence!” and you will not save?” “Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble?” “When, O Church, will you live with integrity?” Christ has come to us in the person of the poor, the hungry, the vulnerable to ask us to give him something to eat, knowing that fidelity the size of a mustard seed can perform miracles, and there are no gold stars or merit badges for obeying the commandments. The issue was never our faith, but our faithfulness. We have the power and the invitation to be partners with God in remaking the world around us, in doing something about the poverty, famine, and injustice together. If we are #Blessed it is to be a #Blessing. At Christ’s table, we are all servers, unworthy of special praise because of the measure of our faith, which is itself a gift from God, but called by this faith to increase our faithfulness, our integrity, in grateful response to God’s faithfulness and integrity. Beloved, the good news is that we have the power and the invitation to join God in becoming the answer to our prayers. How long, O Church, will we put up with poverty, famine, and injustice when God has given us the power to do something about it? Amen.