Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 8, 2026

As many of you may already know about me I grew up a fundamentalist. I was part of a tiny Appalachian Baptist tradition that believed the King James Version of the Bible was the only divinely inspired version of the Word of God. and therefore was “the only rule of faith and practice,” as the denomination’s charter stated. My faith was forged in the hellfire and brimstone preaching of this tradition and cooled in the soothing melodies of shaped note singing about the sweet by-and-by. My grandparents took me to church starting at age 2, letting me stay at their house every Saturday night, a tradition that only ended when I moved to college. My grandfather had this story about how he had come to the faith, miles underground in a coalmine in southwestern Virginia. One night, working in the deep darkness he cried out to God for salvation and it completely changed his life, and he would spend the rest of his life sharing Psalm 139:8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. as if it had been written about his own life. Eventually, he met and married my grandmother, who came to the faith because of him. My grandfather even had his own radio show, where he would ‘testify’ live, on air each week. Many of the other folks in our church had these dramatic stories of instantaneous conversions where God had delivered them from a life of scandalous sin, and had now written their names in the Lamb’s book of life. When I was 7 years old, I understood that God loved me that Jesus had died for me, and that I wanted to go to heaven. So, when I was told that I needed to accept Jesus as my personal savior, of course, I did. Now, in this tradition, the next thing you do is you begin to learn to share your story, your testimony, as we called it. But I was seven. As you might imagine, my story couldn’t include that Jesus had delivered me from drinking or sleeping around, or gambling, or any of the other things that so many of the other testimonies had included. In fact, my realization that I needed a savior had come as something of a shock because it hadn’t ever occurred to me that I didn’t already have one. My faith had come from the witness of others, from their testimonies. From those whose life experiences had driven them to Jesus, whose conversions had literally saved their lives. But where was God in my own story? What good news did I have to share? In John’s gospel today, we see John’s experience of the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ baptism has led him to point to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It is John’s testimony, that Jesus is greater than himself, even offering a baptism greater than his own baptism, that Jesus is the Son of God, that compels his own disciples to leave John and follow Jesus. When Jesus sees John’s disciples following him he asks, “What are you looking for?” John had seen the Holy Spirit descend and confirm that Jesus is the Son of God. Maybe these disciples didn’t know what they were looking for. Maybe they were expecting something like the heavens rending, or voices booming, or a dove descending. We don’t know for sure what they did find, but whatever they found compelled Andrew to go and tell his brother that they had found the Messiah. The season of Epiphany is about recognizing God first in Jesus and then everywhere else. We see from John’s story and from Andrew’s story that God comes to us in the proclamation of the truth about Jesus. God is calling each of us to be preachers and prophets, to first recognize God in our own stories, and then go and tell these stories to others. But we cannot always identify God in our own stories. As I grew in my own faith, I realized that though I couldn’t point to a dramatic rescue or to an instantaneous conversion experience my testimony is that I cannot remember a time when I did not know Jesus. And, it wasn’t until I came into the Lutheran Church and began to hear the stories of folks mostly baptized as babies, who also couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t know Jesus, that I began to hear echoes of my own story. I found that God had been at work in my life the whole time. And I would never have known this without the testimony of others. This good news of God come near in Christ Has been passed from John the Baptist, to the disciples, to the early church, through 20 centuries of believers, into Appalachian coalmines, across AM radio waves, even through fundamentalist preachers. God is revealing Godself not only in the stories of others, but also in your own stories. God is continuing to write the story of the Gospel, in our hearts and lives, through our mouths and hands, calling us to testify to the God come near, first in Jesus, and then everywhere else, that you too may point to God in the flesh and echo John’s proclamation, Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Amen.

What a busy few weeks it has been. I hope you found some rest to recuperate from the Christmas hustle and bustle. I am always grateful for vacation time, to relax and restore, to come back to work with renewed commitment and the energy to do all the things I have to do. But I imagine I am not alone in discovering that returning to work after a vacation is a bit surreal. It always takes a minute to remember the routines, to remember the passwords, to remember what it is I do on a Monday. My desk looks like my life did in December, cluttered with delayed tasks abandoned in the triage of looming deadlines, a stack of old bulletins waiting to be recycled, hastily written notes that I’m sure made sense when I wrote them, a cup of coffee I didn’t get the chance to finish. And sitting at that desk again I have a hard time trying to locate the renewed commitment and restored energy I thought I had found on vacation. I imagine that the return to the classroom, the shop, the office, the lab, feels much the same. What was that thing I was going to do? What was that change I was going to make? What was my resolution? When is my next vacation? I wonder too, if we don’t approach worship in much the same way. I hope that your time here in this place or the time you spend with us online is a source of renewal, of inspiration. I hope you find in this time together a sense of connection to God and to neighbor. I hope you remember who you are and whose you are and take with you the resolve to live a life of devotion and discipleship. But I also wonder if that inspiration, renewal, and devotion is harder to remember in the harsher reality of overflowing inboxes, looming deadlines, impatient clients, and traffic jams. It makes me wonder too if John the Baptist ever questioned his work. I wonder if he ever found it difficult to remember what drove him into the wilderness. I wonder if he questioned his message, his method, standing for hours in the murky waters of the Jordon, in wet camel hair with wrinkly toes and a belly full of locusts, baptizing repentant strangers. I can imagine his hope for the messiah had as much to do with finding some rest for himself as some rescue for his people. We hear echoes of his hope in his question, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” I need you, Jesus. I need a messiah to come and fix all this. I need a rescuer to come and save us from Rome, from ourselves. I need to be reminded that this work is not in vain, that this work is accomplishing something larger than me. I need to know that my sacrifice is seen, is valued, is effective. I need to be baptized by you. Why do you need to be baptized? Theologians, pastors, preachers, and parishioners have been repeating John’s question since he asked it. If this Jesus is God why does he come for a baptism of repentance? Of what does Jesus need to repent? But I think this is the wrong question. The church has spent some 20 centuries defining, articulating, and proclaiming one baptism for the forgiveness of sin. We speak of a rite of initiation, of inclusion. Paul speaks of our old selves being buried with Christ and raised with him to new life. We speak so much and so often of what baptism is and does that we haven’t seen the forest for the trees. Baptism is a rite on initiation. Baptism does forgive our sins. Baptism does unite us to Christ. But this day to remember the Baptism of Jesus, set here in this season inaugurated by the Feast of the Epiphany, invites us to see something less familiar to us in the rite of baptism. This season after Epiphany is about encountering the mystery of incarnation, about contemplating the union of God and matter, the manifestation of God with us in the person of Jesus, the Christ. Baptism is about more than initiation or inclusion, forgiveness or religious identity. Our baptism is the beginning of a new way of showing up in the world, a new way of seeing and encountering the world. Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordon to give us the gift of baptism, a sacred mystery that reveals the sacred mystery at the heart of the universe— the whole of creation is a sacrament. The whole world is a sacrament, the union of matter and God’s very self. And in this sacramental universe we are each priests, ministers of word and work. No matter your vocation, no matter your occupation, you are the steward of a sacred mystery in which God transforms your work into a means of grace. Your scrubs, lab coat, uniform; your nametag, backpack, briefcase; your sport coat, pants suit, apron are all sacred vestments. Your desk, work bench, hospital bed; your countertop, stovetop, laptop; your changing table, kitchen table, conference table; each are a sacred altar where you pour out yourself as an offering and receive back nourishment in return. We do not come to worship, to the font or the altar, to find this sacred mystery in the only place that it exists. We come to worship, to the font and the altar, to learn to see this sacred mystery everywhere that it exists. We should learn from these sacraments to see that God in Christ, revealed in the humble majesty of his birth, proclaimed from heaven in his baptism, is not a singularity in the story of the cosmos, but a particularity which exposes the deeper truth. The incarnation is not limited to Jesus. The incarnation is exposed in Jesus. This is the Epiphany, the revelation of God in Christ, after which we begin to see the God in all things. The whole cosmos is filled with God. All creation emanates from God’s very being, and is destined to return to this source. This is what we mean by salvation. Baptism is the proclamation that this human, this sinner, this mortal, is also divine, a saint, immortal. Creation is filled with the life and love of God. Your life is filled with the life and love of God. Your work is an extension of this Creation, and your work too is filled with the life and love of God. We, like John the Baptist, encounter the Christ in every patient, client, customer; in every student, parent, volunteer; in every spouse, child, neighbor. We, like John, must approach our work as a sacred honor, a humble privilege of service to God’s very self. This does not mean that Mondays won’t suck, that customers won’t complain, that inboxes won’t overwhelm us, that babies won’t cry, that we won’t get sick and tired of standing in our private Jordons wishing to be rescued. It will mean that we begin to see the sacrifice as unto God, as part of a larger sacred mystery as a holy privilege of humble service in a world overflowing with the life and love of God. Amen.

Like most folks, I suspect, I love Christmas carols. They stick in my head Long after the tree is gone, And the lights are put away. I would dare say that most of us could even sing the first verses of most Christmas carols by heart. 100% off-book. Think about it, “Joy to the World,” “Silent Night,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “The First Noel,” “It Came upon a Midnight Clear.” But the real meat of these carols is in the second, or even third verse. Take for instance, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” We could all sing Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting light, The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. But do we pray O holy Child of Mary Descend to us, we pray. Cast out our sin And enter in, Be born in us today? The birth of this Christ child is not some abstract theological concept with no bearing on our reality. Nor is this baby the object of mere sentimentality. This child’s birth is good news to shepherds Working the third shift And living in a field To whom It came upon a midnight clear, That glorious song of old… “Peace on the earth, Good will to all, From heaven’s all gracious king.” But you don’t have to work the third shift to identify with the next verse: And you, beneath life’s crushing load, Whose forms are bending low, Who toil along the climbing way With painful steps and slow; Look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing; oh, rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing. And in this child, whom the herald angels sing we, Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail, incarnate Deity!... Mild he lays his glory by, Born that we no more may die, Born to raise each child of earth Born to give them second birth. Our hope is that this God veiled in flesh This incarnate deity Is Emmanuel. God with us. God for us. The God of shepherds Who lays his glory by To shine in dark streets, Pleased as a man with us to dwell. Epiphany is the second verse of Christmas. Epiphany is where the story gets complicated. Epiphany is where we realize just how vulnerable God is in the form of a baby, in early first century Palestine, under the reign of a murderous tyrant, bent on keeping power at all costs. The epiphany is that God is vulnerable because God is love. In this Love incarnate, we find that grace is the very nature of the Universe, because grace is the word we use to describe the way love behaves toward the beloved. This is the mystery we heard about in Ephesians, the light we heard about in Isaiah, and the guiding star of those wise men. Christ Jesus, God in the flesh, Love in a body, revealed to the whole world. Many of us could sing O holy night, The stars are brightly shining, It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth. As we go from here, Into a world divided, awash in pain, and on the brink of war We must remember that Truly he taught us to love one another, His law is love and his gospel is peace Chains shall he break, For the slave is our brother, And in his name, All oppression shall cease. His law is love and his gospel is peace! As the songs of angels cease, as the babe in the manger becomes the toddler on Mary’s knee, as the wise men take another road home, we begin to live into the second verse of the incarnation. The verse that tells us that the Almighty is also the all-vulnerable. That God has come among us, to live and love, to suffer and die alongside us. To live and love to suffer and die, not instead of us but in us, and through us. God’s radical solidarity with the whole of creation in Jesus Christ is the Epiphany. And this radical solidarity is the calling of the whole church. Where there is pain, where there is suffering, where there is oppression, we are sent not only to proclaim good news but to embody the law of love and the gospel of peace. May the Epiphany continue in each of us! Amen.

What I have learned in these past few years of living in Atlanta is that the traffic is really not as bad as it is usually made out to be. It is the driving that is terrible. Nearly every trip I make feels like some kind of road hazard simulation, wherein the objective is to arrive at your destination alive, the car in one piece, on time, and in obedience to the law. Often, I am forced to sacrifice at least one of these objectives to get where I am going and home again. Since I arrived here alive, in an intact vehicle, and on time, I’ll let you guess which objective I most often sacrifice. This seeming simulation is not gridlock, all of us stuck on the freeway, inching along, hour by hour. It is more like an obstacle course of pedestrians, racecars, school busses, debris from accidents, roadkill from armadillos to contorted deer, out of state tags, and distracted drivers. Almost every day, I have to maneuver around someone going 12 miles below the speed limit, and as I pass, I can see the tell-tale chin to chest posture of someone looking at their phone. Or they’re navigating the GPS on their mounted device. I have seen folks putting on makeup at 32 mph in the left lane. Once on 285, I saw a man reading a full-size newspaper with both hands in a car that I am almost certain does not have a self-driving feature. I’ve seen folks eating entire meals, vaping mushroom clouds out the driver’s window, changing shirts, holding a lapful of small dogs— or children— and I’m sure each of you could add to this list of circus tricks. Father Richard Rohr says that how we do anything is how we do everything. That is, if we take just a moment to consider our driving, we can see that we are driving like we are living our whole lives— distracted, in a hurry, anxious, and dangerously inconsiderate. We are all in a hurry, and none of us are used to doing one thing at a time. We have been conditioned by our culture, by our employers, by social media videos of life hacks, to believe that we should be maximally efficient, that we should be able to walk and chew gum and do calculus in our heads, all at the same time. All of the preparations leading up to this holiday only add to a never-ending list of responsibilities, expectations, deadlines, and outcomes we have to meet. It’s no wonder we can’t drive undistracted. And it’s no wonder that we are so resistant to the idea of prayer. Who has time? Who can be still? Even if I sit still, my mind is racing, filled with to-do lists and disquiet, with memories of that time when the guy in the drive thru said, “Come again!” and you said, “You too!” You can’t stop feeling kind of offended when that lady at work saw your new shirt and said, “What a unique color.” What’s that supposed to mean? You can’t stop feeling the mixture of anger and sadness that only grief can bring. We think of prayer, contemplation, mindfulness, as something beyond us, something for monks and mystics not parents and people with day jobs. Multitasking is the opposite of contemplation. But I think it is also the beginning. Near the end of our gospel reading is a curious phrase. “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” Now, Mary, while traveling, has just given birth in a barn, with a feeding trough for a crib. She’s been visited by a band of uninvited— and likely unwashed— shepherds who were directed to this barn by a company of the heavenly host. Road-weary and child-birth exhausted Mary receives the shepherds’ story, treasuring and pondering it “in her heart.” There is another form of contemplation, meditation, prayer, for us working stiffs that we aren’t often taught. Mary is the mother of an infant. Do you really think she has the time for a 20-minute meditation practice twice per day? No. Nor could most of us carve out such time in our busy days to sit silently and meditate. But Mary can be our model for a new kind of prayer. ************************ St. Julian of Norwich is often depicted with a hazelnut in one hand. St. Julian saw a truth about the whole universe contained in this tiny hazelnut. She wrote, “In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.” In the focused attention of St. Julian she became aware of a truth beneath, behind, and beyond the hazelnut, namely that God made, loves, and holds together the whole universe. This is the same truth proclaimed to Mary by angels and shepherds which she treasured and pondered in her heart. But instead of a hazelnut, she had this baby, wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. When we are multitasking like a one-man band we cannot focus our attention on just one thing. But if we can focus on just one thing we too might find the love of God hidden beneath, behind, and beyond this one thing. We, like Mary, are given this baby to focus our attention this Christmas. We are given this hour, this worship service, to treasure these words and ponder them in our hearts. We are given this bit of bread and this sip of wine that focusing our attention on Body and Blood of Jesus we too might find that we are made by God, loved by God, and kept by God, just like everything else in the universe. Tonight, tomorrow, and over the days to come, from time to time, take just a moment to focus your attention on the thing at hand, your work in the moment. As you pack away your decorations, maybe this year, keep out the manger and the baby Jesus. Let this baby be a reminder to focus your attention in the moment. Over time, you will begin to see as Mary and St. Julian saw, the love of God hidden beneath, behind, and beyond this moment, this work, this object. This seeing will transform your whole life. And it might even make you a better driver. Amen.

In liturgical year A, our gospel readings will be set primarily in the Gospel of Matthew. Each of the four gospels provides a unique perspective on the message, ministry, and person of Jesus. Historically, the Gospels are each depicted in art with symbols that represent the tone of the book. Mark, probably the first of the four, is short and action packed, and is depicted as a winged lion. Luke, written by a physician, and the most complex, is depicted as a winged ox, a beast of burden, for all the work this gospel is doing. John’s gospel, written last, is written once the church has had ample opportunity to grapple with who this Jesus is, and because they know him to be God in the flesh, one step ahead of everyone else. John’s gospel is depicted as an eagle, an image of Jesus’ soaring rhetoric and transcendence. But the gospel of Matthew, written sometime between Mark and Luke, is about Emmanuel, God with us. For Matthew, Jesus is a prophet, a priest, a king. Jesus is the new Moses, the new Elijah. Matthew’s gospel begins with the promise that this child born to Mary is Emmanuel, God with us, and ends with Jesus’ promise, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The Gospel of Matthew is depicted as a person. For Matthew, this image of God— born of the flesh, born of a woman, born into the care of Joseph— this Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us in the flesh. But Joseph didn’t have the benefit of 2000 years of interpretation and art history to help him understand that the news he had received about Mary’s pregnancy was anything more than an insult, a slap in the face, an assault on his manhood, on his dignity. Joseph was a righteous man, by all accounts. He was perfectly within his rights under the Law, to send her away, to break the engagement, which actually required a divorce, even though they were not yet married. He would also have been within his rights to expose her, to reveal her obvious treachery, her infidelity, to condemn her. But because he is a man of righteous character, and possibly because he loved her, he chooses to simply sidestep the issue, after all, this clearly isn’t his problem. This was done to him. But rather than open the both of them to public shame, he will send her away quietly, and he will return to his normal life. And who could blame him. Why should he be responsible for someone else’s child? Someone else’s family? There are many in our own lives we would be content to “put away quietly,” to wash our hands of, to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for. It is easy to think, “I cannot cure poverty. I do well to make my own ends meet. Surely, God does not expect me to do more for others that I am able to do for myself.” Maybe our thinking sounds more like “I have worked my tail off to get where I am. Those who don’t have what I do couldn’t have worked as hard as I have, so let them work for it like I did.” “I don’t mind people coming here to escape violence in their home countries, but they should do it legally. We can’t help everybody!” Maybe we’ve been tempted to throw up our hands give up on the idea of climate change, or social justice, or even just loving our neighbor because the difference we’d make alone will never solve the problem. Or maybe we’re ready to walk away from Christianity altogether, because it seems like it’s more obsessed with self-preservation than living the example of Jesus. Whatever it is, you are not alone in feeling crushed by the weight of something larger than you, larger than you can change alone, larger than you can solve alone. And like Joseph, there is nothing to stop us from leaving, nothing and no one to prevent us from putting away quietly all the things we’d rather not be responsible for. When Joseph has made up his mind to use the right he has to walk away, God comes to Joseph in a dream. God comes and confronts Joseph with the opportunity to go beyond the letter of the law to live by the root of the law: Love. God calls Joseph to do what God is doing. God too is righteous. God too could have looked at the human race in our neediness and wantonness, and God could have walked away. God could have killed Adam and Eve in the Garden. God could have killed Noah in the flood. God could have let the children of Israel remain in slavery in Egypt, or killed them with starvation and thirst when they complained about their freedom. God could have put away Israel because of David’s sin, could have destroyed the people under the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans. But God didn’t. God loved anyway. God left the garden too. God gave the rainbow to Noah as a promise that God would overlook human sin. God wandered the desert in a tent and received no sacrifices when the Israelites ate only manna. God tied God’s honor and glory to the honor and glory of David. And when Solomon’s temple was destroyed, God went into exile, too. And now, God has come to Joseph in a dream. God has come to Joseph in the life and faithfulness of Mary. God is coming in the flesh and bones of Jesus. And beloved, God is still coming in flesh and bone. Matthew’s gospel is represented by a human face to remind us to look for God hiding behind human faces. God is with us in those we would prefer to put away quietly. God is with us in solidarity with the human condition, choosing our lot as God’s own, making our needs God’s needs. Making our suffering God’s suffering. Making our joy God’s joy. This is love; choosing to live in solidarity with another until their problems are our problems, their joys are our joys, their lives are our lives. Joseph shows us what it is to love, what it is to live in solidarity, by hearing and trusting the call of God to take Mary as his wife and Jesus as his own son. We too have the opportunity to live in this solidarity, seeing God in the human faces we encounter in our work, in our world, in our homes, and even in the mirror. God is coming in the flesh. O come to us, abide with us, our God, Emmanuel!! Amen.

I grew up singing in church. I didn’t grow up a Lutheran, and so, the hymnody I learned was not the baroque melodies and ancient chants of the early and medieval church, but the old timey, shaped note, and bluegrass tunes of early 20 th century Appalachia. When I was growing up, the church choir sounded more like the Grand Ol’ Opry than a grand old opera. There was no pipe organ, only a piano, and a reluctant pianist, who was more talented than confident. There were a few different choir directors in my time there. This position was usually filled like the pianist’s position; whoever could say “no” least convincingly ended up with the task. It was pick-up choir. We didn’t rehearse, and everyone who wanted to was invited to join us from the congregation. It was often a 50/50 or 60/40 split between choir and congregation. It was in this church singing that I was introduced to the Spirituals. Songs like “Were You There?” “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” and “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.” These songs moved me in ways that the other old-timey music we sang never did. Singing in church turned into singing in school, where I learned more Spirituals, like “Elijah Rock,” “Soon I Will Be Done” and a cadre of Spirituals arranged and composed by Jester Hairston. In his autobiography, Fredrick Douglass writes about his experience as a slave in Maryland before his escape. Douglass writes about the songs the slaves sang. He writes: “[These songs] told the tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. … I have been utterly astonished, since I came to the North, to find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.” This as all made me wonder, What should we make of Mary’s singing? How should we hear Mary’s words? What tune was her heart singing that day? Would her happy words be set in a minor key, or in ecstatic exaltation to make the Hallelujah Chorus sound like a radio jingle? Our gospel reading today is a song that Luke’s Gospel tells us arises from the heart of a young girl, visited by an angel, pregnant before her arranged marriage, sent away to live in secret with her distant cousins, in a land occupied by a foreign power. When she arrives at her hiding place, her secret is known, even by the baby in her cousin’s womb. Mark Lowery’s “Mary Did You Know?” is a sweet song, but the better question is, Mary, did you cry? Did you stress eat? Did you doubt? Were you afraid? Were you embarrassed? Did you hold the hand and wipe the brow of Elizabeth as she gave birth to John? Did this terrify you? How did you bear the weight of being “blessed” for “all generations?” Were your hands raised to the sky as your soul magnified the Lord, or did your tears wash the dust from your face? As Douglass reminds us, spontaneous singing ought not deceive us into believing that the joy of Mary’s song was somehow proof that Mary’s ankles didn’t swell, that her back didn’t hurt, that she didn’t have morning sickness or weird cravings, or that this child now “with child” wasn’t overwhelmed by the enormous weight of all that she knew. Mary sang to remember; to remember the promises of God, to remember the promises of the angel, to remember the faithfulness of God, the goodness of God, the mercy and justice of God. Mary sang to remind us, of God’s promises, and faithfulness, and goodness, and mercy, and justice. Mary sang to remind God. Mary sang to “breathe the prayer and complaint of bitter souls boiling over in anguish…. a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” A prayer to God to scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, and to scatter proud thoughts in her own heart. A prayer to God to bring down the mighty and raise up the lowly, and to make sure she was one of the lowly ones. A prayer to God to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty, and to trust that what filled her now was indeed a good thing. Mary sang for joy, a joy born of anguish transformed, sorrow transcended, suffering transmuted. Mary’s song did not spring from her joy. Mary’s joy sprang from her song. Beloved, Mary’s song is a form of prayer we have long neglected. Mary’s song arose from her willingness to embrace the reality that was. Mary’s song, and the songs of slaves were not weak resignation to the suffering of the moment as God’s divine, inscrutable plan, but blessed assurance in the nearness of a God who suffered with them, the steadfastness of a God who would deliver them, the justice of a God who would vindicate them, and the power of a God who transforms pain into comfort, sorrow into solace, suffering into relief, and death into resurrection. Mary’s pondering of the angel’s greeting and treasuring the truth in her heart reconciled her to the harsh reality of the world as it is, and grew in her the hope of the world to come. When we allow these songs to rise up in us, to well up in our hearts, and minds, and mouths we too have joined Mary’s song, the song of hope for slaves, the oppressed, the hungry, the lowly. We have become the mother of God, bearing life and hope and salvation into the world by our song, by our prayer, by our joy. Amen.

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.