I remember being in school and having to do all my math by hand, showing all my work. Of course, the reasoning always given for solving these problems long hand was “ You won’t always have a calculator!” Well, I guess we showed them, huh?! I have a calculator, a compass, a phone, a notebook, a camera, a calendar, a measuring tape, a level, the whole Bible, Luther’s Small Catechism, a parking meter, a newspaper, all my favorite music, a tv, and the entire internet in my pocket. All day. Every day. And it has completely changed our lives. Often for the better. This thing can summon an Uber if you’re stranded. It can order takeout if you burn dinner. It can remind you it’s time for your pet’s flea and tick medication. It can help you run a small business out of your home. It can help you stay in touch with friends and family who live far away. It can guide you, turn-by-turn, from one destination to the next. It can help you find and connect to a community. It can help you pray. But, as they say, the greater the light, the greater the shadow. For all the good these devices can do, they are also capable of inflicting great pain. There is a show on MTV called Catfish. The premise of the show is that people write into the host for help in tracking down a person they met online. Usually, the person who writes in has met someone on social media or a dating site, and they have formed a relationship. The person writing in is usually deeply in love and, because their significant other has failed or refused to video chat or meet in person, the subject of the show has become suspicious that the other person has not been truthful about their identity or some aspect of their lives, and they want the host of the show to help them get to the bottom of the situation. With very rare exceptions, the show almost always ends with one person devastated at the loss of this relationship and embarrassed at having been duped, while the other person is exposed and ashamed. Further, the internet has made it easier for hate groups to organize, created a platform for fringe conspiracy theorists to gather a following, and allowed our politicians to circumvent the normal means of mass communication, replacing press conferences and nuanced policy discussions with tweets and hashtags, memes and TikTok videos. Despite the fact that the internet and smart phones have democratized access to information we have only built higher walls between us and allowed pundits and politicians to divide us and pit us against one another. Ultimately, we all wind up echoing the question of Pontius Pilate from the Gospel of John: “What is truth?” It has become very difficult to know the truth and to trust it. We are all fearful that we are living in some cosmic version of an episode of Catfish, being gaslit by our virtual relationship to reality and hoping that someone will be able to help us find what is real. And then we come here this Easter morning with all our grief, suspicion, and anxiety to hear a story about a man rising from the dead and it feels like a bridge too far. Like some sort of fable or children’s story, the stuff of legend or naivete, and we are too grown up, too educated, too streetwise or too wounded to fall for it. To be quite honest, just reading these lessons for this Feast day, it sure seems like even the people in the texts themselves struggled to believe what they were hearing. If we zoom out to the whole of the 10 th chapter of Acts, Peter has received a vision of “unclean” animals— or non-kosher animals— and a voice says that he should “Rise, kill, and eat.” Peter is a good Jewish boy, and he is suspicious, like this is a test of some sort, and he says to the voice, “Yeah, no thanks.” The vision repeats itself twice more and he repeats his answer both times. Then a group of visitors arrives and asks Peter to come to the home of Cornelius, a Roman centurion of the Italian Cohort, because Gentile Cornelius and his non-kosher household what to be baptized into the church. Then Peter gets it, and our first reading is his response. Paul gives a lovely defense of belief in the resurrection in our second reading, but you’ll remember that had he not been knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus or he would have still been persecuting Christians instead of being one. And by his own account, even after that miraculous experience, he still spent 14 years learning what it all meant before he became the Apostle to the Gentiles. And then the Gospel reading. These women are standing in the empty tomb, and had it not been for these shiny-clothed messengers they wouldn’t understood what was happening. And when they tell the story to the apostles, they don’t believe either. Peter has to get up and go to the tomb to see for himself. If these women can stand in the empty tomb and not get it; if Paul had to be struck down and re-educated; if Peter had to be told multiple times and has to go stand in the empty tomb himself— what hope is there for us who struggle to know the truth, who are suspicious of being duped, who are leery of being catfished by reality? Well, our hope is precisely in their disbelief, incredulity, and hesitation. Peter wasn’t convinced by the threefold vision. Or by the women’s story. Paul wasn’t convinced by the blinding light or the voice of Jesus. The women weren’t convinced by standing in the empty tomb. In each instance, they needed reminding, repetition, contextualization. They needed some time to become acquainted with this new version of reality. Their experience needed a story, and the story needed their experience. The Resurrection of Jesus is not an idle tale to be believed in spite of our better judgement, but a reintroduction to reality— a reality that includes the brutality of the cross, the suffering of grief, the ubiquity of death, the tyranny of empire, the injustice and oppression of state violence, the skepticism of disbelief, and transcends all of it with awe and wonder, with healing and hope, with life, freedom, and justice, with a resilience we might call faith. The story of the Resurrection is not a fairy tale ending to the narrative of the life and death of Jesus. The story of the Resurrection is not some creedal litmus test, is not a Pollyanna hope in the afterlife that abandons us to the whims and wiles of this one. The Resurrection of Jesus is a story looking for your experience. The Resurrection of Jesus is an invitation to trust that suffering, grief, death, tyranny, injustice, and oppression are not final. The Resurrection is less about belief and far more about experience, about discovering that life and death and resurrection are always happening. The Resurrection is about showing up to grieve what we have lost and finding that God was working while we weren’t looking, in ways we could not have guessed, in ways we cannot quite understand. The Resurrection is about standing in the empty grave of all our hopes and dreams and needing to be reminded that God promised to bring life out of death. The Resurrection is about holding space for our disbelief until our experience makes sense of the story. The Resurrection is about trusting our experience when the story is hard to believe and trusting the story when our experience is hard to bear. This practiced trust builds in us a resilience we might just call faith. And seeing it for ourselves, we will go on our way, amazed at what has happened. Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen. 

Hosanna to the Son of David!! Welcome to Holy Week!! We have made the journey with Jesus here to the hill overlooking Jerusalem and we have begun our ascent to the ho ly city. As we orient ourselves in this story we need to consider two simultaneous contexts: the context within the text of the Gospel according to St. Luke and the context within which St. Luke wrote this Gospel. Within the text, Jesus has come down the mount of Transfiguration and he has set his face toward Jerusalem. Jesus’ ministry has taken a tone quite critical of the city of Jerusalem, making reference not to the Jewish people of the city but to the seat of power and influence, corruption and collusion, that the city represents. Jesus refers to Jerusalem the way cable news pundits refer to Washington. We have heard Jesus speak of Jerusalem as the brood he wished to gather under his wings but they would not have it. Jesus tells parables in which the rulers and their clerks, the Pharisees and scribes, are the villains and scoundrels instead of the noble heroes. And we have now reached the week of the Passover, when people of Jewish faith from all over the Roman world would travel to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast in the shadow of the Temple. We have heard Jesus critique the ruling class of the Jewish people, a group which should have sided with and cared for the Jewish people, but has sided with the Roman Empire instead and has colluded with this occupying force in order to enrich and preserve themselves at the expense of the Jewish people. We have seen Jesus call disciples named “Simon the Zealot,” “Judas, son of James,” and “Judas Iscariot.” The Zealots were an armed resistance group. Roughly 400 years before the time of Jesus, the Maccabees had led a violent revolt against the Greek occupying force and succeeded in retaking the temple. During their siege, the temple lamp only had enough oil to last one day, but the oil lasted 8 days, a miracle commemorated during the feast of Hannukah. This revolt was led by a man named Judas Maccabeus. For two of Jesus’ disciples to be named Judas while Judea and Jerusalem are again an occupied territory, either means families are hoping for a repeat and naming their babies in protest, or these men are taking to themselves the moniker of a revolutionary. Further, Iscariot is not a surname, but a nickname, derived from a kind of concealed dagger. So, this person’s name is something more like a mob enforcer would have; less of a first name, last name situation and more like ‘Guido the Knife,’ as one of my professors put it. Passover is such a big deal and so many people fill the city that Pontus Pilate, the Roman Governor, is in town to make sure things don’t get out of hand. He would have ridden into the city on a horse, under Roman insignia, paying homage to Caesar, who styled himself as “savior” and the son of the gods. The Jewish ruling class is nervous about this guy flouting their authority and showing no respect for Rome. They worry that Pilate will think they can’t control the people, and maybe that they actually can’t control the people, and so they are plotting to kill Jesus as an insurrectionist, as a usurper, as an example; a threat to the Pax Romana, the so-called “peace” Rome imposed through intimidation and brute force. Then here comes Jesus, a grown man riding on a baby horse, surrounded by Zealots and at least two guys named Judas, one of which is probably armed— they’re all waving palm branches— a symbol of Jewish resistance— to shouts of Hosanna, which means “save us” and calling Jesus “Son of David,” meaning the rightful ruler of Jerusalem and the Jewish people. We have to assume that the folks who watched Jesus lampoon Roman symbols, chide the Jewish rulers who had colluded with Rome, and now shouted “Save us, Son of the Real King!” were assuming that Jesus was going to start a revolution, was going to ‘drain the swamp,’ was going to storm the governor’s palace, was going to be the savior who sat on the throne of David and ushered in a new golden age of Judean prosperity and universal respect. Or maybe they thought that this is how God was going to finally bring justice and real peace. That Jesus was going to remove the tyrant and his oligarchs, establish a new, egalitarian kingdom, a commonwealth of and for the people. But Jesus’ very first stop upon entering the city is the Temple, and he doesn’t just drive out the leadership; he drives out everyone, even the livestock, and seems angry that the temple had become a place of commerce instead of a house of Prayer. Everyone was surprised and deeply disappointed. Whatever they had hoped Jesus would do, he had not done. Have you ever been disappointed with God? Have you prayed and hoped and dreamed and fretted and plotted and worried and wondered why God would take so long to act? Or why God would not act at all, and allow such terrible things to happen? Reality is often disappointing, a cascade of dashed hopes and realized fears. Coping with this disappointment— or avoiding coping with this disappointment— becomes a way of life. When this reality disappoints us it is easier to be mad at reality, to embrace an exonerating and indemnifying cynicism as a protective shield. It is easier to avoid reality, to embrace fantasy and fiction, conspiracy and the illusion of control; to numb out, to dissociate, to distract ourselves from our disappointment or from being disappointed again. But Palm Sunday is an invitation to sit in our disappointment— with reality, with God. Jesus is, as Richard Rohr says, “Reality with a personality,” Jesus came to show us that God is reality itself, that our anger and disappointment is with God. We had hoped for a God of prevention and protection but we have a God of redemption and solidarity. Jesus has a relationship with reality, with God, that is able to face reality as it is and to grieve for it, until a new relationship arises from the grave of the old. Jesus came to show us in the Garden of Gethsemane that he shares our anger and disappointment, and that forgiveness is the product of grief. Jesus has come to show us that reality includes the cross. Palm Sunday is not the end of the story. Palm Sunday is the starting point— from which, we will see the whole cycle of life, and death, and resurrection. Palm Sunday is the invitation to begin again, to enter into this grief, this disappointment, this anger at reality, this anger at God; because we cannot grieve until we are honest about our disappointment, cannot forgive and be forgiven until there is confession and reparation. Palm Sunday is the invitation to begin to trust that life and death and resurrection is the pattern of all things. Palm Sunday is the invitation to lean in, to follow the whole story, to find ourselves within it, and it within our everyday lives, until it builds with in us the resilience that we have called faith, until it leads us to trust in reality, to trust in God. So, join us this week. Come and make the whole journey with us. Especially if you are disappointed in reality, especially if you are angry, especially if you are grieving or struggling to grieve, especially if you need forgiveness or you’re struggling to forgive, especially if you are struggling to reconcile with reality as it is. There is a place for you in this story, because this story is yours. I promise you will not stay disappointed. 

The Celtic people of Ireland have a term used to describe the moments or physical spaces in which a person experiences an overwhelming sense of transcendence, of con nection to the divine, to the great beyond. They call these encounters “thin places” because the veil between this world and the next has grown so thin as to be, in that place and at that moment, imperceivable. Particularly in Ireland there are mountains, coasts, and old sanctuaries now in ruins where people have reported feeling God’s presence in such real and powerful ways that they forget where they are altogether. Others describe thin places that are more local and intimate; in a time of prayer or great distress, in a moment of discernment or confusion, the veil thins and brings an overwhelming sense of peace and tranquility, of clarity or purpose. Perhaps you have experienced such a thin place— a location, a state of mind, a taste or smell, that ushers you into an intimate encounter with the Divine, an encounter that leaves you different than when you arrived, and your understanding of the Holy or the Holy One will never be the same. Today we come to the last Sunday of Lent. This season of contemplation, curiosity, and confession has brought us to a thin place in Jesus’ ministry. After raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus and his disciples are gathered in the home of Mary and Martha and the now living Lazarus is at the table with them. It’s hard to even imagine the overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude, of awe and astonishment that must have filled the air in that place. A beloved friend, brother, and follower of Jesus has just been resurrected from the dead, and not warm-bodied resuscitation dead, but stiff and stinking four-days-dead. This resurrection is not only miraculous, not only a sign of God’s work in Jesus’ ministry, but for Jesus, it’s personal. These are his friends, a sort of chosen family for Jesus here in Bethany. Clearly a place where Jesus felt at home. And among the cross-conversations, passing food, laughter, and celebration, Mary seems to slip away unnoticed. On her return, the casual atmosphere quiets as the sweet smell of perfume overtakes the scent of fresh bread, good wine, and unwashed bodies. Mary has knelt at the feet of Jesus who was reclined at the table. She has opened a jar of pure nard and she has anointed Jesus’ feet, wiping up the excess with her hair. Mary has found her thin place and she has poured out holy oil to mark this sacred moment. Mary makes Jesus the Anointed One— she marks Jesus as the Christ. What she bought for his burial she couldn’t hold. It was not precious by comparison to the surpassing worth of the feet it soothed and salved. The Greek has a word for this—Kairos. This word is often translated as “time,” but that is because we don’t really have a word for this kind of time. It is a point in time when the past, present, and future meet in a divine and miraculous moment. This was the moment, and she had learned her lesson; and she would rather honor the living than grieve the dead. If death meant anything now. Yet there is one who cannot enter this thin place with those at the table this night. Judas cannot move past the tangible things, the things he controls, things like money, things like their public image. He cannot fathom “wasting” such a costly commodity nor can he believe that Jesus would let something so intimate happen so openly. Judas is not worried about where God is and what God is doing in this moment, because he doesn’t count moments. He counts minutes because time is money and he’s afraid they’re running out of both. There is another Greek word for time—chronos. Judas is a slave to chronos time, the kind of time that keeps an eye on the watch, that calculates what is valuable or invaluable, what is spent and what is saved, based on what it has to offer his position, his pocket, his power. Judas knows Jesus can’t have much time left. Judas knows it would take the average Judean almost 10 months to earn what that perfume would cost. Judas knows what they could get for it and how much he could pocket if they did. A touch lightheaded and feeling ever poorer as the scent began to fade, Judas protests, “We could have sold that for a small fortune and given the money to the poor.” Jesus defends Mary: “She bought this for my burial. It is always time to help the poor. But you won’t always have this moment.” I wonder if we too aren’t slaves to chronos time, constantly trying to squeeze a few extra seconds out of our relentless schedules, evaluating what gets our attention based on what it has to offer us in return, taking for granted this table we share with the Anointed One, appalled at the wasteful and undignified piety of others at the table. Yet as people of faith, God is inviting us into kairos time, God’s time, counted in moments and not minutes. Time that doesn’t ask, “how can I spend and save my time,” but instead asks “how is God at work in this moment, and how am I called to meet God there?” This is exactly what Mary is doing in our passage today. Her relationship with Jesus is so intimate that she meets him in this moment this thin place, this place between death and life, this place between what has been and what will be, this place between what God has done and what God is doing. And Mary chooses to be present in this moment with Jesus, forgetting what lies behind and straining toward what lies ahead. Beloved, we stand on a threshold this day, Between living our lives to the minute And living our lives in the moment. Jesus is inviting us to the thin places That are our very lives, To recognize that Jesus is still with us In the monotony of our ordinary days, In the sinks full of dishes Baskets full of laundry Looming deadlines, Failing health, And dwindling bank accounts. In these moments, We can live like Judas, With an eye on the bottom line, And a hand in the cookie jar, Looking out for ourselves, Minding the minutes Until things are better, Until things settle down, Until the congregation is bigger, Until the market bounces back, Until the midterms, Until… Until we have taken the time for granted And missed Jesus in the moment. Or We can live like Mary, With our eyes on Jesus. We can forget the anxiety of the minute We can embrace God’s abundance now, We can eulogize the living, Telling them what they mean to us while we have them Instead of waiting for their funeral. We can find Jesus with us In our homes, At our tables, At our desks, computers, workbenches, dashboards. We can live in the thin places Between Kairos and Chronos time Where Jesus comes to meet us. Places like this table, this thin place Where the church on earth And the host of Heaven Join in an unending hymn To praise the Son of the Living God And meet Christ in the moment. We can come here And share in this table Where the line between bread and body And wine and blood Has become so thin That they have become one. And having met Jesus here We can pour out our lives Like precious oil, A fragrant offering to Jesus, To bless the meeting place of heaven and earth And blur the line between the minute and the moment. Amen. 

“There was a man who had two sons.” This is how Jesus begins this parable we have come to call the Prodigal Son. There was a man who had two sons and one day the young er son came to the father and asked for his share of the inheritance. The father gave his son his share of the property and the son left to make a new life in a new place. The younger son used his fortune to buy friends and throw parties. Then tragedy struck. There was a famine. And the younger son ran out money and ran out of friends and wound up feeding pigs and wishing he could eat so well. So, the younger son decided to go home. “I can’t just walk up to dear ol’ dad and expect him to feed and clothe me,” the younger son thought to himself. “I’ve burned that bridge. I can’t be his son. But I can be his slave.” So, the son goes home and as he nears the house his father, who’s kept his eye on the horizon ever since the younger son disappeared behind it, runs to meet him on the road. The younger son can’t even get out the little speech he’s been rehearsing the whole way home. The father won’t have it. “Quick!” the father shouts to a slave, “Get a robe! Get some shoes! Get a ring! My son is home!! I thought you were dead, But you’re alive! We’ll have a party! I’ve been fattening up a calf for just this reason!! We have to celebrate!!” This is where the older brother comes in. Maybe it’s the end of the day and he’s come from the field for dinner. Maybe the sound of music or the smell of the roasting meat drew him home in curiosity. Whatever the reason, When a slave says the party is for his younger brother he’s indignant. He cannot, WILL not share this meal. “Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you,” protests the older son. “never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!” Now, If we’re being honest, I’m sure most of us can concede that the guy has a point. I mean, this older son has stayed and done his job, honored his father, as the law commands. He’s been there the whole time and now he’s expected to celebrate the return of his whoremongering little brother? I mean, for heaven’s sake, no one even told him about the party!! He had to ask a slave what was going on. I’m not sure I would have gone in either. Maybe you’ve had this same feeling. Maybe you’ve lost a brother or a sister to years of addiction and your Mom or Dad seem to be enabling them. Maybe you’re working harder and longer, struggling to make ends meet, and folks who don’t seem to work at all are eating up your tax dollars in social services. Maybe you’ve been in line at the grocery store behind someone speaking Spanish and using an EBT card and thought to yourself “I can’t believe I’m paying for that.” Maybe you’ve been angry that so much time and resources have been spent on wars in other countries when there are so many problems in this country. The rising tide of nationalism and classism in our nation has been exploited to drive a wedge between neighbors, even between family members. Those of us who were born citizens, or had access to the resources to become citizens, we, like the older brother, may see the plight of our Latinx siblings, the quagmire of foreign entanglement, the rising food prices and falling stock prices and say, “Not it! Not my problem. You need to stay where you are, fix your own country make your own money.” This is what the older brother means when he says “this son of yours.” He means, “this is your problem, and not mine.” This thinking largely comes from the fact that we have been fed a steady diet of individualism and hyper-capitalism that teaches us that life is everyone for themselves, the rich have worked harder than the poor, and that with enough work we too will be rich. We have no responsibility for anyone but ourselves. What I have I earned, I deserve. If you don’t have, you did not earn, and do not deserve. But Jesus’ parable leads us in a different direction. ‘Son, you don’t understand,” the father says to the older brother. “You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours— but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!” A clean conscience needs no mercy, and the older son wants the younger son to pay, to work for it, to deal with his problems on his own, just like he had. But the father reminds the older son that everything he has he has by the same benevolence that killed the fatted calf to celebrate with the younger son. Where the older son wants to distance himself from the younger son, the father calls him a brother. “this brother of yours.” This meal is not just a party, it is an act of reconciliation. You see, this feast not only reconciles father to child but child to child, brother to brother, and this feast, by which the father receives back his son, is the same feast by which the older son receives back his brother. The feast of our reconciliation is the Eucharist, where we are not only reconciled to our Parent, but to each other, brother to brother, sister to sister, sibling to sibling. God is reconciling the world to Godself and to each other. No matter how far away the younger son went, how much he squandered, how shameful his living, how little he thought he deserved it, he was always a son, always a brother. And no matter how much time and energy is spent working for the father, doing what is right, avoiding what is wrong, the older son is no more a son that the younger. Nothing could undo or augment their relationship to their father and brother. But by this celebration feast, each could begin to renew his relationship with his father and brother. Beloved, there is nothing in all of creation that could ever separate us from the love of God. But none of us are only children. This meal that gives us back our relationship with God our Parent also gives us back our neighbors as brothers, as sisters, as siblings. We can no longer say “This son of yours is here illegally.” “This daughter of yours is not my responsibility.” Because we are God’s children too, and every child of God is our sibling, our responsibility. This feast of our reconciliation is not a private meal for two, but an open invitation to celebrate that we are all God’s family by the same grace. We were dead and are now alive!! We were lost and are now found!! And this is something to celebrate!! AMEN. 

“Have you heard the news?” I hear this question a lot. We like to be in the know, to have the scoop, the latest information; to be informed, on the inside. As the new s cycle has gone from the morning paper and the evening news to real time, live-tweeting, video streaming, 24/365, keeping up with the news has become quite the chore. In the early twentieth century, German theologian Karl Barth advised preachers to write their sermons with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. As a smartphone has replaced a newspaper this sort of preaching has become ever more elusive, and I sometimes change the direction of my sermons to address midweek changes, sometimes even early Sunday morning changes. Our screens have become extensions of our psyches, even of our bodies. TVs, computers, tablets, smartphones have become part of how we communicate, how we show up in the world and how the world shows up to us. As these technologies become more and more immersive they become more and more subversive of our ability to rightly perceive reality. These devises, their apps, and their creators are dividing us into market segments in virtual spaces, and into us and them, we and they, the rational and the duped, the sane and the insane, the good and the evil in actual spaces. Algorithms sort and silo us, monitoring and predicting our behavior, radicalizing us with confirmation biases, and then when they can predict exactly how we will behave, they hit us with ads, a private form of propaganda, and sell us whatever they are shilling. These apps are free to us because of what marketers will pay for access to us. Corporate pimps are trafficking us and we are grateful for the opportunity. And it is in exactly this contrived environment, this virtual reality, that most of us consume the news. That news is rarely good. The occasional feel-good, human interest story might sneak past the editors, but crime, mayhem, tragedy, and terror all sell far more clicks and downloads, streams and views, than 80-year-olds graduating college, lemonade stands to fight cancer, or dogs saving their owners from housefires. Folks generally take one of two approaches to the constant barrage of bad news. First, escape. Folks will turn to forms of religion that promise the great by-and-by, the ‘far off sweet forever,’ where suffering will be no more, and my absolution here and now not only frees me from guilt, but also responsibility. Others escape into a liquor bottle, or a pill bottle, or through a syringe, pipe, or straw, through sexual encounters, junk food, social media, video games, or whatever habit or substance they can use to ignore the terror and despair of reality. Some even choose sheer ignorance, a genuine unknowing of the state of things, a sort of ‘plausible deniability’ for any responsibility for the way things are. Escapists are easily manipulated because they’re already looking for alternate realities, and the creators of these screens we all love so much are the very folks selling you their brand of alternate reality. The second way folks respond to the cavalcade of terrible news is confrontation. Some folks are fighting mad, ready to mount an army to take on the forces of darkness in this world. But this is often its own form of drunkenness, an intoxication from too much consumption, and while the fervor for justice is laudable, they usually burn out quickly, like gasoline. And the purveyors of these screens we love are counting on the combustion of this energy to drive more and more time with these very screens. Ok. What does any of this have to do with the lessons for today? Isaiah is written to the people of Israel after they have been conquered and exiled by a foreign power and the prophet is calling the people not to be persuaded by the glamour and glory of the tyrant, but to remember and return to the Lord. The Apostle Paul writes to the city of Corinth, a Greek city conquered by the Roman Empire and living under Roman rule, and the Apostle tells them to remember that God rescued the Israelites from slavery to Pharaoh. Jesus’ entire ministry happens in Judea, which is also a Roman occupied territory. Empires rise and fall. Regimes come and go. Principalities and powers spring up and wither. And in the meantime, tyrants commit atrocities, tragedies happen, customs and cultures die out, plates shift, storms destroy, pandemics disrupt and kill, etc., etc.. Suffering is part of this life. No one escapes it entirely. And direct opposition usually makes the suffering worse. But Jesus proposes a third way. Repentance. And before you accuse me of victim-blaming, stay with me. We tend to think of repentance in terms of guilt and reform, of feeling bad and trying hard to do better in the future. But, given the context, maybe there is a better way to think of repentance. Jesus is not blaming the victims of Pilate’s atrocity for their own desecration. Nor is Jesus blaming the victims of a falling tower for their own demise. Instead, Jesus calls his hearers to repentance— that is, to change their minds, to set their minds on reality as it is, and each time they find themselves drawn to escape or confrontation to return to reality as it is. In our modern parlance, we might call this mindfulness or meditation. The mystics and monastics might have called it contemplation. Others might just call it prayer. And science is starting to discover that this mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer literally changes our brains, creating new neural pathways, thickening the prefrontal cortex, changes our brainwave pattern and makes us less likely to feel anxious or depressed. And even for those who suffer from clinical depression and anxiety disorders, mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer are often part of the clinical approach to treatment. This mindful repentance anchors us in reality as it is and disentangles us from the lies and terrorism of tyrants and tycoons, of algorithms and advertisers, and roots us in reality— that is, it roots us in Christ, who is “reality with a personality,” as Richard Rohr says. When Christ becomes our lens for reality, we can see the cross as the form reality takes, the intersection between matter and spirit. Reality includes suffering and reality transcends suffering with meaning and purpose. This is precisely what we mean by redemption, the making something from nothing God has always been doing in Christ. This mindful repentance is the path through the wilderness in which our Lenten journey began, the path through this wild, uncharted place filled with bad news and anxiety, and the temptations toward easy answers, quick fixes, and addiction. The call to repentance is not a call to feel guilty and try harder. The call to repentance is the call to change our minds, to reclaim our minds from those trying to co-opt them, to reject all the false realities of tyrants and tycoons, and to root ourselves firmly in ‘reality with a personality,’ in Christ Jesus. And when we find ourselves anxious and avoidant or anxious and confrontational, the call is to return to reality as it is in Christ, and to return and return again and again as often as we stray. This takes practice. This is practice itself. But paths through the wilderness are made by walking. And there are many of us walking this path with together. So, when you hear bad news, be mindful, return to the Lord, remember that reality includes suffering and transcends it. We have to change our relationship to the news in order to change our relationship to reality. Mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer is the practice of repentance, returning the heart and mind to Christ, who is reality itself. In changing our minds, we make ourselves less manipulable. We have to do some research— which is not the same thing as googling— and be much more discerning about the media we consume. We must seek our experts and we must listen to them. And when we have cut ourselves off from the tools the tyrants and tycoons are using to manipulate us, we become little outposts within the empire where “alternate ‘realities’” have no sway. We become digital hermits, leaving behind social media and entering society. We become pilgrims and sojourners in an adopted land, seekers of truth in the realm of false gods. Have you heard the news? The good news that Jesus is calling us to repent, to change our relationship to reality, returning with all our heart and mind to Christ, who is the Truth, reality itself. Amen.