If you were here on Christmas Eve then you have already heard me recently talk about Star Wars and I do apologize to you for retreating on similar material, but it has to be done. On Christmas Eve I shared that I had recently been re-watching the original Star Wars trilogy, episodes IV through VI — at the time, I was brushing up to prepare myself for the one that just came out. You may have heard of it. And I said on Christmas Eve that one of the problems you face when you decide to go back and watch the originals is that at this point there are multiple versions, there are special editions, and at times they make rather substantial changes to the story, so you kind of have to decide what story you want before you even begin.

But of course that’s not the only decision you have to make. Because the other decision you have to make when you are going back to watch Star Wars is whether you are going to pay any attention to the prequels, the trilogy of Star Wars movies that arrived in the late 90’s and early 2000s, episodes I-III, and, if you are going to watch them, then, in what order are you going to watch all six movies? Now, there’s a big "if" here. I mean, those three prequels: Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, *and Revenge of the Sith, on the whole, they’re not very good. History does not remember them well. But if you are going to include them in your *Star Wars rematch, you have some options.

Option #1 is that you watch the movies in the order of the events depicted on screen. Let’s call this “narrative order,” though even that phrase is a bit suspect. Anyway. Option #1 is that you start with Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, and you watch them straight through. If you watch the movies this way, you follow the story of the young Anakin Skywalker who grows up, turns evil, becomes Darth Vader, and then eventually gets his comeuppance. You will also have the somewhat jarring experience of watching three movies filled with the best CGI that 2002 had to offer and then falling backwards through time into the very campy and threadbare look of the original trilogy. But if you do it this way, if you start at the beginning of the so-called historical events of the Star Wars saga, you will be actually watching these movies the way that George Lucas wants you to watch them. He’s said as much. Start with Phantom Menace and then go through. (Though, honestly, as an editorial aside, if you have not watched Star Wars and you start with Phantom Menace there is no way that you would ever want to keep going).

That’s actually the problem. The problem is that even though the prequels in theory take place before the events of the original trilogy, they rely heavily on an audience that already knows where all of this is going. They rely on an audience invested in the story beats and the character developments because of where those stories and characters are going to go. Anakin Skywalker is almost entirely irrelevant to the plot of Phantom Menace; the only reason to have any kind of engagement with him is that we know who is going to grow up to be because we’ve already seen that original trilogy. Over and over again the prequels bank on the vast cultural weight of moments from the original trilogy — which, in the timeline of the Star Wars universe, hasn’t happened yet. Which means that to catch all those resonances you almost have to watch them backwards, you almost have to watch the original trilogy first and then fall back through time and watch those prequels. Let’s call this “release order.” It’s not what Lucas wants. But at least doing so allows us to have some stake in the early bits of the story. At least doing so allows Episode 1 to make any kind of sense.

Now, we have no reason to believe that the Gospel of John was released episodically. We are not this morning reading a section of John’s Gospel that was released some years after some other section of John’s Gospel. I want to be clear about that. But that the same time John’s Gospel is not in general written for people who have not already heard the basic story of Jesus Christ. This is the last Gospel to be written and distributed, which means the story's already out there, and I want us to consider for the morning what it means to say that John’s Gospel assumes that we already know the major story beats yet to come. Knowing the Anakin grows up to be Vader completely changes what appreciation we might have for those Star Wars prequels; and, the same is true here. Even the famous prologue to John’s Gospel — in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, etc — it’s beautiful poetry, but it’s not a great way to start a story. It’s not a great way to suck in an audience. It only works because we already know where it’s going. It only works because we’re invested before we ever crack the spine. So, if you will for a minute, let’s consider this morning’s reading as a scene from the prequel section of the Gospel of John.

It’s chapter two. The scene is a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and then John tells us that the mother of Jesus was there. Now, John has no childhood or infancy narrative for Jesus, so this is the first mention of Jesus’s mother, though, she will appear again at the foot of the cross. The wedding runs out of wine, and Jesus’ mother says to him, “They have no wine,” and it’s not entirely clear what this is supposed to accomplish. Is she complaining about poor party stewardship? Is she just sharing information with other interested guests? Or does she know that Jesus has the ability to go and fix this wine shortage? It doesn’t sound like a request, but he sure treats it like one; he says “woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Which is minimally a really cheeky thing to say to your mother, and, beyond that, kind of opaque, especially if you don’t know where the story is going. But elsewhere in John’s Gospels, when Jesus refers to the coming of “his hour,” he’s talking, again, about crucifixion, about the hour of his death. And we know, and John would know, too, of the symbolic linkage between Jesus’s death, Jesus’s blood, and the eucharistic wine. Which means I think what we have here is a kind of strange reference to events yet to come: Jesus’s hour will come, at which point his blood will be poured out as new covenant which we remember with shared wine.

But you don’t get any of that unless you already know. Unless you already know the story, this scene is a mess. And consider this: John doesn’t even contain the instructions for communion that we find in Luke and in 1 Corinthians. Which means that the link that Jesus makes between wine and his crucifixion doesn’t just bank on his readers knowing the rest of John’s Gospel; it banks on them already being children of the broader Christian story. He’s writing for an early church that already has this story on its lips. He's writing for an early church that already has these communion words carved into their hearts. This is “How to Write a Prequel 101” — you take something in which your audience is already deeply invested and you tell the story of its becoming, and you don’t have to convince them to care. They already care. All you have to do is remind them that the part they love is still yet to come. So in its own way, this story of the Wedding at Cana is a story about waiting. I mean, yes, it’s about abundance and grace and transformation and all those other things. But it’s also about waiting. “You’ve kept the good wine until now,” the steward says. “Just wait,” John says. “The good part is still coming. You know it. You already know what’s going to happen.”

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why prequels have become so popular. I mean, we have prequels everywhere: Batman prequels, Superman prequels, Lord of the Rings prequels. For most of my childhood the critique was that all Hollywood made anymore was sequels, like we couldn’t have an original idea anymore. But even sequels have kind of fallen by the wayside. These days all we do are prequels and reboots, stories about how we get to have the stories we already know. Stories where we already know what’s going to happen. I wonder if there is some comfort in this for all of us who shell out our cash at the multiplex: look, our own lives are a mess. Our own lives don’t always make sense. Our own lives have all of these rough edges and all of this uncertainty and anxiety — the world is a fearful place — and isn’t there something fundamentally comfortable about wrapping ourselves in these stories where we so obviously already know the outcome? Where we can leave those anxieties at the door? Where we already know what’s going to happen?

I do think this is the fundamental comfort of reading the front half of John’s Gospel, our text from today included. So much of his language, here and everywhere through this first 12 chapters, all of it presupposes the grace embedded in the story yet to come, the story of that Holy Week in Jerusalem, the story of Jesus’s final days, the story of his death on the cross, and, of course, the story of his empty tomb. It’s all wordplay and irony and foreshadowing — the stories are a mess — but of course our lives are a mess, too, but John invites us to understand our own messy lives through the lens of a story where we already know the outcome. John invites us to understand our own fears and worries through the lens of the promises of God yet to be fully realized. Your story doesn’t make sense, John says. *It doesn’t make sense. It has all these rough edges. It has broken dreams and forgotten wishes. It has broken bodies and beat-up spirits. It has all the pent-up violence of a fragile, unjust world. It has grief and heartache and death. *

Your story doesn’t make any sense. Our story doesn’t make any sense, all this suffering and death doesn’t make any sense, unless we read it through the lens of what was yet to come, Jesus Christ, whose own death tells us of a God who stands with all who suffer and all who grieve. Our story doesn’t make any sense, all these rough edges, all these broken dreams don’t make any sense, unless we read them through the lens of what has already been, Jesus Christ, whose own resurrection tells us of a God who will not stay forgotten, a God who will not be put down, a God who will not stay buried. Our story doesn’t make any sense, all the cracks in the world, all the violence and fragility, all the callousness of the age, our story doesn’t make any sense unless we read it through the lens of what has been from the beginning, what has been from the beginning, the center of the story, the Gospel of this story, the light come into the darkness, Jesus Christ, dead, risen, who will come again. This is the season of Epiphany, so let’s see the whole picture together: we keep the good wine until the end. That’s the promise. That’s the becoming. That’s where the story goes.

The only question is whether you will let this story take hold of you. So let me circle back to where I began. Episode 7. The Force Awakens. Maybe you’ve seen it and maybe you haven’t. I won’t spoil anything of consequence. But finally, after a generation of prequels and reboots, finally, we have a sequel. The Force Awakens takes place a generation after the events of the original trilogy, and one of the more clever devices that the film employs is that, for the characters in The Force Awakens, the stories of the original Star Wars trilogy are almost as mythic as they are for us. What I mean is: we have one character who keeps a little doll of a rebel pilot by her bed, and sleeps in the carcass of one of the old vehicles from the original trilogy, dreaming about the stories she’s heard of that time long ago. We have another character who explicitly talks about growing up to be just like the hero he’s heard about from those legendary times. The characters in The Force Awakens are almost as good at Star Wars fandom as we are, but, almost as for us, those old stories don’t always feel true. They feel like myths. Fairy tales. Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader. They feel larger than life, characters in fables for a different age.

But then the movie gets going. And in one crucial scene — which shows up in the trailers, so, again, I spoil nothing — in one crucial scene, we have characters from those old stories showing up to testify. Han Solo walks back into the movie, and he meets up with this new generation who aren’t even sure whether he’s real, whether the stories they’ve heard are real, whether the myths they’ve heard have any basis in history. “There are stories about what happened,” they ask, skeptically, but Han is here to testify. “It’s true, all of it,” he says. “The Dark Side, the Jedi. They’re real.” And you can see the look on their faces. And you can see the difference it makes. And you can see the call that those stories have on their lives.

So here’s the thing.

It’s one thing to say that we live in a prequel life. That our story begins with God and ends with God, that we are saving the good wine for the end, that we’re just hanging out somewhere in the middle. It’s comforting. It should be comforting. It explains the mess, or at least it tries. But our lives are also a sequel. Our lives are also the story that follows. “There are stories about what happened,” we say, every Sunday, not always knowing exactly what to believe.

But what if it’s true? All of it?

Will you let this story take hold of you?

What if it’s true?

All of it?

Then, who will you become?

Amen.

This passage from Luke 3 shows up almost back-to-back in the lectionary cycle. We read it today as part of the Sunday we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus Christ, it’s part of this rush of biographical moments at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry that emerge right out of the Christmas Season: first, the Epiphany, some years, the presentation in the temple, and then, today his baptism, and off we go. They grow up so fast. But we also sometimes read chunks of Luke 3 during Advent; after all, traditionally, on the second or third Sunday of Advent, we hear stories about John the Baptist, and because you can’t read much about John the Baptist without reading about the thing he’s most famous for, which is baptizing Jesus, we end up reading this story twice in quick succession.

At least, this year, we would have. We would have read this story this past Advent on December 13th, which was the Sunday designated for John the Baptist stuff. That would have been the plan. You may recall that was also the Sunday designated for the Choir Cantata. And then this year it also ended up being the Sunday that we celebrated the baptism of John Patrick Wimer, rescheduled from about a month earlier. And when I went to reschedule it, and I saw that it was John the Baptist Sunday, and I thought, well, this is going to work very well. I mean, what better time than Advent for a baptism, what better story than to read about the baptism of Jesus himself. This is all wrapped up in a very nice bow.

And then I re-read the text. “All were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah. John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” Again, I re-read the text. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” He will burn the chaff with fire. Not everybody’s favorite baptism story. I re-read the text. “the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” I considered that I wouldn’t even have a chance to preach that Sunday with the cantata, so whatever I read would go uninterpreted, at least by me. I re-read the text. And then I decided perhaps we could skip the Gospel just that one Sunday.

What to do with this baptism by fire? Nobody wants a baptism with fire. It’s not the baptism that we celebrate. Nobody sets off to be baptized in fire, at least not in 2015. Although, it should be said. This isn’t necessarily metaphor. The Gospel of Luke is written and compiled sometime at the end of the first century or right at the beginning the second. Either way, it comes into being about a generation after a raging fire spread throughout the city of Rome on a July night in the year 64. Historians dispute the original cause of the fire. It may have been entirely accidental. It may have been caused deliberately by the Emperor Nero, who is famously a bit unstable and just wanted to watch the world burn. But regardless of its actual origins, Nero used the event of the fire as a pretext upon which to begin the citywide persecution of Christians — in fact the documentary evidence of this persecution is one of the first instances in recorded history of this new Jewish Messianic cult organized around this Jesus of Nazareth. It’s a major event in the development of the early church and the marginalization of the early church, at least for a few centuries. All of which is to say that for Luke’s original audience there’s nothing metaphorical about the baptism by fire. This early church knows that reality all too well.

But it’s not entirely clear what the reality of their baptism by fire means for us. John’s words here in Luke’s Gospel give off the air of apocalyptic prophecy, predictions of the second coming that we hear more in Revelation than anywhere in the Gospels, Jesus come back with violent intent, a world so broken it can only be healed with flames. But Revelation is a text wrapped up inside a vision, given to John on Patmos; it’s not clear that it’s meant to contain actual events future or past. And then on the other hand, outside of Revelation, I think we probably overlook too often how literal the Bible can actually be. The Psalmist writes about lifting up the heads of the gates, and it’s not really a metaphor, it’s really because this is a song you sing when the army comes back through the gates of the city. Advent does this, too — a few weeks ago we read in Isaiah about making straight a pathway in the wilderness which isn’t about a spiritual wilderness and it’s not about an emotional wilderness, it’s about getting the exiles home from Babylon on the most direct path through the desert. In general I think we can be so quick to turn Biblical language into metaphor that we forget its original context. Which doesn’t help anything, because it means we’re still stuck with a baptism by fire. And nobody wants a baptism with fire.

What I want to do is to take a bit of a detour through our other reading for this baptism Sunday, back into Isaiah, only a few chapters after that promise to make straight the wilderness paths. God is still speaking to the exiled people, promising them a safe return home, promising them a safe place for flourishing and the rekindling of that sacred covenant. And it’s language that works at a very literal level. “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel,” — the prophet remembers both God’s acts of creation and God’s hand in the political creation of the Jewish state – “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you” — literally, God has arranged for Israel’s liberation from captivity — “I have called you by name, you are mine” — well, that’s already happened just in this reading. And now, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” This is pretty loaded stuff. After all, Israel is about to set out through the wilderness back home, and the last time they were in the wilderness they had to move through the parted Red Sea and it’s only the most famous moment in all of Old Testament theology. Israel knows what it means to pass through the waters. It’s not a metaphor. It’s history.

But then. Here’s the twist. Here’s where it really gets interesting. “When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” And as I have said my first instinct is always that the metaphors aren’t metaphors. There’s got to be fire. There’s got to be flame. And there just isn’t. Not in Israel’s common history. I mean, yes, there are flames out of the burning bush. There’s a pillar of smoke that follows the people out of Egypt. There’s another one that circles around Mount Sinai. But not, like, walking through fire fire. More like fire-adjacent. And I can see some of you flipping through the Bible rolodex in your head, and some of you have already found it. Yes, in Daniel, Shadrach and Mechach and Abegnago walk through the fire. They are put into the fiery furnace and it does not consume them. But Daniel is writing much, much later, and the story of Shadrach and Mechach probably comes from an oral history tradition totally separate from the historic situation of the people in exile. The point is this. There’s no real fire, not in this text. There’s no real flame. There’s no one story that it’s calling on. Despite my best efforts, this is metaphor, and it’s metaphor from the very beginning.

Why does any of this matter? A couple of years ago Mirriam-Webster’s Dictionary, among a few others, made headlines by adding a new meaning to the word “literally.” The original sense of the word, of course, is that something happens in actuality, in reality, not symbolically or metaphorically. But for years there’s been a kind of casual use of the word “literally,” like saying “I’m literally freezing in here” when really it’s just cold and you are not actually freezing solid. It’s the stuff that drives word freaks insane. But not literally insane. Until Mirriam-Webster’s came on the scene and added this secondary definition, where “literally” can now also mean “in effect” or “virtually,” which seems like the exact opposite of its original definition.

And I have to admit I’m sympathetic with the traditionalists here; I mean, what’s the point of having definitions if the same word can mean two opposite things? On the other hand, the problem is when we start using the definition like a weapon. The problem with “literally” is that it ends up being a wedge against basic empathy. So you say “I’m literally freezing in here” and I say “No, you’re not, your blood is still flowing, obviously you’re not literally freezing” and maybe I’ve made my point but I haven’t made any effort to understand your problem. The nice thing about the metaphor is: we’ve all been cold before. The nice thing about the metaphor is: it allows us to connect and commiserate and share stories together. The nice thing about the metaphor is if you’re metaphorically freezing, maybe I could offer you a literal blanket.

All of which it to say, when Isaiah writes “When you walk through fire,” the text is talking to us, too. It’s not just recounting the history of people who literally passed through the waters. It’s not just retelling the story of a people who were literally redeemed out of exile. Those are beautiful stories, but on a literal level, they’re somebody else’s story, until this verse. Until we walk through fire. Until the text calls on a story that doesn’t exist, and it becomes clear that it never meant literally to mean literally, it never meant these stories not to speak beyond the people to whom they were originally told. This language speaks to all of us, it speaks for all of us. The point is, Isaiah gets it. We all walk through fire, one time or another. We all walk through fire, and if you haven’t, Isaiah says, you will. We all walk through fire, the Israelites in exile, all of Isaiah’s readers, even you and me. We walk through fire, we all get baptized in fire, too. The point is we don’t need to visit the end times to understand. The point is we don’t need to watch Rome burn to understand. The point is, we all get baptized in fire. It’s the long, slow work of the Christian life, and you know it as well as I do.

Of course it’s not the baptism we celebrate here on Sunday morning. We don’t baptize with fire, even metaphorically. But then the world out there burns hot enough. Life has a way of doing that baptism for us. Life has a way of burning hot and uncomfortably. Maybe that’s true for you today, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is the cold season, and temperatures are running normally, and cooler heads are prevailing. Or maybe not. Maybe the New Year has turned up the heat. Maybe the fire is licking at your heels. Maybe it feels like anger. Maybe it feels like anxiety. Maybe it feels like anticipation. Maybe it feels like grief. Baptismal fires are unrelenting. They are uncomfortable. They are unwavering, urging us, forming us, tempering us like the forge, like the steel, like the iron, tempering us into whoever God is calling us to be. John says that one is coming who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with Fire, and it’s so tempting to think that he’s not talking about us. It’s so tempting to confine this language to the coffers of history, or to set it some day far yet to come. But the truth is that fire is now. It’s always now. It’s always the long, slow work of the Christian life. And you know it as well as I do.

The good news, of course, is, as it has always been, the water. The water always comes first. In Isaiah, they pass through the waters, first. In Luke, John the Baptist comes with water, first. The good news is that even as the world burns we are first loved and first known and first covered and first washed in the waters of grace. The good news is that nothing in the world can burn away these waters. The good news is that the fire licking at your heels, you, today, right now, the fire licking at your heels is no match for the waters of the grace of God. In your baptism God has named you. In your baptism God has claimed you. In your baptism God has promised you. In your baptism God has delivered you, even through the fire.

There’s an old parlor magic trick maybe you’ve seen before. You take a regular balloon, you blow it up, you tie it. You hold it over a candle flame. What happens? You tell me? It pops, almost immediately. The rubber melts and pops, end of balloon. But then try it this way. You take the balloon. You fill it with just a little bit of water. And then you blow it up and tie it. Now, hold the balloon over the flame, and if you’ve got it right, the balloon won’t budge. You can just hold it right over that candle and the rubber won’t pop at all. It’ll get a little carbon ash on the bottom of it, but the rubber itself will stay strong. And the trick is just science. I mean, water is a really powerful absorber of heat. And so the water inside the ballon is absorbing the heat of the candle so fast and so completely that the rubber itself isn’t having to absorb it, and so the atoms in the rubber aren’t accelerating and popping like they normally would. If I had a couple of balloons I’d show you right here, it’s not complicated, you can impress friends at your next cocktail party, or maybe a toddler birthday party, either one. They’ll be totally amazed. Of course, now you know the trick. You know it’s just science. You know what’s literally happening.

But it’s also a metaphor. And you know it as well as I do. Amen.

Last week my wife and I went to see the new movie Tomorrowland, because I have an old love affair with the director. It’s the guy who made The Incredibles and Ratatouille and even the best of the Mission: Impossible movies, and now he’s doing this weird retro-futuristic thing, a movie where George Clooney gets transported to this place where all of our best and brightest go to live out all of our best hopes and dreams for what science and progress and human ingenuity might bring. I have really vague memories of actually being in the Tomorrowland section of DisneyWorld, which, at least when I was there, in about 1985, was even then pretty clearly dated, a version of what we thought tomorrow might look like twenty years earlier. I think there were a lot of monorails. Something out a bygone World’s Fair, locked in time. Yesterday’s tomorrow, today, so that somehow visiting Tomorrowland ended up being just one more glance back into the past, one more glimpse and who we used to be. At Disneyworld, Tomorrowland is how we used to think the future would look like, and being there says a lot more about who we were then than it does about what lies ahead.

But Brad Bird wants a lot more from his movie than this kind of retro nostalgia. He doesn’t want to make a movie based on what Tomorrowland represents now; he wants to make a movie based on what Tomorrowland represented when it opened, this glistening beacon of the future. And I admit to having mixed feelings about the movie. Being a sermon illustration is not necessarily an endorsement. Sarah liked it a lot more than I did. Partially because the more I think about it, the stranger it gets. The movie has an absolute faith in the power of these visions of the future. The whole idea of the original Tomorrowland was that we believed in the possibilities that lay ahead, and somehow along the way we let them go, and now we look at the future with so much dread and apprehension. It’s like he’s saying: okay, enough with the zombie disaster movies, let’s make something optimistic. Let’s give folks a good vision of what might be.

But then, he never does it. This is my complaint. The movie’s set in 2015, but all we ever see of the world of Tomorrowland is still rooted in that old version, it’s still what we thought tomorrow would look like fifty years ago. There’s no update. It’s still just monorails. There’s no sense of digital life. There’s no sense of connectivity. Nobody has a cell phone, nobody has a smart watch. It has no roots in the real world of 2015, it’s just another time capsule, another fragment of who we used to think we were going to be. It so wants to be about tomorrow. But it’s just one more glimpse, back into the past.

It seems like tomorrow is a much harder place to get to than we give it credit for. And not in the sense that you can’t go home and sleep and wake up and it will be tomorrow. But to envision in. To proclaim it. To dream a little bit about tomorrow. It’s harder than it sounds. Something always gets in the way.

Our story this morning finds Israel on the brink of tomorrow. “In the year King Uzziah died,” it begins, which is no small matter. King Uzziah was one of Judah’s great Kings; he presided over one of the longest sustained periods of stability in the history of the Kingdom. Fifty-two years on the throne. He was beloved. He was revered. Heck, at fifty-two years, he was assumed. He was the foundation. He was an institution. And we know a little bit about what happens when those institutions die. The year King Uzziah died is the year everything fell apart.. It’s the year Kennedy was shot. It’s the year the planes hit the towers. You know where you were. It’s the year everything fell apart, and nothing gets to be the same, and tomorrow’s coming, like it or not.

And Isaiah does not like it. Not one bit. Thrust into the apocalyptic vision we see in today’s text; thrust into some sense of the world beyond the one he knew so well; Isaiah wants no part of it: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Now, there’s some truth here. Uzziah was a good king, but he wasn’t a perfect king. He was a powerful military leader, and conquered more than a few of Israel’s enemies (always a very popular option). But he’s not a perfect King. He got in a little trouble with God for arrogance, got himself some divinely-appointed leprosy as payment. Not that Jerusalem wants to talk about that. Not after he’s gone. You can imagine the obituaries. He was a saint. He was a giant. Look at all the people we conquered. Look at all the prosperity. Never before has Jerusalem seen a king of his greatness in stature. Nobody wants to talk about the dirty stuff. Don’t speak ill of the dead.

But now Isaiah is face-to-face with the Lord Almighty, and all those six-winged seraphs, and he thinks, well, if tomorrow’s coming, I mean, if this is the future, if it’s happening, at least I’m going to be honest. Let’s clear the palette. Let’s have confession: Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned, I am a man of unclean lips. I’m talking up the guy like he was a saint but I knew better. And you should see what my friends say. I live among a people of unclean lips. Isaiah’s coming in for the reckoning. He’s ready for the judgment. He’s not going into tomorrow until we clear up all the mess that went down yesterday. He’s not going into the future without a clean slate and a clean bill of spiritual health. He is repenting. He is making his confession. He’s having his come-to-Jesus moment, you know, eight hundred years early. He is doing everything that good disciples are supposed to do.

But here’s the twist. God hardly cares. God’s not interested.

Isaiah’s on his knees, and then one of the seraphs brings down a hot coal and touches Isaiah on the mouth, and says: alright, you’re all set, you’re ready to go. The world is falling apart, Isaiah can’t wait to talk about it, he is all in on repentance, but God just sends a minion down to take care of it. It’s trifling. It’s nothing. Here, take two of these. You’ll feel better. God’s got more important things to do than hear your confession. Namely: then, Isaiah hears the voice of the Lord. Finally, in this story, God has something to say. But it’s not about King Uzziah. It’s not about all the slings and arrows that led up to this moment. It’s not about the sins of the country past, or even about the sins of Isaiah himself. God’s not looking backwards at all. God’s got eyes on tomorrow: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

And Isaiah says: “Here I am; send me!” And so we read this story like a sweet little call story, and in some ways it is a sweet little call story, and we say that Isaiah’s call starts with his confession, and so we too start our own calls with confession and we start our worship with confession and we lament, we, a people of unclean lips, in a land of unclean lips, and we spend so much time on all the brokenness of the past. And what I want you to hear is that in this story confession is at best a momentary diversion from the real action, a side-show happening down here at the hem of God’s garment. Meanwhile, on center stage, God’s not hearing confessions. God is storming into the future: “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”

I have a deep love of the old NBC Presidential drama The West Wing. It’s not always the most nuanced treatment of American politics, and there’s not always a lot of subtext, but I still love those characters, even the ones I don’t always agree with. I just like the way the dialog sounds. You’d almost have to, if you were gonna like this show for very long. They talk a lot. They explain everything. It’s exposition and explanation, 100 beats per minute. But the president on that show, President Jed Bartlet, has this one little phrase that he brings out when it’s time for the explanations to come to an end, when it’s time to move on. He just says “What’s next?” “What’s next?” Sometimes it’s just a scene cue, like, okay, let’s cut to something else. Sometimes it’s a little more commandeering. Sometimes he’s cutting off his staff entirely. Sometimes he’s shutting them down. Sometimes it’s almost condescending: “When I say what’s next, it means I’m ready to move on to other things,” he explains, early in the second season. “So, what’s next?”

And by time the show comes to an end, this little phrase has wound its way throughout most of its central characters. Almost everybody says it by time the whole thing wraps up, because of course it’s not just a turn of phrase, it’s a whole sensibility. Not that the past doesn’t matter. Not that history doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t get far in Jed Bartlet’s White House with that attitude, I promise. But in his White House, even more important than the question of how we got here is the question of where we go now. Confession is good. Confession is important. But confession’s also just a little self-centered: it’s what we need so that we can hear what God has to say.

So listen up, because God’s not talking about confession. God’s talking about deliverance. God’s talking about restitution. God’s talking about resurrection. God’s talking about “what’s next?”

Everybody in this room, to some extent or another, has followed the spiraling tragedy that is the closure of Sweet Briar College. We are friends of the college, faculty, staff, alumnae, we are community members whose lives have been shaped by the work and wonder of that campus. There is nobody in this community whose life goes untouched by the prospect of Sweet Briar closing its doors, especially this weekend, when we are joined by so many alumnae here for reunions, so much more bittersweet joy and sorrow, almost more than Amherst can bear. It’s been a hard year. It feels like we’re watching so many things fall apart. It feels like we are watching King Uzziah die all over again.

And of course we have no shortage of Isaiahs eager to point out the sins and shortcomings that brought us to this moment. What began as an exercise in grief has evolved into a parade of interrogation and litigation. King Uzziah has died, and we want to know how. Natural causes? Self-inflicted wounds? Or something more sinister? Who stands to gain? Who had the means, motive, and opportunity? Every day the papers are full of theories of his demise. Every day the community sets its sights on new suspects and new theories, for we are all people of unclean lips and we live in a land of unclean lips and none of us is fundamentally incapable of whatever mistakes or mismanagement has led Sweet Briar to this moment. And I don’t meant to sound dismissive. This matters. It matters what went wrong. Uzziah wasn’t a perfect king, and we have to tell the whole story, so confession is the order of the day. Confession is how the past makes sense. Confession is what we’re after, and if it has to be our confession, fine, but if somebody else would confess, that would be even better.

But what I want you to hear this morning is that God’s not talking about confession. God’s talking about what’s next. God’s talking about what’s next because Sweet Briar’s future doesn’t lie behind her. That may sound obvious, but it bears hearing: Sweet Briar’s future doesn’t lie behind her. If the #SaveSweetBriar movement has its way — and truly, God only knows — then the real challenge of this moment won’t be an exact accounting of how we got here, as important as that is. The real challenge will be rebuilding a school and a community that has been dismantled over the last three months, brick by brick. Saving Sweet Briar doesn’t just take an honest examination of the past. It doesn’t just take confession. It takes a faithful willingness to jump into God’s uncertain future.

And the same is true even if Sweet Briar can’t be saved. Even if Sweet Briar can’t be saved, her future still lies ahead of her. When all the dust settles, when all the litigation winds up, when all the money is gone and all the debates are won and lost, no matter who confesses to what, no matter what we know and what we don’t know, the future of Sweet Briar won’t be contained to piles of evidence and correspondence and how many spreadsheets and budget reports. The future of Sweet Briar is now what it always has been, which is the future into which God calls each of us who have been marked and formed by that community. The future of Sweet Briar is what we do and what God does with the gifts of courage and conviction and character that Sweet Briar has bestowed upon us.

You will look back. You will ask “What happened?” It’s right and good to ask. We need to know. Just remember, while you ask “What happened,” God’s asking, “What’s next?”

And God’s asking a lot. Tomorrow is a much harder place to get to than we give it credit for. Fortunately, God is already there, waiting for us. Fortunately, God is already there, preparing a place for us. Fortunately, God who has already crossed the threshold of death itself waits expectantly for us on the other side of tomorrow. We cannot find our way into a future where God hasn’t already been. So have a little faith. All we can do is put one trusting foot in front of the other. All we can do is take one faithful step at a time. All we can do is to be willing for what comes next. God sees the days yet to come. God ushers on ahead.

“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” God beckons, from high atop creation.

And Isaiah says, “Here I am, Lord. I may not be much. I may not be worthy. I may not be perfect. But I’m ready. Send me. Here I am, Lord, ready, for what’s next.”

Amen.

I feel bad for Thomas. Thomas gets a bad rap. Every year we come to this week after Easter, and every year the lectionary serves up this story from the Gospel of John, the story of the disciples hiding in the upper room and having Jesus burst through the door, but Thomas isn’t there, and when he hears about it, he reacts the way I think any of us would react upon hearing that the friend you just buried unexpectedly crashed the only party you chose not to attend and all your friends are going on about seeing your friend up and walking around and you say, not without cause, and not not without merit, you say, “Um. Yeah. Right. I’ll believe it when I see it. Show me the mark of the nails in his hands.” It’s worth noting that of all the responses to hearing of the resurrected Messiah that we have cataloged in scripture — the women running from the tomb, the disciples elsewhere failing even to recognize his face — Thomas’s seems to me the most credible, and the most sympathetic. It seems to me the most fundamentally human of all responses to the preposterous Gospel that we proclaim every Easter Sunday, the Gospel of God triumphant over the grave, the Gospel of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. And Thomas looks this Gospel in the face and says: really? Really? REALLY? I’ll believe it when I see it.

Of course, Jesus does come back and give Thomas the what-for. He shows him the wounds, and Thomas sees for himself, and Thomas gives his own little affirmation of faith, and Jesus seems to give him a little grief for needing something so ridiculous as “proof.” But it’s a whole week later. There’s a whole week between this first appearance in the upper room, the one without Thomas there, and this second one, where he gets to see for himself. And I imagine that would have been a painfully long week in Thomas’s social circle. You know Jesus is the talk of the town, at least among these friends. You know everybody else was there, everybody else saw it, and you know Thomas must have been going a little paranoid. There might have been a few options going through his head, like, well, maybe my friends are playing an elaborate practical joke on me, like we’re all going snipe-hunting and the joke’s on me, or, you know, maybe, all my friends have just lost their collective minds, maybe they had one too many sips of the Holy Spirit, if you know what I mean, maybe I am the only sane person left at this establishment. Great. I think that would have been a long week.

It can’t be easy being unsure whose reality to believe. One thinks of the fine line between a small child’s imaginary friend and a grown-up talking to the voices in his or head. Who are we supposed to take seriously? One thinks of the toys in Toy Story that come alive and terrorize the neighborhood bully, because who will he tell? Who will possibly believe him? Perhaps with a bit more subtlety this morning I think particularly of the comic strip of my childhood, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. In its day Calvin and Hobbes was the most popular comic strip on the planet, and this was back when everybody read newspapers, so I’m assuming you all have a passing familiarity with the setup: a small boy named Calvin, a trouble-maker, sarcastic beyond his years, philosophical beyond his understandings, growing up in a typically suburban house with a typically suburban family and, of all things, a tiger named Hobbes. Notice that I did not call Hobbes an “imaginary” tiger or a “real” tiger, because it’s never entirely clear just what sort of Tiger Hobbes is. When adults are around, Hobbes very often takes the form of a stuffed toy, but when they turn their backs, Hobbes emerges fully-formed, the voice of Calvin’s conscience, the voice of the better angels of his nature, the voice of reason, if you will, in the form of a tiger who may or may not exist.

Now, there are schools of thought on the matter. It’s easy enough to conclude that Hobbes is simply a product of Calvin’s imagination, that he’s a simple toy tiger for whom the comic strip becomes an almost unlimited palette. But this interpretation meets a couple of roadblocks — first, Watterson denies it, claiming that something much more complicated is going on, and second, there’s the matter of the chair. In one particular storyline from the fall of 1987, Calvin is trying to learn magic tricks and arranges for Hobbes to tie him to the chair in his own room so that Calvin can learn to escape. When his parents start calling him to come to dinner, he can’t, because he’s tied to the chair, and even when his father eventually comes upstairs and opens the door, yes, he finds a stuffed toy tiger lying on the ground, but also Calvin, tied to a chair. “You tied yourself up? What on earth were you doing?,” he asks, to which Calvin replies, “Hobbes tied me up, Dad! It’s his fault!,” to which Dad retorts, “Don’t make up lies, Calvin. How did you get yourself like this?” How, indeed? You can explain away most of Calvin and Hobbes’ adventures with arguments about imagination and whimsy, but you can’t explain how he gets tied to the chair. It’s not much to go on, but it’s evidence. There’s something here. Something to go on to help us believe the unbelievable. It’s evidence, and if we’re being honest, there’s a lot more evidence for the real existence of Hobbes the tiger — at least in this comic — than there is in our lives for the real resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

If we’re being honest. We don’t have the access that those disciples had. We don’t get to stand in that upper room and see him face to face, marks of the nails in his hand, wound in his side. Jesus pillories Thomas for his questions: “Do not doubt, but believe!,” but of course he says it right after he’s already appeared and made Thomas’s belief that much easier. Frankly, to me, the whole scene smacks of a kind of privilege, an evidentiary privilege, like, it’s easy for them to say, it’s easy for them to make it sound so obvious, it’s easy for them to make it sound so easy, they’re the ones standing in the room with the one they saw strung up on the cross. It’s not so easy for us. We can’t see the marks of the nails. We can’t see the wound in his side. We have pretty good historical evidence for the life of a Jewish prophet named Jesus and even for his likely crucifixion at the hands of the Roman empire. It’s easy enough to trace a line between this figure and the movement he inspired and the church that grew and became our church. We have evidence. But as for this empty tomb. As for this resurrection. As for this central Gospel proclamation. We weren’t there. We can’t see it with our eyes. We can’t touch it with our hands. We have to take it on faith. We have to take it on faith. And “taking it on faith” just means that doubt comes with the territory.

This is the life of faith, and doubt comes with the territory. In our text today, it sounds like Jesus gives doubt a bit of a bad name: “Do not doubt, but believe!” he says to Thomas, and so paints Thomas with this eternally unhelpful label. But in fact “doubt” isn’t even a very helpful translation for the word that Jesus uses: the choice he gives Thomas is really between becoming one of faith or becoming one without faith. Elsewhere in the New Testament the same word consistently translates as “faithless,” which is surely a far cry from simply having doubts. So let’s not take from this moment a total theology of doubt, and especially not one that casts doubt as the very opposite of faith. Remember: it’s easy for them to make it sound so easy. It’s not so easy for us. These disciples talk about faith but they have no idea what our faith is. They can’t — they have Jesus, standing there, right in front of them. They can’t know what our faith is. They can’t know what it is for us to believe in this risen Christ when there’s no evidence in his favor. They can’t know what it is for us to believe in this victory over death when the only evidence we have is grief and darkness and longing. They can’t know what it is for us to believe in this new heaven and new earth when all the evidence we have is corruption and decay and despair. They believe because evidence presented itself, and if we formed our beliefs purely on the evidence presented to us, I’m pretty sure we would all have given up this cause a long time ago. So if you have doubts — right at this very moment, or all the livelong day, or occasionally, in the dark spaces of the night, or on the second Tuesday of the month, or whenever — if you have doubts about this thing we proclaim, don’t let this story get you down. We don’t get to see the hands. We don’t get to see the wounds. Faith is something we do despite the evidence, so if you get your doubts from time to time, well, I get mine, too, and we’re all in good company together.

But here’s the twist. The important thing is to be a community of faith and doubt that still believes in evidence. Let me try to explain. There’s one theory about Hobbes the tiger that we haven’t discussed, and it goes like this. The theory is that Hobbes is neither real nor fantasy but rather exists entirely in the assumptions of the beholder. So, because Calvin presumes Hobbes to be real, he is real; and, because his father presumes Hobbes to be a stuffed tiger toy, he is a stuffed tiger toy. In this theory, Hobbes occupies no one central existential reality, and the back and forth we see in the comics between real tiger and stuffed toy isn’t a fact of Calvin’s imagination or his dad’s lack thereof but rather represents a kind of rupture in the very universe of the comic. Now, admittedly, this is philosophy without a purpose. It sounds like something drummed up around a late-night campfire just before a conversation about whether or not our whole universe is just one speck of a giant’s thumbnail. But that’s what happens when the comic strip abandons the standard of evidence entirely. Everybody gets what they want: Calvin gets a real tiger; his dad gets a fake one; but the world itself gets split in two, and evidence goes out the window.

And isn’t this precisely where we all find ourselves in 2015, in a world where everybody sees what they want to see through whatever lens they choose, evidence goes out the window, truth follows close behind, and Christians are hardly immune. Whether in questions of scientific ethics, in climate change or evolution, or in questions of social and economic justice, or in questions of sexuality and human behavior, Christians are getting pretty bad reputation — and perhaps deservedly so — for looking at the world solely through the lens of faith, for seeing in the world exactly what we want to see, for not allowing evidence into the conversation. And truly, seeing the world through the lens of faith can be a wonderful thing. I should be a wonderful thing. It should be a hopeful thing. But if the incarnation means anything at all it means that God has entered this world as it is and that God calls us to live in this world as it is and that there aren’t separate laws of physics just for those of us who believe. Quite to the contrary: Jesus came to this world, to the real, material, historical, broken place of this world, not metaphorically, not symbolically, not just on faith. Jesus came to this real place. Jesus loved us as real people. And if we are finally and forever to believe that this real Jesus really rose from the dead, eventually, we’re going to need some evidence.

That’s what I’m holding out for. Evidence. That’s what we’re praying for. Evidence. We missed the party where the risen Jesus showed up in person, and it’s a long wait from that party til the next one. We’ve been waiting a long time. And it’s not like we don’t have witnesses. We have the words of scripture to guide us. We have the creeds and confessions of the church to help form us, words that have been passed generation to generation some even back to those who themselves first saw this risen Messiah. But let’s be clear: we’re taking this on faith, and waiting for the evidence yet to be fully revealed. And this I believe: that the time is yet to come when the real Jesus of Nazareth will walk through that door, when the real Jesus of Nazareth will burst through the threshold between this world and the next, when he will show up bearing the mark of the nails in his hands and the wound in his side. I believe in the day when we will see this all for ourselves. I believe in the day when we will know for sure this thing we have heretofore taken entirely on faith. I believe that the call of the Christian life itself is to respond faithfully to evidence yet fully to be presented. And I believe it will present itself, when the time is right. When the time is right, he will present himself, fully alive, fully risen, fully for us. Until then, we walk only by faith.

After all, somebody tied me up in this chair, and someday, I’m gonna meet him, face to face.

The Gospel for this Easter Sunday is that burying things in the ground isn’t always the best strategy.

Just ask Ezra Sigwela. These days Sigwela is the South African Ambassador to Rwanda. But forty years ago, Sigwela was a political prisoner held on Robben Island, in Cape Town Harbor, a prison-mate of Nelson Mandela’s, during the height of South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Last fall I stood in the cell where Sigwela spent so many years of his adult life, and the poster on the wall tells this story. It seems that by the late 70’s the prisoners at Robben Island were seeing more and more of their colleagues being re- arrested, coming right back as soon as they were released, and that part of the problem was that in the rural parts of the country, where the resistance needed to find shelter, folks on the ground weren’t sufficiently persuaded of the righteousness of the rebel cause. Of course there wasn’t much anyone could do about that from prison, except write. And so one of Sigwela’s prison-mates, Govan Mbeki, wrote something of a manifesto about the need to spread the revolutionary cause throughout the country. Sigwela called it a masterpiece.

The problem, of course, is what to do with it once you’ve got it written down. You’re still in prison. You can’t just put it in the mail, or fax it to a friend, or post it on Facebook. Sigwela claims that he made copies by hand, though he says nothing about trying to get those copies off the island, and I found no evidence that Mbeki’s manifesto ever reached the mainland itself. Instead, Sigwela went with the well-worn strategy often chosen by the activist intellectuals that found themselves locked up on Robben Island: he took the manuscript, and he buried it: “I thought that when we were free, I could go back to the island and retrieve it,” he writes, “So I decided to bury it. Burying documents became part of the culture. I buried the document in the industrial complex because I did not think that they would renovate or dig there. I wrapped the document in plastic, put it inside a Milo tin and buried it two strides from the outside toilet. To mark the distance from the wall, I planted a peace tree. I planted that tree in 1978 and I thought that if I ever come back to the island, I would see this tree two strides away from the wall.”

The problem, of course, is that burying things in the ground isn’t always the best strategy. First of all, for twenty years, nobody ever read this document — however much of a masterpiece it was, it had no circulation beyond the population already stuck on that island. But even later. In January of 1998, long after Apartheid fell, long after Sigwela had been made a free man, in 1998, twenty years later, he returned to Robben Island to retrieve his buried treasure. What he found, instead of a peace tree planted two strides from a bathroom, was a whole layer of cement covering the entire yard. As far as I know, no tree, no bathroom. Certainly no Milo tin. No masterpiece. Whatever use Mbeki’s words might have once been, they’re not there. Admittedly, the fight against Apartheid by then is more or less over. But still, it would have been an amazing memorial to the time that had been. So you can imagine the disappointment. All that work. All that deferred hope. All those years of expectation. Buried, perhaps forever.

You can imagine the disappointment. I imagine it to be not unlike how these poor women in Mark’s Gospel must have felt, coming to the tomb early that morning after the sabbath. In Mark’s account, Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to the tomb with spices to anoint Jesus’s body. In Mark’s account, the body has not already been anointed, and normal Jewish burial practices of the time would leave the body quickly open to rot and decay, so it was common practice to wrap it with spices and perfumes so as to preserve for family members their ability to visit and revere the body for as long as possible, likely until it had decayed to the point of ossification. Which means that for these women this anointing is not an entirely selfless act: they believe in a future in which the body of their savior will serve as a memorial to the time has been. About as useful as Mbeki’s buried manuscript: a museum piece, a relic; the fight’s over, but we have this artifact from the time that was. So you can imagine the disappointment when they show up and he’s just not there. That’s what this strange young man in the tomb tells them, as if they needed it explained. “You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. Look, there is the place they laid him. But he is not here.”

Of course, Jesus does show up, eventually. Strictly speaking, Mark’s Gospel isn’t quite over yet, and in the few stray verses that follow this morning’s readings, we seem to get Mark’s take on Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances. But this tacked-on ending doesn’t show up in our best and earliest copies of Mark’s Gospel, and, stylistically, it doesn’t match the tone of the rest of Mark’s writing. There’s wide consensus that what we’ve got in the verses that follow our reading for today is a kind of epilogue that doesn’t really belong, and if you’ve got a study bible at home with some footnotes in it I’m willing to bet they’ll say the same thing. Which means Mark’s real story of the resurrection begins and ends in today’s reading, and in this real version, Jesus never shows up. There’s no communion on the lakeshore; there’s no walk along the Emmaus Road; there’s no Great Commission from the mountaintop. There’s no Jesus in this Easter story. He’s not here. That’s the whole point: these women come looking; they know exactly where Jesus is supposed to be; but he’s not there.

Some years ago, my friend John and I were on a road trip together and found in some store of oddities in San Francisco what I can best describe as a Bobblehead Jesus doll. This was 2002 — it was about the high-water-mark of the bobblehead craze, when it seemed like every sporting event in America was giving out these bobblehead dolls, little ceramic or plastic dolls of celebrity figures with heads mounted on springs that would, as the name implies, bobble back and forth. So you would go to the game and the first 5,000 fans would get a bobblehead Barry Bonds or a bobblehead Shaquille O’Neal or what have you. But the craze had gotten big enough that now somebody had gone to the effort to manufacture a bunch of bobblehead dolls of famous historical figures, and some store had gone to the effort to stock them, and that’s how John ended up with his very own Bobblehead Jesus. And if you think this story reflects poorly upon the holiness of your pastor, I’d like you to remember two things: 1) we were young; and 2) it’s John’s fault.

That being said. For a while, we stuck Bobblehead Jesus in the cupholder. It seemed the natural place for him. No better way to enjoy the bobblehead than to sit it somewhere where it will bobble most dramatically. But, then, eventually, you start to want your cupholder back. Especially on a road trip. That cupholder is prize real estate, especially around lunchtime. So, after a few days we took that Jesus out of his place of honor. And we stuck him in the storage bin in the center console. You know, under the elbow-rest. Alongside a bunch of spare change and some miscellaneous charging cords and who knows what else. We figured we’d just store him in there and pull him out whenever we needed him. Whenever we needed a laugh, or a bobble, or just a decorative touch. Bury him in that pile of junk, and we’ve got him right at our beck and call. Bury him in that pile of junk, and you know right where he is. As far as I know, he may still be there. There’s some comfort in that. No matter what happens, no matter how many years pass, I’m pretty sure I could go see John and open up his center console and find Jesus, right there waiting for me. It’s so convenient. Bury him right, and you’ve got him right where you want him.

But of course that’s not how this story goes. In fact it’s the whole point. The women come looking, come searching for Jesus right where they left him, but he’s not here. Instead, they have simply this cryptic promise: He is not here; he has been raised. Go, tell his disciples –– Go, tell Peter, that he is going ahead of you to Galilee. And you can just imagine their shock, their disappointment. But we had plans. But we knew how to do this part. It was pretty hard trying to serve the living Jesus. It was going to be so much easier serving a dead one. We knew how to do this. We had plans. We knew exactly where he was. But sometimes burial’s not the best strategy. Like in that parable of the one talent, sometimes burial doesn’t do any good at all. Sometimes God doesn’t want to wait for later. Sometimes Jesus has better places to be than underneath all the junk in your center console. Sometimes the Holy Spirit’s got to move no matter how we try to box it in. Mary, Mary Magdalene, Salome, you and plans for Jesus, but he is not here. He’s gone ahead of you. You had plans for the future, plans for his body, plans for telling his story, plans for going on with your lives after the time that has been. You had him right where you wanted him, all laid out for a future that seemed easy enough to predict. But Jesus isn’t waiting on that future. Jesus isn’t waiting for you. Jesus isn’t waiting for us at all. Jesus isn’t right here. Instead, Jesus is right now. We’re making plans for his body, but Jesus is out ahead of us, right now. On Easter Sunday, Jesus isn’t right here. On Easter Sunday, Jesus is right now.

It’s urgent. Mark’s account of the resurrection is urgent. And it doesn’t let you off the hook. In those other Gospels, Jesus shows up, eventually. In those other Gospels, this urgency resolves — to promises, and visions, and foretastes of the Kingdom. Breaking bread with Jesus by the lakeshore. Walking with him along the Emmaus Road. And undoubtedly these promises matter. It matters that this empty tomb proclaims the promise of God’s victory over death itself. It matters that Jesus along that Emmaus Road hints at the friend who walks with us all of our days. It matters that the communion by the lakeshore predicts the heavenly feast which beckons each of us when those days come to an end. But in Mark’s hands, Easter isn’t just a promise about some life to come. Easter is an urgent declaration about right now.

And just as Mark has asked time and time again, once again he puts to us the question, the challenge, the clarion call of this empty grave: Jesus has gone on ahead of you.* So what will you do?* Jesus isn’t here. Jesus is out there, doing the full work of the Gospel. Jesus isn’t here. Jesus is out there, praying with the sick, working for the poor, fighting for the forgotten. Jesus isn’t here. Jesus is out there, staying by bedsides, waiting in breadlines, dying on front lines, standing on picket lines, speaking for all whose voices have gone unheard. Jesus isn’t here. He’s gone on ahead of you. So what are we waiting for? So what will you do? Yes, the world needs promises. But even more than that it also needs Jesus. Right now. And Jesus is calling for you.

Deny it all you want to. Push it down all you want to. We’re really good at burial. But be warned: it’s not always the best strategy.

Of course Mbeki’s manifesto wasn’t the only document buried at Robben Island. If you take Sigwela at his word, it sounds like burial was the preferred storage method for any number of creative and intellectual pursuits. But none of them has been more consequential than the memoir and political rallying cry begun at the same time by the imprisoned radical named Nelson Mandela. Mandela had a long story to tell, the story of his own fight against Apartheid, yes, but also a raging defense of the rights of all people, the kind of rallying cry that South Africa desperately needed. He would write during the night, 10 or 15 pages, and then during the day pass it off to friends for editorial comments, and then, as his pages were completed, they would pass it again to the secret hero of Mandela’s imprisonment, an inmate named Mac Maharaj. Mac had a special talent. Mac could write in very very tiny letters. So every night, Mac would take completed pages from Mandela’s manuscript and copy them in the tiniest writing you could imagine, and by time they were done, they had two copies: one, the original, six hundred pages of Mandela’s story, ready to be buried in the ground alongside all the other masterworks produced at Robben Island, ready to be saved for some unknown day yet to come; and then the other, the copy, barely fifty pages, small enough, small enough to risk it, small enough to risk sending it into the urgent fray of a world that so desperately needed to hear its witness, small enough to risk going for it, right now.

You know where this is going. One day, Mac was sent home from Robben Island, but not before he’d had a chance to prepare. They sent home his books, too, even photo albums, and behind each of the photos he had spliced and cut those fifty pages, every tiny word of Mandela’s memoir, and in his freedom he shipped those pages out of the country, and those pages became Mandela’s landmark Long Walk to Freedom, the definitive story of the fight that brought down Apartheid. That one copy, sent into the urgent need of the world, that one copy joined the fight that tore down those dividing-walls once and for all. As for the other. They buried it, like they always would. In three big pots, in a vegetable garden. They buried it for later. They buried it so they would know right where to find it. And then, not more than a few months later, the guards decided to build a new wall. And they started to dig a new foundation.

And you know what they found. And you know what they didn’t find. Because Jesus had already gone on ahead. Amen.

Before we get started in earnest this morning I just want to offer my condolences to the UVa fans in the house today: Jack, that was a tough loss last week. It was a tough draw in the first place. Tough draw for UVa being a 2-seed in the first place, after the year they had, though I know they weren’t quite in March the team they had been in January and February. Isn’t that always the case? But just as tough a draw to go up against Michigan State as a 7-seed, second year in a row, too. State’s just got a beat on how to play in March. They’ve become the lower-seeded team that nobody ever wants to play. They’re actually favored this afternoon against four-seeded Louisville. Maybe the oddsmakers have finally caught up to the fact that Michigan State’s a pretty good underdog. Or a pretty terrible one, depending on how you measure it. I mean, if being the underdog means you’re not supposed to win, Michigan State’s gotten pretty bad at it. You’d think after a while a team that keeps winning over and over wouldn’t get to be the underdog anymore.

And where’s the fun, anyway, in cheering for the team that wins over and over and over? I mean, part of the joy of the NCAA tournament is rooting for these teams that come from nowhere and show up to slay the giants. Frankly, by this part of the tournament — this afternoon two games will decide the last two teams going to the Final Four, and next weekend those four teams will play their way to a championship — by this part of the tournament, unless you’ve got a strong rooting interest, it gets a little bland. But in those opening games, with the Kentuckys and North Carolinas and Arizonas of the world facing off against the Hamptons and Murray States and Florida Gulf Coasts and every year one of those little tiny Cinderellas goes on a run. Every year on those first few days of the tournament, somewhere, some giant falls back to earth. And that’s the whole joy of it, these little schools, holes in the wall with dreams far beyond their athletic budgets and recruitment packages, these little schools walking onto the court and squaring off against teams of future NBA All-Stars and finding a way to win, just that one game. That’s why we watch. That’s why I watch. Because I want to root for the little guy. (Except when they play Georgetown.)

Now, we’re not the first people who want to root for the little guy, and I know it because our Psalm for today, as we wrap up this Lenten journey through the Psalms, our Psalm for today is in its own way a celebration of the underdog. It seems to be a dialog, between a warrior returning to the city and the people who have gathered to welcome him back. And so we hear the voice of the people: “Let Israel say, his steadfast love endures forever,” almost like it’s the bold print in the bulletin, and we have the voice of this warrior, perhaps a King, perhaps, as with many of the Psalms, a kind of stand-in for the historical King David: “All the nations surrounded me; in the name of the Lord I cut them off!” However the battle went, it seems to our conquering hero that his win was something of an upset. “They surrounded me on every side; in the name of the Lord I cut them off!” He doesn’t think he was the most likely champion out there. Actually he’s got a bit of a Cinderella complex himself, and it comes out the most in this Psalm’s signature line: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” It might sound a little cocky. It might sound a little like some post-game locker-room interview tape, like “Nobody believed in us. Nobody gave us a chance. But here we are.” It might sound like that, but even so. Cinderella’s got herself a ticket to the dance.

And more importantly, the crowd loves it. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” they cry out. You can just picture it with ticker-tape and t-shirt cannons. And, whats more, remember that we have all of these Psalms because they became regular parts of Israel’s life of worship. We’ve read lament psalms and thanksgiving psalms of every shape and stripe but this one is even in its own particular category. We call it a Psalm for special occasions, like this probably is exactly the liturgy that Israel would bring out when an army was returning home from battle, or when some military leader was coming up the mountain to the gates of Jerusalem. Which means it isn’t just some original warrior who chooses to identify with this rejected stone, this Cinderella stone. The real thrust here is that the entire community chooses to understand their own military and political heroes through the lens of this underdog story. Time after time, nobody believed in them. Time after time, they were the rejected stones. Time after time, they were the underdogs. But apparently God believes in underdogs, because look at us now. Nobody gave us a chance, but here we are. The crowd loves an underdog. The crowd identifies with an underdog. The crowd thrills to an underdog.

Until, of course, the crowd turns.

The crowd always turns. Of course one of the reasons that we end our time with the Psalms on this Psalm on this Sunday is that this is the very Psalm that the crowds chant as Jesus rides that donkey into the gates of Jerusalem. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” they cry, remembering, as Jesus the outcast, as Jesus the hunted, as Jesus the underdog, makes his supposedly triumphant entry into the city. Years later, of course, Peter will go back and mine that same Psalm for his own theology, casting Jesus again as that corner-stone once rejected, but the connection begins here, with this crowd seeing in Jesus every one of their underdog hopes. Rome is the big enemy, of course, and Jesus is marching off to do them glorious battle; he might as well have a sling-shot in one hand and a pile of stones in the other; they are in this fight together; it’s hard even to imagine that five days from now they’ll be calling for his death. Hard to imagine, except, of course, that’s the danger of being Cinderella. Survive long enough, and you might grow up to be the wicked stepmother. Survive long enough, and the crowd turns. The crowd always turns.

By means of illustration let me make a personal confession. I started my interest in college basketball as a fan of the Devil: the Duke Blue Devils, to be exact. It was the winter of 1990. My mother, herself a Duke alum, had begun to carry on a serious relationship with the ups and downs of their college basketball team, which was putting on a pretty good run. In fact that winter they made it all the way to the championship game of the tournament, at which point they ran into a buzzsaw called the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Runnin’ Rebels, and they lost 103-73, the largest margin of victory in the history of the championship game. It was brutal. The next year, UNLV came back for more, and every sports prognosticator in the land prognosticated that they would run the table again. That 1991 team is still widely considered one of if not the best college basketball team ever assembled. They won thirty-four consecutive games, but they never had a chance at my heart. Something about watching Duke lose that blowout had kindled my sympathies. Something about watching my mother unspool herself in front of the television had signed me up. And so, while UNLV ran through its competition with all of the subtlety of a Mack truck, my mother and I, we huddled up with the underdogs. It’s hard to imagine a time when the Duke Blue Devils were the underdogs. I promise you it was the case.

Duke and UNLV found each other in the championship again, of course, but this time Duke shocked the world, this time Duke pulled out a nail-biter, and in our house there was great screaming and rejoicing. And not just in our house. It was widely understood, in the way that only media can paint these things, that the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels were the misfit villains of the piece, and that Duke was the Cinderella story back for revenge. But of course like it is for so many teams before and after, winning was about the worst thing that could have happened to Duke’s public image. Pretty soon Duke-the-scrappy-underdog became Duke-the-unstoppable-juggernaut, and pretty soon after that, well, nobody likes to root for the juggernaut. My sympathies wandered pretty quickly. And more to the point: my sympathies wandered, and wherever they wandered — no matter what team I landed on, Carolina for a while, just to torture my mother, and Princeton, when we moved, and then Georgetown, when I went to college, and no matter what team I landed on, Duke would show up and pound us into the ground. So, along with the vast God-fearing and right-thinking majority of the college basketball universe, I grew to loathe that Duke team which I once called my own. As soon as they turned on me, I turned on them. Or vice versa. No matter what. The crowd always turns.

That’s the haunting thing about Palm Sunday. The crowd always turns. We always turn. We show up this morning with waving palm branches and shouts of Hosanna and five days later we will join our voices to the throng calling “Crucify Him!” The crowd always turns. And we could argue about who turned first, I suppose. Jerusalem might say that they thought Jesus was showing up to take on Rome — nobody likes a juggernaut — and then he starts rampaging through the temple, and then he starts preaching against the religious authorities, and then he has the impertinence to start demanding things of us. Much easier to root for the guy when we had an enemy in common. Much more difficult when he just keeps showing up and pounding us in to the ground. But I suppose we could stand here and argue the scriptural facts of Holy Week until our faces turn blue; the truth is, no matter what, no matter for what reason, the crowd turns. We turn, every time. We leave here this morning with palms waving, and we come back Friday morning with sticks and stones. We leave here with shouts of Hosanna and we come back calling “Crucify Him.” In the five brief days between now and then, we all turn, every one of us.

And we all do it in our own creative ways. I know what some of mine are and I’m guessing you know some of yours. What does it look like for you when you turn on Jesus Christ? Does it look like refusing an act of Christian charity, turning aside a friend — or anyone — who comes in need? Does it look like failing in your own stewardship of who God calls you to be — turning into someone or something that seems to you unrecognizable or insufficient? Or maybe it’s precisely when we turn so inwards that we also turn on Jesus, when we get so focused on ourselves and our own problems and our own vanities that we can’t see the world around us in its striving and in its abundance and in its crying out. The Jesus whose entrance we cheer today makes some pretty uncompromising demands: to love our neighbor. To love ourselves. To love him, and to see him in the face of all who struggle. There’s a very thin path from this Sunday to the next one. It it possible only for those purest in conviction and strongest in heart and fearless in deed. It is the very definition of the straight and narrow. And if not well beforehand, by about Friday morning, every one of us turns. Every one of us sins. Every one of us falls short. None of us are worthy of this King for whom we cheer. None of us can squeeze into this narrow gate through which Jesus processes.

And yet. We still sing this Psalm. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Israel sang it on the return of this triumphant king, yes, but of course they also sang it in exile. They sang it not only when they could celebrate their own victories but also in the throes of their worst defeats, because at the end of the day it’s not just a Psalm about this conquering hero, it’s a Psalm about God who can lift up all who have fallen close to the pit. It’s a Psalm about God’s ability to reclaim anyone and everyone, no matter their imperfections, no matter their ragged edges. They sang it on Palm Sunday, too, when that Messiah rode into the city, and perhaps in their singing is the hint of what they know is coming: that not only has God lifted up this one prophet, but that God can lift them all up, even though they fall short, even though they falter, even though they turn. And we sing it, loudly, defiantly, not just because God could raise Jesus up from nothing but because God can raise us up. Because we go into this week, we go into this world, woefully outgunned by the whole brokenness of creation. Because we go into this week and this world woefully outmatched by the fault-lines that run through our own selfish hearts. Because we go into this week and this world woefully outsized by the twin giant powers of sin and death. We have a tough fight. There’s no doubt: we’re the underdogs. There’s no doubt: we’re the Cinderellas. But God believes in us. That’s the Gospel of this Palm Sunday: God believes in us. The crowd turns. The crowd always turns. But still. Every year. No matter what. God believes in us.

So maybe this is our year.

You know, I don’t watch the opening rounds of the tournament like I used to. I don’t have the time to park in front of a dozen basketball games for the afternoon and watch them all with interest. But I can’t tune it out completely, because I’m still waiting for that one perfect Cinderella story. Never in the history of the tournament has a 16-seeded team beaten a one-seed. Not once. In the more than thirty years since the tournament expanded to a sixty-four-team field, with four games between 16s and 1s, 1-seeds are 124-0, and the average margin of victory is something like 35 points. A couple of times they’ve come down to a single point. But still. It’s never happened. Certainly not this year, when Kentucky, Villanova, Wisconsin, and, of course, Duke, always Duke, each and every one pounded their opponents into the ground. But still. It will happen. It’s one of the frontiers in American sports just waiting to be broken. And I refuse not to be watching. So I don’t have to watch all the games. I just have to be able to watch any single game because it could be that single game that shatters this streak once and for all. Any given year. Maybe this is the year it turns out differently.

Well, it’s too late for Cinderellas this year.

But it’s not too late for us.

Amen.

I want to tell you a story tonight that begins on Christmas Eve. It’s a very particular night on the calendar; many of us will be home with family; many of us will be nestled into church pews. But of course there are still a few shops open and there are still a few hardy souls out there fighting the good fight, gathering the presents, gathering the supplies, gathering the groceries, putting it all together for what should be the joy of tomorrow morning. Which is where our story starts, Christmas Eve, 1996, in a strip mall in the town of Worcester, in the Western Cape province of South Africa.

The strip mall sits just beyond the old boundary of the local township, so on this Christmas Eve the crowd that overruns these stores is entirely black and colored, which, in South Africa, simply refers to people of mixed ancestry. And the king of this strip mall is the Shop-Rite, one of those grocery stores that also sells everything, so you can imagine the bedlam on Christmas Eve Walk into the store with me and you see the long holiday lines at the checkout registers, baskets overflowing, everyone frantically grabbing last-minute provisions, and then just overhead you can’t miss the large decorative Christmas Tree, all lit up, all adorned, towering over the central atrium of the store, and under that tree, dozens of decorative presents, gift-wrapped and ribbon-tied, the joy of the season in all its colorful splendor.

And then.

At about 1:00 in the afternoon, you can’t miss the explosion. The concussive sound of it. The first blast. Instantly, dust and light are everywhere. Instantly, panic: crowds rush from the market into the street, as they can, but many more trapped inside, trapped under toppled shelves, trapped under collapsed roofing. And then second one goes off, and if we had truly been there we would have been knocked unconscious, at best. When the smoke settles, the police will find two unexploded bombs on the scene, devices that had not done their master’s willing. But the two that did the deed will be found out — one, left in a trash can; the other, encased in concrete, covered in gift wrap, and left, right underneath the tree. And so for Christmas 1996 year six families in Worcester lose their loved ones, including two children. Sixty-seven people go home with severe injuries. all of them black and colored. And an entire community is cut down to its very core.

It was supposed to have been different. By 1996, this kind of racial violence in South Africa is supposed to have been a thing of the past. Yes, in the 70’s, and in the 80’s, Worcester had been home to some of the most chilling examples of Apartheid brutality: white cops cutting down young black men, boys, in the street, and then using their funerals as an opportunity to round up the sympathizers. But by Christmas Eve of 1996 that was all supposed to have been over and done with. Six years earlier, the government freed Nelson Mandela and began to dismantle the old legal structures of Apartheid. In 1994, they held — can you possibly believe it? — they held democratic elections across the country, even in the townships, and the people waited in line for hours, days, to vote, almost always for their own African National Congress — ten years prior you would have been thrown in prison even for speaking their name — and Nelson Mandela himself became President of South Africa – can you possibly believe it? Righteousness and justice exploding across the country. You couldn’t miss it. But here we are, at the Shop-Rite on Christmas Eve, 1996, six dead, sixty-seven injured, all black and coloreds. The police will arrest five men, white supremacists all of them, whose only remorse will be that the other bombs didn’t also go off. Which is to say that perhaps righteousness and justice do not appear with explosive force after all. Perhaps we have not come so far as we thought.

And then.

Jump ahead. The youngest man arrested for the bombing is an eighteen-year-old kid by the name of Stefaans Coetzee. Stefaans had been born to fairly careless parents, went through the state orphanage system for a number of years, and then, at fifteen, ended up under the care of the leader of an extremist group called Israel Vision. The group had been strict in every regard: no drugs, no alcohol, and, in their own rewritten version of Scripture, a rigid insistence on white supremacy. And in the aftermath of his arrest, Coetzee stays on a very narrow path. In Pretoria Central prison, he communicates with KKK groups in the US, and with Neo-Nazi groups in Germany, and rises through the ranks of his own local paramilitary regime. For the first stage of his imprisonment, Stefaans is nursed along by the very same hatred and bile that landed him behind bars in the first place.

But a strange thing happens. In early 2002, Stefaans is assigned to a work detail with an older prisoner named Eugene de Kock, notorious leader of the Apartheid secret security unit serving two life sentences and 212 years for his crimes. But de Kock is himself already a changed man, and during the thousands of hours the two men spent together mopping floors, de Kock takes the young man’s anger and turns it around. Stefaans will later remember, “[he] was always telling me, ‘Look Stefaans, you have to stop believing you are superior just because of the color of your skin.’ … He said, ‘Take it from me, I’ve learned the hard way.’ … He never shut up about it. He told me that until I stopped being a racist I’d be in two prisons—one around my body, and another one around my heart.” And finally, a decade later, after the floors were cleaned surely to a mirror shine, Stefaans decides that what he really wants is to meet the people and the families destroyed on that Christmas Eve. What he really wants to do is apologize for this role in tearing their lives apart. So perhaps righteousness and justice will not explode onto the scene. Perhaps they will come with a single spark. Perhaps they will come with a whisper.

And then. Jump ahead.

Now it is November 9, 2009. Tomorrow, November 10, the Constitutional Court of South Africa will hear arguments on whether or not the president should have the authority to grant pardons for political crimes committed during the transition to democracy, crimes like the Shop-Rite bombing. But a thousand miles away, Worcester is still hurting. A woman named Olga Macingwane was at the Shop-Rite that night, thirteen years, ago, and still carries a severe limp as souvenir. A few years after the bombing her husband died and in her physical condition the scars from the bombing have been both emotional and economic. But after reading about the Constitutional Court hearing in the paper, Olga decides that her healing will not be complete without the possibility of confronting Stefaans himself, without the possibility of hearing his story. And so it is November 9, 2009, and Olga and three of her neighbors have made the sixteen-hour drive to Pretoria to meet Stefaans face-to-face. “I am not there to forgive him,” Olga says. “I am there to face the man in my head. I want to hear what he has to say.”

And so they meet, face-to-face, Stefaans and Olga and this intrepid group from Worcester. And you have to understand: until this moment Stefaans has no idea what any of his victims even look like. And until this moment Olga had no idea that the monster in her head was such a mere boy. And so Stefaans answers questions from the group while Olga stays silent. How did he learn to hate? How did he unlearn it? How does he spend his time? Is he sorry? If he were to be free, what could he give to help the community? Stefaans apologizes without reservation. “But I have nothing,” he says, “nothing to give except my life. But there are children now in South Africa,” he says, “children without parents. They might be tempted to get into violent gangs, to follow anger instead of love.” He says, “I can show them that the first life you have to change is your own.” After hours of conversation, Olga finally gets to her feet. She approaches him. “”Stefaans, when I see you, I see my sister’s son in you, and I cannot hate you.” Stefaans walks into her embrace. “I forgive you,” she says, just in a whisper. “I have heard what you said, and I forgive you.”

And then. Jump ahead.

It is January 29, 2013. Stefaans is still in prison in Pretoria. The court did not grant the president the necessary pardon authority, and so Stefaans remains behind bars. If anything, his remorse is even more palpable. He is now in regular communication with Olga and others from Worcester. He begins to petition for parole. He talks about returning to Worcester to work for change and reconciliation. He is not the man he was. But neither is Olga. She, too, has not returned home unchanged. “When I forgave [him],” she says, “I have at least found some peace. I am not Olga the victim. Now, I am [simply] Olga.” And Olga now sits on the steering committee of an organization called the Worcester Hope and Reconciliation Process, a diverse group dedicated to helping the community tell its violent story and in so doing move through and past and beyond the trauma that flows through its veins.

And in that spirit, on this day, January 29, 2013, Olga and her friends at Worcester Hope have organized a remarkable pilgrimage. A chartered train, from Worcester across the wide country to Pretoria, carrying 45 victims of the Christmas Eve bombing, all of them bound to go and meet Stefaans face-to-face. In less than a week they raised the sixty thousand South African Rand necessary to fund the trip. The local white Dutch Reformed Church has packed them meals for the journey. When they arrive, they again find a man overcome with repentance. For some, it is enough simply to see his face and hear his words. For others, they stand in line to embrace him, and the cameras are there, and you can see the footage, this man in all his sins, this community lining up to look their brother in the eye and love him anyway. Because Stefaans is not free to come home to Worcester, so Worcester has gone to him, one spark lighting another and another and another.

Righteousness. Justice. Reconciliation. They show up merely as whispers, merely as glimmers, no grand entrance, no concussive force. Like a mere child, a newborn, laid in a backwater manger in a backwater town in a forgotten corner of the empire. Nothing explosive. Just a spark: one single flame, steadfast against the night. Because of course the story of Christmas Eve does not end on Christmas Eve. It is just the first whisper into violent, broken world. It is just the first spark, one flame against the night. But in that flame is the power of forgiveness. In that flame is the power of transformation. In that flame is the hope of the world itself. Do not underestimate its potential.

Instead, jump ahead. December 11, 2014. Two weeks ago. After years of writing on his own behalf, and then years of the Worcester community also writing on his behalf, Stefaans Coetzee has been granted his parole. He is, at long last, a free man, freed from the prison in his mind, freed from the prison around his body. Freed from the sins of his past by the grace of God and the power of forgiveness. Freed from the past for the work yet to come, Stefaans will spend this Christmas Eve, for the first time in eighteen years, at home, and this Christmas Eve is where his story really begins. As, of course, does ours. It begins here. Loved. Forgiven. Set free. Each of us, one flame against the night.

And then?

Amen.

If you could permanently remove one song from the Christmas canon, what would it be? I mean, if you could just wave a magic wand and your least favorite Christmas tune would disappear, which one would you choose?

Would you go for something from the hymnal? It’s okay, I officially give you permission. We’ve all heard these so many times I’m sure there’s one that gets on your nerves. But I’m wiling to guess that if you could remove one song from the Christmas canon it probably wouldn’t be something sacred; my guess is that it would be one of the hundreds of saccharine secular tunes that play endlessly over the airwaves for six weeks every winter. Something in a “Feliz Navidad,” or a “Happy Holidays,” or a “Wonderful Christmas Time.” Maybe you have some objection to the way that Santa Baby tries to flirt with our good friend Saint Nicholas. Or maybe you’ll join me in registering some objection to that old Christmas duet, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

My objection — and if this is your favorite song, I apologize, and let me casually observe that next week is a Christmas hymn sing and we will take requests and I don’t really like “The First Nowell” either and if you want to get back at me there’s your chance — but my objection to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” is that it’s just a bit, well, creepy. We’ve got this duet between a woman at the end of a date and the man trying to keep her from going home. She keeps trying to leave. “I really can’t stay; I’ve got to go away” she sings, but he won’t quite let her go, and it’s not clear that he is acting quite the gentleman. “The neighbors might think,” she sings, and then, wonders aloud, “Say, what’s in this drink?” and maybe it’s just a strong one or maybe he’s slipped her something truly unconscionable. “My mother will start to worry,” she sings, and frankly, I’m getting a little worried, too. She says “I simply must go / the answer is no,” but he clearly thinks that “No” still means “Yes,” and by the end of the song, he has accomplished his seduction, over and against all of her protests. Hence my objection: that there’s this line between flirtation and sexual misconduct and I’m pretty sure that right about the part where she says no and he figures to keep going, right about there, the song crosses over.

Now, I think there is an argument to be made that “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” isn’t actually a Christmas song at all. I mean, obviously, it’s not in the hymnal, but it’s not even really a secular Christmas song. There’s no mention of the tree or the presents or any Santa name-dropping, and maybe we should file it alongside “Winter Wonderland” and “Let it Snow” and all those other songs that are really just songs about weather. But then we come across a text like ours today from the Gospel of Luke, and I am not so sure that the Gospel doesn’t cross over the same line. You all know this story. God sends the Angel Gabriel to the backwater town of Nazareth, to an unremarkable young girl engaged to an unremarkable young man, and the Angel says to this Mary, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus…,” and it’s worth remembering that Mary has not been to the pageant rehearsals and does not know where this story is going, and to presume that this is the most terrifyingly interesting thing that has ever happened to her would I think be the understatement of all time, but it’s not over. Because then the angel tells her “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” and you might notice that Gabriel can’t even be bothered to phrase it in the form of a question. It’s not an invitation. He doesn’t ask permission. Mary doesn’t even get a chance to say no. It’s just “God needs your womb, and we’re doing you the favor of letting you know in advance.” And I think there’s a line between calling people to discipleship and sexual misconduct and we may have just crossed it.

But then, of course Mary gives her consent. It’s not clear that she has to. It’s not clear that her consent makes any difference to what seems to be the inevitable will of the Holy Spirit; but, still, Mary gives her consent. “Let it be according to your Word,” she says. “Here I am, servant of the Lord,” which, of course, is the polite modern translation for a word that really means “slave.” “Here I am, slave of the Lord,” Mary says, which is hardly the kind of language I would like to hold up as a standard for responsible sexual behavior. And I know I’m stretching the point. But still. For two thousand years Mary has been worshipped for this moment on account of her obedience, and for two thousand years we have extrapolated from this moment a sense that obedience was what God wants out of women in the first place. *Say no if you want to, but, you know, God wants you to say yes. ‘Cause, baby, it’s cold outside. *

I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time saying yes myself to a Christmas story that seems to have so crossed the line into sexual misconduct. And I’m not trying to be perverse or graphic. It’s just: Mary doesn’t get much say here. It feels like she just gets valued for her ability to reproduce and then left on the sidelines of the story. And frankly, in 2014, that sits uncomfortably with me. About a month ago Rolling Stone magazine published an in-depth expose of the culture of sexual abuse at the University of Virginia, an article that went through the campus like brush fire until, a week later, the magazine revealed that the story had not gone through its usual rigorous fact-checking process and that some of its most centrally troubling pieces might not be true. But even so, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that sexual abuse, especially on college campuses, is at epidemic proportions. In 2012, the CDC found that about 19% of undergraduate women experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college. In the same year, the Washington Post found that 55% of colleges and universities with more than 1,000 students received at least one report of a forcible sex offense, and, as you know, those numbers almost certainly underreport the actual problem, as going to the authorities is not always obviously in the victim’s best interests.

And it’s easy enough to blame fraternity life, or college drinking, or some woeful part of university accountability structures, but the reality is that an epidemic of campus sexual violence only emerges from a culture that still cannot fundamentally figure out how to value women for things other than their ability to reproduce. This week Barbara Walters named her most fascinating person of 2014, Amal Alamuddin, an internationally-renowned British-Lebanese lawyer and frequent guest of the United Nations specializing in human rights abuses, and you and I know her better as George Clooney’s new wife. A woman becomes CEO of a Fortune 500 company and it’s still news. A woman becomes president of a major university and it’s still news. A woman becomes pastor of a major congregation and it’s still news. On Friday afternoon, every question asked at the White House Press Conference was asked by a woman, for the first time in history, and the reason I know about it is that it was news. I long to live in a world where women no longer have to do double-duty as both objects and overachievers, and somehow I believe that it starts here, with this story, with this Christmas story, with the conviction that Mary’s got to have more to say than a simple blind consent.

Which, of course, she does. Last week we read the next section of Luke’s Gospel, which contains what we call the Magnificat, Mary’s song, her prophetic exclamation of joy given in response to her new pregnancy. Luke in fact gives Mary quite a bit of dialog (you know, for a woman’s part). But even just in this morning’s text Mary says quite a bit more than we give her credit for. A little bit of historical context will be helpful. Marriages, among families in the Roman empire around the time and place of Jesus’s birth, happened quite young. Among Jews, the average age for brides was about twelve and a half: because a marriage was among other things a financial transaction between two families, it was presumed that betrothing girls before they reached puberty would guarantee that they remained virgins and thus maximized their value. The practice tended to be that betrothal would proceed marriage by about a year; so, money would change hands, a contract would be signed, but the girl would stay at her father’s house for some time before the marriage itself would be consummated. This is where we find Mary, of course: betrothed to Joseph – who, by the way, may not have had much more say in it than she did – living at home, she is property bought, paid for, awaiting delivery. Just because she’s blood doesn’t mean that she’s not also a slave to this household, and slave to this system, and if you’re looking for the real sexual violence in this text I would suggest you find it right here.

But then, an amazing thing happens. Mary consents to Gabriel; she says yes to the Angel; and then, of course, she says “Here I am, servant of the Lord.” “Here I am, slave of the Lord.” Five minutes ago she was property of one man and contractually bound for another, but now by the grace of God’s call upon her she can resist those old identities. She can reject those old assumptions about who got to own her and who got to assign her value. She says yes to God, of course. She consents to this wayfaring Angel. But what she really means is “No.” “No” to a system that treats her like livestock. “No” to a system that barters her away before she can have any say in who she wants to be or who she wants to love. “No” to a system that values her only for the male heirs she can birth. Mary says “Yes,” and of course it’s obedience of a sort, it’s obedience to the call of the Lord, but it’s hardly obedience to the expectations of the men around her; it’s hardly obedience to the assumptions of her society; it’s hardly obedience to the assumptions of our society. Mary says yes, but in saying yes she says quite a bit more than we give her credit for. She says yes, and she means to resist the way things have always been. She says yes, and she means to defy a world that stubbornly refuses to change. She says yes, and she means to fight for the righteous order of God’s new day to come. She says yes, and she means no. No more of this. I serve the Lord, and the Lord alone. * That might sound strange. You might be thinking, “Well, how can she be liberated and a servant of God at the same time? How can be be free and yet a slave?” But as the great theologian Bob Dylan put it – and I’m stealing this one directly from my mother — *you gotta serve somebody. Luke knows it. You gotta serve somebody. Paul knows it: over and over he describes himself as a servant of the Lord, and you get the feeling that those are the good days. You gotta serve somebody. Mary knows it. You make a choice between the world as it has always been and the one who is coming to make all things new. You make a choice. Mary knows it; you gotta serve somebody; and she consents to serve the one of whom she sings, the one who has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; the one who has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. Mary says yes to that one and no to the brokenness, no to the sinfulness, no to the avarice, no to the pridefulness, no to the darkness, no to all those thousand shadow-masters to which we every day nod our silent assent. We have said yes to them so many countless times. But Mary says yes to God instead. And in this is the great hope of Christmas: that, like Mary we can resist the way things have always been. That we can defy a world that stubbornly refuses to change. That we can fight for the righteous order of God’s new day to come. That we can serve the Lord, and the Lord alone.

That’s a Christmas I can say yes to. Let’s do it together. Say yes to Christmas, and no a world overrun with injustice and inequality. Say yes to Christmas, and no to a world so addicted to keeping women in their place, people of color in their place, future generations in their place. Say yes to Christmas, and no to a world run by the few on the backs of the many. Say yes to Christmas, and no to the seductive thought that we have ever been the ones properly in charge. You gotta serve somebody: so, say yes to Christmas, serve the Lord, say yes to the one who first said yes to us. Say yes to the one who first created all things and called them good. Say yes to the one who lifts up the lowly, and fills the hungry with good things. Say yes to the one who waits for us at the end of all our days. Say yes to God, because God said yes to us, in that backwater town, to that unremarkable young couple, God said yes, and Mary laid that yes in the manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Because it was cold outside. Amen.

And so it begins.

Thanksgiving is over. The Advent journey begins in earnest. The Christmas shopping season begins in earnest. One of the nice things about having Thanksgiving so late is that now all of it begins roughly at the same time, roughly right now. I feel like this morning’s service should come with a starting pistol.

Less clear to me, however, is when all of this ends. Theologically, our Christmastide ends on Epiphany, the celebration of the arrival of the Magi, but you know as well as I do that by time January 6 rolls around we will have long since lost our taste for “We Three Kings.” By then it all will feel very much like a party that everybody else has already had had the good sense to leave. Because you know as well as I do that Christmas really gives you a couple of days, and then a few more as a grace period, and then it’s New Year’s, and that New Year’s is the unofficially approved end to the Christmas Season, and on January 2, everything goes back to normal.

Well, almost everything. On January 2nd, everything will go back to normal, except, of course, that we all go into that new day still clinging to whatever New Year’s Resolution we have chosen for 2015. Which is to say that everything goes back to normal on the outside – we go back to work, we go home from vacation, schedules resume, meetings continue, classes reconvene – everything goes back to normal except that next year I am going to the gym fifteen minutes a day. Next year I am turning off the television an hour before bedtime. Next year I am going to McDonald’s no more than once a week. And as a secular end to the Christmas Season, New Year’s makes worlds of sense — you’ve just spent six weeks stuffing yourselves with every indulgence you can think of and it makes sense to land on a spot of self-imposed purgatory.

But theologically — and I know, it’s just the first Sunday of Advent, and I’m asking a lot — but theologically, it seems a very strange thing to exit the Christmas Season on a note of personal discipline and suffering. The Gospel we proclaim on Christmas Eve is not that God only came into the world for those who promise to lose that extra ten pounds. The Gospel we proclaim on Christmas Eve is that the world so overflows with God’s grace and therefore who wouldn’t want to eat an extra piece of cake? And then New Year’s comes — and mind you, we’re still waiting on Epiphany, we still have left in our theological calendar kings bringing more presents — and in the meantime, everybody else wakes up a bit hungover from all that grace, and everybody else dusts themselves off, and everybody else goes to work. Or the gym.

All that in mind, what I want to this morning is make a theological case for New Year’s Day as the theological end-point of the Christmas season. And this is not as superficial or as clerical as it sounds. It asks a fundamental question about what we are doing as pilgrims on this Advent walk. It asks a question, as we go through these Advent Sundays and as we see the banners unfurled on the walls, it asks a question on this first Advent Sunday about hope itself. What is it that we hope for this Advent season? Are we are on this journey hoping for the bounty of Christmas morning; if we’re here for the presents, and here for the decorations, and here for the carols, and here for the gluttony of it; are we on this journey hoping for all the things we get out of it? Or are we hoping for something more personal? It’s the question I ask to each of you this morning: are you hoping towards Epiphany, a hope based on receiving God’s grace as you are, or are you hoping towards New Year’s, a hope based on transformation?

In some ways I think this is the question asked by our scripture this morning. You will notice that the lectionary for the first Sunday of Advent, as it often does, selects for us a pair of texts deeply concerned with the future intervention of God. They are both examples of what we would call Biblical apocalyptic, which is to say, they imagine and beckon some future in which God’s invasion of creation is all the more manifest. In the Gospel text Jesus describes something like the second coming of the Son of Man, and we hear the familiar invocation, “Keep awake, for you know not when the master of the house will come,” and again, it’s no coincidence that we read this as an opening into the season of Advent, a season which is of all times in the Christian year the most apocalyptic in focus, which is to say, we sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and we mean it, and we hope fervently for a coming both symbolized on our every Christmas morning and realized in the promise yet to be fulfilled, a promise of peace on earth and goodwill towards all, a promise of charity and unity and abundance.

But before we get there, I want you to observe that while these apocalyptic visions may imagine a future of peace and goodwill, the mechanisms they employ sound pretty painful. “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from Heaven,” Jesus says. And the Isaiah text is even more remarkable because in this one Israel’s literally asking for it. “O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” the people say, “so that the mountains would quake at your presence. We have all become like one who is unclean.” And it’s all the more radical because Israel has been down this road before. Not twenty-five chapters ago Isaiah addressed a people lost in exile: “Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God; speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” and from then it told the good news that God was coming to rescue God’s people from Babylon, that God was coming to rebuild the lost the city of Jerusalem, it told the good news that is so central to the good news we celebrate this Christmas season: that the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, that we can now live in hope, hope based on the deliverance of God.

But now, in the sixty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, Israel’s faith has moved past deliverance to a hope based on their own personal transformation. “We have all become like one who is unclean,” they confess, —and now Israel needs God to come back again but it’s not for deliverance from some opposing army. It’s not for liberation from some outside evil. Israel’s hope is that God will come back and save the people from themselves. This is hope based on transformation – “We are the clay; you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.” That’s the apocalyptic hope: that we might not always remain the sinners we have always been. That’s what we hope for on this First Sunday of Advent: transformation. But for Israel, if it’s gonna come true, it’s gonna hurt. “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—”

You hope to change the world?, the text asks, with the deep wisdom of experience. You hope for peace on earth, goodwill towards all? God can do it, the text replies. But it’s gonna hurt. Hope, based on transformation, based on pain. God can do it, but it’s gonna burn.

Of course, transformation always hurts. We get comfortable in one shape and it’s no fun becoming a new one and anybody who’s ever kept a gym membership into February can tell you that. But of course this text doesn’t really care whether or not you keep off those extra ten pounds. This text is in for the big stuff. This text is in for Israel’s big sins, the stuff they do time and time again, their greed, their selfishness, their failure to protect widows and orphans and foreigners living within their communities, their failure to obey the basic social contract that lives at the heart of the Biblical covenant. This text is about the deep historical sins that Israel cannot seem to escape, exile or no exile, deliverance or no deliverance, sins of discrimination and injustice that follow them at every turn. This text is about how to hope for peace and goodwill when and if hope requires transformation by fire. In other words, in December of 2014, in this time, in this place, in the United States of America, of course, this text is about Ferguson.

Last Monday St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch stood behind a microphone and announced that, after a months-long investigation, a grand jury had declined to bring any indictments against white police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. You probably know most of this. Brown’s death has become a flashpoint for national conversations both about race relations on one hand and about police brutality, militarization, and authorizations for lethal force on the other, and while few observers expected the grand jury to produce any indictments, the curious ways in which they failed to do so has added to the conversation questions about due process and legal transparency. In the aftermath of the verdict, sections of Ferguson were overwhelmed. In some cases looters broke away from the crowd and took to violence. In other cases the police lobbed tear gas into peaceful gatherings.

It has been a brutal week.

And the brutality of the week is compounded by the fact that it is incredibly difficult to talk about, everywhere, and perhaps most of all here in this room. It is easy and almost inevitable in these moments to get bogged down in questions and doubts about facts which we do not know in full. We have substantially differing eyewitness accounts as to the shooting of Michael Brown and it may be the case that we never fully know the events that led to his death. We may never fully know the Grand Jury conversations that kept indictments off the table; we may never fully be able to trace the actions and counteractions of police and protesters, peaceful and violent on both sides. But do not hear me in this moment say that I think the reality is therefore somewhere in the middle or that we can therefore just write it off. Rather what I want you to hear from me this morning is that we are sinful people, and we bring our sins to the table, and it makes the conversation hard.

But I believe this: we are also hopeful people. Our prejudices may divide us but our hope unites us. We are, of all things, Advent people, who hope for God’s promises yet to be fulfilled. We in this room and throughout this country are people who hope together especially in this season for peace on earth and goodwill towards all, and God can do it, I believe it, you believe it.

But this is no cheap hope.

It is the great apocalyptic hope of Advent: hope that we might not always remain the sinners that we have always been, hope that God the potter can mold us into something new, hope based on transformation, based on pain. So for all of us who look towards Ferguson and hope for a country whose racial wounds are a thing of the past, we should be careful what we hope for. Because God can do it. But it’s gonna hurt.

In South Africa, we met with an organization called the Khulumani Support Network. Khulumani is a network of survivors of Apartheid violence numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Khulumani is the most prominent national voice keeping alive the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the TRC, that worked after the fall of Apartheid to give voice and justice to victims of the brutal regime. The TRC had officially recognized several thousand Apartheid victims to the government for the purpose of receiving reparations, and the government paid them far less than what had been recommended despite having more than enough money in a specific account for the purpose of those payments, and part of what Khulumani does is to both acknowledge Apartheid victims far beyond the scope of what was originally allowed by the TRC — victims that could not bring themselves to testify at the time, victims who didn’t understand the questions, victims who didn’t understand the process — and to level pressure against the current government for access to reparation money that has, fifteen years later, gone largely untouched. The central conceit of Khulumani is that these victims still have voices that need to be heard. That’s what the word means in Zulu: Khulumani. We are still speaking.

But the thing that shocked me most about Khulumani was this: that among its hundred-thousand-plus-membership you will not find not only Apartheid victims but also its perpetrators. Members of the Apartheid police. Prison guards. Government officials. Perpetrators of one of the worst systems of racial injustice in modern times who were themselves so victimized by their own actions, so traumatized by the violence of the system they served, perpetrators so victimized that they still need to tell their story. And so they sit in support groups and tell their stories. And so they sit in conversation with their victims and tell their stories. And so they live to tell their stories, stories of brutality beyond our imagination, stories whose telling rests on the conviction that the legacy of the TRC still matters, that the truth still matters. With thousands upon thousands of their fellow South Africans they proclaim year in and year out – they are still speaking – that their hope for transformation, their hope for no longer being the sinners they always had been — their hope rests on the painful acknowledgement of what came before. It hurts. It’s got to hurt. But then, that is the Advent hope we proclaim so loudly this day: a hope based on transformation, which is based on pain, which is based on truth. The truth hurts.

It is, of course, the language of confession — we have all become like one who is unclean. The truth hurts. And it is the only way through.

So now, this Advent, after Ferguson, who will tell the truth about race in America? And I don’t mean the truth about what happened on that Saturday afternoon or what happened inside that Grand Jury chamber. Those answers matter but they are not the big truth. The big truth is that America’s racial wounds have never had a chance to heal because all we have ever wanted to do was move on. The big truth is that this country was built on the original sin of racism, and continues to be traumatized by its effects. The big truth is that this country was built in large part by Africans and Native Americans, children of God whose lives did not matter in the eyes of my white ancestors, and whose lives continue not to matter as long I refuse to tell the truth.

The truth is, I can move to any city in this country and be reasonably sure of finding a place to live. The truth is, I can be pulled over for a traffic stop and be reasonably sure of my own physical safety. The truth is, I can go to the movies, or open a history book, or turn on C-SPAN, and see people of my own skin color (and gender and sexual orientation) widely represented. The big truth is that I was born into a system of privilege that was built on the backs of those it continues to oppress. So were most of you. We did not build it; in fact we are both its perpetrators and its victims; that's how trauma works; but, there’s no moving on for any of us until we tell the truth. The big truth is that any violence undertaken by protesters on the streets of Ferguson pales in comparison to the violence recapitulated against black and brown bodies every time we do not tell the truth.

But the lie is comfortable, because it is the shape that we know how to be.

Lord, that you would open the Heavens and come down. We have all become like one who is unclean. Last Sunday Michael Brown, Sr., father of the deceased, walked into a four-hundred-gallon pool at Flood Christian Church in St. Louis and emerged newly baptized. It was not timed around the grand jury deliberation; in fact, the baptism had been planned months in advance; in fact, it was intended that father and son be baptized together, but of course that was not to be. And then, Monday night, when violence struck the streets of Ferguson, Flood Christian Church was burned to the ground. The ATF is investigating. The pastor suspects white supremacists. Why would protesters burn a church? I don’t know that truth.

But I know this one: this week the baptismal waters of God are too full of the blood of God’s children. This week we who have on our hands the waters of the covenant of grace also drown in the blood of the ones who have died for our sins. This week we who have already massacred one son rush towards the manger to massacre another. We can say we’re in it for the presents, or the decorations, or the carols, or the general gluttony of the season. Or we can tell the truth. And it will hurt. But it will transform us. And it will leave us changed. And it will send us into the New Year more resolved than we ever have been.

So I hope.

So, we are doubling up on our Exodus stories today, as you have already noticed. Partially this is selfish: the schedule of readings only permits us room to read one of these, but they are both so good, and so juicy, and offer some irresistible fruit for the preacher, and so why not read them both? But of course that would hardly be helpful if the stories were not also in some way connected, that is, connected beyond the obvious, which is that both stories land us in this in-between time in Israel’s journey, in-between the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, as we read several weeks ago, and the delivery of the Ten Commandments from Sinai, which will show up for us next week. For now, they are liberated from slavery, in the wilderness, a bit adrift, and without any kind of operating manual. There’s something of a college campus Psychology 101 experiment going on here, or some tawdry reality show: what happens when you take a group of people out of bondage and leave them to freely wander the wilderness with only the bare minimum of food and water and without any kind of direction? Is this what happens when God stops being miraculous and starts being real? How do the people respond?

And the answer, time and again, in these stories and elsewhere, seemingly everywhere in the Old Testament, is that the people complain. Biblical Israel loooooves to complain. You may recall that in last week’s text the people had begun to complain for lack of food — “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt; you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” And this week of course they’re complaining for lack of water – even though they have already camped in places where water was abundant, but as soon as it’s not, of course, Moses hears it: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” Honestly, for a story that we only have because later generations of Israelites saw fit to treasure it and hold it close, it doesn’t exactly put the people in the best light. They come off as whiny. They come off as overdependent. And they certainly come off as what I am calling severely over-miracled. That is, you know, God sent ten whole miracles to Egypt to get them out of slavery. And then God went and divided that whole sea in two just so they could get across the border. And just when you thought God was done, when they needed food, there God is again with Manna. Not that I have anything against the cause of liberation, but honestly, these people have grown a little bit entitled. And so they complain.

They complain to Moses, and Moses has just about had it. In our first story he loses it to God – “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me!” – but the second story is at least as interesting. Here we find that, when the people are not complaining to Moses about God, they’re complaining to Moses about each other; that he has become the single arbiter of every petty debate that the entire wandering nation of Israel manages to have. Just imagine the United States Supreme Court working its way through Judge Judy’s docket and you’ve got the idea. “Britney told me that she’d pay me $40 to wash her camel and I washed her camel but she never paid me and I want my money,” and, you know, Moses didn’t sign up for this, and he knows it, and so his father-in-law, Jethro, says: look, this is ridiculous. “You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. For the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” You have no business hearing every single little asinine complaint for all these people. You got to delegate. So Moses does as he is instructed, and appoints judges from among the people to hear all these petty cases. This is actually the origin of the system of judges that will persist as Israel’s political organization up until the emergence of King Saul in 1 Samuel. But it’s just as big for the folks on the ground — Moses, who gets to save his energy, and these complaining people, who get recruited to be agents of the system against which they have been so vociferously complaining. Complain loudly enough, and they put you in charge.

Isn’t that always the way? Complain loudly enough, and you get put in charge. Husbands and wives know this, I know they do. Complain about the laundry, and pretty soon, you’re doing the laundry. Complain about having the same dinner too many times, and pretty soon, you’re cooking dinner. But no one specializes in this like churches. I have a friend who is married to an Episcopal Priest. They moved to Baltimore a few years ago for a new call and my friend, Mark, himself also Episcopalian, decided to tag along to the annual Diocese-level Convention as an alternate delegate from his area. Not much authority granted to those who attend annual Convention as alternate delegates. Not much at stake. But Mark made one crucial mistake. When the convention was over, he filled out one of those post-conference comment cards, and he didn’t just check all the boxes, he actually gave some prose feedback, and, of course, nobody takes the time to do that unless you’re really on a soapbox about something, and I don’t know what it was, but Mark was complaining about some part of their programming and there you have it, his whole list of complaints, right there underneath his contact information. Crucial mistake. Wouldn’t you know it, a few months later, Mark gets a phone call. You obviously feel very passionate about some of these planning issues. Won’t you come join the Planning Team for next year’s Convention? And of course a few months after that, he was made Co-Chair, and the year after that, he was running the whole show. Now, he’s a major player throughout the Diocese, like it or not, all because had the energy to complain.

Complain loudly enough, and they put you in charge. It’s exactly the thread that holds these stories together. Israel complained about starving in the desert, and God gave them Manna. But a few days later, when the start in about the water, you can hear God and Moses both start to get just a bit exasperated. What, do you think I am just made of miracles? You think this stuff grows on trees? Yes, God does put on one more show; under instruction, Moses strikes this rock with his staff and water flows from the rock and the people have water to drink and one more sign of God’s power although at this point if they still need signs and wonders to believe I think we have some basic questions about their sanity that would be worth asking. But what separates this story from the Manna story is that the miracle isn’t just about providing for the material needs of God’s people. God tells Moses to “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you,” and when Moses strikes the rock he does so “in sight of the elders of Israel” and what is most notable here is that this is the first time that Israel even gets to have elders. This is the first time that the Biblical text in any way recognizes an office among the people of Israel, besides Moses, an office that by definition should be part of the solution and not part of the problem. As soon as you have officers, you have people who get complained to instead of just people who get to complain.

And in fact this is no mere subplot of Israel’s time in the wilderness. This is the big narrative arc. It starts with Israel completely at God’s whim, sprung from captivity by a God determined to move Heaven and Earth in their defense. It ends next week at Sinai when Israel is given instructions for their own participation in this whole God-relationship. The arc here is God’s gradual call upon Israel to be a responsible party in its own theological journey. I got you out of Egypt; I did that part for you. I even got you some food. But at some point here you’re going to have a part to play. At some point here you’re going to shoulder some of the burden. That’s where this arc goes: they’re about to sign a covenant together, Israel and God, and that’s what covenant means, it means that each party has responsibilities to the other, and if Israel’s going to shoulder those kind of responsibilities than the least they could do would be to learn how to find some water for themselves and not just spend all day complaining. Or, rather, they complain loudly enough, so God puts them in charge.

Now, my point this morning isn’t to write a cautionary tale about what happens when you complain, nor is it to encourage complaining. Complain if you want to. You might get put in charge of something. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, and let’s move on. Because I think in fact this is one of those times that it’s important not to precisely locate ourselves in this text. We are not as Israel here wandering without a covenant. We are not wandering without a set of instructions to help guide our participation in God’s journey with us. The basic movement of these stories – Israel complains, so God gives them more responsibility – it’s not in our present. It’s in our past. It’s in our heritage. It is the deep current that flows underneath our relationship with God; it’s the hard-coded stuff. Which means that the point of preaching these texts this morning isn’t to warn us about the possibility of having responsibility in our walk with God. It is rather to remind us of the responsibility we already have. It is rather to say that we all hold this covenant in joint custody. God may be the miracle-worker, but we also have our own work to do. We know how to gather the Manna. We can find water for ourselves. We can do it, I know we can, because God called Elders out of the church and showed them how. We can do it, I know we can, because God gave Israel the freedom and responsibility to hold up their own end of the bargain – not alone, but as partners, joint stake-holders, in a journey that continues here, now, in this place, with us.

That’s why we call it stewardship. Because we are all joint stake-holders in the particular journey of God’s people known here as Amherst Presbyterian Church. As you may know, we are gearing up here in this congregation for our annual stewardship campaign. Letters will go out. Budgets will be on display. We will ask you, as we do every year, to make a pledge for 2015 — a dollar amount that represents your financial commitment to the basic operating expenses of APC. And it seems to me that there are two ways to approach this process. One is to file “church stewardship” alongside every other charitable contribution that any of us make. On paper, that makes a lot of sense. In our house, church contributions and our other charitable gifts get filed right next to each other — it’s all charity, when the IRS comes around. A few bucks to Doctors Without Borders. A few bucks to the local food bank. These places will not thrive or merely survive based solely on your support alone but it’s nice to give when you can. A few bucks here and there, whatever your preference. And surely if you want, and this is so very often what happens, surely if you want you can toss church stewardship in that same file, a few bucks to Amherst Pres. They seem nice enough, and why not? I can write it off on my taxes.

The alternative, of course, is to be formed by the story of Israel in the wilderness, and to choose to live as joint stake-holders of this particular journey. To choose to live as people who have claimed ownership — or at least co-ownership — of the community known as Amherst Presbyterian Church. The difference, of course, is that living as joint stakeholders in this church will fundamentally change who you are. It is not as simple as tossing a few bucks in the plate. It is as complicated and costly as saying that who you are and what the church is are fundamentally interrelated. This is your church. The church is you. Its ability to thrive and stumble does not rest on somebody else’s shoulders or in somebody else’s checkbook. It rests on you. And just for the record, let’s be clear: joint-stakeholdership respects no seniority. From the moment you join the church you are called to assume ownership, and that call rests upon you until the moment God calls you away. It falls equally among those of us who have been here for five minutes or for five decades. So don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am speaking to the person sitting next to you. This place is yours. You can choose to act as stakeholders or not, but either way, this place is yours, and it absolutely will thrive — or merely survive — based on your support.

The good news, of course, is that you all are miraculous. That’s the arc of this Exodus story, right? God does miracle after miracle, and then, after a while, the people find their own food, and they find their own water; it doesn’t flow out of a rock forever. The people take ownership of their stake in the wilderness journey and they themselves become the instruments of God’s supernatural work. They become the miracle, and I have no less confidence in you. You all are miraculous. When someone here needs food, you show up, and soon enough the room is swimming with ham biscuits and casseroles. When the roof leaks, you show up, and soon enough everything goes back to normal. When someone here needs comfort, you show up, and soon enough the room is swimming with the powerful mercy of the Holy Spirit. You are feeding this whole community, through Meals on Wheels, through this Preschool, through your commitment to worship and service and justice. That this unlikely church has survived — has thrived — on this corner for almost two centuries is nothing short of miraculous, a miracle of God made manifest by your labor. So I don’t care what wilderness we may wander into. I don’t care if food looks scarce on the ground. I don’t care if our water supply runs dry. This church is in good hands, because it’s in your hands, because with your hands God works miracles.

Amen.

So, to set the scene: we are in the middle of Spaceballs, Mel Brooks’ 1987 parody of Star Wars, Star Trek, and every other science-fiction-fantasy-space-opera. Spaceballs, in other words, is not a serious film. It is among the dumbest of the dumb, but there is a nugget of truth buried here that we need for this morning. Just at the beginning of the second act, our intrepid heroes, after daring to a kidnapped princess, have crash-landed on a desert planet. They set off on that long cinematic walk across the wilderness, Lawrence-of-Arabia style, but, before they go, the captain advises this very high-maintenance princess to take from their ship “only what you need to survive,” and the camera cuts, and the next thing we see is the princess walking unladen through the desert while our heroes drag behind them multiple heavy pieces of her oversized luggage. After a few beats they give up in exasperation. While the princess looks on in horror, the captain opens the heaviest piece of her luggage and removes from it the largest blow-dryer you have ever seen.

The captain stares down at this monstrosity of a thing, wondering, no doubt, what in the dickens has gone so wrong with his life that he is now dragging through the desert this anchor of a device all at the behest of a spoiled rich girl, and so he picks up this blow-dryer and with some disdain in his eyes asks of her “What’s this? I said, ‘Take only what you need to survive.’” To which she replies, “It’s my industrial-strength hair-dryer, and I can’t live without it.”

All punchlines aside, somewhere in that joke is, believe it or not, the question at the heart of our text for today, which is, of course: “What do you pack for a journey through the wilderness? What do you have to take with you to survive?” Israel has escaped from Egypt; they have crossed the Red Sea; they have left Pharaoh’s army in disrepair. They are bound for some promised land of milk and honey, but of course that’s still a while off, forty years, but they don’t know it yet. All they know is that the wilderness is a hard place to be; they’ve gone from watering-hole to watering-hole but at some point the hunger begins to set in.

And so, about a month and a half removed from crossing that Red Sea, then, Israel really begins to complain, and Moses and Aaron, the two who rescued them from Pharaoh in the first place, of course they’re the ones who get it. “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Now, first of all, don’t over-interpret “fleshpot.” It’s not a euphemism for anything. It just refers to whatever large cauldron they would have had access to for the proper cooking of meat. It’s where Israel makes their Brunswick Stew. Second and more importantly: how bad does it have to get – how bad must it have been – for Israel to so quickly grow nostalgic for its time in slavery, and, lest we forget, under the constant threat of genocide?

It must have been bad. But of course this is usually where the God of abundance kicks in. The father welcomes home that prodigal son, the one who lost everything, and kills the fatted calf. One basket of bread and fish transforms into the feast befitting a multitude. The Biblical God of abundance, perhaps not so unlike any half-competent church pastoral care team, is perfectly capable of finding people in their hour of need and stuffing their freezers full of casseroles. But what God gives Israel in this wilderness is not such an abundant feast. It is no fatted calf or endless basket of fish. It is certainly an unsatisfying foretaste of the land of milk and honey. It is, rather, this thin layer of starchy dew littered on the ground, this “Manna,” of which God says, “Take only what you need to survive.” “Take only what you need for each day, one day at a time.”

And as if to rub the point home, when some of the Israelites try to save some of it, you know, a little extra, just in case something goes wrong tomorrow, a little nest egg – there’s so much of it, it would be a shame to waste it – when Israel tries to save a little extra, it just turns foul overnight; the text says that it overflows with worms by morning. Which isn’t totally surprising, of course. Food spoils. But in this story it’s not entirely natural, because of course on the day before the Sabbath Israel is instructed to collect twice as much, and on the Sabbath morning there are no worms at all, so that Israel can observe its day of rest. So maybe it’s not exactly what they need to survive. It’s what they need to survive *as God’s people. *

Now, even 4,000 years ago, this living day-to-day is not the normal way of things. Israel is no stranger to food storage. Grains would have been kept through the winter. Milk would have been made into cheese so that it could last without refrigeration. Israel is hardly used to living hand-to-mouth. Nor, of course, are we. We have just come through the high season of our own annual harvest, which means that for some of you I imagine that right now your own kitchens and houses are as full as they could possibly be with fruits of the harvest set away for winter. Carefully frozen, in labeled ziploc bags: “Blueberries, June 2014.” Dried, perhaps, in tupperware sitting in cupboard, “Apples, October 2014.” Or, perhaps more likely, down in the basement, in cardboard boxes stuffed foot to brim with mason jars, your harvest has been pressure-sealed and boiled – I think it was Teresa Smith who told me she had put up 40 pints – “Tomatoes, September 2014.” We know what to do with abundance. The winters are long. You save some for later. I am hardly an expert in home canning and I have never done it without seriously scalding myself with boiling water but even I, this year, in the full glory of peach season, even the Gaventas got in on the game, and in our pantry you will a half-dozen jars of our own preferred method of abundance-deferral: “Peach Butter, August, 2014.”

But Israel’s not putting up mason jars. They’re not allowed. With no way of knowing where they are going or how they will get there or how long it will take, Israel is explicitly denied the opportunity to build up a little security. “Take only what you need for each day.” “Take only what you need to survive.” There’s no food storage. There’s no “saving for later.” There’s no long-term planning. There’s no rainy-day fund. This text has no patience for abundance. And the reason it gives, of course, is that God in this wilderness wants Israel to subsist on God alone. One day at a time, God says, “and then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” In this story God wants Israel to wake up every morning relying every morning on the grace of God. More than that: God wants Israel to wake up every morning knowing every morning that it subsists purely on the grace of God. So while the Bible surely offers us many examples of the rich abundance of the kingdom, the perspective in this particular story is somewhat different. In this particular story abundance becomes the problem, because abundance would give Israel the means to fend for itself. What we have here instead is God who gives just enough. Just enough, to live as God’s people. Just enough, for now. Abundance may come tomorrow. This story is about having enough for right now.

No collection of mason jars could possibly in real life exceed the collection dreamed up in Jane Smiley’s 1991 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres. Smiley, a daughter of the midwest, takes the rough outline of Shakespeare’s King Lear and unleashes it across the setting of a slowly dying family farm. Her setting is no stranger to the miracle of abundance and the struggle for survival: while the farm creaks uncertainly from year to year, the kitchen overflows with a bounty numbered in mason jars. At every turn of the page somebody is opening a jar of something: pickled peaches; tomato chutney; pepper jelly. But it seems that for every jar they open there are at least a dozen left in the basement; in fact, in one sequence, she describes finding no fewer than dozens and dozens of unopened jars, dust-covered, forgotten, in one sense such a testimony to the bounty of a place and the abundant life that sprang from it.

But in Smiley’s book the mason jars don’t just represent abundance. They also represent some fundamental inability to live into the present moment. In the original play, the noble, aging Lear becomes suspicious of his youngest daughter’s sincere affections, driving her away and leaving himself in the hands of her two conniving sisters. But Smiley’s book takes as its central character the older of these sisters, who, as the book goes along, finds herself in various kinds of battle with every almost member of her family. I will spare you the melodramatic details of why. Suffice to say that Ginny begins to nurse a murderous rage against her middle sister, Rose, a rage she quite literally bottles up. She finds some poisonous water hemlock on the farm property. She cuts some inside of some fresh liver sausages, covers them in a jar with brine water, and boils them to a seal. Then, she takes that one jar of poisoned sausages, mixed with a sundry group of a dozen other mason jar delights, and delivers it with a smile on her face to her sister’s welcome arms. She figures someday, her sister will get what’s coming to her. All she has to do is wait.

A great deal of time passes, as it always does when we are waiting for the future to happen. That jar of poisoned sausage sits on the back of the shelf, like so many of the mason jars in my house, like so many of the ones in your house, waiting for a day that never comes. A great many pages later, Ginny comes back to the house on a mission to find that jar and destroy the evidence. She does, of course, behind so many dozens of other, dusty jars. She pours it all down the sink. She bleaches the area clean. She removes all trace of this future she had once left waiting. And what she describes in that moment is its own kind of liberation: as Israel from the slavery that lingers in its past, so too Ginny here from the grisly future waiting around the bend. As she empties that jar, she describes being relieved of the “burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.” Ginny transforms from being someone for whom the future looms darkly to one who can live into the present moment. And Smiley leaves her having blissfully enough, just for right now.

Which means our challenge in this story isn’t simply to eat our way through all the apple butter in our pantries. Our challenge is to figure out how to live as a community of faith content to have enough, just for right now. Here at Amherst Presbyterian Church we are just entering into stewardship and budget season. In the weeks ahead you will be hearing about where the church is in its own financial stewardship, what are our hopes and dreams for the coming year, and, as these things go, you will be asked about your own commitment to those hopes and dreams. It is, of course, the money in your pocket that makes those dreams into reality. And one of the challenges I will offer — not just to us as individuals, but to the congregation as a whole — is to consider what it means to be a community that is unafraid to spend what it has, unafraid to spend down a balance of goodness and grace stored in so many dusty mason jars. There is nothing so poisonous to a community as the work of waiting around for a future we have canned somewhere in the basement. It’s not a call to financial irresponsibility, nor a call to flamboyant consumption. What it is is a reminder that God’s church is happening right now. This is the destination. Israel thinks their walk with God begins when they get to the promised land. But it begins now. The challenge is to be a church that says “Who we are is not wrapped up in some dream of a future yet to come. Who we are are these people, in this journey, together, right now.”

And every day we will have just enough, just exactly what we need. So much of our lives live under the shadow of hypotheticals: “What could we do if we had a million dollars?” “What could we do if we had 400 people in the pews every Sunday morning?” “What could we do if we had that brand new church building?” But in this story the question is no longer hypothetical. It’s not about what happens after you make it to the Promised Land. It happens right now: “What will you do with the gifts God has already given you? What do you need to do the ministry that God has called you to do, right now?” And the answer, of course is that what we have right now is already enough to do whatever God is calling us to do. Because what we have right now cannot be measured in bank statements or church ledgers. What we have right now, every morning, every morning laid out for us like the dew, what we have right now is the immeasurable grace of God. You can’t stockpile it for later. You can’t take it with you. There’s no way that we can get so much grace from God today that tomorrow we can do it without Him. So relieve yourselves of the burden of having to wait and see what is going to happen: tomorrow we will still have enough. Because God will not abandon God’s people. Because God will meet us every morning like the rain. Because God will shine upon us every evening like the sun. Because God will walk with us every step of the journey. Because here, especially in the wilderness, here every morning comes with exactly what we need to survive, as God’s people.

It’s our industrial-strength grace of God, and we can’t live without it.

Amen.

This morning brings with it a couple of particular programming notes: it is World Communion Sunday, a day in which we particularly observe and recognize Christian unity and our solidarity with Christians around the world. It is also the day on which we collect the Presbyterian Peacemaking Offering, now called the Peace & Global Witness offering. Money given to this offering goes to support social justice advocacy, reconciliation, and relief efforts both locally and around the globe. And of course it’s no coincidence that the two events happen on the same day: as we gather around the table to consider our connections with Christians around the world, we are invited likewise to give of ourselves in light of those connections. It’s a day for global citizenship, practiced even here in these pews.

But I have to admit that the current events of the world make these two programming notes something of strange bedfellows. Two weeks ago, America began bombing strategic locations within Syria in the hopes of destabilizing ISIS, the unrecognized jihadist state operating throughout much of Syria and Northern Iraq. For months, ISIS has been the focus of a great deal of anxiety, a great deal of reemergent panic about militant fundamentalism, and wild speculation about what America’s involvement should be. American Christians attempting to stand in some solidarity with their international brothers and sisters have of course paid particular attention to the fate of Iraq’s Christian minority. In July, refugee Bashar Behnam described to the Wall Street Journal the scene in his hometown: “There is not a single Christian family left in Mosul. The last one was a disabled Christian woman. She stayed because she could not get out. They came to her and said you have to get out and if you don't we will cut off your head with a sword. That was the last family.”

It would seem on this particular Sunday that the twin causes of Christian solidarity and peacemaking don’t sit so comfortably. We are, again, at war, with nothing so dramatic as a formal declaration or some dramatic gesture but war nonetheless, as if it matters to those on the ground whether or not the conflict makes for good theatre. We are, again, at war; once more into the breach. And of course there are and will be endless arguments about both the tactics and the strategy of this conflict. About whether or not the justice we seek is possible by the means we employ. About whether or not America has both the standing and obligation to act as such a singular component of a supposedly global coalition. There are good arguments on all sides, but this morning isn’t the time for that. This morning is the time for trying to reconcile this paradoxical call to solidarity and peacemaking. Let’s assume, for the moment, that our cause is perfectly just. Let’s assume, for the moment, that our fight is perfectly wise. Still, how can we be peacemakers if justice and solidarity require the violent destruction of our enemies?

And if that proposition sounds fundamentally wrong to you, consider at least for a second that it is without question the bedrock of this Exodus story. The Red Sea parts, and Israel moves through it, and then God lets the waters back in and Pharaoh’s armies are completely destroyed. This is a military massacre of the first order. And on one hand you can say that the cause was just. Israel was in slavery, and it’s not like Pharaoh hadn’t gotten his chances to end this without violence. The ten plagues of Egypt that precede this story are nothing if not God’s attempt at a diplomatic solution. (Well, that’s oversimplifying a bit, given the extreme violence that occurs even within those plague narratives, but it doesn’t occur without escalation. Pharaoh had his chances.) And then finally Israel is on the run, and they are through the parted waters, but Pharaoh’s armies are massive and his resources infinite and he will pursue them into the wilderness and he will have food and shelter and they will have nothing – this fight is not over when Israel crosses the water. It’s only over when Pharaoh’s army drowns beneath the waves. It is as if the story one-by-one closes off every alternate possibility and every alternate reality until the water comes crashing in. So I repeat: how can we be peacemakers if justice requires – even once – the violent destruction of our enemies?

Now, it should be noted that Israel expresses no such misgivings. What we’re not reading this morning is the chapter that follows, which is the song that Moses and the Israelites sing immediately following Pharaoh’s destruction.

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—
your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.”

It goes on. Scholars tell us these words are among the oldest in scripture, building-blocks of Israel’s theological identity. But is that really how we are supposed to feel, we, the self-styled peacemakers, singing glad songs of triumph at the scene of a massacre? Dancing on the grave of a thousand dead Egyptian soldiers who had little more recourse to resist Pharaoh than did the any of the Israelites? Is this really what being a peacemaker looks like? Is this really what being a peacemaker feels like? Like victory? Like retribution? I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously! Is that what it’s supposed to feel like?

Honestly, I’m not sure it feels like anything anymore. Two weeks ago we went back to war; or, we started a military intervention; or, we began a series of combat engagements; or, whatever you want to call it, two weeks ago we went back to war and the news makes no dent in collective psyche of America. It’s like it’s not happening, it’s like nothing happened, which I suspect is really about the fact that it has happened so consistently for a generation that we have lost all sense of perspective. In my lifetime it has been intervention after intervention: Granada, Panama, Kuwait. Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, at some point you just run out of emotional investment. At some point I lost my capacity to feel in proportion to the real cost of our so-called “engagements.” It is easy enough to observe that our wars today happen only on video screens; those in fact seem to me to be the best days. The worst ones happen 140 characters at a time.

And it feels like our numbness isn’t just a side-effect of over saturation. It feels like matter of national policy. Last week on 60 Minutes President Obama was interviewed about the state of American engagement in Syria, and when Steve Kroft pressed him about the disproportionate amount of the work done by the U.S. in this international coalition, Obama argued in return that America’s exceptionalism — “we are the indispensable nation,” he said — that America’s indispensability has converted this nonstop warfare into a kind of regular government program. “When trouble comes up, they call us,” Obama said. “That’s the deal … That’s what makes this America.” But my question is whether we really want to talk about violence on an almost unimaginable scale as a kind of municipal service. Because there was a time when warfare was a special occasion. But treating military action as just another one of the services that our government provides gradually dulls and numbs our emotional response, at least for those of us whose loved ones are not being deployed across the ocean; it’s no longer special, it’s no longer traumatic, it’s no longer cathartic, it’s no longer wretched; it just is. It’s what we do. That’s what makes this America.

How can we be peacemakers if war has so dulled our senses? Journalist Chris Hedges spent fifteen years as a foreign wartime correspondent — in the Middle East, and prominently in Sarajevo. After he came home, in 2003, as this country was in the first months of its invasion of Iraq, Hedges began to write about wartime as a kind of cultural narcotic. “I learned early on that war forms its own culture,” Hedges writes. “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal injection, for was is a drug. It is peddled by mythmakers… it dominates culture… it can give us a purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. War is an enticing elixir. It gives us a resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.” Which is not a blanket indictment of military action. Hedges is not a textbook pacifist, and neither am I. It is simply to note that our capacity for warfare has a power over us; it is seductive and addictive; and I would submit that our general numbness about intervention in Syria is that of the addict for whom such small doses are required even just to feel normal. It just is. That’s what we do. That’s what makes this America.

In some ways, then, I think the part of this Biblical story that speaks to our historical moment is not the euphoria of liberation at the end but rather the addictive quality of captivity that hangs over its opening. Just like our addiction to a certain story about American military obligation, Israel is addicted to a story about its own captivity. Having fled the city, and now stuck between the Red Sea and Pharoah’s advancing armies, Israel turns on Moses: “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness!” Israel has been in slavery for so long that they have forgotten any other story to tell, about who they are, about where they came from, about what they want. And while slavery surely hasn’t been a popular option, the real terror in this text is having no story left at all. If Israel can’t be slaves, then who can they be? Who will they be? What becomes of them in the wilderness? Even here, slavery has a kind of narcotic effect; it gives meaning and purpose and the most dangerous battle waged in this story is not between armies but rather within the hearts and minds of the Israeli nation. The most courageous act in this story isn’t a single moment of military prowess. Rather it is Israel’s collective decision to leave behind the comfortable numbness of the only story they know about who they are, and to risk the wilderness instead.

For me, this moment of the text is the American moment, but it is not the intoxicating effects of slavery that have their hold on us but rather the narcotic-like-effects and power of war. Which means that for me the first step to being peacemakers — peacemakers in a world where Pharoah’s armies have to drown, peacemakers in a world where the cause of justice sometimes leaves no peaceful alternative — the first step to being peacemakers in an unjust world is open up some space in our hearts where we can have healthy, human, emotional responses to our own violent ways. The first step is choosing to leave behind the narcotic story of military intervention as just part of who this country is and instead choosing to bear the moral cost and weight of our actions. Just because there are just causes does not mean that there are just wars. No war is just. And while the Bible doesn’t lack for songs of military victory, it also abounds with the moral cost of violence and death, from the mark of Cain to the marks in Jesus’s hands. We live as people of a book, people of a God who seeks justice and abhors violence and if we would be peacemakers in a warring age, peacemakers in a warfaring nation, peacemakers addicted to a wartime drug, if we would be those peacemakers, the first thing we would do is ask forgiveness. Hedges says that his writing is not a call for inaction but rather a call for repentance. I say that the first step in being peacemakers is making peace with our God. There are days when our cause may be just. There are other days, too. And because we can’t always tell the difference, and because solidarity also means solidarity with the victims of our war-making, and because we desperately owe ourselves the opportunity to have human emotions in a dehumanizing age, and because we can’t always tell the difference, we ask forgiveness.

Frances Spufford tells the story of the deathbed request of Bernard Montgomery, Field Marshall of the British Army during the Second World War. One February night in 1976, as Montgomery was nearing the end, his housekeeper became alarmed one evening and summoned one of his old battalion commanders, and when the friend asked a visibly distressed Montgomery what the matter was, he said “I’ve got to go meet God, and explain all those men I killed at Alamein.” Now, Montgomery was a brute of a man: antagonistic, self-possessed, arrogant. But he had an exceptional tactical respect for his soldier’s lives. At the second battle of El Alamein in late 1942, Montgomery had been dealt an untrained army ill-prepared for the tactical requirements of the landscape. And so, instead of trying to outfox the Germans, Montgomery settled in for what Spufford calls a “battle of attrition.” He sent his ill-prepared soldiers forward towards the enemy, through the minefields, line by line, a slow, steady, bloody victory with casualties numbering over thirteen thousand. It was a brutal affair. But in comparison to the blood-letting happening at that moment in Russia or elsewhere along the Western front, Montgomery’s results were almost gracious. His victory was hard-fought, but valuable, and no life had been disregarded.

Still, “I’ve got to meet God and explain all those men I killed at Alamein.” By all tactical accounts Montgomery was as respectful of human life as anyone in his position could possibly have been. What happened on that February night to prompt his call for repentance? Into what wilderness did he cross over? Spufford's answer is this: that Montgomery “had noticed that no matter how few soldiers his strategy killed, and no matter how many more would have been killed if a less careful strategist had been in charge, and no matter how essential it was that somebody be in charge – nevertheless, the deaths he caused had been absolute in their significance for those who had done the dying… you could do what must be done, and do it as well as possible, and it would still be the case that locally, body by body, the consequences were cruel, and sad, and left the fabric of the world tattered and blood-streaked.”

Friends, we worship a God of peace, and we wait for a day of peace, but in the meantime, the fabric of the world is as tattered and blood-streaked as ever. May God forgive us. May God be gracious upon us. May God make peace to shine upon us, now and henceforth. Amen.

Big news in the world of Harry Potter Fan Fiction.

Last week news outlets got word of chapter-by-chapter rewriting of J.K. Rowling’s multi-platinum series, rewritten to remove all of the wizarding and the witchcraft. I hope that sound strange. I mean, Harry Potter IS wizards and witchcraft, the story of a young boy who discovers that he is more than what he seems and in fact that there is a whole world of magic-doing happening under our very noses. There is an argument to be made that removing all of the magic-doing from Harry Potter is akin to removing all the parts of Star Trek where they go into space. But of course ever since Rowling’s series began to explode across the best-seller lists, there has been this particular kind of Christian counter-argument, arguing that anything that so glamorizes the practice of wizardry or witchcraft must be inherently bad. There’s been this suspicion — maybe even from some of you in this room — worrying that books who trade so heavily in magic must be corrupting the youth who read them. And so finally, this week, fifteen years later, we have Harry Potter rewritten without all that magic mumbo-jumbo.

The author writes, “I’m new to this whole fanfiction thing; but recently, I've encountered a problem that I believe this is the solution to. My little ones have been asking to read the Harry Potter books; and of course I'm happy for them to be reading; but I don't want them turning into witches! So I thought….. why not make some slight changes so these books are family friendly?” And I’m not going to exhaustively detail her story, which essentially starts from scratch using only the vaguest names and concepts from the Harry Potter universe. Suffice to say that the major change here is that the orphan Harry is no longer whisked away from his unmagical relatives to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. In this version, he’s taken away from his atheistic, rationalistic parents and dispatched to the Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles, presided over by the Reverend Albus Dumbledore.

The presumption here of course is that magic as a literary devices is inherently unChristian, and I have to admit up front this morning that I find that presumption really difficult to wrap my head around. Not only would I argue on one hand that the Harry Potter series actually does a remarkable job of talking about some fairly significant Christian themes — whether Rowling has any intention to do so I can’t say — but the way in which she champions courage and self-sacrifice in the particular face of death I find to thoroughly outline the sort of disciple I would like to be when I grow up. But that’s a different sermon. We could do a whole series. Rather my concern today about dismissing magic as an unChristian literary device is that magic itself shows up throughout our own Christian literature. The Bible does not believe itself to describe a perfectly naturalistic world whose existence is occasionally punctuated by the invasion of the Christian God. It’s a more complicated place than that, and as example, you need look no further than today’s Scripture readings.

In our Gospel lesson, Mark, always with a flair for the supernatural, Mark, pits Jesus early in his ministry against an unclean spirit that has taken possession of a man in the synagogue. And before you dismiss the spirit as simply the premodern interpretation of an epileptic fit, note that Mark gives it dialog: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God!,” at which point Jesus rebukes this spirit and commands him flee and it is this supernatural moment – this magical battle – that establishes Jesus in Mark’s Gospel as a force to be reckoned with. And we could say the same and more for this moment in our Exodus story, the story we have now been following for several weeks. We have come to this critical sequence of events in which Moses and Aaron show off the power of God to the Egyptian Pharaoh in some vein home of convincing him willingly to free the people of Israel. In total they comprise the narrative we know as the plagues of Egypt, but this morning we read simply the very first scene, in which Pharaoh goads Aaron into performing some wonder to show off the power of God, and Aaron does so, and throws his staff down on the ground and, voila, it transforms into a snake. Behold the power of God rendered as literary magic.

Perhaps you are bothered by these magical literary moments. Perhaps you are bothered by the suggestion that these are anything more than words in a book and that they might represent an actual supernatural reality and not just some mythical understanding of what we could certainly explain away if only we had more data. But that’s not actually the part that bothers me. What bothers me in this story is what comes next: that after Aaron throws down his staff, and after it turns into a snake, that Pharaoh summons all of his sorcerers, and they do exactly the same thing. They throw down their staffs, and, as the text says, “by the power of their secret arts,” now we’ve got a whole nest of snakes, and yes, Aaron’s snake devours the other snakes, and God’s power wins out, but does it bother anybody else that Pharaoh gets to have sorcerers, too? I tell you, for me, it’s one thing to understand the supernatural elements of this book to be those occasional punctuation marks where God shows up. It’s quite another to recognize that even Pharaoh gets to have magical powers. That the God of Exodus has no monopoly on the supernatural. That the story Israel tells us not a story of being saved from the dreary reality of slavery by a supernatural force; rather, it is the story of being caught in battle between two supernatural entities, between the power of God on one hand and the power of Pharoah’s secret arts on the other. In that regard Israel could very much identify with the man in Mark’s Gospel whose body is occupied by demons and whose liberation is accomplished only by the superior firepower of Jesus Christ. So much, here in Scripture, for the so-called natural world.

To me, this is what makes the Harry Potter rewrite so ironically un-Biblical: not because it Christianizes the good guys, but because it naturalizes the bad ones. In some ways the rewrite maintains the basic duality of the original books: there’s a natural world where most people live, and a supernatural world where those fortunate few learn to channel their powers. But whereas the supernatural world of the original books contains both the forces of good and evil – the big plot here is good magicians versus evil magicians – in the rewrite there’s no such thing as supernatural evil. Harry’s nemesis, Voldemort is no dark minister. He has no such supernatural power. Of all things, he’s just a politician, working in the background. So I would argue that this rewrite hasn’t really stripped out all of the magic from Harry Potter — after all, in the second chapter, Hagrid drops to his knees in prayer and he and Harry are suddenly transported through the ether to Hogwarts, and surely in that moment magic and divine intervention are just two sides of the same coin. What the rewrite has done is strip away all the magic from the forces of evil. In the original books, the natural world isn’t a bad place. It’s just a bit boring. But from the perspective of the Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles, Pharaoh doesn’t get to have magicians. Just lobbyists.

And I have to admit that I’m a little surprised to find what seems to be a rather conservative rewrite of Harry Potter that has gone out of its way to remove the idea of supernatural evil when it seems to me that it is more often on the conservative end of the religious spectrum where you will hear reference to something like Satan or the Devil in the first place. For centuries, this has been how Christians have talked about something like a supernatural power to combat and rival God the Almighty. And on one hand I do want to at least observe that the character of Satan is at best a composite of Biblical fragments and that Scripture doesn’t give us the sustained narrative of one singular evil cosmic force the way that it does with the cosmic force of God. On the other hand, it’s undeniable that both Israel, in its telling of the Exodus, and the early church, in its telling of the first stories of Jesus the Messiah, it’s undeniable that both of these early communities found meaning and solace in understanding the human situation in decidedly un-natural terms. Whoever Pharaoh was, it made sense for Israel to cast him with a league of evil magicians. Whatever possessed that man in the synagogue, it made sense for the first Christians to understand his condition as an invasion of wicked spirits. And regardless of whether or not we want to dress it up in a red satin coat with a forked tail, I wonder if it makes sense for us to consider the evils of this world to have just a hint of the supernatural. Unlike the Voldemort of this piece of fan fiction, you can’t just vote them out of office.

Now, those of you here today who have struggled with your own demons may know this already. Why else do we call them demons, except to recognize and understand the things in our lives over which we have so little authority? You know friends and family, strangers and friends, who have struggled with mental illness, with depression, anxiety, and worse, with addictions both diagnosable and not. You know those stories walk up and down the street of this community every single day, and they sit in these pews on Sunday morning. I have a friend who’s an alcoholic because his father was an alcoholic because his father was an alcoholic and so on, you get the point, and I have no idea how you break that cycle, I have no idea how you fight the stuff that is genetically hard-wired into your very being except at some point you surrender to a higher power. Addictions, mental illnesses, chemical dependencies; that’s how they operate, they burrow into the places in our body chemistry over which we have little or no control. You can’t get up in the morning and decide not to be depressed. You can’t get up in the morning and decide not to be an addict. You can decide not to have a drink. That’s about as far as it goes. But the next morning, the demons will still be there. Satan doesn’t go away just because you wish he would. That’s the whole point.

And it’s not just in our private stories. It’s in our public ones. This past week has seen a revival of protest and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown a month back. Of course we just kind of waited for this to go away. The news cycle doesn’t know what to do with a story that keeps happening. But at this point America’s legacy of systematic racism is so hard-wired into our genetic fabric that these stories have no possibility of going away. Even if the protesters went home. Even if the talking heads went quiet. Even if the authorities played nice. It keeps happening, again and again; in Ohio, black teenager John Crawford shot by authorities while picking up a BB gun in a Wal-Mart. It keeps happening, because our racism is pathological, and because we are addicted to the institutions that profit from it, and because fear and distrust have so burrowed into our body chemistry … You can’t get up in the morning and decide not to be a racist. I just hope you can decide not to pull the trigger. Either way, the next morning, the demons will still be there. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole reality of the brokenness we experience in the world and in ourselves, day in and day out, that sin and addiction both hold us firmly in their grasp. The mass of supernatural evil is not measured by scientific equipment but with the weight of human experience. There are things we just can’t get out of.

Which means that the question isn’t really whether this evil is literal or just literary. Both the Israelites and the early Christians lived in highly polytheistic times. The nations and religions around them took it as a matter of objective fact that the cosmos was inhabited by any number of supernatural forces. Mark’s Gospel emerges in a culture that has no trouble believing in all manner of magical powers. The scandal is surely not that one of them might possess a man. The scandal is that Jesus Christ commands him, and with authority. Likewise for Pharaoh: the Book of Exodus came of age in a world believed to be commonly populated with the supernatural. So what if it says Pharaoh has his hands on some magicians? The point isn’t what Pharaoh can do; the point is what God can do; and, when Aaron’s snake stands triumphant, there and then is Israel’s testimony to the ultimate power of God. The common claim of this morning’s Gospel is therefore this: no matter our futility before the forces of sin and death; no matter our cowardice before the powers of death and despair; no matter even the intractable brokenness of the world itself; no matter all the things we can’t get out of: we worship a God more powerful than any of our demons, with grace more powerful than our sinfulness, with love more powerful than our addiction, with liberation more powerful than our captivity. We worship a God bigger than any of it, so have hope. Have courage. Be unafraid.

Despite my best wishes, we don’t actually live in a world of wizards and witchcraft — at least as far as I can tell. But nonetheless there is something true about a world where evil is given such supernatural power. In Harry Potter it is personified these dark creatures called Dementors, who terrify their victims by casting upon them a pall of fear and despair. Paralyzed by sadness and grief, the victim is rendered defenseless to the Dementor’s attack, unless he or she can cast what is my favorite magical spell, the Patronus spell. A Patronus is a kind of silver-white creature that only the most advanced magicians can summon; they emerge from the end of the wand in the form of animals unique to each: a phoenix, to Dumbledore; a dog, to Ron; a stag, to Harry. These creatures are the personification of courage and hope; and they love nothing more than to fight Dementors. The magician who can summon a Patronus therefore has no fear of fear. She has no despair from despair. She has courage, and hope, because the power of her enemies has already been overcome. We don’t actually live in a world of wizards and witchcraft, and yet, when Aaron summons from his staff a snake more powerful than all of Pharaoh’s darkest magic, Israel has their Patronus. And with such a magician on our side, what fear have we of fear? What despair from despair? Yes, the world overruns with brokenness and sin. Yes, Pharaoh gets to have magicians. But we get God who made Heaven and Earth. We get God who writes the last page of the book.

And I for one am glad that our God has a little flair for the magical.

When I was 15 years old my father disappeared without leaving the house. His body didn’t go anywhere new, but he disappeared, and this pale imitation showed up in his place. In some ways, it was a pretty good copy. For a while, he could go to his job, he could go to the grocery store, he could drop off the dry cleaning. I’m sure clerk at the gas station didn’t notice anything different. But we knew, mom and I, we knew. Or at least she knew. I’d like to tell you that I was right there, that I was in the room when we first noticed that real Dad had been swapped out for some cut-rate photocopy, but I was 15, and life was busy, and I was busy with everything except the emotional health of my own parents, which had never in my life been something that I had needed to take care of. I can’t swear that I was paying close enough attention to notice that my father had in fact disappeared, but it makes me look a little better in this story if I loop myself in, so let’s just say: when I was 15, my father disappeared without leaving home, and only a very few people knew, but Mom and I, we knew.

The thing was, once you noticed, you couldn’t not notice. My father — and some of you have met him, and maybe you will recall enough to back me up — my father can talk to anyone. He’s got no end of charisma; he’s got no end of charm. He smiles with his eyes, and the way he does it is just to let out for a split second some fractional gasp of the joy that radiates in his heart, and it lights up the room, and when he disappeared, everything changed. When that pale copy of my father entered the room, you could feel the temperature drop five degrees. You could taste the shadow of a few scattered clouds drifting in front of the sunlight. He was a grayscale ghost in a technicolor world, and when you looked in his eyes; when you looked in its eyes, there was no smile; there was no joy. He didn’t want to talk to you; he didn’t want to know you, he didn’t want anything, because he wasn’t there, because he’d disappeared, without leaving home.

I don’t remember when I first heard the word “Depression,” I mean, in a clinical sense. Anybody can be depressed; everybody gets depressed, lower-case D, every once in a while. I get depressed when the Braves are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, which, judging by their performance as of late, will be any moment now, but that wasn’t this. This was the real deal. On my 16th birthday my parents, in conjunction with my dad’s therapist, decided that my father was under such a cloud of acute Clinical Depression as to merit hospitalization. As a birthday present, they waited until the day after to let me know, which, in retrospect, seems fair. He checked himself in to the psychiatric wing of Princeton hospital, the acute ward, which is the one where they take your shoelaces and your belt and anything else that you can make into a noose. It was a very grayscale place, and it fit him perfectly.

Mom and I didn’t really talk about it with the outside world, not much. What do you say that possibly sets anybody up to ask a follow-up question you might want to answer? “Well, my father’s in the hospital with acute Clinical Depression” invariably led to something like “What’s he so sad about?” which may be actually the worst possible follow-up question. Were there parts of my father’s biography helping to gather the fuel for his Depression? Absolutely. He grew up in a family where expressing your emotions wasn’t exactly smiled upon, and as a consequence it was always going to be harder for him to process anger, shame, anxiety, fear, you name it. And were there parts of my father’s life in 1995 that helped light the match? Almost certainly. His office routine was stressful in ways I don’t think anybody else has ever entirely understood, and, you know, he had a bratty teenage son who probably wasn’t helping anything. Well, I told him I loved him. More than a few times. We all did. What else can you do? I told him I loved him, because it was true, and because I didn’t know what else to say, and because I didn’t know how else I could help, and because I thought it might help, and because I thought “how could anyone be sad who is so well loved?,” and because I thought “Love never fails,” and because I thought “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” and surely, if we love him enough, if he just sees how much we love him, surely he’ll come back.

And he did come back. He came home again for the bulk of the summer and early fall, but, Mom and I knew, it wasn’t really him. Everything wasn’t better. My mother tried to coax the joy back into his heart, to coax the color back into his palette, but her tenderest affections were for nothing. And so my love affair with love ended on November 3, 1995, when, on a Friday afternoon, we found my father’s body unconscious in his study. He had taken the vast majority of the pills in the medicine cabinet — whether to end his life or escape the afternoon or just feel something else, anything else, nobody knows for sure, not even him. What I know of that evening are only fragments: catching a glimpse of his inert body; searching through trash cans for empty pill bottles; sitting on the front porch waiting for the ambulance. Of course, many of you have met him, so you know: thankfully, he did not complete his most morbid task. The doctors saved his life. He was then readmitted to the psychiatric hospital, and this time, things got better, and when he came home, finally, it was really him, and my mother and I could finally stop looking for a passing herd of swine into which to exorcise whatever demons had taken him hostage.

But here’s what I learned: Clinical Depression is a son of a bitch. It’s not a mood. It’s not what you feel when a lot of bad things happen and you get sad. Getting sad when bad things happen is a normal, rational response. But Clinical Depression interferes with the brain’s ability to have normal, rational responses. It creates a chemical imbalance. It invades the architecture of the brain and starts translating what actually happens in the world into what it wants you to think, and what it wants you to think is that you are unloved, unlovable, and unworthy. And so my father, who is my mother’s soulmate and whom she loves with abandon, and whom I love and loved then as much as any sixteen-year-old is reasonably willing to admit, my father believed himself unloved and unlovable, and every time we told him we loved him the demons living in his head took those words and rearranged them and what he heard was “You don’t really matter. Actually, we’ll be better off without you.” At a chemical level, it didn’t matter that we loved him; it didn’t matter how much we loved him, because we couldn’t say it in a way that could penetrate the shield that Depression had erected around his sense of self-worth. Yes, Dad got better. But here’s the thing: love didn’t beat his Depression. It couldn’t. It couldn’t get in. The only way to fight a chemical imbalance was with chemistry. And so they only thing that worked were pharmaceuticals.

That sounds bleak, and I know it sounds bleak. We love love. We’re big fans of love. Love can do all kinds of things; it says so right here in scripture; Paul just about falls over himself to tell the Corinthians how magical love is and how if they just stir some love into their fractured church that everything will come out just fine, or at least that’s what I think it says – “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” No wonder this passage is great for weddings, and I’m sure some of you even heard it at your own weddings, and I’m sure most of you have heard a wedding preacher get up and read this passage and tell that young couple that love will be the secret ingredient to get you through anything, that as long as you love each other, you can do anything, you just go to the back of the pantry and you pull out that secret sauce and then – voila – happiness will beat a path to your door. Today I would very much like to be that same preacher; I could stand up here give the same prescription for the wounds of the world, blood and tears and mourning in Missouri and Gaza and Iraq and West Africa and around the world, I could stand up here and say that what the world needs now is love and of course I do think the world could stand a good dose of it but I don’t actually think love can do everything. Sometimes the chemistry is just out of whack.

Now, you’ve heard my story. I don’t pretend that it’s that unusual. I don’t know your story, exactly, but Depression and other anxiety disorders affect something like 40 million adults in the United States. That’s about one in five adult Americans, or, in other words, a fair handful of those of us gathered here today, so, I can make some guesses. This is the epidemic hiding in plain sight. And of course, this week, it was a bit more on display. On Monday the tragic news broke that comedian and actor Robin Williams had succumbed to his own lifelong depression; that he had succeeded where my father had failed, or, vice versa; that the had taken his own life. And this wasn’t one of those Hollywood deaths-by-overdose that we so typically blame on drugs and alcohol, though, certainly, Williams’s prior struggles with drugs and alcohol are well-documented. But Monday’s loss was something more inexplicable, and thus somehow something more tragic. After all, said the pundits and the eulogists, after all, isn’t it particularly tragic that a man who was so beloved could himself feel so little love? Didn’t he know how much we loved him? Didn’t he know how much his family loved him? Isn’t there a way we can blame someone for this, either his family, for not loving him enough, or we ourselves, for not telling him enough, or even Williams himself, for not wanting to believe it? Isn’t there a way love could have fixed this if only whoever it is that we ought to be blaming had done what in retrospect we decide they ought to have done?

And so you see what Depression does: it turns love into a weapon of anger and guilt and shame. In Depression’s hands, love becomes the lynchpin of everything we should have done or could have done. It asks a thousand dark questions on a thousand dark nights and it turns a chemical imbalance into an opportunity for anger, and guilt, and shame. If we understand Depression as a failure of love – a failure to love, a failure to be loved – then we not only sabotage real opportunities to treat and cure the disease at a chemical level, but we also give ourselves infinite chances to plunge further headfirst into the darkness. I don’t know your story, but you now know a bit of mine, and I can tell you without any need for pity or consolation that on my darkest nights, when I have most acutely felt the weight of my father’s disease, when I have felt it as anger and guilt and shame and you could have been there for him and you could have helped him and you could have convinced him, convinced him he was worthy, convinced him he was loved, on my darkest nights the words of grace to me have been this: love can’t do everything. There’s nothing you could have said or could have done. It isn’t your fault. Having Depression doesn’t mean you’re not loved; it just means you can’t hold that love in your heart. It isn’t your fault. Curing Depression with love is like bailing out a boat with a sieve. It isn’t your fault.

So of course I don’t actually disagree with St. Paul here in First Corinthians. I just think he’s been misunderstood. He never says that love can do anything. He never says it’s a magic potion that you keep on the shelf in case of emergency. Instead I hear in these words – “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” – I hear Paul not extolling the power of love but rather its persistence. For Paul here love is not, as the poet would say, the thing with feathers; it’s the thing with armor. It’s the thing with reinforced steel. It’s the thing invincible to all the chemical imbalances of creation. “As for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end,” but, for Paul, love, like those mythical post-apocalyptic cockroaches, love, for Paul, love survives everything. When the world tears us apart, love stays together. When brain chemistry runs us down, love stays on its feet. Even when all the brokenness of creation stands in our way, when we can’t see the path before us, somehow, love gets through. For Paul, love is playing rope-a-dope with the slings and arrows of creation, and someday, when sin and death run out of steam, when injustice has no more arrows in its quiver, when anger and guilt and shame have no more worlds left to conquer, someday, when all those thousand dark nights converge onto the sunrise, on that day, love will still be standing, thanks be to God, who loved us from the beginning.

So here’s what I want you to know: God loves you, and God will always love you. It’s not going to fix everything. There will still be long nights of the soul. There will still be days when the best you can do is grayscale. There will still be weeks like the one just past, weeks when the chemical imbalance of the world overflows onto the streets of Ferguson, and Gaza, and Baghdad, and even and especially when it shows up in your life looking like the ghost of someone you used to know. But God’s love doesn’t give up so easily. Here’s what I want you to know: God loves you, no matter what. God will always love you, no matter what. I want you know it. I want you to feel it. I want that thought to burrow into the inner confines of your soul, underneath all the neurons, underneath all the synapses, underneath all the chemistry, somewhere so unassailable that you can never allow yourself to think anything else.

That’s what I want, but that’s not how brains work.

So, instead, let’s just say this. God loves you, and God will always love you, and even if you can’t know it, especially if you can’t know it, especially if when I say “God loves you” the demons taking residence in your brain translate that into something that says “that really can’t be true” and “I don’t really matter,” especially then, even if you can’t believe it, it’s still true. Even when you can’t know it, it’s still true. Even if you can’t hear it, it’s still true. That’s my story. That’s your story. That’s our story. That’s the only way we ever get through. Amen.

We have been reading through Peter’s sermon on the Pentecost day, this extensive section of the second chapter of the Book of Acts. The spirit has descended and given all those gathered of Judea the ability to hear and understand each other, and, as we heard last week, Peter is trying to interpret the astonishing events of the day in light of the just-past crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ – and not only that, but he’s laid a fairly thick guilt trip on his Judean audience for Jesus’s death; you’ll remember from last week’s reading Peter’s repeated cadence “this Jesus, whom you crucified.” But this week his attention turns from the historical event of the resurrection to the decision at hand for those gathered, and those with Jesus’s blood apparently on their hands. You’ve seen this amazing thing, Peter says, and I’ve tried to explain why, and I’ve told you the good news and I’ve told you the bad. The question now is: what are you going to do? And the answer, in this text, is baptism. Hearing Peter’s pronouncement of their guilt, the crowd screams out “brothers, what should we do?,” and Peter replies: “Repent, and be baptized,” and a few verses later the text notes that all those who welcomed the message were baptized, about three thousand people. Not a bad days’ work for a budding apostle.

But it’s not immediately clear exactly what theological effect this baptism is supposed to have. Of course, on one hand, Peter’s got the crowd pretty well whipped into a frenzy; they’re clearly eating out of his hands at this point and maybe when they shouted “brothers, what should we do?,” he could have gotten away with giving out old-timey elixir or magic beans or really, whatever he wanted. I think it’s fair to say that he let a profit opportunity pass him by. At least bottle the water first, Peter. These folks have money to burn. So perhaps it is presumptuous to say that the baptisms have any sort of theological effect at all, other than to give the crowd something to do with their guilt and their excitement. But Peter makes a fairly distinct claim to the contrary. He gives the sacrament two fairly distinctive selling points: “Repent, and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Why this baptism? That your sins may be forgiven, and that you might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The first of Peter’s selling points is fairly well-worn territory, even by the time he says it. By the time the Pentecost comes around, baptism is already a well-worn practice for repentance and the ritualized cleansing of sin; in the time of John the Baptist, of course, it signifies the washing away of the sin of the world, the commitment of the faithful to lead lives somehow separate and apart from the lives of vice and corruption and greed that are always such the regular course of human affairs. So it is even today, that our baptismal vows often include the directed renunciation of evil, so that the waters of grace can wash us clean and rid us of the dirt and grime and stench of fallen creation. You might have heard that a few weeks ago no less a public figure than former Vice Presidential Candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin waded into the theology of baptism, suggesting at an NRA rally that if she were in charge America’s enemies “would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists,” a statement which, I suspect, regardless of your feelings about Sarah Palin or your feelings about torture, might have you at least raise your eyebrows. Baptism as torture doesn’t sit well. But, setting aside several other substantial objections — including Palin’s disregard for the actual desires of the baptized – I suppose that if baptism really and simply is at its core a kind of divinely-powered steam-cleaner, and if you are so convicted about the particular dirtiness of American detainees, then perhaps then perhaps the Governor’s sacramental theology is somewhere along the right track.

But the washing away of sins is only the first of Peter’s selling points for this baptismal act. Of course given that he’s just accused the crowd of murdering the Messiah, repentance and forgiveness might be the first thing on their mind. But it’s not the whole package – but wait, there’s more! – That your sins may be forgiven, and that you might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Yes, the crowd’s in the market for repentance and forgiveness, but given the events of the day – the Holy Spirit descending in flame, the gift of tongues and understanding dispersed among all the gathered tribes of Judea – we’d understand if they were interested in something a bit more fantastic than the mere assuaging of their guilt. They’ve been witness to nothing short of an apocalyptic act, so Peter’s not just selling forgiveness; he’s selling the take-home version of what they just saw: the gift of the Holy Spirit — you know, that crazy flame that just tore up the hillside. And more than that: Peter’s sermon makes clear that Jesus’s resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit mark the beginning of a new kind of relationship between God and God’s creation. That crowd is witness to the dawn of a new era of human history; it’s a new world order, and by pitching baptism as the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter’s offering access, entrance, an invitation into what that world is going to be. God has invaded. Death has been overcome. The boundaries between Heaven and Earth have fallen away, to say nothing of the flames of the spirit. Y’all are gonna want to see what comes next, Peter says. Best get baptized.

All of which to say that there is a kind of tension between these two selling points, between selling baptism as the washing away of sin and selling it as the gift of the spirit, because so often the first feels like retreat from the world while the second in this case wants nothing more than to engage it head-on. Baptism as divinely-powered steam cleaner seems bent on washing off all of the dirt that naturally accrues when we play outside in the real world; on the other hand, baptism as the gift of the spirit feels more like an invitation to throw open the doors and go get our hands dirty. It feels less like an exit strategy and more like an invitation, more like an entrance ticket, more like a guest pass to next act of the God who brought fire down upon the mountaintop. And, to be fair, the disciples who receive this spirit go on to do all kinds of amazing things. Remember those characters bumbling around at the end of the Gospels, scared to leave their homes, unable to recognize Jesus standing next to them, afraid and confused at every turn? Well, after Pentecost, after this gift of the spirit, it’s not just a new dawn for creation; these guys turn over a new leaf. They’re preaching to packed houses. They’re tearing up Jerusalem. They’re even healing the sick and casting out demons! These disciples who once cowered in fear behind the locked door of the upper room now rush headlong into the fray. Because this baptismal gift of the spirit isn’t just an invitation. It’s liquid courage.

Liquid courage. Which means that the question isn’t just “what does baptism do?” but also “What will we do in response?” Some years ago a few friends and I had secured badges of the lowest possible rank to the Iowa City film festival: basically we had paid some amount of money for the privilege of walking around in a public area and, if some film screening happened not to fill up with people having better badges than us, we might get a seat. This rarely happened. And so we spent several days realizing just how pointless were the badges we carried around our necks. Their pointlessness was never on more naked display than when we realized via some local gossip that a few minor celebrities had deigned to make an appearance at this festival and were hanging out in a particular VIP tent. And so, having nothing else to do, we went over to the entrance to this tent and once again realized that our badges got us nowhere – to get in, you had to have a particular sticker on top of your badge. But then, after a good spell of bored-out-of-our-minds gawking and loitering, we discovered discarded on a corner of the ground a few of the stickers themselves! And now we could just put the stickers to the badges we already had and then we, too could be VIPs, and we could go into the tent, and who knew what adventures might befall us? It seemed almost inevitable that, after going inside, we would be discovered by some passing talent scout and whisked off to a life of glamor and luxury.

And so we readied our new stickered badges, and walked up to the entrance to the tent, and then, I have to tell you, we just totally chickened out. I mean, we just kept right walking right past like nothing had ever happened because what if we got caught? and won’t we get in trouble? and won’t the authorities of the Iowa City Film Festival figure out that we don’t belong?, because it’s not enough just to have the invitation. You have to have courage. The courage of the apostles, to take this gift of the Holy Spirit and let it loose upon Jerusalem. The courage of all those who follow that same Spirit headlong into the here and now, proclaiming the good news of the Gospel, healing the sick, uplifting the poor, loosing the bonds of injustice, freeing the captive. Yes, baptism symbolizes the gracious forgiveness we have in Jesus Christ. Yes, it marks the covenant of grace that passes to each new generation of God’s children. But for those children of God; for we children of the Pentecost; baptism also asks a question: Will you serve? God sends us into the world as servants of Jesus Christ and his commandments: Will you follow? God sends us into the world as foot soldiers in the great triumphant cosmic march of redemption: Will you fight? God sends us into the world to be agents of reconciliation, to be ambassadors of mercy, to be advocates for righteousness. It is no small task. The powers of sin and death have yet fully to relinquish their grip. It’s not for the faint-hearted. But it is for the baptized: do you have the courage?

Here’s a fun trick that you should not try at home. For any of you who have ever put your hand into a flame or put out a candle with your fingers, this is the next step: you can, in theory, put your hand into a vat of molten lead and bring it back unharmed. I’m talking metal cooking at six, seven, eight hundred degrees. Now, before you try it — and, again, please don’t try it — before you try it, there’s one secret step. All you have to do first is dip your hand in water. Just regular water. Just a quick dip, shake off the extra, and then right into the lead. What happens is pure science: the heat of the lead turns the water to steam, and the steam becomes a layer of gas that ends up insulating your flesh from the temperature of the lead. At least for a moment. I wouldn’t recommend trying it for long. But then again, I wouldn’t recommend try it at all. Regardless. It’s called the Leidenfrost Effect, and if you go find the right Mythbusters clip you can watch it happen. Fingers go in the water, fingers go in the lead, everything comes out just fine. Because the water’s not just cleaning the skin. The water’s giving it strength, power, resilience that it would never have on its own. Just a dip in the water and suddenly there’s no telling what you can do. If you have the courage.

Do we have the courage? It should be the question that we ask, of all days, on this Mother’s Day. For whatever else motherhood may be, whatever it may mean, whatever it may mean to each of us here gathered this morning – for surely each of us can acknowledge that few things in creation are as complicated as the cause of motherhood – but surely at its core motherhood is nothing but an act of radical courage, an act malcontent with the world as it is, an act that recognizes the incompleteness of the present age, and yet an act that gives itself in service of a better day to come, an act that imagines God’s grace pouring into each new generation, as Peter so passionately argues — this promise is for you, and for your children, and for all who are far away. Yes, Peter says, baptism will wash away the past. But it will also lay the future vividly open before you. It will ask of our hopes and of our imagination and of the sweat of our brow what world we offer to those who will inherit it from us. 200 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted weeks ago and held without mercy. Their mothers had the courage to imagine something better. In this country one in five children live below the poverty line. Their mothers had the courage to dream of something better. Every week, 375 children in Amherst country take home bags of food prepared by Amherst Cares. Their mothers had the courage to hope for something better. The question for us is and should be: do we have that courage? Do we have the courage to hope and dream, the courage to speak for the voiceless and serve the needy, the courage to follow the path of Jesus Christ and fight for justice and forge some better tomorrow?

It’s the question baptism asks us, and maybe it should torture us, just a little bit. And it should be the question we ask, today of all days, we who are the children of grace, we who are the children of the courage of our mothers, we who are the children of the courage of all who came before us: if we are the heirs of the gift of the Holy Spirit descended in flames upon the mountaintop, will we live into the courage of those convictions? If we have truly been steeped in the living waters of God’s grace, will we step into the fray with faith, love, hope, and just a bit of reckless abandon? For if we are truly seeking the ends of the one who made all things and sustains all things and redeems all things, what force on Heaven or Earth could be our equal? If we truly are sealed with the mark of the one who rose from the dead, what obstacle could ever stand in our way? If Jesus Christ is for us, who can be against us?

Amen.

I want to tell you about the funniest joke in the world. You might think this would be something of a competition, but no, actually, the “Funniest Joke in the World” comes from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the madcap British sketch comedy show of the early 1970s. And it’s not just one of their sketches that I find particularly funny; no, the sketch is actually called “The Funniest Joke in the World,” and, at the risk of killing the joke by explaining it, here’s how it goes. The scene opens during World War II, on a man writing away at his desk; the narrater tells us that his name is Ernest Scribbler, writer of jokes, and that he is about to write the funniest joke in the world, and that, “as a consequence, he will die laughing.” And so he does, convulsing in laughter until he keels over at his desk. His mother walks into the room, finds the body, finds the piece of paper, reads it, and then joins him in laughing herself into the grave.

The comedy, of course, is in the escalation. A brave Scotland Yard inspector shows up and explains that he is going to go retrieve the joke after first inoculating himself by listening to a series of sombre laments, but it’s of no use. And then the scene shifts and we are informed that the British army have decided to weaponize the joke. They translate it into German — each translator only taking one word, for safety — and then deploy it to the front. And so Monty Python treat us to a series of wartime vignettes in which British soldiers get the best of their unsuspecting German counterparts not with guns and bullets but rather with the swift telling of a joke – in German, of course. At the Ardennes, they counter German artillery by yelling the punch line across the open battlefield. One captured soldier tells it several times in quick succession to break his torturers and find his freedom. It must be hysterical. It’s certainly powerful.

In fact the skit ends with the narrator reporting that in 1950 Joke Warfare itself was banned by the Geneva Convention, and that the last copy of the joke was sealed under a monument inscribed “To the Unknown Joke.” And so, out of deference to the power of this weaponized joke, the skit never reveals the English-language translation. Apparently they don’t want to kill their audience. We only ever hear it in German, and in later interview the Python guys confirm that it’s just nonsense German. It’s a bunch of German-sounding gibberish: “Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!” See, it’s hilarious! I have no idea what it means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s the funniest joke in the world and I don’t get it at all. Because of course it’s a joke about a joke, it’s a story about a story, and the power’s in the telling.

Now, our Gospel text for this Easter Sunday morning, this passage from the Gospel of Matthew – it’s not quite sketch comedy, but it is a story about a story, with the power in the telling. This Easter Sunday morning you might expect to hear us tell the story of Jesus rising from the dead, and of course in some ways that’s exactly what we’re doing, but not quite. Matthew doesn’t tell that story. He tells the story of the crucifixion. He tells the story of Joseph of Arimeahea preparing Jesus’s body for burial, and of Pilate’s men sealing the tomb with a large stone. And then it skips ahead, and we have today’s text wherein the women go to the tomb and suddenly an angel from heaven comes and rolls away the stone and tells them the story: “I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified; he is not here, for he has been raised, as he said.” What we have this morning is not the story of Jesus’s resurrection. There’s not a scene in this Gospel where Jesus himself gets up out of that grave and dusts himself off and sets about his business. Instead, what Matthew gives us the story about the story. It’s the story of the women who first heard the news. It’s the story of the angel who first told it.

And it’s not just the case here in Matthew’s Gospel. In fact none of our four Gospels tell the story of Jesus getting up out of that grave and dusting himself off. None of them begin their accounts of Easter Sunday with any of Jesus’s followers meeting the man himself in the flesh. In Mark, the women come to the tomb and find the stone rolled away and a young man there in a white robe: “You are looking for Jesus who was crucified; he has been raised, he is not here.” In Luke, the women find the stone rolled away and inside the tomb two men in dazzling clothes show up bearing the same news: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” In John, always a bit of an outlier, Mary and the disciples confront the empty tomb and the abandoned linen that had wrapped Jesus’ body, and after the disciples flee the scene, then our two angels in white show up to comfort her: “Woman, why are you weeping?” In no case does it happen that Jesus just “shows up” before the news of his resurrection is already announced. Which is to say that the story we tell on this Easter Sunday is not really first and foremost the story of the resurrection, but the story of a story. The story of the first ones to hear. The story of the ones who told. The story of that hour when any of us first believed.

Does that seem to anybody like we’ve watered down the Gospel? After all, is it not our duty this morning to proclaim the triumph of God over the powers of sin and death and not simply to remember a nice story that we once heard? Did you come to church this morning to worship the living Lord to just to wrap yourselves in a story? Don’t let the spring blossoms and the sunlight fool you: it’s a dark world out there. Disease, destruction, death: these things are the order of the day. And don’t let the sunlight fool you: it’s a dark world in here: desolation, distraction, despair, these things are the everyday rulers of the human heart. Our politics lie in ruin. Our planet stands on the brink. Our people obsess with death. So is this all we can do? To, gather in the sanctuary on this sacred morning, curl up under the soft fleece blanket of the resurrection, tell ourselves one more time the story we want to hear? If the resurrection of Jesus Christ has only ever been a story, however frequently told, however lovingly told, however comfortably told, at what point do we just call this what it is: circumstance? hearsay? the punch line from an epically long game of historical telephone? Or worse: against the gaining powers of sin and death, against the marching forces of time and history, do we just call this story what it is — pointless? meaningless? powerless?

Except that the power of this story is in the telling. Matthew knows it. Last week we talked about the shaking of the earth as one of Matthew’s signs for the cosmic power of God. It happens when Jesus first enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It happens when he breathes his last upon the cross. And then, if we’re reading carefully, it doesn’t happen when Jesus rises from the dead. Jesus has been raised in the night; he’s not there in the tomb; sometime in those uncharted hours he has broken the boundaries of life and death and gotten up out of the grave but God waits until the women show up to shake the earth. They go to see the tomb and “suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone.” For Matthew, the resurrection is an apocalyptic event — and by that word I mean not that the world is ending but rather that God is invading, that God is rupturing that thin tissue between Heaven and Earth – but the invasion doesn’t happen when Jesus rises from the grave. It happens when the women show up. It happens when the angel shows up. It happens when the angel says “I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified, but he is not here, but he has been raised.” It happens when the angel tells the story. When he tells the story, God shows up. When he tells the story, the power of Heaven unleashes itself on that Jerusalem countryside. When he tells the story, then and precisely then does the full apocalyptic force of the resurrection break forth into the lives of its witnesses.

Which means that Easter Sunday isn’t just about what happened two millennia ago in that graveyard outside the city. It’s about what happens when we tell the story. And the central conviction of this text, and the central conviction of the Gospel, is that the story has power in the telling. And while there’s nothing funny about it, it’s not unlike that funniest joke in the world: a story whose power in the telling is the power of life and death itself. This isn’t just the soft fleece blanket called Resurrection; it’s not just the cozy Sunday morning called Resurrection; in the words of Brian Blount, this is Resurrection, Weaponized. The conviction that the story itself comes with the apocalyptic force of God. That in a world overlong in the clutches of sin and death we are not left to fend for ourselves but rather that we come armed with the magnificent power of the Gospel. Disease, destruction, death: such things have no champion to equal the force of God set loose upon the earth – when we tell the story. Desolation, destruction, despair: they account for nothing, they add up to nothing; even in the darkest night they amount to nothing – when we tell the story. When we tell this magnificent story. When we tell this magnificent, weaponized story about the powerful vision of God.

Before his death, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  – himself no stranger to the weaponized power of the story of the Gospel – King began to strategize about how the tactics of the Civil Rights movement might be similarly applied to the cause of the most poverty-stricken Americans, and in the months immediately after his death, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began to work on following through with his project. In a plan not dissimilar from the earlier March on Washington, but in some ways more ambitious, King had imagined what came to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, a prolonged in-place demonstration on fifteen acres just near the reflecting pool on the National Mall. In May, the protesters began to arrive. Three thousand in all. They built plywood shantytowns, streets, a city hall, a general store, a first-aid station; John Kelly of The Washington Post recounts that in some cases the residents considered it nicer than the homes they’d left behind. On June 19th, fifty-thousand marchers joined them for a day of solidarity, demanding jobs, a living wage, the possibility of economic opportunity for every citizen of the republic, an invasion of a vision of justice into very heart of our nation’s capital. They called it “Resurrection City.”

Of course, these things fall apart. One day after the solidarity march, violence erupted at the non-violent protest. Someone threw a molotov cocktail, either within the city itself, or beyond its boundaries at the capital police; of course on these matters history rarely speaks with one voice. The police responded with tear gas; four days later they cleared the camp entirely. Many left voluntarily. A few were arrested. In sum, Resurrection City faded into the hot, sticky swamp of a DC summer. And yet, four months later, Resurrection City’s manager, an activist by the name of Jesse Jackson, wrote that the City’s death was far from certain: “Resurrection City cannot be seen as a mud hole in Washington,” he wrote, “but it is rather an idea unleashed in history… [and] the idea has taken root.” And what else could it possibly be? What else could resurrection be but an idea unleashed in history? A story unleashed in history? A story weaponized for justice. A story armed for love. A story combat-ready for hope. A story accompanied by the invasive power of God.

One last retelling. As you undoubtedly know, few among us in this country know the awful power of death like our soldiers who come home caught in the grip of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. So many of their names go unspoken. One of them is named Luke. By his own hand, he writes, “I’ve struggled with depression my whole life. I self-medicated with whatever I could – adrenaline, food, a little pot, more than a little alcohol and a lot of prescription drugs. But you probably never would’ve known.” And then of course he came home from the war and all those wounds festered inside. All those wounds festered in the grip of the power of death that held him in its grasp, not entirely in full view of his wife Jill, but neither entirely out of sight. All those powers that claim their grip on us in the darkest hours of the night. And then in the darkest hour of his, the fall of 2011, in about two in the morning, he found himself sitting on the floor of his closet with the door closed and his fingers wrapped around the grip of a nine millimeter pistol. He was trying to write a note. As he says, he was trying to “frame the end of [his] story.”

Of course, Jill had been writing a story of her own. In her version, Jill says that at some point “the anger, the pain [was] so much a part of us… [we’d] actually become it. We [knew] it too well.” At one point she screams to God, “Why did you let the world fall down on us? You abandoned us … you let him reach for that gun … you just left him there to die!” And then she hears God say, “Let go, Jill. I have you. I have him. I love him more than he can comprehend. Let go, and let me hold him for just a little while.” What a ambitious thing we do, to claim that God can hold us, even for a little while. To claim that God’s hold on us can free us even from the grasp of death itself. To hold in one hand the instrument of death and in the other the weaponized story of resurrection. To tell that story, even in the darkest hours of the night, and then, by the power of God, to watch it come true. While Luke was hiding on the floor of the closet, his oldest son cried out from his sleep; instinct took control; and before long, as Luke says, “the gun was back in the safe and the boy was in my arms. Some day I’ll tell him that he saved my life.”

And when you do, Luke, you tell the whole story.

So, last week in the news I read that Jesus has taken up residence in Davidson, North Carolina. Now, you may know Davidson — home of the college of the same name, just north of Charlotte — and you may not. I’ve never been. I know the college only by reputation — for years it has been one of the preeminent colleges with deep connections to the Presbyterian Church. In fact that whole part of the country teems with Presbyterians. We’re all over Charlotte. We like those Smoky Mountains. We put a fabulous retreat center up near Black Mountain. It’s Presbyterians wall to wall out there, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at all that Jesus has come there to hang out.

Except of course that he doesn’t show up exactly in the way we might expect. In this case, he’s on a park bench. An Episcopal congregation in Davidson — yes, they have those, too — an Episcopal congregation has installed a statue of Jesus on a park bench right in front of the church. He’s lying on his side, shrouded in a thin blanket, hands and face hidden – in fact in every respect he looks intentionally indistinguishable from the masses of homeless who find their best shelter on park benches not unlike that one. The look is convincing enough that one of the neighbors called the cops: she drove by, thought she saw an actual homeless person sleeping on the bench, and called the police.

As you might expect, Davidson’s a fairly well-off community, at least affluent enough that just seeing a homeless person sleeping on a bench would be sufficient cause to call the authorities. On a quick drive-by, she couldn’t possibly have even seen the only distinguishing feature, there, set in the stone of his exposed feet, the marks of crucifixion. Which is to say that it may be controversial enough to depict the base reality of homelessness without even adding Jesus into the mix: once you do that, it gets even more so. The rector has this to say: “This is a relatively affluent church, to be honest, and we need to be reminded that our faith expresses itself in active concern for the marginalized of society.” And I would want to add that our faith not only expresses itself in such concern, but in fact has its roots precisely on those societal margins, and if that sounds controversial, I hope it at least also sounds Biblical: You may remember from the Gospel of Matthew: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head;” or, perhaps, the more familiar insistence from Jesus’s lips that “Just as you did it to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”

Yes, at the very center of the story we tell is a man who dares to occupy the very margins of society and then dares us to welcome him in. And so goes our first pass at tonight’s reading from the Gospel of John, the traditional reading for Maundy Thursday, the story of course of the Last Supper and Jesus’s commandment to the disciples to love one another and also this memorable scene where he strips of the clothing of his journey and puts on the towel of a servant and begins to wash his disciples’ feet. And Peter won’t have any part of it – “Lord, are you going to wash my feet? You will never wash my feet” – because of course we have servants for that sort of thing and that’s the right order of things and apparently he just hadn’t taken seriously Jesus’s insistence on identifying himself, over and over, with those on the lowest rung of the ladder. Apparently all of those healings and all of that preaching about social justice and all of that identification with those most quickly forgotten and every minute of Peter’s part in Jesus’s radical acts of hospitality and all of it just vanishes. You know if this had been on a quiz – True or False: Jesus cares more about the middle-class than he does about those on the margins – you know Peter would have aced that thing. Heck, even an essay question would’ve been no problem. But it’s one thing to have the answer, and another one to live it out.

How well we know, that it’s one thing to have the answer, and another to live it out. How well we know the answer, and how easy it is to offer ourselves in half measure.A drop in the offering plate; a drop in the bucket compared to what we could do and what the world needs. I remember walking up the streets of Madison Avenue early one Sunday morning – and this is in the last few years, this is Michael Bloomberg’s New York – and of course every block of the city was full to the brim of high-end retail, glass-fronted skyscrapers and boutique sandwich joints, all scrubbed as clean as they could be, and then I’d pass a church, and there, underneath some old gothic arch, there would be huddled together as many homeless as could possibly fit, sleeping on the steps of the sanctuary, wrapped in whatever meager coats and blankets they could find. And on one hand it’s powerful to realize that those churches have agreed not to call the cops and not to push away those who have no other place to go but then of course I’m pretty sure that if Jesus was there he would have opened the door. Or, rather, more to the point, I’m fairly sure that Jesus was there, sleeping on the steps, and the door wasn’t open. Naked, and we did not clothe him. A stranger, and we did not welcome. We just let them have the doorway. Half measures. Easy enough for me to critique while I walk past.

“Lord, are you going to wash my feet? You will never wash my feet!” Peter is incredulous that even here, even at the very end, that even here Jesus could insist on radical acts hospitality as the very cornerstone of the Gospel. He becomes the servant so that we all become the servant so that we all might know what it is to give our clothes to the naked and open our doors to the stranger so that we might all know what it is to do that Maundy Thursday commandment of loving one another. And yet. This simple act – leaving behind the clothes of the journey, taking on the towel of the servant, washing the feet of the disciples — Jesus isn’t just showing the disciples what it means to serve. Even more fundamentally he’s showing them what it means to be served. He’s not just teaching us about opening our doors and welcoming strangers; he’s welcoming us; he’s opening himself to us. This Last Supper table isn’t just Jesus’s last chance with a captive audience to ram his point home before the big exam. It’s more than that. It’s the first glimpse of a table feast where Jesus isn’t just the servant; he’s the host, and we are all welcome. All of us: You, me, the guys sleeping on the church steps, the woman calling the cops, all of us, served; all of us, at home; all of us, welcomed to that everlasting banquet where nobody goes hungry and the doors never close. In that sense we should hardly call tonight the Last Supper. In that sense it is really only the first of many.

In just a few moments we will gather around this table to break bread and pour the cup together and serve one another as we have been taught. It is an ambitious thing we do, to believe ourselves worthy of these gifts, to believe that in this bread and in this cup that Jesus might ever serve us, to believe that at this sacred table Jesus might ever welcome us, to believe that even in a dark and cruel and violent world Jesus might ever be gracious unto us. And yet this is the Gospel of Maundy Thursday: that he was hungry, and we did not feed him, and yet his body is broken for us. He was thirsty, and we gave him nothing to drink, and yet he pours out his blood as the cup of eternal life. He was naked, and we did not clothe him. He was a stranger, and we closed our doors. But do not miss the marks of crucifixion in his feet. They are nothing short of the power of God working for the redemption of all things. And by that power. By the power grace of this day. By the power grace of these three days. By the grace that welcomes us at the table and to the garden and beneath the cross and beyond the grave, by that grace we are known; by that grace we are served.

“Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

“Child, I have already made you clean.”

Amen.

In the summer of 2009, the state of California found itself in a serious financial hole. You may well remember the market crash of 2008, and the ripple effects that brought state and municipal budgets around the country to their knees, perhaps nowhere more so than in California, which, by the end of the next summer, had completely evacuated its cash reserves and had begun to pay its own bills with IOUs. And the state was hamstrung not only by the tidal wave of national financial meltdown, but also by its own cumbersome legal system, a state constitution that failed to give state leaders enough room to maneuver their way through the crisis without the whole thing crashing to a halt. Public opinion began to shift past the usual cries of “Throw the bums out” and towards the conclusion that the system itself was flawed beyond repair.

And so during that long summer, voices around California began to call for a statewide constitutional convention, a kind of democratic Hail Mary whereby a group of citizens unencumbered by the burden of actually holding office might do the kind of drastic revisiting of the state constitution necessary to let the state move forward. And of course the magic of a constitutional convention would be that you wouldn’t just send the folks who were already deadlocked in the state senate; no, you could just send regular people. Individual cities and counties could appoint their own delegates. Or they could elect their own delegates. Or, in my personal favorite, you could just put all of the Californians into a computer and let some algorithm pick them out of a hat, like jury selection. And then you’d have a few dozen or a few hundred random people, farmers and teachers and doctors and tradespeople and probably a few lawyers thrown in for good measure, all of them outsiders to the political process, all of them entrusted with rewriting it from scratch. Who could think it would ever work? –  except, of course that it’s the story of how this country got made in the first place.

And a powerful story it is, a story of government by the people and not by an elite political class. A story so firmly-entrenched that even now few things attract voters like the claim of being a political outsider. Let’s just pause and consider the irony of that for a moment: if you’re applying for a job as an accountant, I presume that prior experience in accounting generally counts in your favor. So it was, once upon a time, in our national elections: the New York Times observed that four of the five presidents to be elected in the years prior to Vietnam and Watergate had served in the United States Senate prior to their election – the fifth being Eisenhower, who has little claim to outsider status. But in the years since those seminal events marked the corrosion of public faith in the institutions of our democracy, four of the six men elected to the oval office had never previously served in Washington and made systemic reform a hallmark of their campaigns – and one of the other two is of course our current president, whose tenure in the senate was historically brief and whose 2008 campaign was no stranger to populism.

Suffice to say that we are in love with political outsiders — or, at least, with the belief that government has been removed from its people and that only periodic injections of real people back into its veins can somehow right the ship. And so we want candidates who seem like those mythical “real people.” We want candidates who see Washington not from the inside but instead can sit alongside us on the couch and watch the news with heads shaking. We want candidates whose political naiveté we can mistake for inoculation from the inside baseball influences of corruption and money. We want a bit more Frank Capra and a bit less Frank Underwood. And, Vietnam and Watergate notwithstanding, we’ve wanted it this way for a long time, back before Lincoln stood at Gettysburg and articulated the ideal of a government by, of and, for the people, back before those first farmers and teachers sat in Philadelphia and signed those ideals into law, all the way back, at least, to the story that we tell on Palm Sunday, the story of Jesus Christ, our first populist hero.

You already know the story well enough. Jesus and his disciples have made the decisive turn towards Jerusalem to be in the city for the Passover festival. He’s already been throughout Galilee, of course; he’s fed the multitudes; he’s healed the sick and the blind; but, of course, he’s also stood on the Mount and said some rather uncomfortable things about the Jewish authorities of the day; of course he’s taken more than a few opportunities to levy his complaints about the current establishment, both the Jewish high council and the Roman imperial delegation. All of which is to say that Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem isn’t simply the next stop on the wandering tour of some mystic healer. It is in no uncertain terms the decisive end of something that strongly resembles a political campaign. And when the text says that a “very large” crowd was set before him, and that the crowd streamed behind him as he processed and sang “Hosanna to the Son of David,” which, you know, in a land where David is the only face on Jewish Mount Rushmore, that’s kind of a big deal, and when the text says that the whole city was in turmoil – actually the Greek says that the city was shaking, quivering because of his coming – it is in no uncertain terms because this outsider – this Jesus from Nazareth – has won the hearts and minds of the people. His people. And now he comes to the capitol.

I wonder what they really thought was going to happen. What did they want from this Holy Week? What’s the plan here? He’s supposed to walk into the temple and give that one great sermon and then the Pharisees and Sadducees and all of the religious authorities will just have this transformative moment and give up centuries of authority and control just because, you know, he talks nice? The chief priest isn’t a democratically-elected position, no matter what this crowd thinks. Or perhaps their dreams are more explicitly political? Perhaps they imagine him not seated in the temple but rather unseating Pilate and loosing the reins of the Roman state? And how exactly is that supposed to work? They call him Son of David, but at least David was a military man. David knew his way around a battlefield. If you’re going ten rounds with a Roman phalanx and you’ve got your choice of David or Jesus on your side there’s no military textbook in history that would choose Jesus. So I’m just not sure why the crowd is so eager, I’m just not sure how this is supposed to work, when the deck is so stacked against him. When the system is so stacked against him. And yet the city trembles with anticipation because the people finally have their hero.

For a few days. In fact it’s hard in Matthew’s Gospel to pinpoint the exact point that the crowd turns against him. Perhaps it’s as quickly as in the verses that follow today’s story, when Jesus immediately goes into the temple and casts out the money-changers. Perhaps it’s later in the week, when he begins to preach about the whole city falling to pieces. But somewhere along the line, in some whisper campaign hidden from our view, somewhere along the line as you well know the public opinion changes and by time Pilate brings him before the huddled masses they are shouting “Crucify Him” even while the Hosannas still echo through the valley. Which means that it is not simple enough to say that Jesus the outsider gets chewed up and and destroyed by the intractability of the system. That story is surely the one we most want to tell, where Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Washington is just too much. No, the story is here is something different: where the people who crown this outsider hero themselves become complicit in his destruction – without a hint of self-awareness, without a hint of reflection or contrition. This is some dark twisted version of Mr Smith where at the end all the calls and letters are asking for Jimmy Stewart’s head on a platter. Who would be the man of the people if the people tremble only in bloodlust?

That’s the problem with populism, of course – a voice in American political history with which I am very sympathetic. But in practice it so often proclaims that the roots of our problems lie with corrupt institutions and that if we can only inject into those institutions people heretofore uncorrupted – you know, people just like us, regular people – then we can magically transform them into kinder, gentler, more honest institutions, more worthy of our public trust. But you and I know different. You and I know something more fundamental about sin. You and I know that institutions don’t corrupt people; people corrupt institutions. You and I know that the roots of our problems lie in the fundamental brokenness of all of God’s creatures, and that populism affords us little but the occasional opportunity to lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we’re not the problem. That Washington is corrupt and we aren’t. That Jerusalem is corrupt and we aren’t. That it’s just the system, man, and we deserve better. That what we want on Palm Sunday, this illusion of a day, the Feast Day for the Myopic, that what we want from our leaders this Holy Week is for God to come in from the outside and clean things up and even if he dies, better that than implicate us in the process.

Only a small fraction of you would ever have had the occasion to try and navigate the official website of the Presbyterian Church USA. It’s not an experience I recommend. It’s unintuitive. It’s poorly designed. Woe to the visitor who simply wants an updated Book of Order. One gets the sense of competing organizations and competing perspectives all trying to coexist in one space. It’s not clear which agency serves what governing body or which program staff are meant to be the lead on what mission field. It is something of the butt of jokes, at least in the strange world of professional Presbyterian humor, and I admit that from time to time in the past I have fantasized about having the opportunity to just fix that website right up, to just put everything in its right place so that it wouldn’t be so hard for people to find the information they need. And then maybe two years ago I was at a denominational event and someone from the national office was taking questions and someone in the audience asked about the website and why it was, point of fact, so terrible, and the man explained that the website isn’t terrible at all. It’s just that it perfectly communicates the national structure of the Presbyterian church. It perfectly encapsulates the entangled mess of competing bureaucratic agencies that we as a denomination have voted into existence. So the problem isn’t the system, man. We have the system we deserve. In fact we are the system we deserve.

No wonder the whole city trembles. Except that there’s yet another way to read that verse. It doesn’t just have to be anticipation. It doesn’t just have to be bloodlust. In fact the literal rendering of that verse – that the whole city was shaking – shows up again two more times in Matthew’s Gospel. In the first instance, in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s death, when the temple curtain ears itself in two, Matthew recounts that the earth itself shook, trembled. In the second, one of our reading for next Sunday morning, when Mary and Martha go to the tomb early on the first day of the week, and suddenly an angel of the Lord appears in front of them and Matthew says that “for fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.” Which is to say that this is something of a special-occasion verb. It’s not something Matthew casually throws around. And nor is it just a Palm Sunday verb.

No, this shaking, this trembling, occurs in this text in precisely those moments when God most profoundly invades God’s creation. It’s what happens when God’s plan for the fullness of time is on its most naked display: when Jesus breathes his last upon that Good Friday cross. When God cracks open that Easter morning tomb. And here, on Palm Sunday, when the Messiah rides into the city with the look of a simple man on a donkey and the feel of a cosmic collision. Which means that the scope of this moment is bigger than Jewish religious infighting. That the scope of this moment is bigger than Roman political maneuvering. Yes, Jesus rides into the city as a man of the people, a man on a mission, but he’s after more than the keys to the city. He’s after more than the corruption of Jerusalem herself. He’s here to break open the most corrupt system in the land. He’s here to conquer us.

The question, one last time: what do you want from this Holy Week? Here on Palm Sunday it is always so easy to imagine ourselves sitting back to enjoy a show, that we can watch Jesus disappear through the gates of the city and then go find a good spot in the bleachers to watch the rest of the week unfold. You go, Jesus! You get those nasty Sadducees! But if the story of Holy Week isn’t about Jerusalem on the inside and the people on the outside; if instead it is about the great collision between the force of God’s will and the relatively insignificant scope of God’s creation, then for the week ahead there’s no place to watch from the sidelines. It means Jesus isn’t just here for the Sadducees. He’s here for you. He’s here for us. He’s after the most intractable sins of the human condition: he’s after all of our pride and all of our greed and all of our petty jealousies. He’s after the powers that have us most stubbornly in their grasp: he’s after the addictions, the demons, the voices that whisper from the shadows.

The people’s hero, maybe, but not because we chose him. Rather because he chose us. Rather because the great ends of creation are God choosing us, walking with us, suffering with us, and then suffering for us once and for all time. Because the story of Holy Week doesn’t just happen in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. It happens right now, this week, and it happens right here, in the deepest places of the human heart. It’s the story of God dying for us and for our redemption. It’s the story of God living for us and for our transformation. It’s the story whereby anyone in Jesus Christ is a new creation; the old life has gone; everything has become new. It’s the story of God’s grace refusing, refusing, refusing to let us go. So no matter what you want from this Holy Week, remember that this Holy Week isn’t about what you want. It’s about what God wants, not first a God of the people, nor at all a God by the people, but fundamentally and to the last day God for the people, for all the people, for Mr. Smith, for Washington, and even for us. Amen.

So you want to know how to resurrect the dead?

Ezekiel does, too. I’m wiling to bet the book of Ezekiel isn’t exactly the most dog-earned part of your family Bible so indulge me in a bit of introduction. If you want to know how to resurrect the dead, Ezekiel does, too, because of all of the prophetic voices of the Old Testament there is nobody who lives with loss and grief and death quite like Ezekiel. Of course we have prophets who stood in the courts of power and spoke God’s most uncomfortable truths; of course we have prophets who stood on the brink of exile and warned of God’s imminent judgment; of course we even have in the wistful and hopeful words of the second half of the book of Isaiah the voice of one who could see his way back to the promised land and so preached with joy and expectation. But Ezekiel is something different. Our best Biblical historians believe that he was born in Jerusalem but at the very end of the reign of the kings of Israel, which is to say that as a young man Ezekiel witnessed the fall of the city at the hands of the Babylonians.

Perhaps he wasn’t old enough to prophesy about the destruction like Jeremiah or Isaiah, but he was certainly old enough to remember — so that by the time he enters his prophetic work, the city has already been destroyed; those Jews who survived the battle have already been taken into exile, but Ezekiel is old enough to remember how things used to be. Which is to say that it’s not enough to simply refer to him as the prophet of exile. After all, Israel will stay in Babylon for generations, and soon enough those who can recall the great city in her glory will long since have died off, but here in this particular moment the wound is so fresh and the memory so acute and Jerusalem isn’t this vague dream of something better but rather the very specific memory of something just passed, like it was yesterday, of people taken away, of friends and family left behind. Surely there is no prophet who can match Ezekiel for living inside the shadow of grief and loss and that nostalgic longing for what used to be. So you want to know how to resurrect the dead? Ezekiel does, too.

And then we land on today’s text, which is certainly the first cut on every “Ezekiel’s Great Hits” album ever produced: the story of the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel has a vision wherein the hand of the Lord leads him out of the city of Babylon, back out into that wilderness that Israel knows so well; the Lord led him out of the city into a valley covered with bones – dry bones, in particular, which is to say that it was not a valley of the freshly fallen but of those long since dead, and he asks the very simple question that resonates at the heart of the text: “Mortal, can these bones live?” And there’s no question of the symbolism of the moment: for Ezekiel, the valley of dry bones can be nothing other than the symbol of Israel’s lost kingdom. In one sense of course each skeleton lying in that valley represents someone fallen in the great siege and battle that brought Jerusalem to its knees; but in another, broader, sense, the valley of dry bones represents not just Israel’s fallen soldiers but also the death of the the Kingdom itself, the death of Israel’s place among the nations, the death of Israel’s place within God’s plan for the fullness of time? How could this valley of bones be anything but the mass grave wherein lie all of Israel’s hopes and dreams, all of its most rigidly-held convictions, indeed its entire perspective on the slow unfolding of history? And how, for a prophet who could still close his eyes and hear the sounds of the old city bouncing through his memory, how could this question dangle with any more temptation: “Mortal, can these bones live?”

You want to know how to resurrect the dead?

Of course you do. But much like Ezekiel, it’s not just those fallen soldiers that we mourn. No, you know as well as I do that on Sunday mornings we gather in these pews – we Christians all around the world, but especially those of us dangling from the old language of the mainline church – that we gather in these pews and mourn not just the bones of those who have gone on ahead but also the death of something we can so easily remember. Back when the pews were just a little bit more full. Back when the sounds of children more audibly bounced through the sanctuary. Back before we were closing churches and losing churches and turning churches into condominiums and used bookstores – really, what does it say about the lost relevance of the church when an empty sanctuary can of all things become a used book store? According to Pew Research, in the late 1970’s about 26% of the baby-boom generation attended worship services “weekly or almost weekly.” In 2010, among the millennial generation, that number was at 18%; so, even adjusting for the tendencies of younger generations to wander away before coming back, still, across the board, numbers are dropping and pews are emptier and it’s not just here. It’s everywhere. And the trend line is terrifying — not just here, but everywhere.

So you want to know how to resurrect the dead?

Well, I’ve teased it long enough. And the truth is that in this text, God makes it look pretty easy. God says to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to these bones; tell them to hear the word of the Lord, and they will live, and I will put my breath in them” and Ezekiel does as he’s told and, he prophesies, he relays the words of the Lord, and sure enough, he then describes hearing a noise, a rattling, the bones popping back into one another, reassembling into the skeletons of the lost, wrapping skin and flesh around their brittle frames and yet, nevertheless, standing lifeless. And so God instructs him again: prophesy to the breath itself, prophesy to the wind, and bid it come enter these bones and give them spirit and give them life, and Ezekiel does as he’s told, and sure enough, the breath comes in, and he describes them all coming to life, standing on their feet, a vast multitude. Which is to say that this text is nothing if not firmly convinced of the power of prophesy. You want to raise the dead? Prophesy. You want to raise the dead? Preach the good news. You want to raise the dead? Preach the Word of the Lord, and look, all that is lost will be returned, all the dead will be reborn, all that for which you mourn will live again.

You want to resurrect the church? This text makes it sound so easy. Just preach the Gospel. Just preach the Gospel. How do you bring a church back from the brink? How do you fight against the twin forces of secularization and consumerism and rebuild a church just like it was? If there were ever a text for a preacher on a power-trip, surely this would be it, like somehow I or any of the thousands of preachers this morning who stand with some humility before the text and before God and before you and try to turn dry bones into pew-fulls of bodies, like any of us could do so if only every word was perfectly chosen and every gesture perfectly timed and every i dotted and every t crossed and as long as we preached the Gospel to its utmost then certainly these bones might yet live.

But of course it’s not just us. Because churches don’t just try and preach the Gospel on Sundays between about 11:25 and quarter til’ the hour. We take to the streets in mission. We take to the streets in outreach. And of course those are good things, and don’t hear me saying otherwise, because the question isn’t “What does God require of us?” but rather “How do we resurrect the dead?” And if I’m honest I’ll admit that for every congregation I’ve heard imply that you could resurrect a church with preaching, I’ve heard as many preachers imply that you could do the same thing with mission, that again, as long as every detail was perfectly chosen, as longs we found exactly the right cause, as long as we engaged exactly the correct avenues of community support, as long as we leveraged our commitment of resources to exactly the correct degree, then by the magic alchemy of Ezekiel here in this valley that somehow our prophetic act would bring the church back to life, and we could resurrect the dead with just this one simple trick. “Mortal, can these bones live?” Well, sure, as long as the youth group is well-funded, and the kitchen committee well-organized, and the international mission trips well-attended, and of course the preacher well-spoken. As long as we grease the wheels of prophesy. People will come.

But notice that before Ezekiel gets to any of the programmatic decisions, there’s something else on his mind. “Mortal, can these bones live?” and Ezekiel says, “O Lord God, you know.” “O Lord God, you know.” At first it sounds like Ezekiel’s just ducking the question, like he thinks it’s a trick: Can these bones live? “I dunno, God, you tell me.” But there’s something more powerful happening here, in that after everything: after the siege, after the fall, after the exile, with all evidence to suggest that God had indeed given up Israel to the ghosts of history, that Ezekiel can nonetheless stare at the wilderness bones of his people and affirm that God is still in charge. “O Lord God, you know.” O Lord God, whose wisdom we don’t always understand, whose mercy we don’t always perceive, whose ways we don’t always appreciate, O Lord God who let our enemy to the gates of the city and led us back into the wilderness, O Lord God, can we live again? Can we be restored? Can the great city thrive as it once did? For as much reason as Ezekiel might have to think that God has given up on Israel, nonetheless, he doesn’t give up on God. Mortal, can these bones live? O Lord God, you know.

Ezekiel knows that his kingdom survives or falls, that his people live or die, not first on the back of their prophetic gifts but rather on the will and providence of God. And it sounds simple, but of course it’s oh-so complicated. Because how tempting is it always to think that God’s church is something that rests on our abilities? How tempting is it to think that it’s in our hands — that our worship team, and our music program, and our Christian Education, and our mission & outreach, and all the things that we do, that somewhere in that mix there either is or isn’t the magic formula that brings dry bones to life? You could fill your days sifting through the endless stream of church punditry identifying the three, five, ten, or twelve steps necessary to revitalize churches; you’d hear the same tropes over and over again: hospitality, inclusivity, intergenerational ministry, community-formation, mission and outreach, spiritual discipline – is that 12? – but I tell you that the only force in the history of the human endeavor that has ever brought a church back to life has been the grace of God. The only force that has ever breathed new breath into congregations or denominations or any somewhat-dusty gathering of God’s people has been the power of God. How seductive it is to think that church is something we can bring back to life, when indeed the very breath of this place is the breath of the Holy Spirit itself!

This past week I sat across the table from a man whose church is in the process of leaving our denomination. And we talked about his reasons for supporting the move, reasons I’ve heard before; as politely as we could we danced around the fundamental questions of Biblical interpretation that have ruptured so many churches and so many denominations. And then afterwards he looked at me and asked with some longing in his eyes: You know how many churches are leaving; you know how many churches are dying off; are the people in charge even paying attention? And one of the folks I was with gave some answer about how of course the church talks about decline – in fact some days I feel like it’s all we talk about – but that it’s also true that not everybody agrees with one another and people hold to different principles and different theology and we try to hold it all in the balance. I held my tongue on the answer I wish I’d given, maybe because it feels like such a pithy confirmation class kind of answer, and so I didn’t say the hard part, which is that none of us are the ones in charge. That this is God’s church and God is the one in charge.

Of course saying so doesn’t make it easier. Most days I think it makes it feel even murkier, when we have to admit that we don’t always know what God is doing. That we can’t always see what God sees. That when we look at the numbers and we look at the graphs and we look at the survey results and the trend lines and we feel the dryness setting into the bones of these places that we love, how hard is it to admit that we don’t entirely know what God is doing. And yet God is the one doing it. God who breathed life into the first dust of the world. God who brought his people out of the wilderness time and time again. God transformed the whole valley of bones into the multitude of his people. God who died for us and then rolled away the gravestone. I don’t always know what God is doing but I know that God is the one doing it. I don’t always know what we will be except that I know we will be whatever God wants us to be, because I know that in God’s power, all things are possible.

You want to know how to resurrect the dead? Of course you do. I do, too. But that’s not the point. God knows how. O Lord God, you know.

I meant to have a sermon this morning; I really did; you gotta believe me; but, instead, I spent all week watching college basketball.

No, I’m kidding, before you run for the exits; I do have a sermon for you this morning, but I’m not kidding about the college basketball part. March Madness, right? Tip-off for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament starts at about noon on Thursday and between then and about midnight tonight they will have played 48 insane games of college hoops, and especially for those Thursday and Friday afternoon hours it’s like every office I have ever worked at just kind of ground to a halt. And of course it used to be that you either had to call in sick or rather just sit there at your desk surreptitiously checking the scores, but these days, with all the games streamed live online, you can turn your desktop into a college-basketball-watching-superstation, regardless of whatever work you were supposed to be doing.

I suppose your boss should care. Every year about this time somebody comes out with some back-of-the-envelope math to calculate how much the NCAA tournament costs us in lost productivity. This year I read $1.2 billion dollars for every hour of tournament overlap with regular office hours. But maybe I’ve just been very lucky but every boss I’ve ever had has been just as sucked into the tournament as I was. I remember working on a small team where each of us had our own offices fairly closely situated and so, on the first day of the tournament, I put on the first game kind of in the corner of my screen while I half-heartedly looked at some other work and tried to concentrate on my real job and then about twenty minutes later after a particularly spectacular play I heard a pretty loud exclamation from the direction of my boss’s office and realized quickly that he was watching the game, too. In fact the entire team was watching, each of us hiding in the relative safety of our own offices, nobody quite willing to step away from the desk and nobody willing to turn the game off.

That’s the rub of it, really. We just sat there. Which begs a question. I mean, if I’m just watching the game, and if my boss is just watching the game, and if the whole team is just watching the game, and if nothing so mission-critical is coming down the pipeline at the office, why just sit there? I mean, why not the lot of us just get it in a car and head down to Buffalo Wild Wings and camp out for the afternoon? Call it group bonding. Call it team-building. Call it a corporate retreat, whatever; let’s just acknowledge that we’re not getting much done otherwise and we might as well enjoy the moment together but instead we’re glued to our desk chairs and I would argue that we were not glued there by corporate policy or by some anxiety about the dollar value of our productivity but rather the voice inside our heads that says you have a job! and you have to be here! and well, you don’t want to be the sort of person who just walks out; what would you think of yourself if you were just sitting at Buffalo Wild Wings at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Thursday? Don’t you want to be the sort of person who at least seems like they’re doing work, because work is what made this country great! and Work is what makes us great! and Work is what gives us value! And so, with centuries of old-fashioned Protestant work ethic stirring in our souls, with the words of that old hymn ringing in our ears – “Come, labor on! Who dares stand idle?” – with the deep subconscious conviction that working at that desk was central to our sense of self-worth, we all just stayed put, each one to an office, none of us getting a thing done.

You may be wondering — and rightly so – what any of this has in any degree to do with the story of the Samaritan woman. And so I will admit to you that because no single Sunday morning permits us time to wade through the vast richness of this text from the Gospel of John, and today we will, for the most part, leave the Samaritan woman herself alone, content I hope to be for all time a sign of God working beyond the boundaries of what God’s audience ever expects. Instead this morning I want us to think about the disciples, who, being themselves deeply schooled in the old-fashioned Protestant work ethic, find themselves in the tragic position of no longer having a job to do. You may recall from the very beginning of the story that Jesus sends them off to town for groceries; after all, they’ve been traveling for so long and they needed supplies. And then after this whole conversation with the Samaritan woman the disciples come back carrying everything they could from a strange market in a foreign land; you know, as tired as Jesus was, at least he got to sit by the well and the disciples went all the way to town and carried back a heavy load, and then Jesus promptly says, “Well, I don’t need any of that after all / I have food to eat that you do not know about.”

You have food to eat that we don’t know about? Well, that hardly seems fair. Going to get the food was our thing! Like, we can’t cast out demons or turn water into wine or do any of that fancy Jesus healing stuff, but we can go to town and get groceries. And you may not have noticed this, but, you know, we kinda like going to town to get groceries. It gives us something to do! It gives us a way to help. And then you just decide that you don’t need us to get groceries anymore? I mean, I’d understand it if somebody else had come along and tossed you a sandwich and you might not say no, but c’mon, this is Samaria, Jesus, you know that’s not happening. That’s what the disciples actually say: “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Because they know perfectly well it’s not Samaritan charity he’s living on, they know he’s doing this for himself. But then what’s the point of having disciples? This is full-blown vocational crisis: what are we doing here, giving up everything, following you around; we just wanted to help and you won’t let us help, and we’ve all been in that moment when somebody else wanted to make you a cup of tea and you didn’t really want a cup of tea but you began to realize that the cup of tea really wasn’t for you, it’s just that this person really wanted to help and really wanted to do something and could only figure on making a cup of tea so finally you just say yes, fine, I’d love some tea, because everybody wants their work to be valued, and more than that, everybody feels valued by their work. Otherwise, What’s the point of having disciples? Why are we even here? What good are we if we can’t even go into town for groceries?

It’s a full-blown vocational crisis. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that as a society we are ourselves living in another full blown-vocational crisis, a crisis in the American theology of work. The world got smaller and we sent jobs overseas – 2.6 million offshore jobs in 2013. The economy crashed and never entirely got back on its feet; at the height of the recession 6.8 million Americans had been unemployed for more than six months; 3.8 million remain on those rolls and many of them will never again hold steady jobs. College graduates face skyrocketing debt with fewer and fewer avenues to the kind of employment that can pay back those loans. But we’re dealing with more than a long slow recovery. Consider this nugget offered up by technology visionary Jaron Lanier: at the height of its power, Kodak employed 140,000 people and was worth twenty-eight billion dollars. But in 2014, Kodak is bankrupt, and the face of everyday photography is a smartphone app called Instagram, and when Instagram was sold to Facebook for one billion dollars it employed thirteen people. Take a picture on your phone and share it with the world and sure, there are people employed in making that phone and sure, there are people employed in maintaining the digital infrastructure thats store that photo, but not enough to bridge the gap between 140,000 and thirteen. The reality is that technology and automation and innovation have reduced the amount of work necessary to perform the societal functions that we rely on, and now the danger is that we have millions of people – well, at least 139,987, but of course that’s just the tip of the bucket – who have been left entirely behind by our old ethics about work and value and earning your way. What happens if we can only value ourselves according to our work and there just isn’t enough work to go around? What happens if all we want to do is go into town to buy groceries but then Jesus just orders everything he needs on Amazon instead?

It’s tempting to view our vocational crisis as an economic problem with economic solutions. Anna Coote from the New Economics Foundation argues that it is time for us to to shift away from the forty-hour workweek and towards something like a thirty-hour schedule. Along with opening up the space for more widespread employment, this could have all kinds of ancillary benefits: it gives more breathing room in the day, especially in households where both parents work; it leaves a smaller ecological footprint, as people with less time are more likely to drive or fly than to take the train or the bus. Research suggests that workers with shorter shifts are more productive within those shifts, so, Coote argues, you shrink hours and you employ more people and you raise wages and you get a productivity boost to compensate and everybody wins. But of course we don’t have the kind of historical data you would need to make this uncontroversial; instead, we’ll keep arguing about the minimum wage and we’ll keep arguing about best employment practices but the reality is that even the best policy outcome would just be a stopgap measure because the big trendline here is that more and more jobs become automated and digitized and programmed and no economic policy can possibly make a dent.

But more importantly, no economic policy that can silence that voice inside us that says “What will I do if there’s no more work for me? What will I be worth then?” That’s the thing about a vocational crisis. It’s not economic. It’s emotional. It’s spiritual. And you don’t even have to lose your job to know how it feels, because we live it every day. For a society bent on making life as convenient as possible, we are working ourselves to death. For a society bent on saving as much time as possible, everybody’s busy. Think about that: I used to have to take the film out of the camera by hand, package it up in those fancy Kodak envelopes, drop it off at the CVS, wait a few days, go back to pick it up, and then swing by the post office and put a few of my favorites in the mail to grandma or mom and dad or whoever and now I just put it on Instagram and five seconds later it’s done and yet somehow I have less time. How are things? Well, you know. Busy. Isn’t everybody? It’s become entirely socially unacceptable not to say how busy you are, and yet by all accounts life has never in human history been more convenient. It doesn’t add up. And the reason it doesn’t add up is that it’s not an economic crisis: it’s emotional; it’s pathological; it’s the voice inside that says “Who am I if I’m not working? Who am I if I don’t have a job? Who am I if I don’t have a task at hand?” And so the fullness of the hours of the day, the frenzy of the calendar, the torrid pace that we set for ourselves; these things become the yardstick of our self-worth, and the voice inside is there to make sure that we don’t measure up.

An vocational crisis. A spiritual crisis. A theological crisis, when we assume that work is the thing that gives us worth. “Oh sure, there’s work to do,” Jesus tells the disciples, as he so often does, using the image of sowing and reaping in the fields. Jesus tells them, “Oh sure, there’s work to do: the harvest is ready and it’s happening and that’s where I’m getting my food and you could be out there harvesting, too.” In some ways it’s a very basic answer to their question: Surely nobody else gave him food?, when of course he has been fed by his encounter with the Samaritan woman. “Oh sure, there’s work to do,” Jesus says, hinting at the mission that still lays before them. But he doesn’t just answer the question on their lips. He also answers the question in their hearts – if we can’t even buy food, why are we here in the first place? what’s the point of having disciples? – and Jesus says all those working in the field are “gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.”

So that they may rejoice together. Which is to say, Jesus doesn’t want to just give them a job; he wants to celebrate with them, together. Jesus doesn’t just want to give them tasks; he wants to enter into relationship, together. Is it so shocking that Jesus might have gathered these disciples not because he needed assistants or errand-boys or people who could go fetch groceries from town but rather instead because he wanted the company of friends and family and loved ones he could call his own? What if the disciples were called not to go do the shopping but rather simply to be known and loved by God made flesh among them? Surely, here, at last, is the very heart of this Gospel: that you, too, are called not first to do, but simply to be – known and loved by God made flesh. That your value is not measured by the length of your to-do list but rather by the width and breadth of God’s mercy and grace. That your worth is not bound up in the fullness of your time but rather revealed only in the fullness of His. That you are not your jobs. That you are not your schedules. That you are not the tasks set before you. That you are first and foremost and simply and wonderfully children of God, measured only by the boundlessness of God’s love.

Dorothy Bass tells the story of a friend who had stumbled across an open and unscheduled day, a true gift in a sea of over-scheduled frenzy. As Bass tells it, “When her husband came home, there she was with her feet up, reading a magazine. He was happy for her, but she was embarrassed. And so she leapt to her feet, explaining that before this quiet interlude she had done the laundry, made some important phone calls, and helped with their daughter’s homework. ‘Congratulations,’ he chuckled, ‘You have earned the air you breathe. Now sit back down!’”

You’ve already earned the air you breathe. Or, rather, perhaps we should say: God has already earned the air you breathe.

Now sit back down!

So, I don’t know about you, but I had just about had it up to here with the Sermon on the Mount. Last week Carol Ferguson in this pulpit suggested that to people who suggest that those chapters of Matthew are their favorite part of scripture her response was often, “Really?,” and I have to admit that I tend to agree. Not that it’s not important. Not that it’s somehow invalid. Not that it’s somehow tangential to Matthew’s overall program; quite the contrary, for weeks we have been living in the very center of Matthew’s program, wherein Jesus makes such concrete and absolute demands upon his disciples – which, you know, theoretically, kinda-maybe-sorta includes us – we have been in this text that would have us be such impossibly better versions of ourselves, that would have us kill off those parts of our own selfish desires that we hold most dear; one imagines the disciples at the end of Jesus’s sermon staring at each other with that look of bleak hopelessness that says “Hey, who needs a drink? It’s been a long day; let’s go home, open up a bottle of something, kick back, relax, see what’s on TV.” I, for one, could use a bit of a break from all the “Thou Shalt Nots” and “Truly I say unto yous.”

And so as if to anticipate our need for a night off, the lectionary skips ahead to this day in the Christian Calendar, the last Sunday before Lent, Transfiguration Sunday, upon which we jump to Matthew’s account of Jesus leading his disciples up the mountaintop and putting on a show. After all, they have been working so hard, preaching and walking and healing and walking and feeding and walking and walking and walking and walking and so, not unlike the Little League coach taking the team out to Pizza Hut after the game, Jesus takes these chosen few up the mountaintop and this time the show’s on him. And it’s Transfiguration Sunday, so you know what’s about to happen: Matthew says that Jesus changed in front of their eyes – the Greek word is “metamorphisized” – that his face shone bright like the sun and that even his clothes became as white as light, like that nice guy walking through the valley with them turns out to be instead a figure of pure radiant light; and if that wasn’t enough of a show, then, suddenly, Moses and Elijah appear from somewhere beyond the grave and they all start chatting; it’s like this particular mountaintop is where the history of the Jewish people comes to life in some interactive animatronic exhibit, like we’ve walked into the Biblical equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg and here’s Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry and our tour guide is asking them questions.

And so Peter makes a not unreasonable request – considering all they’d been through, considering all the preaching and the healing and the feeding and don’t forget the walking, considering all of it, finding himself on this mountaintop watching what seems to be a Biblically-themed laser light show and he thinks, Well, this is fabulous! I mean, this is the seat of luxury; I mean, who doesn’t like a nice vacation to the mountains every now and then; this is what I needed, just a little bit of time away, just to put my feet up and relax and see a show … You know what? Let’s build a house here. We could, right? I mean, we’ve been at it for a while now and, well, isn’t it about time we let somebody else have a chance? Whaddya say, Jesus? You, me, Elijah, Moses … James and John, if you guys want in … we’ll just kick back, you guys do your thing: Jesus, this is clearly who you really are; Moses, Elijah, great to have you guys back; clearly this is where the real business of God is taking place and you know there’s no business like show business so you all do your thing and I’m glad to be the audience.

Now, even if you don’t want to live on a mountaintop, I think we can all see the allure of trying to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a laser-light show. In fact, this weekend, thousands of American Christians have flocked to exactly such a thing, the new release of the movie Son of God, basically a re-edited version of the Gospel narrative from the Bible miniseries that came out last Spring. Now, I haven’t seen either the miniseries or the film, so I’m not here to nitpick the differences between the story they tell onscreen and the story we hear in the text, although I presume there are some. You may know better than me. Rather I simply am curious to observe how quick we are to act as though the Gospel story were something that we could just watch from the comfort of a dark theatre, preferably one with stadium seating. Thursday night, movie theaters across the country were booked solid to see advance previews of this thing. In Charlotte some church or group of churches bought out a 27-screen multiplex, and I’m sure that this afternoon churchgoers across America will flock to this movie by the van-ful, and I get it, I mean, the task of Christian living is hard and there is no shortage of healing and feeding and walking and how lovely is it on those afternoons when you can just sit backup and put your feet up and watch a movie and still call it discipleship. It’s like I’m back in high school European history and it’s right after midterms and all we’re doing in class is watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the great part is you can totally pretend that you’re learning something.

Until the movie stops and the teacher asks you a question. Or, in Peter’s case, God shows up, in a cloud – Matthew loves the Old Testament, where God always shows up in clouds – God shows up and bellows, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” and if you’re Peter there’s no great controversy here; I mean, sure, it’s not everyday that God appears in a cloud but Peter has already confessed Jesus to be the Son of God so it’s not like there’s new information on the table, but then God says “Listen to Him” and Peter just loses it. James and John, too, really; Matthew says they fell to the ground overcome by fear. Curiously enough, when Mark tells the story of the Transfiguration it’s the vision of Jesus in white that causes the disciples to become afraid, but here in Matthew they’re all fine and good until God speaks to them – “Listen to Him!,” God says – they’re perfectly comfortable watching the show until it turns out that the show is watching them. It was all well and good when it was just up there on the screen but now it’s coming at them, now it’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ in 3D, and like all 3D movies, it makes you look funny, and it costs more…

Actually, I’ve only been to one 3D movie in my own living memory. It was something like the summer of 2003, long before 3D reclaimed its throne in movie theaters across the country, but on a hot day at the King’s Dominion theme park just outside of Richmond, a group of friends and I decided that we needed a break from the sun and so we took advantage of the short line for the SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Experience. It wasn’t exactly a ride, but it was one of those theaters where the chairs move around to simulate whatever motion is happening onscreen, and that was the day when I learned that my eyes don’t really focus well with 3D glasses – I just saw two overlapping planes of images and they’d never come together – and combine that with the seat moving underneath me, well, I spent most of the film cowering on the floor. One might argue that I had the most rational possible reaction to seeing the SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Experience. But regardless: I’ve never put those glasses on again, and I never will. Not for Avatar. Not for Gravity. Nothing. So I get Peter cowering on the floor. But it’s so much easier to watch the show on the screen than it is to follow when it starts moving you around.

“Listen to him!,” God says, and I think in that moment something crystallizes for Peter, like it just occurs to him for the first time that the long call to discipleship that Jesus had preached so many times, the demanding and exhausting words of the Sermon on the Mount, the call to repentance and reconciliation that Jesus had been making at every turn, it’s like just now on this mountaintop it occurs to Peter that all of it actually might involve him, too, that it all might make demands on him, too, like it wasn’t just a nice story he was watching but something that was moving him around. And it would be easy to poke fun at his slightly overdue epiphany if we weren’t all all walking around in that same half-dressed state, like, you know, Sunday morning we all go to the show and talk about justice and peace and love and mercy but it’s not like on Monday we actually have to advocate for justice or live as peacemakers on Tuesday or love someone on Thursday or God forbid, Saturday, find room for mercy except maybe it’s just exactly like that when God says “Listen to him” and the whole thing jumps off the screen. And it’s not just that I find justice and peacemaking personally inconvenient – although, let’s be honest, I do – it’s that I find myself physically incapable of living into this demand. I mean, you can give me the glasses and put me in the seat, but my eyes just won’t focus the images together; I can’t make it work, this Gospel in three dimensions, this Gospel in any dimension that includes me playing along; I just can’t, we just can’t, we can’t see to pull it off.

But then, something unexpected. Something unique to Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration: with Peter and James and John cowering on the ground in fear, the Gospel reports that Jesus came and touched them, and instructed them to rise and be unafraid, and that when they looked up all they saw was Jesus – no clouds, no blinding white, no Moses and Elijah – just Jesus, alone. Because of a touch. This whole laser-light show, visions of the dead, God speaking from a cloud, and the whole thing resolves to a touch. And more than that: throughout the Gospel, and particularly in Matthew, Jesus’ touch is an instrument of healing. By his touch he has made the lame to walk; by his touch he has made the hungry to be fed; by his touch he has made the blind to see. In fact one strains anywhere in this Gospel to find an instance of Jesus’ touch that does not immediately come with healing. And so I think of Peter, on the floor in terror. I think of myself, on the floor, unable to reconcile the Gospel in three dimensions; I think of all of us who cannot see our way to lives of faithful discipleship. And yet Jesus touched him, and the clouds parted. Jesus touched him, and the visions receded. Jesus touched him, and his eyes were healed, and then and only then does Peter see Jesus in his true form: not just the nice guy walking around the valley, but neither only figure of pure radiant light summiting the mountaintop; but rather, the two in combination, the one and the same, the radiant power of God living and breathing among us, serving among us, healing us with a human touch. That’s the power in this text – not in its abstract divinity but rather in its simple humanity – that it works with a touch – and that with a simple touch it is not Jesus but rather Peter, and the disciples, and all of us gathered on that mountain, who come back down to the valley forever transfigured.

Now, I still can’t see 3D movies. But every once in a while, when the clouds part; every once in a while, when the light shines in just right direction; every once in a while, when the Spirit comes with a touch; every once in a while I get a glimpse of justice. Every once in a while we all see the outline of peace. Every once in a while we all see a trace of mercy. I think this is the path we walk as those transfigured on the mountaintop, after which it is not simple enough to say that the show involves us and moves us and calls us into service but also that the one who calls us is there at out side with a touch; the one who calls us is there making our eyes to see, making our lips to speak, making our legs to walk. That’s the Gospel of this text: not simply that we are called by this God on a mountaintop but that God does not stay on the mountaintop, that God lives and abides with each of us down here in the valley, that God transforms and sustains each of us down here in the valley, that God heals and redeems each of us down here in the valley, in every moment of creation.

So this afternoon after church you may make your way with thousands of Christians around the country to a movie screen and a showing of Son of God – I’m sure it’s playing down in Lynchburg somewhere – or maybe you’ve already seen the full miniseries and you have no need to see it again. And I will be curious for your thoughts and I hope you will let me know what you see. But don’t forget that if you want to see Jesus Christ at work this afternoon you don’t have to go to the movies. You don’t need parking or popcorn or special glasses or advance tickets. All it takes is the courage to look at the world with transfigured eyes, to see creation in its every dimension. Don’t forget to see not just the unbearable decay of our bodies but also the incarnate healing of Jesus Christ made manifest in hospital volunteers and blood drives and parish nurses and underpaid nursing staff and all those who touch us with the touch of the Holy. Don’t forget to see not just the overwhelming despair of poverty and injustice but also the incarnate work of Jesus Christ made manifest in meals on wheels drivers and food bank coordinators and public defenders and political activists and all those who touch us with the touch of the Holy. Don’t forget to see, in just a few moments, not just the simple, ordinary elements of bread and juice but also the incarnate work of Jesus Christ in the act of public communion, transforming not just the bread we break but each of us ourselves, helping us serve one another, helping us love one another, helping us touch one another with the touch of the holy. Go to the movies if you want to. But don’t forget to see the work of Jesus Christ in its every dimension.

And how could you forget, when God so insistently helps us remember?

To say I was excited to receive Matt’s invitation to preach here at Amherst Presbyterian would be an understatement. This was, after all, my church while I was a student at Sweet Briar. That was my seat in the choir freshman year. You were the ones I praised God alongside. And here was the first church service I attended after I heard my call to ministry, six Februaries ago, and watched with new eyes as your pastor led the service, and wondered for the hundredth time that week if this, this thing called ministry, was really what God wanted out of me, and here was where I heard the answer for the hundredth time that yes, God was calling me, and would support me all the way.

So it is quite an honor to join you in worship today, and a double honor to stand in this pulpit and preach. I’ve been looking forward to it since Matt first mentioned I might be able to come. As soon as I knew which Sunday I would be here, I immediately clicked over to the Revised Common Lectionary website, which I have recently and very proudly bookmarked on my internet browser – an important milestone as I make my way from seminary student to minister of the word and sacrament. I scrolled down to see today’s gospel reading: Matthew, part of the Sermon on the Mount.

At which point the bottom promptly dropped out of my stomach. This is heavy-duty stuff.

Every once in a while I will hear someone, usually someone who considers themselves spiritual but not religious, someone trying to show how enlightened they are, say something to this effect: “I don’t really believe Jesus is God, but he did say some really nice things in the Sermon on the Mount.” I don’t know what Sermon on the Mount they’re reading; I have a sneaking suspicion they’ve never gotten past the Beatitudes. Or maybe what we read today sounds good in the abstract, as long as you don’t feel any personal compulsion to follow it yourself.

But if we are going to take any of this seriously, this book we call sacred scripture and this Jesus we call our savior and this faith we call our calling, there’s nothing “nice” about our gospel reading today. These are deep, hard, mission-impossible commands, ones that leave me squirming in my seat whenever I hear them.

*Let somebody hit you as much as they like? * *Hand over your hard-earned belongings to anyone who sues—or even just asks? * *Go the extra mile—literally—for somebody who treats you like a slave? * *Love those who would wish you harm, who would pull the chair out from under you in class, who plot ways to make you look bad in front of the boss or would even bomb your home? * At this point in the reading my hands are sweaty and I’m remembering all too well the guys on the corner I drove past this morning on my way to preach this sermon, the ones with cardboard signs asking for money. And I’m trying to remember the last time I really prayed for my loved ones, much less my enemies. And I’m thinking maybe if I’m very quiet no one will notice the guilt written all over my face.

But then comes the kicker, lemon juice on a binder-full of paper cuts: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

At this point I’m through whimpering and squirming and ready to just throw up my hands and forget the whole enterprise. I thought Jesus came to earth to understand what it was like to be human, with all our failings and frailties! Now he expects us to be perfect, and not just straight-As, white teeth, taxes-done-ahead-of-time perfect but God-perfect?

I am sure I am not the only one in this room who has had to resist the siren song of perfectionism, and I am sure I am not the only one who knows how insidious and destructive the craving to be perfect can be. To see such a command here, in black and white, coming out of the mouth of my beloved Jesus, who ate with traitors and hookers and touched the untouchable, feels like the last straw. If you’re looking for perfect, God, I say as I walk away, you’d better look elsewhere.

But then I remember I’ve made a promise. I’ve made a promise never to give up on this book, no matter how angry or puzzled it makes me. I’ve made a promise never to lose faith that God so loved the world, this corrupt, crying, broken, flailing world, that he sent his only son to live in it and die for it. So I begin again. I go back to that mountain in Galilee. I trust that Jesus is saying something important here, and I do my best to listen with an open heart.

Turn the other cheek. Give to everyone who begs. Love your enemies.

I’ve sometimes heard people claim that these teachings really mean we’re just supposed to be nice to people, but these commands go far beyond mere amiability. I’ve also heard that Jesus is being sneakier than we realize, that he is giving his fellow Jews advice on how to perform nonviolent resistance against their Roman oppressors, a precursor to Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. That may be part of it, but I don’t think that tells the whole story either. And sometimes I hear that turning the other cheek is a way of guilting someone else into recognizing their sins while keeping your own nose clean, and I don’t buy that for a second. The God who dispenses grace so freely, so abundantly to all does not want us to respond only out of guilt.

Sometimes I think we get anxious that religion is just a web of guilt trips, a way to keep us on the straight and narrow by overwhelming us with shame and fear. But God is not a God of shame, not a God of fear, but a God of grace. Grace: God’s constant ability to seek the best of us, to give us space to grow into children of God, to try and fail and try again. So if this passage isn’t about being nice, and it isn’t about making jerks look the jerks they are, what is it about? Is it really just a set of far-flung ideals, ideals that are nice in theory but utterly impracticable in reality? After all, if we followed each of these commands to the letter, God’s beloved children would end up bruised, naked, exhausted, and destitute. This can’t be what God wants for us.

What happens when you turn the other cheek, give more than you’re asked to, pray for those who are always on your case? What happens in that moment when you choose not to strike back or raise your voice or get even?

Grace. Grace happens. The grace that God poured out on you splashes over onto another. The tit-for-tat pauses and becomes something else, maybe a conversation, maybe just time to think, time to breathe. In that moment—that time to make a better choice, a choice that stems from love and not anger—we share the grace that God has flooded our lives with. We stop hoarding that grace, as if God had reserved only a few precious drops for us, and realize that the person we are all prepared to hate or turn away deserves grace as much as we do.

When we pray for someone we can’t stand, we force ourselves to acknowledge that they too were made by God, that there is a chance—however slight it may seem—for the lion to lay down with the lamb, for swords to be beaten into ploughshares, for the kingdom of God to reign on earth.

When you turn the other cheek, you see things differently. You see that God’s power to transform and redeem is greater than the power of a lawyer to demand your coat or a boss to demand your energy. You see that the thread running through God’s expectations of us is not despair for our shortcomings, but hope that we might one day love each other as God loves us.
Because as much as we like to read an “us” and a “them” into this passage—they who strike, we who turn the other cheek, they who ask too much, we who are always the givers, they who are our enemies, we who are the only ones trying to make amends—we know in our hearts that we have been on both sides of the equation.

There’s a verse in this passage that gets overlooked sometimes, because it’s not a command to us, and we’re so busy heaving a sigh of relief that we don’t really hear it: God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

It’s a shocking claim, really, and it goes against all our notions about fairness and justice.

God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, not because God is careless, but because God cares more than we can imagine. Because there is no situation so hopeless, so fractured, that God cannot redeem it.

Fair enough, you say. But what about that last verse? The one commanding us to be perfect? Well, this is where two years of Greek at Sweet Briar and another year at seminary come in handy. Looking at the Greek text, I see that the word for perfect is “teleios,” whose root word is “goal.” Literally, it means something like “has fulfilled its ultimate purpose.”

Love your enemies, your neighbors, yourself, and you will fulfill the purpose God set out for you.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a doozie of a command, when you think about how much out there in the world is just plain unlovable, and just how stingy we tend to be with our love. But deep down we’ve always known that love is the name of the game in this thing we call faith, and we have the steady heartbeat of God’s love to help guide us along the way.

Which leads me to my final bit of linguistic showing-off. The verb in this sentence—Be perfect!—can be translated two different ways. The most common way is the command—Be perfect now!”—and that’s not incorrect, but the verb can also be translated as a regular future tense: “You will be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

This last sentence is not a threat, not an out-of-reach ideal, not an impossible command. It’s a promise! A promise that we will get there, that we are on a journey that leads towards the peaceful reign of God.

Therefore you will fulfill your purpose to love one another, just as your heavenly Father has already fulfilled his purpose to love you.

Therefore there will be grace enough for all your mistakes, all your anger, all your greed, all your bitterness, as we move forward in this journey we call faith to become God’s perfect children.

God makes no promise that for today following these commands won’t get that other cheek hit too. Sharing grace isn’t easy, and it isn’t “safe”—Christ knows that better than anyone. The promise that God does make is that we, the people God made, the people God saved, can be the seeds for a new way of living, a way that leaves space for healing to happen when things go wrong, a way that doesn’t require us to keep our dukes up all the time, a way that lets us spread the grace we have been so abundantly shown.

In the name of the God who has turned the other cheek to us again, and again, and again, Amen.

Last Saturday night in Lubbock, Texas, in the closing seconds of an otherwise normal college basketball game between Texas Tech and Oklahoma State, things turned a little ugly. Oklahoma State star and future NBA draft selection Marcus Smart fell into the stands after trying to block a layup and then heard something from the lips of Texas Tech super fan Jeffrey Orr. Now, there’s no evidence as of yet to prove what the fan actually said; Orr, who is white, claims to have called Smart a “piece or crap” and Smart, who is black, claims to have heard something considerably worse and much more racially charged. The cameras didn’t get the audio, but they got the rest: Smart gave Orr a strong shove and was then promptly called for a technical foul and ejected from the game. The ESPN announcers called it “disgusting behavior … I don’t care what kind of player you are … ” Smart’s team promptly lost the game, and in the days since, both men have offered public apologies: Smart apologized quickly and with some apparent sincerity for letting his anger get the best of him; Orr apologized via a statement from the Texas Tech Athletics Department. Some intrepid researchers have picked over Marcus Smart to find each and every moment of his prior indiscretions. Meanwhile, alums of Big 12 basketball, players who have come to Lubbock on the visiting team, have come forward with memories of Jeffrey Orr and the taunts and abuse he used to hurl at them from his court side seats.

And so, much of the early part of last week, until we had all moved onto something else, the sports world argued this incident from every conceivable angle. Athletes get heckled all the time, both professionals and amateurs; was Orr guilty of a kind of heckling that crossed the line? Does it make a difference that we’re talking about an unpaid amateur basketball player, playing only for his college and for the hope of riches in the NBA; if you’re being paid hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to play basketball, are you expected to suffer the slings and arrows of the audience with some greater indifference? Of course it’s never legal to hit somebody without physical provocation, so of course what Smart did was wrong in some textbook sense, but if Orr had said whatever he said to him just standing in line at the grocery store, would our reaction change? What does it matter that they are separated by this arbitrary sideline, where one of them is part of the action and one of them only watching from the stands? Is Orr just the symptom of a disease of misbehaving fans who insult their fellow human beings without fear of reprisal? Or is it just that Smart couldn’t handle his emotions, that he needs to grow up and toughen up and suck it up, that frankly he should be honored just to have the opportunity to be there in the first place, that those announcers were right and it’s “disgusting” to see anger get the better of someone so privileged? Aren’t we supposed to be the kind of people who know how to keep our anger in its place?

Or aren’t we supposed to be the kind of people who don’t even feel that anger in the first place? In today’s reading from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t just concerned about violence: he’s concerned about the anger at the very heart of it: “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that [even] if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” Now, the passage merits just a little bit of context. Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assumes an audience well-steeped in Jewish law and tradition, and it’s clear that when he begins with “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times” that he’s making specific reference to the reading of Jewish law, of Torah, what we would recognize as sections of Leviticus or Numbers or Deuteronomy, that he’s making reference to the reading of this scripture during regular Jewish worship. Of course much of Jewish law is concerned on its face with crafting socially acceptable behavior, and so very often it doesn’t bother so much with human emotion as it does with the unacceptable outcome of those emotions – like, in this case, the Torah’s fairly obvious opposition to murder without having a great deal to say on the subject of anger.

Not so for Jesus. You have heard it said that whoever murders shall be liable to judgment, but I say to you that even if you are angry you, too, will be liable… And if you are anything like me at this point in the text you are feeling at turns both terrified and confounded. Terrified: could Jesus set the bar of judgment any higher? I mean, when it just said “Thou shalt not murder” I figured, okay, that’s a pretty self-explanatory prohibition, and any given morning I like my chances of checking off that box. But “don’t get angry?” Who among us could stand in that judgment? Which, of course, makes it all the more confounding: who among us could stand in that judgment? We are human beings and we are hard-wired for all kinds of emotional responses and as long as we keep that stuff in its place don’t we all get along alright? And if Jesus is going to start lecturing not just about how we act but how we feel and if those feelings are so hard-wired into us in the first place doesn’t it just make you want to channel your inner adolescent and turn back to God and say “Well, you’re the one who made me this way!” Sins of behavior I can work on. Sins of attitude, well, that feels a bit much. If I’m honest, being told not to feel angry just makes me angry. It’d be ironic if it weren’t so tragic.

Although, even as I say that, I’m not sure that we don’t prefer it this way; I’m not sure that we don’t prefer the Gospel of emotional repression. And by “we” I’m no longer talking about humanity in general but really I’m thinking about we those odd frozen chosen who call ourselves Presbyterians, sons and daughters of Calvin, sons and daughters of a long theological history where the whole point was to keep yourself in check at all times. At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, we’re not exactly known for our emotional availability. This past week I saw a few fake Puritan Valentine’s Day cards going around Facebook, with slogans like: “You almost make my heart dance, and dancing is forbidden;” “Being with you fills me with impure thoughts, and I am ashamed;” or my favorite, “Happy Valentine’s Day; let us never speak of this again.” Laugh at that all you want to, but you’re still all sitting very quietly in your seats and listening to a very rational sermon and it would take no great disruption for this whole thing to feel suddenly indecent and disorderly because if Presbyterians are good at anything it is first and foremost knowing the things that you just don’t do. You sit quietly. You wait your turn. You act your age. And if, God forbid, you have an emotion, you keep it to yourself, you keep it inside that bubble. All in the service of what? What purpose serves a checklist of things we’re not supposed to do other than to make sure we never end up doing anything?

Which is a way of saying that I think we secretly like the strict Gospel of emotional repression because we can turn it into a safe Gospel of non-participation. Something like this: along with basically every American kid of the last four decades, I spent a few years playing youth soccer. And even grading on the curve of those millions of young aspiring athletes, I was terrible. I had no instinct for the game, and I had very little physical ability to back it up. I wasn’t coordinated enough to maneuver the ball with any grace; my hope in most circumstances was that I would get the chance on defense to kick the ball out of bounds and so let the rest of my team catch up with the play. But of course we were young enough that at the end of the season everybody had to get some kind of award, so I remember vividly when our coach handed out awards one year and I got the award for “Best Position Player,” which as far as I can tell is a polite way of acknowledging that I just didn’t want to run around. Like there was this one little patch of grass at left midfield and that was my patch of grass and if the ball came through my patch of grass going the wrong direction I would dutifully kick it out of bounds.

And I could have told you that what I was doing was trying to follow directions; I mean, part of our coaching was the importance of being responsible to the positions we were assigned to play, presumably because one of the problems of coaching little kids in soccer is that so many of them will just follow the ball wherever it goes and lose sight of the whole field. And so I could have told you that what I was doing was playing my assigned part in a larger strategy except that what it felt like to me was that I was just trying to keep my head down until the whole thing passed over. Like I would be perfectly content for left midfield to be this bubble where nothing ever happened and from which I could watch the rest of the game with relative comfort. You know, there are people on the field whose primary goal is helping the team to score, and they act accordingly, and it means running, and it means getting into the thick of play, and it means taking risks and taking mud and taking one or two kicks to the shin; and then there was me, and my primary goal was not embarrassing myself, and so I acted accordingly, and it meant standing there at left midfield and hoping that the ball stayed well to the right. And I wonder if we don’t secretly love this text, I wonder if we don’t secretly love trying to keep all those emotions inside, because our primary goal is not embarrassing ourselves, regardless of the outcome of the play.

And then the following verses give us even less room to hide. When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Now, it has been occasionally argued that what Jesus is doing in these verses is to put in somewhat more relatable terms the absolute demands of the ones that proceed: that is to say, that what sounds like an absolute prohibition on feeling anger here gets placed within a more concrete, real-world kind of context: if you’re about to make a temple offering, and you remember that somebody in your community is upset with you for some reason, go and make peace, go and make reconciliation, and then come back to the altar. It sounds considerably more practical than trying to keep all your emotions in check. Except observe now the completely radical inversion that Jesus has proclaimed: that his disciples are now exhorted not simply to say “no” to anger and “no” to rage and “no” to their most primal emotions – instead, they are compelled to say “yes” to lives of reconciliation and forgiveness and community.

Frankly, I think it was easier before this verse, when we could just imagine “sin” to be a list of things we agreed not to do, and as long as we successfully avoided doing them, we could stay in that bubble and play our position and let the world go its merry course. It’s relatively easy not to do a list of things that we’re prohibited from doing. But Jesus has the gall to challenge us to a particular and risky and dangerous thing called discipleship, and on this playing field sin is no longer simply a checklist mutually avoided; now, of course, “sin” is what happens when we agree not to do the whole host of things we are in fact called to do: it means not living lives of reconciliation; it means not living lives of peacemaking; it means not living lives of forgiveness; it means coming into this sanctuary, as we all do every Sunday, remembering the great unreconciled brokenness of the world and not running from his bubble out into the scrum. Sin means staring at the great causes of justice and mercy and declaring from the safety of left midfield that as long as we’ve followed the rules we haven’t done anything wrong.

Every Sunday before we heard the words of scripture we say together the words of the prayer of confession. The goal in crafting those words of confession is always to find language that can dovetail with the particular interest of the week’s scripture lessons; some weeks those prayers are written from scratch; some weeks they’re adapted from prayers found in any number of different worship resources; some weeks they’re lifted entirely from centerpieces of our Presbyterian tradition, like our Presbyterian Book of Worship. In fact the Book of Worship has a variety of pre-fabricated prayers of confession, some for various specific occasions or various specific themes, but today in worship we have prayed the first and most foundation prayer in our own Book of Worship. These words are the words that our theological heritage claims to be the most foundational way of expressing our brokenness before God: “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” For as difficult as it may be to count up all the wrong things we do, how much more staggering a task to imagine all the work we leave undone? And yet, if, when you come to the altar, if, when you gather at this place, if you remember all the work you leave undone, leave. Go. Be reconciled. Confession doesn’t start in here, right after the first hymn and right before the Gloria Patri. It starts out there, on the field of play, on the field of all the work we leave undone.

So a white fan said something stupid and a black basketball player did something stupid and for the better part of the week we all argued about which one of them had been more stupid and did it ever occur to any of us opining from the sideline that we, too, even in our own homes and communities, have left undone so much of the work of reconciliation? Just last night a judge declared a mistrial on the count of first-degree murder for Michael Dunn, a white Florida man accused of shooting a black teenager Jordan Davis in a parking lot in a dispute over loud music. In the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the critical voice screams that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws make it all but impossible to convict what are clearly crimes of racial violence. And of course the whole sad story is a story of anger gone unchecked, mine as much as anybody’s. But it’s not enough for anger to shout from the sidelines, from the bubble, from left midfield where it firmly plays only its own position; if we would be disciples; if we would follow this Messiah in thought, word, and deed, if we would open our hearts and our minds and our lives before him, then we would seek the reconciliation of the world not just in the headlines but in our own fragile, vulnerable, and risk-averse lives.

Got anger? Maybe you should. But don’t just bring it to the altar. Bring it to your brother and sister, in love, and together we will follow this Messiah beyond these walls and towards the great ends of reconciliation. Amen.

Jesus said to them, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” You are the light of the world. You know, I am willing to put up with a certain amount of Biblical dissonance. I take as one of the hallmarks and privileges of being Presbyterian that we can tolerate a certain amount of Biblical inconsistency, like we try in reading these ancient and holy words not to lose the forest for the trees. But you know, if you hang out in churches long enough some of these words get etched in your brain and among those etched into my brain are Jesus’ words to his disciples in the Gospel of John: “I am the light of the world,” he says. “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” And I don’t think it’s asking an indelicate question to put these two verses together and shake our heads a bit. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells his disciples, and then later on apparently he says, “I am the light of the world,” and he seems quite insistent in each moment and frankly I’m not sure he can have it both ways. Or else we have a political flip-flopper for a Messiah.

And frankly, given what seems like two mutually exclusive options — I mean honestly, either we’re the light or he’s the light and I don’t think there’s much space for negotiation — given the two choices, the temptation is just to pick one and go with it and try our best not to bother with the scripture passage in which the other one appears, and if we are going to just choose one over the other then I personally vote for the John passage because it sounds so much easier. “I am the light of the world, and whoever follows me will never walk in darkness,” and personally I like the idea of following a guy who’s doing all the work. It sounds like we’ve all gone backpacking for the weekend and in my pack there’s a change of clothes and a toothbrush and I’ve got a granola bar in one hand and a gatorade in the other and I am just skipping merrily down the trail and then Jesus is up there at the front of the line and he’s got all the food and the whole tent in his bag, and he’s got a couple of cast iron pans dangling just for good measure, because apparently Jesus brings cast iron pans when he goes backpacking, and in one hand he’s holding a firewood axe and in the other there’s an industrial-strength flashlight shooting way off into the woods and this is my kind of camping. Why would I want to be the light of the world when I could get somebody else to do it for me?

By contrast, Matthew’s account of Jesus’s words to the disciples is challenging, to say the least. Challenging because it takes this image of light, an image woven throughout scripture as an image of hope, an image of deliverance, an image of salvation, an image as powerful for the Israelites in exile as it would have been to the disciples gathered around the mount, an image suffused with the possibility of change and transformation and progress and deliverance and liberation and it takes all of these images of theological promise and puts them directly on our backs. And we’re just in chapter five. I mean, he’s only just gotten here. We’re only moments in to that Sermon on the Mount, only moments in to Jesus’ ministry; frankly, I don’t know if he’s gotten enough buy-in at this point to start passing the buck but here he is, saying “You know, this really is all going to be on you. All that Beatitude stuff I said. That whole program of justice and mercy and love; it was a nice-sounding thing, wasn’t it? Well. that whole thing is really in your hands, now. After all, you are the light.”

Of course that’s how it feels most days, like Jesus gave us a vision in these words of scripture and then turned out the lights to let us figure our way in the dark. Sarah and I have a running stockpile of flashlights in the house, many of them purchased in the statewide panic that led up the New Jersey landfall of Hurricane Sandy. We have a couple of good LED lights that put off a much more powerful beam that you might guess; we have a couple of good pen-sized flashlights for small spaces and small needs. But when Sandy actually hit and we lost power we really had no idea how long it was going to be until we got it back and we really had no concept of how quickly we were going to drain the stockpile of batteries we had amassed and so as often as we could we relied on the last flashlight in our arsenal, which is this emergency light powered entirely by hand. That is, there’s a little crank on the side of it, and if you turn the crank for a few minutes you’ll generate just enough power to throw the softest and most useless beam of light across the room – it’s not powerful enough to help you actually see anything, just powerful enough to make you think you might want to walk over there where it’s pointing but of course by time you get there the beam is dead and you have to crank it up again. So I’m not opposed to the concept; but from experience I can tell you that the execution leaves something to be desired. To be honest, we found it much more effective as an occupier of time than as an illuminator of the world.

To be honest, that’s how I, that’s how we, that’s how all of us feel most days about the whole project of making the light, about the whole project of being the light. Like we’re not opposed to the concept, but the execution leaves something to be desired. Like Matthew says we are to let our light shine before others so that they may see our good works but honestly some days – you know the days I’m talking about – some days our batteries are just about run down. Some days our power is just about run out. And there doesn’t have to be a bad guy here. There doesn’t have to be someone out there running on a platform opposed to justice, peace, and love; it’s just that the task of being the light for this vision is so overwhelming. I’m all for the concepts of justice and peace and love but as for becoming a model of them myself – well, that just seems unlikely – and if the thrust of this Gospel, if the thrust of these lines from Matthew is that I need to become someone I am demonstrably not in order that I satisfy the God who made me demonstrably not that way in the first place, then of course I vote for John. I vote for John every time, because Matthew’s text says “You are the light of the world” but I’ve been sitting here cranking this flashlight for as long as I can remember and still I can barely see across the room and it’s not that I don’t want to go to the Promised Land but honestly I can’t get from here to the doorway without tripping on the coffee table. I like the vision, but I can’t see the way past the furniture. And I doubt you can, either.

And yet I wonder whether these two verses from Matthew and John are really so diametrically opposed. John’s image, of course, begins even in the prologue, in the words seared on our hearts in which the light has come into the darkness and not overcome it; for John, the world is darkness, and the only way light gets in is when God comes in the flesh. But I’m not sure that Matthew has such a drastic cosmology. Several weeks from now, we will meander across Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration, in which Jesus takes his chosen disciples to the mountaintop and reveals his true self: Matthew writes that his face “shone like the sun” and that his clothes were as white as light. Which is to say that even in Matthew, even for disciples given this daunting task of lighting the darkness, they are never given to do that task alone. Rather they are joined in their journey by one whose vision is far more powerful than anything they could see with their own eyes. And of course in John it’s the very much the same story in different words, the story of the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus, the story of God’s promise of presence in and with the disciples even after Jesus has left their midst. It turns out that either way you vote you get the same result: you get the story of God who is faithful to us even when we have lost faith in ourselves. You get the story of the Holy Spirit who loves us even when we have so often forgotten how to one another. You get the story of Jesus who is bringing vision to creation, even when we have lost sight of the way.

We’re not far removed from one of my favorite moments of the liturgical year, the candlelight service of Christmas Eve. This year as usual we read the scripture from John 1 — that the light has come into the world and the darkness has not overcome it — and then we distributed light throughout the sanctuary on those little pew candles that churches always bring out on Christmas Eve. But as much as I love that moment, it does seem like the choreography is just a bit out of sync with the theology. Isn’t the Gospel of Christmas Eve that we have some light in this world greater than what we ourselves can provide, and so isn’t it just a bit odd that we symbolize that Gospel by turning off all the lights except for the ones that we ourselves can hold? And then you’re reading the prayers and singing the hymn and trying to hold this candle steady and hoping against hope that you’re not dripping wax on the floor and hoping against hope that you don’t set your hymnal on fire and really everybody kind of holds their breath for a few moments — admittedly, a few very beautiful moments – and instead of the good news I instead just feel a tremendous sense of anxiety over whether or not we will burn down the sanctuary. So I submit to you that the Gospel is not embodied in that moment of candlelight alone. Rather it is best proclaimed in the moment that follows — when the lights come back on, when we remember that the power of a hundred small candles pales in comparison to the power of just a few overhead bulbs, the moment when we sing with joy that our path in this world is lit not just by our own candles but by Jesus on the mountaintop, shining like the sun.

And so this morning in this sanctuary we are engaged in another moment of proclamation of the Gospel, a service of ordination and installation for our new class of session elders. This morning we charge MJ and Donna and Mary Linn with the same words spoken to those disciples long ago: “You are the light of the world.” Let your light shine in the world so that others may see. Let your light shine in this church so that we may know the way. Nurture that small wax candle as best you can. Let it guide you through session meetings and committee meetings and hospital visits and late-night phone calls and cavernous email threads, and let it guide you through the never-boring and occasionally-gracious and always-human journey of helping to serve God’s church. But no not forget – let none of us forget – that it is not finally our light that guides us, nor is it our vision leads the way. Rather we are led by that light shining from the mountaintop, that light that we can’t always see. And so we walk by faith, because our candles alone are woefully inadequate to the darkness. And so we walk by faith, stumbling through the night and wary of the obstacles. And so we walk by faith, by the conviction nonetheless of light unseen. And so we walk by faith, and we let Jesus worry about the furniture.

The lectionary today in its journey through the Gospel of Matthew leads us into Jesus’ sermon on the mount and then gives us only this brief moment to consider the Beatitudes, certainly among the most well-known words in all of scripture. And though we could certainly spend a whole season preaching through each of these well-worn lines, the challenge today is rather to figure out what to say of them as a whole unit in such a brief passing moment. The challenge is multiplied by the coincidence of the Beatitudes appearing on Superbowl Sunday, which, while not being observed per se on the Christian calendar is nonetheless an event of some cultural force. But let it not be said that I am not up for a challenge. So, if you will: blessed are those who punt, for they shall have the ball returned unto them.

Actually, while the game tonight will presumably have plenty of punting, the trendier minds in football strategy have been telling us for some time now that punting is, more often than not, bad strategy. The offense has four plays to advance the ball ten yards and if they can’t make it in the first three down they have the option to use their fourth down to punt the ball downfield into their opponent’s possession and thereby at least give the other team a worse starting location on the field, so punting has been around in professional American football since the very beginning and at the very center of the pulse of most football games is the assumption that punting is elementary strategy; it’s just what you do; not punting; not kicking it downfield, using that fourth down for a regular play – so-called “going for it on fourth” – is a risk that the long history of American football confines to only the most dire situations. Punting is the basic conventional wisdom of football, alongside, you know, “trying to score,” and, maybe, “wearing helmets.”

But then the most recent generation of football analysis – the real data-driven, numbers- driven stuff, guys with Masters Degrees in statistics or econ who end up making a living playing fantasy football – these guys are adding up the numbers and it turns out that punting on fourth down is more often than not terrible strategy. Now obviously context matters a lot. Field position matters, yards left for a first down matters, the score matters. But the general consensus among those who have studied the statistical history of the game is that the net change in field position offered by a punt is generally overshadowed by the percentage chance of scoring offered by going for it on fourth down. And if you doubt the stat wonks, consider this: at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock Arkansas, high school football coach Kevin Kelley has taken this approach and run: his team almost never punts on fourth down. In 2009, they punted twice, and reached the state semifinals. In 2010, they never punted, and went to the title game. In 2011, they punted once, and they won the whole thing.

Now, the obvious question is: if not punting is such an obviously successful strategy, why do professional football coaches punt all the time? And the answer, to the best that anyone can figure, is that while punting may not be the statistically strategic move, it is by far the safe move. It is the expected move. It is the move you make as a coach if you have some value associated with being employed. If, tonight, Denver coach John Fox calls for a dramatic fourth down conversion and misses, he will end up being the lightning rod for criticism of what might have been. But nobody will fault him for punting. If he punts when he’s supposed to and his team loses anyway, at least it won’t be directly on his head. And so instead of choosing a strategy that maximizes his team’s chances for victory he would be choosing a strategy that minimizes his own risk of public humiliation. The problem for a coach is that in the big game it’s almost impossible to be the hero and entirely too easy to be the goat and so the goal is just to kind of slip through unnoticed, to get by at the margins of the game instead of underneath the spotlight. And so the longstanding strategy of punting on fourth down, established since the dawn of time as football’s most conventional wisdom, turns out not to be a strategy for winning a football game at all; rather, it’s just a strategy for staying conveniently anonymous and being conveniently forgotten.

Now, for a quick brush past the Beatitudes we could do worse than to understand them as an inversion of conventional wisdom. The Jewish literature of Jesus’s time abounds overflows with interest in the possibility and practicality of wisdom; advice for the best kind of successful living; something like Life’s Little Instruction Manual written in Biblical Hebrew. One thinks immediately of the grounded pragmatism embodied in the book of Proverbs, or even in the dutiful logic of so many of the Psalms. “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked,” the Psalter begins; “Happy are those who live in the Lord’s house;” Proverbs keeps up the pace: “Happy is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates;” “Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding.” And the wisdom these books advise seems invariably to be a very safe kind of wisdom, a very typical kind of wisdom, the kind of wisdom made entirely uncontroversial by the fact that everybody basically agrees that it should be followed in the first place, regardless of whether anybody ever gets around to actually doing it. “Happy are those who walk in the law of the Lord,” spoken with the deep assumption that “everybody’s doing it and why don’t you?” As a strategy for winning at life you will find nothing in Scripture to equal these verses for their directness. “Happy are those whose way is blameless.”

Except for one problem, which is that you have to forget the word “happy.” Our regular translation, of which I am normally quite fond, has a blind spot for this particular construction of Biblical Hebrew; it’s like they couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it and so they reverted to the cheesiest kind of modern claptrap. “Happy.” Hmph. Here’s the real story. Several centuries before Jesus, the Hebrew scriptures were famously translated into Greek and in fact we have every reason to believe that it was the Greek version of those Scriptures that was most prevalent among the Jewish communities of Jesus’s day; as subjects of the eastern half of the Roman empire it’s entirely likely that they were better at Greek than they were at Hebrew. I know the feeling (that’s a little seminary humor). What it means for us today is that our translators have ignored the fact that the Old Testament word translated as “happy” shows up again in the Gospel of Matthew, in our reading for today, and since the beginning of time we have translated it as “Blessed.” Now, I like that translation, but whether it’s really the right English word or not isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus is precisely quoting the very language and structure of the so-called Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and he’s quoting it so that he can turn it upside down. You’ve heard it said: “Blessed are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked,” but I say to you: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

So what we have here instead of conventional wisdom is a strategy of risk. Forget punting — blessed are those who go for it on fourth down. Meekness? Hardly a conventional virtue; it’s hard to fight your way to the top of the heap on meekness; but Jesus says God will reward you for it. Mercy? Hardly an adaptive trait. I mean, you can’t get very far in this world on mercy; but Jesus says God will reward you for it, and I guess if you’re just crazy enough you could put all these bits of strategy together and come up with a model for Christian discipleship that would be in practice so ludicrous to those of us long steeped in the best kind of conventional wisdom that it would look nothing short of foolhardy. Because of course we play discipleship as safely as we can. We huddle up here on Sunday morning and we call the play and we agree that really the whole point of going out there into the world is not to embarrass ourselves by doing something so risky as practicing mercy or meekness or peacemaking; it is so much easier just to hang out in the safe anonymity of conventional wisdom, what Paul calls the wisdom of the world, and we fool ourselves into the belief that just because everybody else is doing the same thing that it must somehow be the right thing to do. Meanwhile the world cries out for mercy, and the world cries out for peacemaking, and the world hungers and thirsts for righteousness, and what do we do in return? We punt. Jesus gives us a vision of what could be if we but dare risk ourselves in His name, and instead, we punt. God gives us nothing short of a strategy for the healing of creation, and instead, we punt.

Fortunately, the Beatitudes are something more than strategy. After all, even the word “strategy” implies that this text is at its heart concerned first and foremost with guiding our Christian behavior; by using the word we make the assumption that the text is first and foremost about us. And surely in a quick brush past the Beatitudes there’s very little to undermine that assumption: we run through the text and think, “Well, maybe we should be merciful, and maybe we should be pure in heart, and maybe we should be peacemakers,” and while I don’t want to take that urge away, let’s not overlook where the text lands, the final Beatitude, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” And Jesus doesn’t say “Blessed are those who are reviled for my sake;” the change of grammar is distinctive, and it suggests that only at the very end does Jesus really mean to address his hearers directly. And if that’s the case, if it’s only in the last line that Jesus ever really talks not just to his audience but about his audience, then we have to reread the entire thing. Maybe “Blessed are the peacemakers” doesn’t just mean “Go be peacemakers;” maybe it also means “Hey, there are peacemakers out there, you know, the crazy ones, the ones who buck all the conventional wisdom, the ones you all forget about all the time, and yet God blesses them. And there are folks out there practicing mercy, you know, the crazy ones, the ones defying all the convention of the world, the ones you all never want to talk about, and yet God blesses them.

So maybe this passage isn’t all about us. If it is, then all we have is strategy, Life’s Little Instruction Book, newly revised and and now available in Greek. But if it’s something bigger. If it’s about all the people we forget. If it’s about all the people on the margin. If it’s not just about us and instead about the limitless reach of God and the limitless reach of God’s mercy, then this text is more than strategy. It’s promise. It’s the promise that God’s spirit finds even those poor in spirit. It’s the promise that God’s table makes room even for those who hunger and thirst. It’s the promise that God’s righteousness finds even those persecuted in the name of that righteousness. It’s the promise that God’s blessing extends to those whose live far beyond the boundaries of conventional wisdom. That’s the good news of this text: that it is something more than a proscription for what we ought to do; it’s a powerful declaration of what God is doing.

There is no player less respected in a football locker room than the punter. Kickers as a whole, of course, are smaller, and weaker. They’re not seen as “regular” football players; they just have this one job and it doesn’t involve hitting or tackling or very often being hit – in fact in the field of play NFL kickers are a protected class; you can’t hit them without incurring a penalty – and so you can go a long way in football just by mocking the kickers. But at least place kickers get to be symbols of victory. A field goal can win the game; it happens all the time. A kickoff likely means your team just scored, so everyone’s in a good mood; but the punter only shows up when everything has gone wrong. He’s not just smaller and weaker; he’s a symbol of strategic failure. No football fan in recorded history has exploded into spasms of glee at the announcement that their team’s punter was coming onto the field, because it means that something has gone terrible wrong. And the metric for success as a punter is only that you incrementally help your team hand the ball over to their opponents, so it’s not like punters ever get to be heroes; It is a life of professional anonymity. It is a calling inextricably tied to systemic failure and entirely destined to be forgotten; even in the spotlight of tonight’s game I doubt you will ever really see the punter. And yet blessed are those who punt.

Blessed are those unknown and unheralded who symbolize our most strategic failures. As of this morning the death toll in the Syrian Civil War has topped 136,000, roughly four times the population of Amherst County. They live as anonymous symbols of our failure, and yet blessed are the those who mourn, and blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. In this country sixteen million children live in food-insecure households. They live as anonymous symbols of our failure; and yet, blessed are the meek who hunger and thirst, for they will be filled. 2.3 million Americans reside behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world by a sizable margin. They live as anonymous symbols of our failure, and yet, blessed are those who are persecuted, and blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy in the kingdom of heaven. This Gospel is not about the conventional wisdom; it’s about God’s promises to those whom the conventional wisdom has chosen conveniently to forget. The only question to us is how conventional will be our response?

Many of you know that my wife Sarah is clergy in her own right; she serves as the assistant rector at an Episcopal church; and very often the first question that people ask us when they discover that we are an ecumenically ordained couple is whether or not we therefore have long arguments about theology, like they imagine that we would sit at the kitchen table on a Tuesday evening and rehash sixteenth-century arguments about church governance and ecclesial authority instead of just trying to figure out whose turn it is to clean up after dinner. We have also, each of us at this point heard every stereotype under the sun about our spouse’s denomination, and it is safe to say that we’ve repeated a few of them when the occasion of married life demanded it. But the truth is that on the whole we each benefit greatly from the wisdom of each other’s tradition; she, I think, learns on occasion from the good Presbyterian disciples of organization and order, of which her husband is far from a shining example. But, for my part, have learned greatly from her congregations about the theological act of throwing a reception.

Now, don’t take this personally. This particular congregation – Amherst Presbyterian Church is a church that knows how to feed people. Just last weekend at the session retreat as we were asked to identify various strengths in our congregation and somebody brought up not just our congregation’s prowess in the kitchen but in fact a specific recurring contribution to our potluck breakfasts, the details of which you’ll have to pry from someone else. This congregation knows how to feed people. But as a general rule I think there is some truth in stereotype here; if you were choosing between a dinner thrown by Episcopalians and a dinner thrown by Presbyterians and there were no criteria for your decision except the quality and quantity of the food and drink to be put in front of you I think many of us might make a decision that we’re not comfortable saying here on Sunday morning.

And the difference is surely not ability or acuity in the kitchen; surely the difference is one of sensibility; for whatever reason, I think Presbyterians – and again, you all excepted – have a kind of anxiety about putting together a decently lavish reception. Some years back when I was in the life of a different Presbyterian congregation Sarah and I would sometimes have occasion to come home on Sunday afternoons and compare church receptions, and I remember with perfect clarity coming home one September afternoon after both of our churches’ homecoming lunches. Hers had been this fully-catered outdoor picnic at some luxurious estate, more than you could eat and drink for adults and kids alike, and ours had been, as I recall, green salad and a piece of toasted bread. Surely not because we were incapable of having something more lavish. Surely rather because we had some good Presbyterian anxiety about being lavish in the first place, like if somebody accidentally brought dijon mustard instead of regular mustard that it would constitute an affront to the Gospel and be grounds for disciplinary action.

Or maybe it’s not about lavishness. Maybe we just want to know that people come to church for the right reasons, like having junk food around on Sunday morning would begin to constitute a kind of theological bribery and we need to know that you come to these pews out of a deep spiritual need to commune with the transcendent God and not just because you like donuts. There’s a moment towards the climax of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes Ebenezer Scrooge onto the trading floor of the London Exchange and they overhear two of his colleagues debating whether or not to go to the upcoming funeral of someone – probably Scrooge – for whom they obviously bear very little affection. “It's likely to be a very cheap funeral," [says one of them,] “for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?" [Says the other,] “I don't mind going if a lunch is provided… but I must be fed.” And of course we don’t want anyone here who just comes for the lunch and not for the chance to hear the good news and so the decently and orderly Presbyterian solution is to ensure that there is no lunch because of course what we do in this place is not the nourishment of the body but the nourishment of the soul. Eat breakfast before you come.

Now, of course, this is a congregation that knows how to feed people, but I suspect that were we to probe the deep scriptural history of this so Presbyterian anxiety we might find ourselves squarely in our Gospel reading for today, in this moment that separates out the nourishment of the body and the nourishment of the soul, this moment in which fishing for fish and fishing for people are presented as mutually exclusive options. This is of course the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry; in Matthew’s Gospel he has only moments before begun to preach his message, and so this story of Jesus calling his first disciples really has the opportunity to be a kind of foundational statement about outreach and evangelism and why people ever hear the good news. Simon and Andrew are the first Christian converts in recorded history, and then as now just as soon as they join the church he puts them on a committee, the outreach and membership development committee: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

And of course he makes it sound like a promotion. That’s the troublesome bit. I mean, it’s not like Simon and Peter and Andrew weren’t doing important work. Communities along the Sea of Galilee need fishermen. I can’t help but imagine that the success of local fishermen would matter quite a bit to the welfare of their communities. Those men being out in the sea doing their jobs might just be the difference between some families having food to eat or not, and then Jesus comes along and says “forget that business — I will make you fish for people! We are starting a movement! This thing is gonna grow like wildfire, so get out of the boat and let’s go fishing!”

And then what happens? In the Gospel of Matthew the very next event is Jesus’s sermon on the mount, a sermon that sustains itself over several chapters which we will have occasion to hear in the weeks ahead, the most exhaustive account of Jesus’s preaching in scripture and the cornerstone of Matthew’s Gospel; by this time his fame has spread throughout the region and the crowds are following him from as far as Jerusalem and Judea and yes even Galilee; the man is on a roll; his church absolutely is growing like wildfire and yet I wonder, as Simon and Andrew work through the audience, passing out leaflets and doing crowd control, I wonder if in that crowd they find all of their old friends from Galilee or I wonder instead about the ones who couldn’t make it because they were back home providing their own lunch, because when Simon and Andrew and don’t forget John and James all left at the same time frankly it kind of decimated the local economy and now Galilee is a lot hungrier than it used to be and who can find the time to go to church when you have so many mouths to feed? All because Jesus told them not to bother with the fish anymore, not when they could catch people instead.

But of course despite my protest it’s quite clear that Simon and Andrew have done a miraculous job of membership development; after all, half a chapter ago nobody knew who Jesus was and then he put these guys on the committee and fifteen verses later he’s preaching to crowds gathered from the four corners of Israel. And those of us in 2014 who can only imagine what it’s like for a church to grow like wildfire are left with no option but to kind of stare at this text in disbelief, to try and wring from it with such little success a recipe for outreach and dare-I-say-it evangelism that can turn five guys going fishing into a thriving ministry of thousands. I mean, what do you do? Is the secret that you just need to have Jesus in the pulpit? I know I’d show up for church. Or is their membership committee up to something? Do they have a trick up their sleeve that they haven’t shared with the rest of us? Maybe their brochure’s better than ours. Maybe their website’s better than ours. Maybe they’ve got fliers in just the right places; maybe they’re just going door to door selling Jesus like he was a vacuum cleaner, no good Presbyterian sense of decorum about themselves. Maybe it’s just that moment in history, a moment where people were so hungry for any morsel of good news that they would drop everything? Or maybe God is just somehow on the side of that congregation. Maybe that’s why they’re thriving. Maybe that’s why they’ve got all the crowds and why we can’t read this text with anything but envy.

Except that there’s a line we’ve overlooked, the last line of our reading from this morning, long after Jesus pulls together his new disciples and long before the crowds gather around the sermon on the mount, we have a single line of scripture that contains multitudes in its grasp: that Jesus went throughout Galilee, "teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people." Curing every disease and every sickness! Obviously we have throughout the Gospels stories of healing and stories of Jesus as miracle-worker, but Matthew doesn’t even bother here to tell us the details; the point here isn’t in the intimate interactions between Jesus and those who seek his healing touch; the point here is for Matthew to show us exactly how Jesus grows his church, for all his talk about spiritually fishing for people it turns out that before he can ever gather them to hear a single sermon, before he can ever get them out of their homes for church on Sunday morning, before he can ever so much as pique their curiosity about how God might be at work in their lives and in their midst, the first thing that he and his membership development committee do is provide for their most basic physical needs. He makes the lame to walk, and then they can come to church. He makes the deaf to hear, and then they can listen to the sermon. He feeds the hungry and heals the blind, and then they taste and see for themselves that the Lord is good. The implication is clear, and if you hear nothing else this morning hear this: there is no evangelism; there is no membership development; there is no strategy for church growth; there is no outreach that does not begin with feeding the most basic needs of all God’s children. Hungry people can’t hear the Gospel.

When I was an early teenager, thirteen or fourteen, I went through that phase that I think most teenage boys go through where I could just eat everything. I just perpetually vacuumed up everything in my parent’s house that wasn’t either nailed down or some kind of raw grain. If my mother were here she could describe the experience of this much better than I can, of thinking to herself “Oh, perhaps I’ll have one of those crackers I bought yesterday” and then going to shelf and realizing, “Oh, no, never mind. They’re gone now.” It meant that there was no such thing as a breakfast that would hold me until lunch, and so I have this memory, as ridiculous as it sounds, of getting excited on those Sunday mornings when I would come to church and realize it was a communion Sunday, because, you know, snacks. Even if I’d eaten breakfast ten minutes ago I knew that come along about halfway through the sermon I was going to start jonesing for something, and thank God communion was coming and at least it was better than nothing. And I admit that to you with some reservation, because it sounds so crass, because Presbyterians love nothing more than to spiritualize what we do here in denial of the very basic human realities of our situation: “Yes, it’s just a little cube of bread and a little thimble of juice, but of course it’s the bread of life and the cup of eternal salvation and eat and drink of these and you will hunger and thirst no more!” But I’m thirteen, and I can tell you the truth, and that’s just a little square of bread and it’s better than nothing but I’m still hungry, and that’s just a thimble of grape juice and it’s better than nothing but I’m still thirsty, and frankly if you want any of the rest of your song and dance to make sense just hand me the rest of that loaf and one of those pitchers and leave me be. We may not live on bread alone, but still...

Hungry people can’t hear the Gospel, which means that the task of church growth always begins by meeting the most basic human needs of our fellow children of God. Membership development begins at the shelter. Outreach begins at the clinic. Evangelism begins at the grocery store, and it’s not handing out leaflets. It’s handing out coupons. And if that sounds ludicrous, or if that sounds over-ambitious, or if that sounds like I am just lost in the dream of what it would be like to be a church growing like wildfire, take heart, because more than anything else this is a congregation that knows how to feed people. Amherst Cares, Blue Ledge Meals on Wheels, and the Amherst Food Pantry are all supported by donations from these pews. Daily Bread in Lynchburg relies on a stable core of volunteers from among our membership. And last night at the community dinner, many many of you joined together to serve seventy-seven plates to people from throughout the town, and in so doing you are not just helping those less fortunate, as if that itself were not already a noble task: no, in fact you are with God’s help making space in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ can live and work and breathe.

The only task remaining is to imagine how much more we could do, how much more God could do with us, how much more God could do with the abundance given to us. The only task remaining is to ensure that we are not meeting the needs of the world with nothing but a meager offering of toast and salad. Seventy-seven plates once a month is a wonderful thing but you and I both know that it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the real needs of this community and so if you want to build up a church together, let’s feed people. This is a congregation that knows how to feed people, so the only question is whether we are really living into the abundance of God’s grace and mercy? Or are we just handing out thimbles of grape juice and cubes of bread?

It feels like we are now properly in the dead of winter and so as antidote I propose instead that we talk about baseball. So here’s your baseball news of the week: this week the Baseball Writers Association of America announced the results of its annual election for the next class of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Now, the Hall of Fame itself is a private institution that celebrates the wide history of the sport, but for a player to be named to the Hall is a particular kind of honor, bestowed this year on dominant pitchers Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, along with legendary slugger Frank Thomas. And nobody in their right mind would raise much of an objection to any of those three being included. But of course every year we nonetheless have some controversy along the way; last year it was about players with obvious Hall of Fame credentials not making it through because of their association with steroids, but this year’s controversy was about the voting system itself.

Here’s how it normally works: the Baseball Writers’ Association of America is a by-invitation-only independent guild, largely composed of team beat writers and former beat writers. The balloting process for the Hall of Fame happens largely in secret, as opposed to the mechanism for selecting the midseason All-Stars, which include rampant fan balloting, write-in campaigns, internet voting and constantly updated vote totals; so, the Hall of Fame process feels like something that happens in a secret bunker with the curtains drawn and cigar smoke seeping out from underneath the door jam. But this year something broke down the door. Several months ago a website called Deadspin — a site that gets millions of daily visitors but isn’t exactly a hallmark of old media and let’s just say their invitation to the Baseball Writers Association might have gotten lost in the mail – Deadspin announced that they had gotten access to a Hall of Fame ballot and would poll their readers to determine how they should fill it out.

This sent shockwaves through the Writers Association, because "This vote is a sacred honor" and "Who better to handle it than the journalists who follow the game day in and day out?" and "Why would you trust fans with this kind of decision?" and of course the only way that Deadspin could have access to a ballot in the first place would be that some Association member had agreed to fill it out in accordance with their wishes. Which was exactly the case. This week, after the results went public, and long after Deadspin had revealed the very reasonable outcome of its own poll, this anonymous journalist revealed himself to be Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald — a fairly well-known figure in sports media who was trying to make a statement about the absurdity of the voting process and who instead was stripped permanently of voting credentials and then pilloried throughout the sports media landscape.

Now, of course the Writers’ Association has a valid argument: that selection to the Hall of Fame ought to be done by the people who know these players the best, and beat writers, by the nature of their jobs, know these players better than anyone. But it’s hard to take this argument very seriously when you consider the the vast pool of baseball knowledge that doesn’t get to be part of the writer’s association, be they legendary broadcasters or former players or writers working outside of the daily newspaper trade. Frankly, any pool of baseball knowledge that fails to include Bob Costas seems fundamentally broken. No, it seems more than likely that the real issue at stake here is the determination of who gets to be part of the story. As a fan, you turn on the TV or go to the park, you get some snacks and you sit back and you watch and, barring some errant foul ball, you’re not really part of the action. Beat writers live and breathe these teams for 162 games a year; they’re on the field after the game; they’re in the locker room; they’re on the team bus and the chartered jet. You can see how they might begin to think that they were part of the show itself. You can see how they might begin to think that they had parts to play that were necessary for the perpetuation of the entire enterprise, like there’s this wall between the people who make it happen and the people who watch and the Writers’ Association knows which side of the wall it’s on and which side we’re on and they’re going to keep it that way.

Now, I could talk about baseball all day, but instead… let me suggest that the controversy in our text for this morning, Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism by John, is in its own way a controversy about who gets to be part of the story and who’s just in the audience. At first it seems like this is John the Baptist’s show – after all, he is the one that everyone in Jerusalem and Judea is coming out to see; Matthew spends a long chunk of time prior to our story today establishing John’s ministry and the apocalyptic tone of his preaching; even the Pharisees and Sadducees come to be baptized and they hear “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” But even then it’s clear that John is really just a bit character; he preaches that “one who is more powerful than I is coming after me…,” which would be no surprise even to novice readers of this Gospel given that the first two full chapters were about establishing the singular historical, narrative, and theological importance of Jesus Christ. This whole Gospel is the Jesus show, and John knows it; he knows he’s just a bit player in somebody else’s script; he’s seen the name on the marquee; he’s seen the movie posters with “Jesus Christ” in big, George Clooney-sized font; heck, he might as well be in the audience. And then in our text today Jesus shows up and says “I’m here for you to baptize me.”

And I think we need to sit for a minute in the imaginary stream of John’s consciousness, like You’re here for me to baptize you? But you’re the story! You’re what this whole production is about! I am on my best day an extra walking down the sidewalk in the background of a shot which may or may not make it into the final edit of the movie called "Jesus Christ," starring Jesus Christ, executive produced by Jesus Christ, you get it. I mean, _me_ baptize _you_? Don’t get me wrong – I’m on board with everything you’re doing – I’m a big fan. But I’m really just a fan. And who am I to be a part of this story? Just some blabbering guy in the wilderness living on roots and berries! I wouldn’t know where to start, and I really don’t want that kind of responsibility; frankly, it’s so much easier just being a fan. What if I mess it up? What if I do it wrong? Would you want to be responsible for taking the Messiah and holding him underwater? Would you want even for a moment to know that the history of salvation, the history of God, the history of God’s people was resting on you not accidentally drowning the Lord of Creation? Wouldn’t you rather just get some snacks and a drink and watch from the upper deck?

How terrifying it is to realize that in the unfolding story of God we are not just the audience. How terrifying it is to realize that we, too, are onstage, with parts to play.

One time when I was about ten or eleven my parents and I had gone to some festival at which there was a magician working over a crowd of several hundred. I don’t remember anything about his act except that he was doing quite bit of escape work: you know, handcuffs, chains, that sort of thing, and then at one point he asked for a volunteer from the audience and lo and behold my father ended up on stage strapped into a straightjacket. Now, my father doesn’t seem like the sort of person who volunteers from the audience so perhaps the crowd was quiet and he was just plucked from the stage, I don’t remember, I was ten, don’t hold me too close to the facts. What I remember was that it was my father’s job first to demonstrate that it was impossible to remove himself from the straightjacket, and then to secure the magician into the straightjacket and tighten the straps and then stand there and watch as the magician made his amazing escape. But equally amazing to me was that my father had gone up there in the first place; I mean, so many things could have gone wrong. What if my father had been some amazing escape artist himself and had just slipped out of the straightjacket and embarrassed the magician there in front of everybody? Or what if, in tightening the straightjacket, he had accidentally undone whatever trick the magician had in place to guarantee his escape? What if the whole show had fallen apart because of some easy mistake?

And of course everyone in that crowd thought that my dad was a plant. I mean, that’s how these shows work, right? You put a friendly face in the crowd, and you make sure that he or she’s the one that comes on stage, and you have some corny dialog about how you two have never met each other before and have no knowledge of what’s about to happen and then magically it works anyway and I remember thinking “Well, my dad’s a lot of things, but he’s no plant! He’s the real deal! He was up there, untrained, unbriefed, and the whole thing was riding on him!” Which, admittedly, is a bit of a stretch; I mean, I’m sure the magician could have recovered even if Dad had gone off-script; it’s not like my dad was the one in charge of the whole act. But still. Who wants that kind of responsibility, especially when you’re totally unbriefed on what’s about to happen?

Still, John the Baptist consents, and baptizes Jesus Christ in the Jordan. And the clouds part and the Holy Spirit descends like a dove and the voice of God is heard over the waters: “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased,” and I am sure that the whole crowd gave John a hard stare and assumed he was a plant. I’m sure everybody there thought John had learned the whole act in advance — everybody except John himself, whose anxiety and incredulity – “you want me to baptize you?” – is the most human of responses to the scandalous thought that God’s plan for creation itself might require anything of us. That God is up to something not just for us but with us, something that involves us, something that gets us out of our seat and using our hands and joining into the act. But of course even though he doesn’t know it, of course John in this story actually is a plant. Even though he doesn’t know it, even though he doesn’t quite believe it, even though he finds it to be patently absurd that God’s story would have some requirement of him, still, God has put him in this moment; God has put the words on his tongue; God has put the skill in his hands; God has put the willingness in his heart for such a time as this. So that John might get out of his chair and walk down that long aisle towards the stage of creation itself, that he might walk onstage by faith and not by sight, that he might say to himself “I have some part in this story and God will help me do it.”

For us at least as much for John, it is a terrifying thought to consider that the story of God still continues, here in this day and time, here in this community, here in this congregation. The thought that God calls us not just for our own ends or for God’s own amusement but because God’s plan for the fullness of time runs through each of us. It's like this: I’m a big fan of Jesus; you may be a big fan of Jesus; you may like a lot of what the man has to say; but in this place we are something more than fans; these pews are not the safe vantage points from which we lazily observe the ongoings of the world. Last Sunday we were visiting with my parents at their new home in Waco, Texas, and on Sunday morning we went to the Presbyterian church with them and one of the pastors who knows what I normally do on Sundays said to me “I hope you enjoy the service! Enjoy not having to do anything!” And I know what she meant and it was nice just sitting in the pews but really this is not a stage and you are not the audience. I am not putting on a show and I hope you haven’t come to see one. Rather we are gathered in the collaborative effort of figuring out what part we will play in a show that is much larger than this sanctuary and bigger than any of us, and the real drama here is all around us; it is the unfolding story of creation in which God has given each of us a part to play.

And so our congregation moves into the new year together, a new year of dreaming together, a new year of doing together, a new year of listening together for God’s will for all of us. It will be, as it always has been, a very human process, full of mistake and misunderstanding and misapprehension. On our very best days we take two steps forward and just one step back. But still, I hope you will join us, and not just from the pews. I hope you will join us, and not just from the audience. I hope you will join us, because it is one thing to dream together and another to find the hands equipped to make those dreams reality. Serve on session. Help on a committee. Visit the sick and homebound. Engage with community missions throughout Amherst. Call an elder, call the church, come to my office and say “This is what I care about and this is what I’m going to do!” It doesn’t take skill. It doesn’t take training. You don’t need to know your lines in advance; there was no dress rehearsal. All it takes is the barest willingness in your heart and I can assure you that God has planted you here for just such a time as this. So I hope you will join us and say to yourself “I have some part in this story and God will help me do it” so that together we can help write the story of God for this place and time.

Amen.

As far as I can tell, there are two general strategies for trying to catch Santa Claus in the act. You can, if you choose, set up a kind of elaborate surveillance system. I never got quite this ambitious as a kid, but given the upgrades in technology I can only imagine what you could put together with a basic video camera, a motion detector, maybe something as simple as a tripwire or one of those invisible laser beams that provide security in all the heist movies. At some point Santa will enter the living room and either by tripwire or laser beam or motion capture he will close a circuit that will turn on a camera that will provide the best kind of documentary evidence of Santa’s activities. We can do this. We have the technology. Or, for the less ambitious, or at least for the less techno-savvy, or even I suppose for those who would be less satisfied by video evidence and much more satisfied with an eyewitness experience, you could, I suppose, just stay up tonight and wait.

Now, I never tried this with much success. The Christmas Eve dictum in my parents’ home was always that we had to go to sleep so that Santa could come, that the lyric of him knowing when we’re sleeping and when we’re awake applies less to his evaluation of our behavior through the year and more to his uncanny ability to wait on present delivery until we have exhausted ourselves and collapsed. He apparently shows up with such laser-like precision that if you but drift off for just a few minutes, somehow, he’ll know, and so the order of the night must be: Vigilance! Stay awake! If you really want to see for yourself, stay awake at all costs! But of course at some point our bodies just give out; at some point we just give out, we can’t keep our eyes open, we drift off hiding in the downstairs closet and wake up again in our own beds with gifts from Santa under the tree, and I don’t know, is there in that first light of Christmas morning a glimpse of disappointment, like “I wanted to stay awake and see this for myself! This was going to be the year! But instead, yet again, I’ve slept through Christmas and I’ve missed it. Next year I swear I’m setting up laser beams.”

What if you sleep through the most important part of Christmas? What if you miss it? I ask because for all the richness of Luke’s account of the nativity, we rarely acknowledge that most of the people in Bethlehem are asleep the whole time. Mary and Joseph descend upon the town alongside hundreds of other travelers, tourists drawn by the occasion of the imperial census. How many artists and painters have imagined the look and feel of that manger, isolated, quiet, nobody around but the Holy Family and those first few visitors? And then how easy it is to forget that just out of frame is the city bursting at its seams with tourists, and every one of them, apparently, asleep? They must be asleep, because just to get an audience the Angels have to go way out of town, way out to the fields where the shepherds are the only ones up late. And we know their story well enough: shepherds working the night shift, dropping everything to come see this newborn King. We know their story well enough. But what about everybody else? What about Bethlehem? I challenge you to find a creche set with a bunch of sleeping tourists in the background. But they’re still part of the story. So what about the people who slept through the whole thing?

I ask because so much of the scripture we read and hear during the Advent season is about the imperative of staying awake. “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know when the master of the house comes!,” Jesus warns his disciples late in the Gospel of Matthew, a text we read in this pulpit less than a month ago. Get ready! Stay awake! The order of the season must be vigilance! Because God is coming into the world and we’ve got to be ready! For the better part of a month – longer if you’re really into advance planning – for the better part of a month we’ve all been in this chorus of getting ready and staying awake. We put on the right Christmas music. We watch all the right Christmas specials. We get all the decorations hung in place, we think about all the right presents and all the right gifts, convinced that if Christmas is going to happen it’s going to happen because we’ve stayed awake to make it happen, that we will through the sheer exertion of our own vigilance will this thing into existence. And we get around to this night, Christmas Eve, emotionally over-caffeinated and spiritually under-slept, like we’ve been prying open our own eyelids, desperate not to miss the miracle and exhausted from all the work of trying to make it happen. All in the hope that we might be with the shepherds, awake and ready when the moment comes, ready to meet this newborn King in the flesh.

But the problem is that of course it never quite works; at some point our bodies just give out; at some point we just give out. At some point come Christmas Eve it’s quite clear that we’re not with the shepherds at all, but just another handful of the sleeping tourists of Bethlehem. I suspect that most of us have been sleepwalking for more of this journey than we even realize. Maybe you’ve knocked yourself out with the exertion of getting ready, or maybe this year it just felt better to stay asleep the whole time. Maybe you didn’t want to open your eyes in the first place, not when you know perfectly well what you’d see: the pain and darkness and heartache of the world, the pain and darkness and heartache of our own lives, always so much more fragile at Christmas, always so much more vulnerable to the shadows of the past and to the spectre of some Christmas in our imagination. Wouldn’t it just be easier to close your eyes and shut off the music and pull the covers over your head and wake up sometime in January? Couldn’t you just close your eyes with all the rest of us, the other sleeping tourists of Bethlehem? But then, what if you miss it? What then? What becomes of us?

Part of the problem is that we spend so much of Advent trying to keep ourselves awake that by time we read this passage from Luke the shepherds seem like moral heroes; they’re up and at the ready while the crowds in Bethlehem sleep through the whole thing. But there’s no evidence in this text that the shepherd’s nighttime schedule as anything but a marker of their socioeconomic status. They’re working the graveyard shift in an unregarded profession, and that the angels visit them says nothing about their strength of character but rather everything about the unexpected places in which the Gospel shows up. By contrast, the same is true for Bethlehem. There’s no evidence in this text that the good news of Jesus Christ spreads to anyone based on their strength of character or vigilance, or even based on the amount of caffeine shooting through their veins. And then the carol we just heard speaks of Bethlehem in its “deep and dreamless sleep,” a line that has long caught my curiosity. Why isn’t Bethlehem dreaming? Isn’t the promise of the Messiah a live promise for the Jews of Jesus’s time? And yet no dream, no promise, no expectation or vigilance could prepare them for the gift given in that manger. And as the angel herself says to those shepherds awake in the fields, “I am bringing good news of great joy for all people” — not just for the shepherds and the Magi, not just for the dreamers; not just for the ones awake and ready; not just those lying wait in the closet to see this thing in the flesh, but even and especially to Bethlehem, even and especially to those lying dreamless, even and especially to all of us who have long since fallen asleep.

Friends, this is the Gospel of Christmas Eve: that God came into the world not because Bethlehem was ready but rather despite Bethlehem having long since gone to bed. That God comes into the world not because we have so prepared the way but rather despite us having long since fallen asleep. That there is hope in this world, hope for this world, dependent not on our preparation and vigilance but rather on the unrelenting love of God, God who worked for us before the foundations of the earth, God who dreams for us in the longest nights of exile and despair, God who who sees for us when we have closed our eyes to the brokenness of the world, God who longs for us when have long since given up on ourselves, God who keeps watch over us when we have long since drifted off to sleep. This is the miracle of Christmas: that Jesus Christ comes into the world not to find those ready and waiting, but even and especially to love those lost in dreamless sleep.

So tomorrow morning when you wake up; Thursday morning when you wake up; the day after, the week after, the month after, if you wake up with that glimmer of disappointment thinking “Oh! I wanted to stay awake, but I’ve slept through Christmas, I’ve missed it, yet again,” remember that this miracle is not ours to create or ours to miss. This miracle, as true for the shepherds in their fields as for the Magi half a country away as for all the tourists of Bethlehem sleeping comfortably in their beds, this miracle is good news of great joy for for all people. A child has been born, a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

As for tonight, go home and get some rest. Close your eyes and let sleep take you. Grace always comes in the darkest hour of the night; may it find a path into your sleeping heart, into all of our sleeping hearts, in the most joyous and unexpected of ways. And for what it's worth, if God needs to wake you up, a newborn will do the trick.

Amen.

Sunday sermon from the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2013
Text: Matthew 1:18-25
Preached by the Rev. Matt Gaventa

This morning I’d like to start with a little bit of show and tell. You might not be able to see much from where you’re sitting — though I’ll leave it out after the service. This is a relief statue by an artist named Charles McCollough called “Joseph Does His Part.” If you can see it at all, you can see Joseph sitting in the chair in the middle of the piece, a bit of a frazzled-new-father look on his face, the baby Jesus screaming a bit of a frazzled-new-baby kind of scream. Flanking them on both sides are of course the animals of the manger, who seem notably and unusually awake, and then, in the corner, on the floor, at last we find Mary, asleep, with an unmistakably contended smile on her face.

The piece was a gift the first Christmas after we had Charlie, a reminder to a new father that Joseph gets a part in this story, too. And this year it stands alongside the other creche sets we have on display, and in some ways it stands as a bit of a corrective. It’s not like we have a huge collection, but maybe five or six different creche sets, gifts from friends and family from travels around the world, and every year when we take out the Christmas decorations and unpack the creche sets I find myself in the process of trying to arrange the figures on the shelf and, after setting up Jesus, and after setting up Mary, then never being entirely sure which one of the remaining figures is supposed to be Joseph. You’ve got a couple of shepherds, a couple of Magi, and Joseph, and maybe it’s just a gender thing but it very often takes me a moment to figure out which one is supposed to be which. In some pieces you even have the baby Jesus and Mary carved as one piece, from the same hunk of wood or the same bit of stone, forever held together while Joseph, again, recedes into a rather anonymous background. So I like putting up this sculpture, even with Joseph looking very much out of his depth, even with the newborn Jesus screaming to wake the dead. It’s nice to see Joseph play his part; what’s more, it’s nice to see a reminder that even Joseph has a part to play.

Of course at first glance this is exactly the function of our text this morning from the Gospel of Matthew: a nice reminder that, even with Mary and Jesus so often carved from the same part of our imagination, that Joseph still has a part to play. Matthew is the only Gospel to give Joseph any kind of decent screen time, though, admittedly, we really only have two narrative accounts of the birth of Jesus. Mark’s got nothing on the nativity at all, and John can only tell it in symbols. So we’ve got Luke, of course, who tells the story of two women, cousins, Mary and Elizabeth, a kind of family melodrama, and the story of that quiet night in Bethlehem where everybody gets together around the manger and sings songs. It’s a very nice story, it’s the story we know all too well and the story we will tell when we gather here on Tuesday. But here in Matthew we have something different; it’s not melodrama; it’s a kind of action-adventure: it’s got Joseph’s quest to protect his family from Herod’s maniacal henchmen; it’s got the flight into Egypt; it’s got the massacre of the firstborn – it’s got heroes and villains, it’s got sexual intrigue, it’s got exotic destinations; Matthew’s story of the nativity is like the ultimate guy movie. If you’ve ever read the Nativity story and thought, “You know, they should adapt this into something that I could watch on TBS at 10:00 on a Saturday night,” Matthew’s three steps ahead of you. All it needs is a camel going off a cliff and then exploding into a fireball.

Now, it maybe the case that half of your family would want to watch the Joseph and Herod blow up camels on TBS while the other half would clamor to see Mary and Elizabeth do Luke’s version of the Nativity over on ABC Family. The truth is that if we wanted to, we could basically fight the battle of the sexes using nothing but the first few chapters of each of these Gospels. For Matthew, Mary’s little more than a sex object, pregnant without cohabitation, she’s a plot device that sets all these men in motion; on the other hand, for Luke, Joseph’s just about the same, he’s just there to drive the camel; he’s a prop to get the story to Bethlehem because of his blood ties to the city of David. In Luke, the shepherds get way more screen time. But then of course these two Gospels are trying to tell the same story for two very different purposes. Luke is consistently focused on characters at the margins of society – this is the Gospel that brought you the Prodigal Son and Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Gate – so of course Luke wants to tell a story where power comes in unexpected places, even and especially on the lips of two unlikely women. Matthew’s agenda is generally a bit different: he wants to ground the story of Jesus in the long story of Israel’s history, so that Jesus’s reevaluation of Jewish law will pack the biggest punch. No wonder he spends the entire first chapter of his Gospel just listing the generations that tie Jesus back to the house of David. And no wonder his story of heroes and villains sounds like it could come right out of Exodus. It’s supposed to. So sure, we could fight the battle of the sexes using nothing but the first few chapters of these Gospels, but I think we’d be missing the point. The point is not to argue about whether or not Mary and Joseph play their parts. The point is that both of them have a part to play.

To me, that’s one of the joys of reading these two stories side-by-side, as if you could almost picture Matthew reading over Luke’s shoulder and saying “Yes, okay, women, cousins, shepherds, the innkeeper, the manger, the goats, the cows, – great, just don’t forget Joseph! In this story, everybody gets a part!” There’s something beautiful about the insistence that here at the foundational moment of the Christian story, that here we all have a part to play; it’s something of a foretaste of the kingdom that declares that everyone gets to be here. To that end, I hope at some point, whether here or at another church, I hope that you have had a chance to witness the great chaos of a kids’ Christmas pageant. If you haven’t, you might catch one this afternoon or Tuesday afternoon, and you might learn something about the Kingdom. Because a church Christmas pageant is not like a Broadway production in which you have a limited number of parts and you hold auditions and the best people get the parts and the rest of them don’t. No, a church Christmas pageant finds parts for everybody. If your kid shows up for rehearsal, they get a part. Heck, if your kid just shows up on Christmas Eve with a costume, they probably get a part.

But of course the challenge is that a Christmas pageant doesn’t scale particularly well. If you have twenty kids for a pageant, you can have one Mary, one Joseph, one Angel Gabriel, three wise men, an innkeeper, and then a handful of shepherds and sheep. But if you have eighty kids for a pageant, you can have one Mary, one Joseph, one Angel Gabriel, three wise men, and then dozens and dozens of shepherds and sheep. Or you start inventing characters. In the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Lucy appoints herself the Christmas Queen. In the movie Love, Actually, one of the kids is set to play the Christmas Lobster. And you know there’s no lobster in this text, and yet there is something of an affirmation that everybody gets a part. And there’s something beautiful about that image, about the manger with Jesus and Mary and Joseph and then, stretching far out into the fields, far as the eye can see, dozens, hundreds, thousand of sheep, donkeys, oxen, goats, lobster, chickens, monkeys, Christmas creatures of all shapes and sizes, anybody and everybody who could find a costume and we’re all here gathered around the manger.

But as beautiful an image as that might be, I think that if we read a little closer it gets a little harder, because the real problem in this text from Matthew is that even Joseph doesn’t actually really do anything. He starts to, briefly – he starts to disown Mary because of her untimely pregnancy – at which point of course the Angel intervenes and tells him not to, and he agrees, and for the rest of his narrative existence in Matthew’s Gospel all Joseph does is agree with what angels tell him to do. “Joseph woke from sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.” He has three dreams: the first one in our text today, and then one telling him to flee to Egypt, and then one telling him to come home, and every time all he does is wake up and do as the Angel commands him. It’s not bad for stage time. But it’s still not much of a character. For as poetic an image as it might be, Matthew reading over Luke’s shoulder –  the reality is that Matthew seems pretty suspicious of Joseph having much agency at all. All he does is agree; all he does is whatever the angel tells him to do; and honestly he’s not any more critical to the story than the camel.

This is an important corrective, because, as beautiful an image as our sheep- and lobster-infested pageant may be, the truth is that we love to treat Christmas like a pageant because we love to treat Christmas like something we have to pull off. The burdens we can put on ourselves to make this holiday happen are excruciating. Just consider all the things you have spent the last three weeks doing in order to pull off this pageant of a Christmas: all the cookies baked, all the shopping done, all the presents wrapped, all the travel arranged, all the beds made, all the suitcases packed, all the parties attended, all of the i’s dotted and t’s crossed in this long protruded Advent runup to the pageant we call Christmas. The truth is that we hardly need a reminder of everyone’s part in this madness, because all we do is spend this season locked into the anxious frenzy of believing that our part will be the difference between a good Christmas pageant and a bomb, that somehow it won’t be Christmas if we don’t get our part together, that if we forget our lines, that if we miss our cue, that if we’ve let something slip along the way, that if we don’t evenly space the ornaments around the tree or don’t pull the roast out of the oven at just the right moment or never manage to find that perfect gift for everyone in the family, that if somehow this year doesn’t live up to the nostalgic idol in our imagination that somehow Christmas just won’t be the same.

And then what happens when you just can’t do your part? If the success of the Christmas pageant rests entirely on you, what happens when you just can’t? Maybe the checkbook feels a little light. Maybe work feels a little off. Maybe you just don’t feel yourself; make no mistake: we are in the darkest season of the year; this is when the ghosts come out, and maybe you feel a little haunted. Loneliness. Depression. Disease. Maybe you’re just not here. Or maybe you’re haunted by ghosts of a different sort, empty seats at the Christmas table, ghosts of those nearest to us whose absence is never more acutely felt than in this season when everything is supposed to be the same as it always was. The days are at their shortest and the nights are at their longest and the danger of stringing up ornaments and blasting Christmas music is that the dissonance of it all can make you think that this whole thing only works if you can put on your brightest holiday sweater and turn that frown upside-down, but maybe the thought of showing up and doing your part and singing “Joy to the World / The Lord is Come Let Us Adore Him / Did you hear the bells?” just makes you kind of feel the darkness in the pit of your stomach, and of course it can’t possibly be Christmas if you don’t do your part.

Maybe that describes you this year and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe that voice in your head speaks more loudly some years than others. But when you hear it – and you will hear it – I want you remember Joseph, not because the story’s about him, but because it’s not about him at all. Because in this text there’s no room at all for the characters to get in the way of the story. In this text, the birth of Jesus presses forward, inevitably, unstoppably, a force to be reckoned with, a force to be unequalled by anything any of the characters do, be they Joseph or Mary or Herod or the wise men or the shepherds or the innkeeper or the donkeys or the sheep or the camels or even the Christmas Queen and the Christmas lobster. There is no part small enough to be unwelcome at the manger, but there is also no part large enough to change the good news of this Gospel: that Mary is set to bear a son, and Joseph will name him Jesus, and he is come to save all his people. Here on the brink of opening night, here’s the power of the Gospel: Christmas isn’t a pageant. It benefits not in the least from our best production values. It needs no stage managing. It cares not a whit whether we memorize our lines, nor whether we find our best costume nor even whether we look the part. Rather Christmas is the story that began long before our opening act, the story that will continue long after our curtain falls, the story of God loving us no matter what part we play.

So I will admit than when I took a first look at this statue I was a bit bothered by the frazzled-new-father look on Joseph’s face. It seemed to play along with every stereotype of the panicked and incompetent new father who couldn’t be bothered to get his act together. Why does Joseph have to look so terrified when he’s just trying to do his part? But in light of this Gospel of course that’s precisely the point. We can look terrified. We can look frazzled. We can stand with Joseph and Mary in that manger and look panicked or afraid or desperate or haunted. We can stand out with the sheep and the camels and the lobster and feel the darkness of the night surrounding us and the chill of the wind of the bleak midwinter. We can play our part in this story with every ounce of our humanity still intact – our sins, our brokenness, our fears, our jealousies, our selfishness, every ounce of it; this is the only part we have: to gather around the manger in faith, to gather around the manger in joy, to gather around the manger in the simple hope of seeing God do God’s part.

Amen.

If you have ever overslept your alarm clock, you will have had that whiplash moment of going from the pleasant bliss of having an extra fifteen minutes to the abject panic of realizing just how late you are for whatever you were supposed to be up for. As far as I can figure, that is the exact experience of having Thanksgiving so late in November that we now wake up from our proverbial tryptophan-induced slumber to the urgency and immediacy of Advent. Like, usually we have a week to sleep it off. But instead, bam, December. Bam, Christmas. You may be serving leftover turkey at the Christmas parade after-party but don't let it bother you. This thing is happening, ready or not. Three and a half weeks until the big day, you can start X-ing off the calendar boxes, and even if you were late to the party we are all systems go. You'll be forgiven for feeling just a bit disoriented.

But before we start too earnestly in our countdown, this reading from Matthew ought to at least give us pause. The customary texts for Advent will eventually take us down the well-worn paths of reading through the story of Mary and Joseph but they begin, curiously enough, with something of a flair for the apocalyptic - "But about that day and hour no one knows..." - Jesus's words to his disciples cautioning them against making hotel reservations for the night of his second coming. One can easily flesh out the other side of this conversation, that the disciples must have imagined that Jesus would outline a specific course of historical events to follow his death and resurrection, a whole list of precise dates and times, or even that the first hearers of Matthew's Gospel must have been pouring over the tea leaves looking for the hidden secret plans for the day of judgment. You just know the disciples were trying to work that out for themselves because Christians have been doing those calculations for two thousand years: if you want to know when Jesus is coming back, just ask the internet, or drive around until you find the right church billboard. Somebody will tell you. God knows we all love a soapbox. Or, instead, you can read the scripture: "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." In a rare moment of total humanity, even Jesus here doesn't know the full plan.

And yet I suspect most of you are not, as we read this text, scratching out "second coming" from whenever it was pencilled into your datebook but rather wondering why we should talk at all about the scheduling of the apocalypse on the first Sunday of Advent? Are we not busy enough in this season getting ready for Jesus to show up the first time - why bother ourselves with the thought of him showing up the second time? And yet Advent is about something more than preparing ourselves for Christmas. It's about something more than crossing off calendar days along the way to our real destination; Advent is something unto itself, and in Christian life what we celebrate here is not only the season of anticipation of Christmas morning but also the life of anticipation of God's reentry into creation. In Advent, those two kinds of anticipation are irretrievably intertwined with one another. What we long for in the promise of Christmas morning, already fulfilled in that manger long ago, is not so different than the longing we have still for the unfulfilled promise of God for the redemption of all things. All of which is to say, as we wake up on Thanksgiving weekend and the first Sunday of Advent to the collective whiplash that announces that the Christmas season is also finally upon us, as we count down the hours towards that day of all days, be careful, because "about that day and hour no one really knows."

The summer that Charlie was born, in the sort of demented state that new parents consistently find themselves, and as I was working then only on Sundays, one of the things Sarah and I discovered was the sheer satisfaction of walking with stroller from our student apartment to the local shopping mall at about 10:00 on a weekday morning and emerging with a Starbucks beverage. I can't tell you the deep feeling of accomplishment we felt the first several times we successfully made that voyage, the payoff of which was not only a bit of fresh air and decent cup of something hot but also the feeling of fellowship that would wash over us when we found ourselves with baby and stroller surrounded in that mall by the dozens of other parents doing exactly the same thing, 10:00 being a late hour when you have a young kid, and so everyone was waiting with bated and sleep-deprived breath for those doors to open. And so began our routine: a regular stroller walk from our apartment to the mall, a regular date with the barista at the Starbucks, and some regular camaraderie in our dementia.

All of which is just rationale to explain to you what I was doing sitting on the couch in the middle of the mall aisle at about 10:30 on a Tuesday morning in the middle of August of 2011, the first time that year that I saw Christmas decorations. There I was, baby stroller in one hand, hot beverage in the other, having a bit of a moment out in the world of normal people, when out of the corner of my eye I began to notice something that I presume you would only see in a mall at 10:30 on a Tuesday, which is to say that I saw a couple of employees rolling a cart of Christmas decorations, elf costumes, tinsel, lights, right through the center of the mall. Right there down the aisle, brazenly, unapologetically, not as if they were unaware that it was the middle of August but rather as if they knew perfectly well what day it was, as if they knew perfectly well how absurd their timing was but simply didn't care. As if they didn't even care that we still had Back-to-School, Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving to go before Christmas decorations would be widely tolerated! As if they weren't even aware of the liturgical inappropriateness of hanging Ivy and Mistletoe while we were still only scratching the surface of Ordinary Time! I tell you I had to resist the urge to open up my own church planning calendar - of course in this story I carry it around with me - and go explain to them the error of their ways!

Needless to say that the decorations did not actually appear on public display anytime soon. Surely there were simply being relocated for one reason or another. Surely they were being relocated at 10:30 on a Tuesday because that seems like the sort of time when the mall could get some of its housekeeping done without having the judging eyes of the public upon them, or at least that whoever wanders the mall at that hour might well be focusing their attention on their babies and not so much on the window decorations. Which of course means that it's not really a story about retail policies on Christmas decor. It's just a story about my own miscalibrated sensitivity, like why do I really care when they truck out the Christmas stuff, like do I really believe that Halloween and Thanksgiving can't survive on their own without my policing all the retailers for violations of the liturgical calendar? It seems to me that the story is really about how I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on the baby and enjoying a beverage and instead I'm once again jumping onto my portable soapbox. God knows we all love a soapbox.

And I have hardly been alone in my reservations. It is a very popular soapbox. It is nothing short of required in the more fashionable corners of Christianity to declaim all manner of Christmas celebration until Thanksgiving has run its course, or rather until Advent has properly appeared, one or the other, so that in solid Presbyterian fashion we might anticipate the birth of the Savior of the World decently and in good order. You can put up the decorations on the street lamps, but don't accidentally turn them on. You can stock up on Christmas music, but don't accidentally play any of it. If you find a deal on a nice red and green tie or sweater, that's fine, but make sure it's in the back of the closet until that right day and hour, or at the very least, don't wear it to church. We've got it so that church is the last place in God's creation that Christmas is allowed to show up. We don't want to pollute the sanctity of it, like somehow it will be deprived of its magic power if we accidentally let it out of the box at the wrong moment. And I know I sound sarcastic but the truth is that I'm incredibly sympathetic to all of this, in no small degree out of a deep love of Thanksgiving and a deep sense that Thanksgiving somehow needed my protection - but really, if what we celebrate at Christmas is the in-breaking of God into creation, than how silly of us to run around arguing over when we allow it to show up?

Surely that's the full force of this morning's scripture, wherein the disciples' need to quantify and schedule Jesus's arrival is matched entirely by our own determination that Christmas should come like clockwork. But Jesus offers them instead a different kind of perspective. About that day and hour no one knows, only the Father, because God alone is the Lord of time itself. Because God is not bound by our seasons and our patterns and the habits of our calendar. Because God works in God's own time, and not at all in accordance with our expectations. That's where this text goes, of course: Jesus draws the comparison between his coming and the events of Noah and the flood: For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. But this comparison is less an outline of some great cataclysm that waits for us with the in-breaking of God but rather a reminder that God transgressing the boundaries of creation to be among us is and should be a remarkable surprise. In some ways the story of Advent is the story of Jesus arriving in accordance with scripture and in accordance with prophecy but in other even more important ways it is also the story of surprise, the story of a Messiah appearing for an unlikely people, born of an unlikely family, wrapped in unlikely clothes and laid in an unlikely manger. It is the story of God's grace encountering us in unexpected ways. So who are we to try and contain it to three and a half weeks on the calendar?

Astute readers of the bulletin and astute observers of the hymnal may note that our closing hymn today is not really an Advent hymn. It is, properly and scandalously, a Christmas hymn. Now, you may be playing Christmas music at home already. For all I know, you may have been playing Christmas music well since Columbus Day. And maybe it doesn't seem scandalous to you at all to sing a Christmas hymn on the first Sunday of Advent. That's just fine. But maybe it does feel a bit off-kilter. Maybe you know just how many beautiful Advent hymns there are in our hymnal and what a shame it would be if we didn't get to sing all of them. Maybe it feels too soon, like just because there are lights and tinsel up doesn't oblige us as a theological community to skip over the season of waiting. Or maybe you've got that feeling in the pit of your stomach, and I have been with you in that pit for many years, that feeling that Advent somehow needs our protection, that Christmas has overgrown its boundaries like some unruly weed and part of our charge as a Christian community is to try and contain it within its appropriate time and place, to try and save Advent, to try and save Christmas, to try and keep them in their place for their own good. But if what we are really talking about here is the surprising entrance of God's grace into an unlikely world, then Christmas is really the last thing in need of saving.

Instead, it just needs watching. That's the last turn in this text. "Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming." Keep awake. It sounds like Jesus is just egging the disciples into a life of constant anxiety. But consider the larger context. After his resurrection and ascension, they will be left alone to carry on the task of encountering that surprising grace of God, and without the Messiah among them, it won't be easy. As we all know, the world can be a dark and dangerous place, a lonely place, especially for those lost in the conviction that God's grace has left them to their own devices. If we have become convinced that God will only come in God's own time then it is easy enough to feel abandoned, betrayed, left behind by a God who stubbornly refuses our beck and call. But instead, Jesus suggest, we could be watchful. We could encounter the world not with the assumption that God shows up on cue but rather with the expectation that God's grace still has surprises in store. We could remind each other that even in the deepest and loneliest hours of the night, that God is with us, that God is not yet done with the redemption of all things. We could enter Advent convinced that God's light has come into the world and the darkness has not overcome it. We could be watchful people, not just a people who watch television Christmas specials and community parades but a watchful people, seeking out the surprising grace of God, born in a manger, born to walk among us, still walking among us.

So this Advent, I would invite you to watch out for Christmas. To watch out for the grace of God in surprising ways and unexpected moments. And frankly, if all it takes to open our eyes to this surprising thing is singing a Christmas hymn on the first Sunday of Advent, then, for God's sake, for your sake, for all our sakes, sing it loud. Turn the organ up. Open all the stops. We sang with such with plaintiff expectation O Come O Come Emmanuel but we've also got to sing with reckless watchful abandon Come, ye Angels; Come, ye Shepherds, Come all creation and worship this Newborn King! I say the world is a dark and dangerous place and frankly if listening to Joy to the World in August reminds you of the faithfully surprising grace of God then turn that music up. Let's not spend so much time worrying that Christmas might come too early that we forget to rejoice in it coming at all. Because really, are we in the business of reminding Jesus what exactly is the schedule of His arrival? Are we in the business of becoming the righteous grouch simply because the decorations have gone up too early and given joy in some unauthorized way? Are we really supposed to stand on a soapbox in the middle of a shopping mall and opine over Christmas having loosed its chains?

Or shall we instead just keep a watchful eye on that baby?

Amen.

If you've been counting along, you know that today could be the Thirty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Anybody who knew that without looking gets a sticker. But instead, this is the Sunday in our Christian life together that we call Christ the King Sunday. It's the last Sunday of the liturgical year: next week, believe it or not, we begin Advent, which also begins the year again. We start the year by expecting the birth of Jesus in that lowly manger and we finish it off by exalting him as Lord on High, and then we start over. But I will submit that Christ the King Sunday is something of a difficult thing to wrap our heads around. It feels kind of like the church equivalent of a Hallmark Holiday. Unlike Advent or Easter, we don't really have a good story to tell for this one, and it's not like we don't worship Jesus as a King throughout our calendar year. Heck, as you may have already noticed, the hymns for Christ the King Sunday are all shared in our hymnal with Ascension Sunday, six weeks after Easter -- basically they're all the hymns where Jesus is up high somewhere. Frankly, it's not obvious why this Sunday even exists on the church calendar, except that perhaps we wanted to finish off the year with something more specific than just another Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Of course, the other reason that it's hard to wrap our heads around Christ the King Sunday is that we just don't like kings very much, a fact I was reminded of time and again this week during our national remembrances of Abraham Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg and then, of course, of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The two men are separated by a century and yet consistently yoked together in our historical memory: one, a big-government Republican; the other, a fiscally-conservative Democrat, both beloved in death and yet frequently demonized in life. Now, of course, Lincoln is the picture of Presidential wisdom, a man who guided the country through its darkest days and abolished its most abhorrent institution, but in his life he was in many circles a tyrant, the president of a country built on the principle of self-determination who launched a war against states who sought to exercise that principle. Throughout the south they called him the worst name they could think of. They called him King Lincoln. And don't let's get started on Kennedy and Camelot.

But even if we claim not to like kings very much, it hasn't stopped us from arguing about these two American kings during these occasions of remembrance. We ask: does JFK deserve his legacy as the patron president of civil rights, or is his halo really an effect of the sympathetic electoral landslide that gave LBJ all the capital he needed to pass through the Voting Rights Act? Overseas, does he deserve to be considered the instigator of American involvement in Vietnam, or, given a full term in office, would he have changed direction and avoided the long course of affairs that bound our country to that war for the next decade? If he hadn't died, what would he have done? And even now, for a country whose polarization still has its deep roots in the war Lincoln oversaw, it seems this week that we find ourselves asking again for his wisdom, asking the question made so much more potent in our imagination by the fact that dead men can't answer it: if he were here now, this country being such as it is, what would Lincoln do? These two men are the closest thing to kings that we have, a fact that drove their contemporaries to distraction. Depending on who you ask, in their day actual Lincoln or actual Kennedy were tyrants, dictators, fascists, tearing apart the foundation of the country; these days, in death, they're just philosophical constructs, ideas, political paradigms, prisms through which to view all the plagues of the modern age, and they drive us to fascination. It's the difference between being Lincoln the man and Lincoln the idea, between being Kennedy the man and Kennedy the idea. It seems the burden of Kingship around here is to be scorned and unloved in life but in death endlessly petitioned.

But if you wanted American political history you could have stayed home for Meet the Press. So let's talk about Jesus the man and Jesus the idea. That's the tension at the heart of our text this morning, a haunting text for Christ the King Sunday, the section from Luke's Gospel in which the soldiers mock him as King of the Jews and in which it is also inscribed over his crucified body, "King of the Jews." And the only difference here is that Jesus isn't even dead yet and already everybody in the story is too stuck on Jesus the idea to pay any attention at all to Jesus the man. The Romans, of course, think he's a King, which is to day, they think the's the leader of a political movement, the leader of an organized attempt at recreating the Jewish nation-state that has been subordinate to some conquering power almost since the moment that Israel went into exile 500 years beforehand. Rome thinks he's a King - that's why they give him the sign - but Rome has no interest in a Jewish King, because what kind of empire would it be if they let their conquered foes go around having Kings. Rome likes to supply its own political leadership, thank you very much; it's the imperial excuse for why Jesus is up on that cross in the first place, because Rome has this idea of what Jesus has become: a political rabble-rouser, maybe a military organizer, certainly a figure of Jewish national and historic interest. Rome's going to kill him off just like they would kill of any other rebel running around under the guise of kingship: not because of who he is, but because of the idea of who he might be.

And lest you begin to suspect that Rome is the singular bad guy in the story, let's remember that the Jews on the scene don't act with any more faithful sense of the moment. No, they're the ones screaming, "Well, if you're really the Messiah, just take yourself down off that cross. You can just save yourself, right?" Now Jesus is every bit as much of a Messiah as he is a King. It's an old Jewish word meaning savior, and in Jewish history it's bound up with being the one who will liberate the people from bondage much as Moses had done so long ago. For hundreds of years the Jews had been waiting for and expecting the coming of this Messiah, just like the ones they used to know; it's like in their hands the word "Messiah" has become this small box and there was a time when all they wanted to do was fit Jesus inside that box and make him into the Messiah of their dreams and expectations but it just wouldn't fit. Their Messiah wouldn't have said such uncomfortable things about wealth and power. TheirMessiah would never have thrown the lenders out of the temple. Their Messiah would never have gone and gotten himself caught like that. So just like Rome isn't wrong to think of Jesus as a King, the Jews here aren't wrong to think of him as a Messiah; it's just that both groups are so plagued by the idea of who Jesus might be and nobody is paying any real attention, any close attention, any faithful attention to who he actually is.

And I know that it sounds like I'm pillorying these characters, the Jews mocking him and the Romans stringing him up, I know it sounds like I'm angry at their misperception. And maybe I am, a bit - it's hard to read about this decisive moment and not be a bit angry at the people who were there on the scene. But to be honest, mostly I just feel sorry for them. I really do, the Jews and Romans both in this scene. They are witnesses to the singular event of history; they have in their presence the son of God as he gives his life for the redemption of all things; they are standing before the cross whereupon God decisively showed his unfailing love for all creation, including them, and they can't see it for what it is. It's like they've got blinders on where the words "King" or "Messiah" have been carved out of the black; they can only see in the shape of their expectations. They can't see the love. They can't see the redemption. They're so busy measuring Jesus against their expectations of what a King or a Messiah should be that they miss the miracle of what he actually is, the miracle of what he actually does.

Which means I feel sorry for us, too, because I think we too get so caught up in the idea of Jesus that we miss the miracle of the actual Jesus. Now, our expectations might run a bit different. We might not be the like Romans, on the lookout for a political revolutionary. We might not be like the Jews, on the lookout for a national savior. We expect the Jesus contained in the pages of this book, the idea of Jesus handed down generation to generation, teased and twisted and misplaced and misconstrued. We trot out the idea of Jesus to settle arguments or justify our agendas; in short, we treat Jesus like just another dead president, a nice guy from history whose ideas might be helpful if we can figure out what to do with them. No, our expectation is that we're on the lookout for nothing at all. We're not waiting for Jesus to show up; we're expecting him not to. But the power of the Gospel is that the real Jesus isn't contained in the words of this book. The real Jesus isn't contained by the events of this story. That's the promise embodied in the criminal's prayer at the end of this text, "Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom." When you come into YOUR Kingdom - a declaration that Jesus's Kingdom is something bigger, something more vast, something more cosmic in scope than any of our expectations can contain, but even more importantly a promise that Jesus's work won't end with the end of this story. No, the real Jesus, far in excess of our ideas and our expectations, the real Jesus, dead on that cross, buried in the tomb, will rise again to keep working for his creation. The real Jesus isn't contained in the pages of this book because the real Jesus has been working alongside us long after its words were chiseled into stone. I wonder if we could stop looking for the living among the dead? I wonder if we could stop trying to tease his corpse for answers and instead simply listen for him to speak? In short, I wonder if we could stop asking "What would Jesus do?," and instead start asking "What is Jesus doing?"

I'm sure you've heard the phrase. Its acronym spread like wildfire over the past few decades in youth groups in churches all around the country, often carved on wristbands as WWJD. It never made it to my youth group but I have many friends for whom it was no small part of their adolescence, this worn reminder that in all of the contexts of growing up, in all of the temptations of growing up, they were to invoke the moral example of Jesus and do accordingly. And even though the phrase gets associated these days with a pretty evangelical strand of Christianity, its origins actually come from the progressive mainline churches of the turn-of-the-last-century, when Christians were urged to consider What Jesus Would Do as they encountered the real questions of poverty and inequality and injustice that preoccupied the early Progressive era. And certainly we could all do much worse that to hold the idea of Jesus out for ourselves as an example of how to be in this world. Surely there are worse heroes.

But there's a danger in the question, because we're not really asking Jesus. We're just asking our own projected idea of Jesus. Tim Stafford says that when we ask "What Would Jesus Do?" we just end up asking "What would I do if I were a better person?" And to be honest I can't imagine carrying that around on my wrist. In my imagination it feels like being handcuffed by the reminder that I'm not good enough, that I'm not kind enough, that I'm not wise enough, it feels like living in the shadow of who I'm supposed to be instead of being freed to live as I am by grace. But the fundamental problem is that it's too small a question. We ask "What Would Jesus Do," implying that what we mean is "What Would Jesus Do if He Were Here," but the gracious and powerful truth of the resurrection is that Jesus is here, loving us as we are. Jesus is here, working for us as we are. Jesus is here, not binding us by the wrist but rather embracing us in his arms. The real question of the Christian life is not "What Would Jesus Do" but rather "What Is Jesus Doing," and the answer is simple: Jesus is here, loving you, loving us, working through all of us for the redemption of all things.

Friends, this is the Gospel of Christ the King Sunday. Of course the day itself is a bit of a invention. A bit of a projection. It's not the anniversary of anything, it might as well be just another Sunday in ordinary time. But remember that Christ is not King just because we take a day to announce it. He's not the King of our expectations nor is he King according to our expectations. Rather he is the living, breathing God set loose upon creation, with mercy, with grace, and with love, thanks be to God.

Amen.

So I have to tell you that I am getting very excited because I love hosting Thanksgiving. Sarah and I hosted for years before I went to seminary, but, as you might expect, campus housing doesn't really lend itself much to large-scale hospitality, and my parents were living close by so there was really no excuse whatsoever for Thanksgiving at our place. But in the last year they've moved and we've moved and now we almost-sorta-kinda have enough room to host some family so we're doing it, which means that I get to plan Thanksgiving dinner and this brings me an unreasonable amount of joy. I do love having an excuse to plan a big meal - I love making the elaborate grocery lists; I love running to a dozen different stores looking for the right ingredients; I love the elaborate scheduling of oven time. And of course it all leads up to that one singular moment of presentation, and then, after we eat, then comes the best part of cooking up a Thanksgiving feast. It's my favorite moment of being the chef on Thanksgiving - sitting on the couch while everybody else cleans up.

Now, you and I both know that there are all kinds of unwritten rules about cleaning up after Thanksgiving, and the best thing about being the head chef is that I don't have to figure out what the unwritten rules are. I can just observe. Now, we don't have a large kitchen, so there are only so many people who can help at any one moment, and my hunch this year is that my father will take on the central role, the man who mans the sink and scrubs the dishes, and that Sarah and my mother will probably be the ones ferrying dirty dishes back to the sink and drying the big ones and putting them away. But we have a few other guests coming, too, and I admit to some anthropological curiosity about just how the clean-up dance will go. Will they muscle their way into the inner circle? Will they ferry things about in actual busyness? Or will they be the sort who just kind of scurry about looking busy, maybe having some important piece of stemware to grab from the living room, a task that takes a surprising amount of time before they can afford to return to the kitchen and then they can oh-so-innocently ask if there's anything they can do to help just as Dad is finishing wiping down the countertop. You know that routine, right? You might even be planning out the choreography of that routine for yourself this year. We've all done it at one point or another. Who wants to do the real work when we can just do the work around the work?

Now, as I said, the great joy of being chef is that I really don't have to be concerned about these work rules, but in this last chunk of Paul's letter to his church in Thessalonica, he is nothing if not concerned about the rules of work. "We command you to keep away from believers who are living in idleness," he says, and it seems likely, given the urgency in last week's text to address those who think that Jesus is set imminently to return, it seems likely that some of the congregation has just figured they don't really have to bother doing anything because it's about to be the rapture anyway. But Paul's not having it: "we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies," and of course there's not really a Greek word for busybody; what it literally says is the the people who "go around the work." You know, we have the people washing dishes, and then we have the people helping them wash dishes, and then we have the people who just look like they're helping wash dishes and that's where Paul draws the line. "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat," he says. Everyone "earn your own living," he says, or literally in the Greek: everyone eat your own bread. If you will pardon the pun, no more loafing around.

Now, in a country that loves work as much as our country does, in a country that values work as much as our country does, it is entirely tempting to take this verse - anyone unwilling to work should not eat - and carve it into stone on all our national monuments. Just scratch out the part on the Statue of Liberty that speaks about the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and carve in big letters "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat." But I think we have to be very careful. Paul is writing to a largely self-contained community, and even though his presenting concern is members who don't want to work it's clear that his vision is of a community where everyone participates equally. A community where everyone is given equal access to the jobs at hand, to be sure, but just as much a community where everyone is given equal access to the table. Let's be very clear: the problem Paul sees in Thessalonica, where everyone gets fed but some people aren't doing any work - that's a pretty good problem to have. How much worse would it be to not have room for everybody at the table in the first place?

And yet next Thursday, as my family and guests are jockeying over who actually has to work and who just gets to work around the work, after we will all have gorged ourselves beyond physical repair, across this state and across this country the huddled masses of 21st-century America will be getting into their cars to go turn on the lights at the Wal-Mart, at the K-Mart, at Target and Best Buy. It used to be that Black Friday started on Friday morning. And then it was Friday midnight. And now it's starting right after dinner. And I'm going to take it on faith that nobody really wants to work at Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving night. Nobody working at Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving night wouldn't rather be sitting around the Thanksgiving table, sharing equally in the harvest. And yet we have no room for that dream in the current American dreamscape. Instead, those lucky among us will sit at our table and say our prayers of thanks - Dear God, Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to buy high-definition televisions at below-market prices - while across town, turning on the lights at the Best Buy, those whom we won't feed do the work we won't do to make possible dreams we don't really have. So you tell me who on that night is unwilling to work - and who among us deserves to eat.

That's the problem in this text - anyone unwilling to work should not eat - because at first it feels like Paul's given us a hook to go around snaring all the ne'er-do-wells, it feels like Paul's given us license to go around preaching "Gotcha" religion and judging anyone whose habits don't meet our expectations; but if we read with integrity, and if we confess ourselves with honesty, the only thing on the hook here is us. And not even just you and me as individuals, but the big "Us." If Paul's vision is really of some properly egalitarian community, of a table where everybody gets to work and everybody gets to eat, then the problem in this text isn't just you and I treating our neighbor in unequal measure but rather the systemic inequality that has become the lifeblood of the world in which we live. We could have so easily carved this verse into stone at the foot of the Statue of Liberty but if Paul showed up on the boat and read that verse and saw this country as it is and saw the great and growing gulf between those who sit at the table and those who cannot but make it happen anyway, I cannot imagine that he would do anything but weep.

Which means that, much as we are all convicted by this verse, and much as I would love it to therefore light a fire underneath each of us, the reality is that there is only so much any of us can do to right such a large ship gone so terribly awry. Case in point: a few years back the Panera restaurant chain launched a pilot program whereby several of its St. Louis stores became "pay-what-you-will" stores. That is, there was a particular meal combination that you could order at Panera, and the meal had a suggested donation price to go with it, but you could pay whatever you wanted. Now, Panera got some amazing press for doing this. Of course, they're giving away food for free, which doesn't sound a lot like "anyone unwilling to work should not eat," but if we're buying into Paul's larger vision then Panera was trying to say something righteous about mutual responsibility and mutual entanglement. The whole model was that customers who paid above the suggested amount would offset the losses from those who couldn't afford it. The problem was that, by and large, nobody showed up. Oh, they served something like 15,000 meals, which isn't nothing, but it's a drop in the bucket next to the traffic those locations did on a regular basis. And it's not like St. Louis didn't have need. The problem was that the city was already so economically divided that there simply weren't any Panera locations next to any of the neighborhoods where the hungriest people were living. You know how that goes: one part of town gets the Panera and the Starbucks, and the other part gets the McDonald's and the Popeye's, and the distance between them only gets longer. So think about that: Panera is a multi-million-dollar business and all it wants to do is to put its least-profitable foot forward and fling open its doors and give away its product and it can't even make a dent because the problem is too big.

So friends, if the problem is that big, the last thing we need is another rule about who gets to eat and who doesn't get to eat. What we need is a table big enough for everybody. What we need is the promise of a meal where anybody can cook and anybody can clean up and everybody gets to eat. What we need is the vision of Isaiah, in our other text from this morning, the vision of the new heaven and new earth where God's people do not labor in vain, where we plant vineyards with fruit enough for everyone, where we build houses with with room enough for everyone, where the wolf and the lamb feed together and even the lion feasts simply on the straw. What we need at this table is not just to know who does the work and who doesn't do the work; what we need is grace.

And don't think Paul doesn't know it. Say what you will about the man, he knows his scripture, and dollars to donuts he's got this exact passage from Isaiah in his mind as he's writing to the Thessalonians. He knows the truth of the Gospel: that God has promised for us a feast large enough for everybody, that we wait on that day when we will sit alongside our brothers and sisters of every time and place and no hunger shall go unfed and no thirst shall go unquenched and nobody will be across town opening up the Wal-Mart because everybody will be at the table. That's called grace. That's the Gospel, and Paul knows it. But he also knows that the Gospel is a double-edged sword, and even while it's painting the picture of what God will do in a day yet to come it's also reminding us of who God calls us to be on this day. Maybe the best table we can set still isn't really big enough for everybody. But while we wait on God's table, the least we can do is work on ours. That's why I'm so thankful for groups like Amherst Cares. That's why I'm so thankful for events like the 2-cents-a-meal offering that this Presbytery operates. That's why I'm so thankful for this congregation's historical commitment to combating hunger throughout Amherst county: because it lives out the conviction that even if our table can never be big enough, there's always room for one more.

Now, I told you earlier that my favorite moment as the chef on Thanksgiving is sitting on the couch while everybody else cleans up. What Paul would say to convict me I leave to your imagination. Suffice to say that it's certainly not the most important moment. Nor on Thanksgiving is the most important part when we first carve the turkey or when the first guest goes back for seconds or when we all fall asleep in front of the TV drugged out on tryptophan. No, the most important moment on Thanksgiving is when we say grace. Now, if your house is anything like mine, saying grace on Thanksgiving involves a whole inventory of things we're thankful for. It will be a laundry list of blessings and Lord knows we could do a lot worse in our prayers than simply listing the things we're thankful for. You can go a long way in the Christian life on gratitude.

But a prayer of thanksgiving isn't quite the same thing as saying grace. Saying grace isn't just saying what we love about what we have; saying grace is speaking the vision of God both in its promise and in its conviction. So say grace: the Lord is about to create new heavens and a new earth! Say grace: no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress! Say grace: like the days of a tree shall the days of God's people be, and they shall long enjoy the work of their hands. When you sit down at the table this year, when the work of cooking is done and the work of cleaning has just begun, before you begin, say grace. Say grace, because grace is the promise of that feast God has prepared for all of God's people. Say grace, because grace is the vision of what might be and so of the work God yet calls us to do. Say grace, because grace is the question that asks whether we are really doing all the work we can for God's kingdom, or whether we're just loafing around.

Amen.

No one will be as surprised as me that today's sermon isn't about money. Today is, after all, stewardship Sunday; it's the Sunday in the life of our congregation when we first receive financial pledges for the next fiscal year, as we will today during the regular time of offering. It's not an event on the liturgical calendar, but in most churches it might as well be, and of all Sundays it's the one where you come to church most expecting to talk about money, and very much to my own surprise I'm not going to, partially because I'm confident you've heard that sermon before; partially because I'm committed to speaking and preaching about money throughout the calendar of our time together and not just one this one particular day; but, largely because I recognize that stewardship isn't just about why we give our money. It's also about where we give our money.

Now, it used to be the case that the church was the sole provider of almost every kind of social or community service, schools, orphanages, welfare assistance, etc., all under the umbrella of the church, which meant that giving to the church was kind of a one-stop-shop for making charitable contributions. But as you know, these days churches compete for charitable donations alongside all kinds of worthy non-profits. Which means that the financial health of any one congregation doesn't just compete against our natural tendencies to hold on to what's ours; it competes even against our charitable impulses; it competes against all the other organizations that vie for our gifts. The enemy of stewardship Sunday isn't just greed, which is easily demonized; sadly, it's also Habitat for Humanity and the Red Cross and your Alumni Association and the list goes on. So it seems to me this morning that, as we prepare to put our pledge cards in the offering plate, it seems to me that we ought to be able to articulate not simply why we give, but why we give here. I want you to give not simply out of theological obligation but also out of excitement for what's happening here. Which means it's not a question about money. It's a question about who we are as a congregation, about who we are and where we're going.

Who we are and where we're going. It's a surprisingly Biblical question. Last week we got to know the congregation of early Christians in Thessalonica. It's a church for which Paul exhibits great tenderness and great affection. But as we heard today in this central chunk of a rather short letter, even for Paul's most favorite congregation it is not always easy to remember who they are and where they're going. In Paul's absence, the congregation has been inundated by some bad preaching and some less-than-helpful theology. Which means that the pastoral response in this letter is not only to repair some of the theological harm but also urge the congregation to remember their roots. That's how our text today closes:* "So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us."* Hold fast to the traditions. The world is changing. There are all kinds of preachers of dubious theological merit. Paul has set his church afloat into a sea of uncertainty in a storm of risk and political danger and to help moor them, to help them know who they are and where they're going he has this imperative: hold fast to the traditions.

Now, in our world, which is also changing very quickly - you may have noticed - I think tradition gets a bad rap. Contrary to popular belief, it is not simply the process of doing the same thing over and over again. I should know, because I am hardly a creature of habit. For me there is nothing at stake in having the same morning routine day in and day out; I'm happy to let it come as it comes, but I do love a tradition, because tradition isn't just about what we do day in and day out but how we are connected to the larger story of who we are, where we're going, and where we've come from. Most of you know that my wife and I are living right now in Lovingston, which, if we're being honest, is going through a rough patch. We don't see many folks on the street. It very often feels like a town that used to be here. In fact we've lived there for less than a year and in that time at least three local businesses have closed their doors permanently, and it's not like we had any to spare. But then on Halloween, from all over Nelson county, families of all shapes and sizes descended on Front Street in all manner of costume, and all of a sudden all the doors were open and the town was alive, hundreds of people flowing through the streets, and in that moment we realized how much more there was to learn about the place we were living. Tradition does that: it fills the occasionally empty streets of a changing world with all of the stories and names and characters and colors and shapes of everything that's gone before. We know how that works. We sit in the pews where our parents sat. We sing the hymns our grandmothers sang. We pray the prayers our great-grandfathers prayed, and so on, and so back into the past, tradition holds us fast to some persistent vision of who we are.

But that's not the whole story on tradition. A brief look at our Gospel reading from this morning would give us an entirely different perspective. The Sadducees have heard Jesus talk a lot about tradition and they've heard him talk a lot about change and they figure he can't have it both ways so they try and trap him with this convoluted question about marriage. We can skip the details. Suffice to say that, in some ways, Jesus gets off on a technicality, but it's a bit more bruising that the Sadducees realize. He's arguing that in God's kingdom all those traditions won't really apply, that our Lord "... is God not of the dead, but of the living." Which is to say that, for Jesus, tradition is fine for telling you where you've come from but it can't do much to tell you who you are now or where you're going, because God is not of the dead but of the living. So we sit in the pews where our parents sat and we sing the hymns or grandmothers sang and we pray the prayers that our great-grandfathers prayed but still, God is here with the living. The resurrected Christ is here with the living. The power of the Holy Spirit that rebuilds and reforms and rejuvenates and reimagines us is here, with the living, always doing something new. So if we are engaged in telling the story of who we are, of setting and stewarding the vision of who we might yet be, it means we are engaged in not just holding fast to the traditions that brought us here but opening ourselves to the new things that God is doing in this place, here with the living.

We have to hold fast. That's who we are. But we also have to let go. That's where we're going. We have to hold fast, and we have to let go, and it's exactly as complicated as it sounds.

What does that look like? On my smartphone I have an application called "Daily Prayer." It's actually produced by the Presbyterian Church - by some programmer that the denomination has paid for the task. It's a very simple application: it contains the readings and scripture for morning and evening prayer services throughout the lectionary cycle. Those readings and prayers were originally compiled for our printed Book of Worship, so it's not like the programmer had to write any prayers from scratch. All the software does is take these words and put them my pocket in a simple, easy-to-use kind of way. But since the content itself is so very old, you might imagine my surprise when, a few weeks after I first installed this application, I got a message telling me that it was time for an updated version. Now, this is just kind of the life of owning a smartphone -- the software changes all the time, and I am constantly in the process of installing updates. But that's to be expected for programs that do all kinds of new and innovative things. This one is just a prayer book, and the words haven't changed in generations, and yet every six weeks or so here I am with a little reminder to install new version, which means that in our denominational budget somewhere is a line item for active development on this one application that really seems like it shouldn't have to change. And to be fair, it's not like they're making huge changes. It's not like they've put all these fancy bells and whistles in it; it's not like it's integrated with Facebook or uses GPS data or some other fancy new trick. It's just that the technology changes so quickly, and the code has to change if it wants to stay relevant. The screen sizes change. The software rules change. It's just the way the industry goes, and our programmer is doing his best (or her best) to keep up, with one hand holding fast to those old words and that old Word of God, and with the other constantly letting go of the code and that makes it happen.

Now, we have an alternative. Whoever is in charge of the existence of the Daily Prayer app has an alternative. They could simply say: look, this thing works well enough. Maybe a bug here or there, but for the most part, it works. We've pretty much got the program we want. The words aren't going to change. The prayers aren't going to change. It works on all the phones that you can buy right now and that's good enough for us; we've got to quit. We can't keep paying this one guy to make updates to something that really shouldn't have to change. In software development, this happens all the time: companies decide, for whatever reason, that the code has accomplished all of its intended goals, that it's about as good as it's ever going to get, that they're not going to work on it anymore. And it goes into what we call Maintenance Mode. Maintenance Mode means that we think the program is good enough as it is. Maintenance Mode means we're going to do what we can to preserve the code as written, but we're not changing anything; we're not investing anything. It just has to live or die on its own. As you might imagine, Maintenance mode is easy. You don't have to make anything anymore; your overhead disappears; you can just sell it for pure profit. And maintenance mode is cheap, because you can sell your program without having to pay your programmers. But the problem with Maintenance mode, of course, is that technology changes underneath our feet. But most programs that go into Maintenance Mode just fade into obscurity. Even if you don't program all the bells and whistles, just staying relevant takes investment. Just staying relevant takes ongoing imagination. Just staying relevant takes holding fast and letting go.

And now it's Stewardship Sunday, and you get to decide whether this congregation is in active development or Maintenance Mode. You can say: look, this thing works well enough. Maybe a bug here or there, but for the most part, it works. We've pretty much got the program we want. We've got the traditions that hold us fast. And we will do more or less the things that got us here, and we will putter along. It's relatively easy. It's relatively cheap. But remember that most programs that go into Maintenance Mode just fade into obscurity. The walls won't instantly cave in. The roof won't immediately collapse. The crowd won't suddenly vanish. But the hard truth is that the world is changing underneath our feet, and if we put this church in maintenance mode - or, one might argue, if we leave this church in maintenance mode - we will, nonetheless, slowly, gradually, inevitably, fade away. We will become the church that used to be here.

So you get to decide, but I, for one, choose active development. And this congregation has, time and again in recent history, chosen active development. You've chosen the hard path of investment and change and risk. You put money into the revitalization of this sanctuary, in order to realize a vision of having a place of worship and welcome for anybody that God sends through our doors. You took the financial risk of calling a full-time pastor, because of a vision of this congregation wherein its life does not stop when the Sunday service ends but continues throughout the week. And this year your session has time and again chosen active development. We've invested to create the parlor space in the education building because of a vision wherein this church might be a place of comfort and fellowship for people in every season of life. We've done the small and less glamorous work to ensure that the life of our church preschool continues to thrive in accordance with the vision of community service and education long ago articulated by this congregation. And in the year to come, it is very much my hope that we continue to be a congregation in active development. The proposed 2014 budget includes a substantial percentage increase to this church's commitment to community mission and outreach, not just because of a vision of who we are but of what Amherst is, a vision of how this congregation might lift up the community around it. We are very much holding fast to the core of who we are: to the words of Scripture and the words of prayer that have borne us this far. But we are also letting go, taking a leap of faith, carried here only by the Word made flesh, by the resurrected Messiah, by the God of the living who works in our midst for peace and justice and reconciliation and we are just trying to keep up.

Active development is hard work. It takes sweat. It takes energy. It takes imagination. And it takes stewardship. You know it and I know it: none of this happens without you, not without your time, not without your talent, and not without without your financial support. And if you can give, if you can give out of your imagination and not just out of the money left at the end of the month, if you can give to a vision and not just to a budget, then before you know it we will not just be trying to keep up with the living God. We will be riding something more powerful than we have ever known.

Hold fast.

Let go.

Amen.

Good morning again. It is, in fact, good to be here. Many of you know that I was gone last Sunday as part of a week of continuing education, most of which was spent on retreat with a group other new Presbyterian pastors from around the mid-Atlantic, part of a denominational program called the Company of New Pastors. For a good chunk of this week I sat in conversation with a fairly intimate group of friends and colleagues and talked about the challenges and opportunities and hopes and joys of ministry, and the more I listened, and the more I talked, the more joyful and thankful I became for having been called here into the life of this particular congregation. I am so very thankful to be here, and it occurred to me that you all ought to know that, and if you hadn't heard it recently, that you all ought to be reminded. I am thankful for the chance to go away and be in study and be in contemplation and be in fellowship with the company of my peers, but I am even more thankful for the chance to return home, here.

And lest you think that it's not a pastor's job to butter up his or her congregation like that, I present to you Paul's second letter to the church in Thessalonica, the source of our texts for this morning and for the next few weeks. Like with most of Paul's letters, this letter is written to a church that Paul himself founded and a church that Paul himself knew. But unlike many of Paul's more famous letters, unlike his rebuke of the infighting amongst the church at Corinth or unlike the vitriol he directs towards the leaders of the Galatians congregations, the letters to the Thessalonian church are just overflowing with love and tenderness. These churches are his children, of course, but some days it feels like one of them's in juvie and one of them's a dropout and one of them's moved away and won't return his calls and then here's lovely, sweet, doting, tender, Thessalonica. "We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing." Sweet Thessalonica, the apple of her father's eye.

But easy, loving words don't make for an easy, loving season at the First Presbyterian Church of Thessalonica. Of course reading Paul's letters is often a bit like listening only to one side of a phone call, and it does require a bit of imaginative filling in of the blanks when we hear the next verse, when Paul writes that he "boast[s] of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring." It's hard to know exactly what the persecutions and afflictions are, but we can make some educated guesses. It's not easy to be a Christian in the first century in the eastern half of the Mediterranean. It meant proclaiming a Jewish Messiah who had rejected or reinterpreted most of the Jewish law. It meant proclaiming the Lordship of a simple carpenter even above and beyond the reach of Roman imperial power. These are not comfortable proclamations, and they were not always met with comfortable responses. Members of the Thessalonian church were likely ostracized, mocked, imprisoned, even killed for their beliefs, despite, according to Paul's boast, despite having done everything right: their faith is growing, they love one another, I mean, what else can you ask for in a congregation, and yet the results speak for themselves. Persecution. Affliction. One imagines them looking at their brothers and sisters and thinking Come On! In Corinth they can't even break bread together without coming to blows and we're the ones getting persecuted? Or look at the Galatians! They can't get the first thing right and their church is growing like wildfire. Say what you will about the theology, at least they get results! Of course we can't actually hear the other side of the conversation, but if we could, I think it would sound something like this. Paul. Dad. You know we're doing everything right, or at least the best we can. You said it yourself. But it keeps coming out wrong. What now?

It could be the cry of so many churches that we know and love. God, you know we're doing everything right - or, at least, we're doing the best we can. We're faithful. We love one another. But it keeps coming out wrong. It's the cry of so many churches: I mean, the pews are getting a bit less crowded. The numbers are getting a little too tight for comfort. None of us are getting any younger, and it feels like the world has passed us by. Depending on who you ask, Christendom is dead or the church is dying or the whole thing's been done for a while and we just don't know it yet. And yet we did the best we could. It is me, or is that cold comfort? We did the best we could. We were faithful. We loved one another. Is it me, or is that really the most galling part, really. I mean, how wonderful would it be if in fact we had a obvious list of big church sins, an obvious list of things we had done wrong that had turned history against us or turned people against us or turned God against us. How wonderful would it be if we instead were the First Church of Corinth or Galatia Presbyterian and, sure, we'd've had some problems in the past, but nothing we can't work on, nothing we can't get better at, nothing we can't get our minds around. When we talk about fixing the church these days it almost sounds like we all go to the First Church of Corinth or Galatia Presbyterian, where the problems are obvious, the solutions practical, and the results guaranteed. Here's what we're reading at the First Church of Corinth: How to Build Youth Ministry that Lasts. How to Grow a High-Impact Church. How to be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples. All of them real books doing very well on Amazon. And of course we want to build lasting youth ministry and high-impact discipleship. But what if being church is more complicated than a how-to manual? What if being church is more difficult than a flowchart and an instructional video? What if instead of sitting in the pews of Galatia Pres, where they have obvious problems with cheap solutions and guaranteed results we are sitting here this morning in the First Presbyterian Church of Thessalonica, where we've done the best we could, faithfully, with love, and still, it keeps coming up short? What now?

For many years of my life this season of the year has been apple pie season. Now, I do love to eat good apple pie, but that's not the point of apple pie season. The point is that this is the season of the year when, for about a decade now, I have tried again and again and again to bake an apple pie like the apple pie in my dreams. I began somewhere in the "American Fruit Desserts" section of The Joy of Cooking. I taught myself to make a crust: first, in the traditional way, cutting cold butter into the dough by hand, and then, later, using frozen butter and the food processor to much the same effect. But over ten years I've rolled, chilled, cut, shaped, formed, repaired, rejected, rehabilitated, and thrown out more pie dough than the casual kitchen chef has any business having produced in the first place. I've come home with apples of almost every variety. Some days I cook them first. Some days I put them in raw. Some days I left them sit in the sugar and the lemon just to soften up a bit. Some days I mix them with just the butter and the sugar, some days with the allspice, or the cinnamon, or the ginger. I've set the oven rack on the bottom. I've set the oven rack on the top. I've preheated at 350, 425, 500, and most of the temperatures in-between. I've coated, sprayed, and brushed that crust with every combination of oil, sugar, butter, egg, and spice you can name. And I would love to tell you. You have no idea how much I would love to tell you that in ten years of systematic exploration of the question of how to make the apple pie of my dreams, that I have narrowed it down to a science. That after all of this there is some preferred method for getting to that vision that I hold somewhere in-between my heart and my stomach. But the truth is that I haven't got a clue how to make that pie, because every time I do it, because every time I do it even the same way, every time it comes out totally different.

The apples set, or, more often, they don't. The juice runs, or it doesn't. The crust is flaky, or it's not. The apples bake through, or they don't. It looks like a pie, or it doesn't. And they're all good. (I mean, most of them are good.) Some of them are very good. But there's no consistency. Just because I made a good pie last week doesn't mean a thing about the week to come. It's like there's no correlation between all the stuff that I do before that pie goes in the oven and what actually comes out. It's like, you put a bit of ginger in - no big deal - and so the crust explodes. Or you put a little egg white on top and the apples don't set. These are things that should have no scientific relationship to one another but the results speak for themselves, except that in this case what the results are saying is totally unintelligible. At this point I am willing to believe that, after I put a pie in the oven and shut the door, that the magic goblins who live in my walls open up the back of the oven and swap my pie with a random selection from their inventory of unhappy, imperfect pies just to play tricks on me. And the most spiteful consequence of it is not that we are spending our autumns eating imperfect pies. The most spiteful consequence is that I have done this thing over and over, faithfully, and with love, and I am losing my confidence in the promise of results.

Or maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the promise of results just gets us in trouble. Maybe the gift of spending a sunday at the First Presbyterian Church of Thessalonica is that we get to realize with some humility that we are not the only chefs in the kitchen. It's the loving reminder Paul gives even to his most favorite child, here at the end of our text: we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith. To fulfill by God's power every work of faith. Which is to say, as Paul says, that we are called to live by faith, but that faith alone is no guarantee of results. According to Paul's vision, in which the history of human lives and the history of the church are always more about God's work than ours, more about God's actions than ours, the only guarantee of results in this world is the power of God itself. The Thessalonians are asking "how do we build the church of our dreams and expectations?," and Paul has to remind them that they're asking the wrong question. There are no how-to guides for Christian discipleship, because we're not called as servants of the results. We're not called to be customers of a market-savvy, metrics-driven, results-based package of Christian witness in which we might so easily forget who it is that actually gets anything done around here. We're not called to ask how we should build a high-impact church or how we should build youth ministry that lasts without first asking what the free-roaming, free-ranging, free-thinking power of God is doing in this place. No, friends, we are called as servants of the living God, and so we serve faithfully. We serve with love. We roll out the dough the best we can. We fill it with the best fruit we can find. We crimp the edges with as delicate a touch as we can muster. We lay it in the oven with gentle care. We do it over and over and over, because persistence is the thing, and it is only the power of God that will fulfill our every good resolve and work of faith.

Next Sunday here in this congregation is out stewardship dedication Sunday. In just a minute Janice Augustine will say a bit more about how this season works and what you should expect. But before she comes up here, I want to lay a bit of a foundation. It is tempting to look at a church budget, or to think about giving to a church, as an act of getting results. In fact this is why everybody loves a special offering: the church needs new carpet, so we take up a collection, or the church needs new signage, so we take up a collection, and there, lo and behold, we have new carpet, or we have new signage, and it was as easy as that. Nobody likes to give money without seeing the results. But this life of Christian stewardship isn't really about results. Not really. Sure, of course, we all have in our heads, myself included, a vision of the church of our dreams, and we'd love nothing more than to open our checkbook in the promise of the realization of that dream. We'd love nothing more than to walk up to the counter and ask the salesman, "How much for that amazing, vibrant church in the window?" and walk out proud owners of the church of our dreams. But we don't own this church. We don't even own the vision. God is in this mix, taking our best ingredients, taking our worst ingredients, taking whatever we give and transforming and reforming and reshaping and rebuilding and fulfilling our every work of faith into something larger than we can imagine. If that sound scary, it should, because we don't always know what we're going to get. But if that sounds hopeful, it should, because we are in the hands of the living God, the hands of one who has been faithful unto us, the hands of one who has loved us, from the foundations of the earth.

A friend of mine was preaching regularly as a seminary intern at a small church. And every one of his preaching Sundays he would show up and say to the pastor there, "Well, I'm not sure about this one," or "I'm not sure this one's going to work" or "I think the last one was better" or "Next month I'll make sure it's a good one, but apparently not today." But the pastor would just ask, "Who's to say whether it's good? Is it faithful?" Is it faithful? She knew, as Paul knew, that all we can do is roll the crust the best we can. All we can do is set the fruit the best we can. All we can do is be faithful. So this week, as you think on your stewardship of this congregation and God's vision in this place, as you think of all the years that have gone before and all the dreams we have yet before us, as you think on what it means for you to offer of yourselves and your resources to the realization of that dream, as you work your way towards a number and write it on that card, you may wonder whether it is enough. You may wonder whether it will work, or whether it will suffice, or whether you can do more next year or whether last year was better or whether it really will be good enough. But remember this: we know too little of what God will do with our gifts to lead our lives based on the results. The question of Christian life is never "is it good enough?" or "will it work?" The question is only this: is it faithful?

Is it faithful?

Is it faithful?

So, the good news of the week is that we once again have a normally operational federal government. For about the first two weeks of October, as you probably know, the whole thing shut down, the result of conversations between political parties having reached something of an impasse, and I suppose we ought to celebrate the good news of having it back, regardless of your feelings about the political fine print of the compromise that brought it back from the dead. I suppose some sign of compromise or agreement in our political leadership ought to be some small comfort. But I admit that for myself it feels pretty hollow. After all of the hand-wringing over the original debt ceiling debate of 2011, the supposed armageddon of going over the fiscal cliff and the hullabaloo about the fiscal sequester, honestly, while reaching some bare deal this week seems like it should feel like progress, instead it simply feels like intermission before we come back in three months or six months or nine months and do it all again. It feels like we are locked into a cycle of political brinksmanship, each time wagering with more of our country's well-being, each time filling our days with hand-wringing about who's won this round while in reality everyone keeps losing. And frankly, having been locked in this cycle for several years now, and with no seismic changes on the horizon, it's hard to think of why I should hope for anything different three, six, or nine months down the road.

This sermon is about that hope: the hope for something different than the cycle of political destruction we have seen time and time again, the hope for something different than gridlock and apathy and corruption, the hope for something different than this country on this planet in this moment of its history. Had I thought of it in time I would have, in a nod to Amherst County's Big Read of Emily Dickinson this season, I would have titled this sermon along her lines: hope, she says, is "the thing with feathers," and so often it seems to stop in our hearts only for a moment before some cycle repeats itself again and again hope goes its birdlike way. I want to talk about hope; after all, this is a church, and perhaps this is that moment in our week when something like hope flutters through our periphery; perhaps here in worship, perhaps here in this space is when we get a glimpse of hope and we try to package it up and write it down and take it with us back out into that world of gridlock and apathy and corruption and somewhere during the week it flutters off and we come back again. So perhaps this morning I am here encourage you, once again, in that most delicate hope.

Or perhaps hope itself is the problem. Margaret Atwood, in one of her dystopian novels, observes that "as a species, we're doomed by hope," a quote I was reminded of this week in the hands of a writer named Chris Hedges, whom I have admired for many years. I don't agree with everything he says, but he invariably says it with wisdom, and this week upon the reopening of the federal government he wrote of this moment in what he would call the decline of the American empire that:

There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion ... They naively trust it will all work out. Absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, ... self-help gurus ... and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

For Hedges, delicate or not, hope is the drug that keeps us locked into cycles that repeat time after time; I hope I paraphrase him correctly to say that if only we could rid ourselves of hope once and for all, then, surely then, then finally we could stop waiting for the world to change and start doing it ourselves. So far from encouraging you in your hope, perhaps I should encourage you to let it go, such that we with unencumbered vision might finally see the world as it is.

Of course, despite his anxiety with religious belief systems, I think Chris Hedges and Jeremiah have quite a bit in common. Jeremiah, too, knows more than a bit about the decline and fall of empire. For years prior to the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians, and prior to the exile of the Jewish people into Babylon, Jeremiah had been speaking to his countrymen with words not so different than the ones we have from his more contemporary counterpart. Jeremiah has said time and time again that the Lord would come to destroy Jerusalem because of its sins but the people have said, "No, our hope is in the Lord, our hope is of the Lord, we wait on the Lord!" But of course we know what happens. The people doom themselves with hope. Babylon comes. Jerusalem falls. The temple is destroyed. The people go into exile. The prophetic vision of destruction and disaster that Jeremiah had been preaching for the better part of his life comes true true in ways more devastating than even he predicted. Everything is lost, especially hope, and then in the midst of ruin God speaks to Jeremiah with words quite different than any he has heard from the Lord before and I am sure quite different than anything he ever expected to hear: The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel ... It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors ... a covenant that they broke ... But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Just when Israel has given up hope, God steps in. When Israel's hope fails, when Israel ceases to be able to imagine anything but exile and desolation, just then, God's hope shows up.

Now, we have to be careful to recognize what God's hope in this prophecy does and does not do. Recognize that it does not bring deliverance. God doesn't strike down the Babylonian army, nor does God rebuild the temple. Israel had spent so many generations learning how to hope in God and expect God's deliverance but God's hope doesn't quite work that way. It doesn't bring change to the reality of the situation. It just brings the idea of something new, the dream of something different. And then, in some of the most poetic language in scripture, God takes this hope, this new covenant, this new relationship between God and God's people, God takes this hope and writes it on their hearts. The covenant of old had been carved out of stone on the Sinai mountaintop. That's the only framework for the act of writing that Biblical Hebrew has; writing is carving; and now this new covenant will be carved into the hearts of God's people. It does not end the exile. It does not restore the kingdom. It does not change the world. But it changes them. It takes God's vision for the world, first carved into the rock at Sinai, it takes God's vision for the world and writes it on the hearts of God's people, where it cannot be sullied, where it cannot be diminished, where it cannot be lost.

This is a vision of hope quite diametrically opposed to the one with which we began this morning. This hope is not a thing with feathers; it is not light and delicate to behold; it does not flutter away at a moment's glance. No, this is the hope hard-wired into the very fabric of the human experience, the hope that we can't rid ourselves of no matter how hard we try. It's a tenacious little bugger. I think every sports fan in the room knows something about this kind of hope. For myself, as a baseball fan, and more so as an Atlanta Braves fan, this is the time of year when I like to pretend that baseball is over. There are still some other teams playing, but I don't like to talk about them. And frankly, because the Braves have been such a failure in the playoffs for so many years, I have developed a rather thick skin when it comes to setting my expectations: just because they make the playoffs, as they did this year, does not set my hopes aflutter. I expect disappointment, partially in the hopes of being less disappointed when the time comes. But the thing is, no matter how low my expectations, there's this hope that I can't quite extinguish. It's the gift and the curse of the game, that even to the last strike, even down a couple of games in the series, even when every rational instinct and logical conclusion tells me to just give up and turn the television off and go to bed and save myself some sleep and save myself some sanity, there's something underneath that instinct, written on the fabric of my soul. It's a tenacious little bugger. It's in it to the last pitch.

And of course hope doesn't change the reality of the outcome. It doesn't bring deliverance. But it changes us. If you want to see what I mean, don't look at playoff baseball. Instead, find a game in late September between two teams who've been out of the race for weeks. There is something undeniably magical about going to a baseball game where neither team has hope; where it absolutely doesn't matter who wins. You can sit back with a beer and a hot dog, you can relax and feel the sun and the wind on your face, you can have a nice chat with your neighbor, maybe make a few new friends. If you miss a pitch, who cares? If you miss a hit, who cares? If you miss half the game, who cares? The stakes are so very low. But if you put a little hope in. If the game matters. If all of a sudden you can see what might be and what might be is good and beautiful and means something, if you put a little hope in, it changes everything. Now, the crowd is off their seats. Now, their gaze is fixed. Now, every moment matters. Now, the crowd is in the game. Now, the crowd matters, because they have hope, Hope, this hope written on our hearts, this hope that God has mixed into the batter of who we are: it is not the thing that dooms us. It is the only thing that makes us care, so if there is hope for us, it is because of God's hope carved in us.

So we now have a joint House and Senate conference committee that will produce a budget outline by December 13. By January 15, both houses will either vote on a finalized budget or at least vote through another continuing resolution lest the government again outstrip its funding. And then, by February 6, they will both again vote either to raise or reconsider the debt ceiling, such that the full faith and credit of the country goes without further blemish. At least, that's what will happen in what Matt Yglesias calls "Fantasy America: nice, clean, easy, and clearly not going to happen." There reality will be somewhat less idyllic. The reality will be altogether familiar. After all, the upside of being locked into a cycle of gridlock and apathy and corruption is that at least we know what to expect. And yet the danger of being locked into a cycle of gridlock and apathy and corruption is that we know exactly what to expect. After years of living out our own most cynical expectations, how could we possibly imagine anything else, without hope? How could we possibly dream of anything else, without hope? How could we possibly get out of our seats and into the game and work to create anything else, without hope? And yet it is that tenacious hope that persists, that tenacious hope that endures, that tenacious hope that is not diminished by the world as it is but imagines with God's eyes the world as it might yet be.

So I will not encourage you to have hope, because the truth of this Gospel is that we have hope, like it or not, written in our hearts. I will not encourage you to let it go, because it's hard-wired into who we are, because we can't let it go, because hope is God not letting go of us. The question is not whether to have hope, but what to do with the hope we have. After all, I think Hedges is right to be skeptical about us. Humanity has a poor track record. We love cycles we can't get out of; we hurt ourselves over and over; we hurt the ones we love over and over; we barely notice the world around us and even when we do we barely care. If hope were ours to keep and ours to nourish we would have left it for dead generations ago. Fortunately God has put it somewhere where we cannot let it go. Underneath eyes that don't want to see and lips that don't want to speak out and hands that don't want to work, underneath all the very broken humanness of the world, somewhere in the very center of our being, is God's vision for creation, written on our hearts. It is the one thing that can make us see. It is the one thing that can make us care. It is the one thing that can make us speak out as witnesses to a vision greater than our own. So thank God for that vision! Thank God for that imagination! Thank God for that hope! Thank God we have it written on our hearts.

The inside of my car is always a pretty messy place. You may know that already. You may have noticed. They say a messy desk is the sign of a creative mind. I hope the same goes for my car. Anyway, with such a mess in mind, I want you to imagine what it must have been like to spend two months in the car with me at one stretch. Just after college, that's what my best friend and I did, across the highways and lonely country roads of America. Our project was to go to a game at every Major League Baseball stadium -- a goal which we accomplished, and I'm glad to talk about it, but this isn't the time. This is the moment to describe to you what it is like to effectively live in one car for two months. Now, I don't want for a minute to compare our life in a car with the plight of real people who are forced to live in their cars for reasons of poverty and warmth. Ours was a choice. But even as a choice, because we were just out of school and because we didn't have jobs or lives set up for us somewhere else, because this wasn't a break from the norm but rather the in-between-time before we both set out to figure out what normal was going to mean, the truth is that we didn't really have homes. We had stuff in storage in a few different locations, but we didn't have leases in our names or deeds in our names. We just had this car, a 2001 Honda Accord, and for fifty days in the summer of 2002, that car was our home, and we filled it with garbage.

Yes, it was partly personality and disposition -- we were never going to keep that car clean, it's just not a skill set either one of us was born with -- but also in our defense I don't think you can make your home in a car for very long without trashing the place. There's no built-in garbage can. There's no built-in recycling. It's meant to be a temporary spot, a place you hang out while you're going from one thing to the other. And while in some ways we settled in -- a cigarette-lighter-to-AC-adapter, hooked to a laptop, hooked to a cell phone long before there were smartphones, gave us the first mobile internet either of us had ever seen. But mostly we treated that vehicle like the temporary home it seemed to be, with every empty Fritos bag and soft drink bottle, every cheap plastic novelty helmet from some forgotten stadium, every scorecard or tourist brochure or parking pass, all of them heaped in a pile no one in right possession of their faculties would ever want to catalog. I remember more than once simply pulling the car up to a dumpster and doing a purge. I remember it never entirely helping. How do you make yourself at home without the basic comforts of home at your disposal? How do you settle in when you're just passing through?

Last week we read from the prophet Jeremiah as he grieved the coming exile of the citizens of Jerusalem at the hands of the invading Babylonian army. This week, we jump ahead, and we find the newly-exiled Israelites in Babylon having no interest whatsoever in settling in, no interest in unpacking their boxes, no interest in even keeping the place tidy, because, and you can hear the chorus in every word of this scripture, because they say Babylon is not our home. We didn't ask to be here; this isn't the place God promised for us; and, you know, more to the point, we're not going to be here for very long. Why unpack? Besides, Real Israel is still happening, back in Jerusalem; there's still a remnant of people there, left behind after the invasion, left behind after the city fell and the temple was destroyed. That's where God is, in that city, with those people, and so we're going to fight our way back.

And then they get this letter from Jeremiah. Oh, man, you would have thought they would have had it just about up to here with Jeremiah by this point; he's the only one who saw this whole thing coming, and you know how history loves a know-it-all, and then of course Jeremiah got to stay behind in Jerusalem with the rest of the remnant and so he doesn't really know what we're going through and so he doesn't know what it's like and where does he get off telling us to build houses and live in them and plant gardens and eat from them and get married and have children and do all the things you would do if you were going to stay here in Babylon for a long time, like if Babylon was going to be our home now, like if we're going to live here, second-class exiles from Jerusalem, second-class children of God. And Jeremiah says, well, you're gonna be there for a while, you might might as well settle in.

And the letter doesn't even stop there. It just gets worse. "Seek the welfare of the city where God has sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." Seek the welfare of the city? This city? You know we're in Babylon, right? I mean, okay, you tell us we're gonna be here for a while, so we might as well unpack, and I can get that on a kind of practical level; eventually, even if you don't want to be on this particular trip, nobody likes living directly out of a suitcase. But seek the welfare of the city? This city? The people who just invaded and captured us? No, I don't think so. We're going to fight back! Every chance we get, we're looking for a way out. We're tunneling under the fences. We're storming the gates. We're hiding in the laundry truck. We're busting out of this joint, because this is Babylon, and God is back there in His temple in Jerusalem with the rest of Real Israel, waiting us to come back, waiting for this whole thing to be over with. The whole thing screams "temporary"! Who wants to unpack?

There's an old joke by a comedian named Mitch Hedberg that goes something like: "Hey, if you find yourself lost in the woods, suck it up! Build a house! Say 'I used to be lost, but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!" Which is not entirely different than what Jeremiah is insisting on: Hey, guys, I know it's not exactly home, but at least you'll be there for a really long time! It's all enough to make him sound like the punch line. The whole thing prompts the question of whether home is truly and only where the heart is, or whether it can instead simply be the place where we build and plant and sweat and grow and live. What happens when we get stuck between the two? I know it sounds like an abstract question. But I think for this particular congregation, in this particular stage in our life, few questions could be more concrete. It was a bit more than a year ago that I first met with the search committee from this church. We were meeting in Lovingston, but I decided that I would first drive down and see Amherst and see the church for myself. I got off there at highway 60 and came up to 2nd street and saw this building, and then after a while I circled around through town up towards business 29, at which point, much to my surprise, I passed a piece of property with a sign in front of it that said "Future Home of Amherst Presbyterian Church."

Which was, I have to admit, news to me. I think there had been some mention in some information form about a piece of property but I didn't know anything about a plan for construction and so I think I went to the committee and asked something along the lines of "So, I passed this sign..." and so I began to learn a story about this church, a story I'm still learning and so I hope you will forgive any misplaced details. The story goes that a generation ago this church began to dream of a home different than this home, began to wonder if God was calling it to a place different than this place, and so began to pray and listen and work and save and plan and soon enough there was land purchased and soon enough there were drawings and architectural renderings and soon enough there was money set aside - not enough, but some, a start - but then, soon enough, that's all there was, everything kind of stalled, and for a generation you've been here, we've been here, stuck in-between the home where our heart is and the home where Jeremiah nonetheless still calls us to build and plant and sweat and grow and live. It may be odd to consider that the way in which we intersect with this text is to realize that our time in a building that has been here for almost two hundred years is filed under the Biblical category of exile. But for these Israelites exile isn't about the length of stay, and it's not about where you started off; it's about longing for somewhere else, about feeling called to be somewhere else, about feeling like your theological identity is bound up in being somewhere other than you currently are. Like we were on God's path, and somehow we missed our turn, and now the path is somewhere over there, and now we're just lost in these woods.

So we've built a house. Or, rather, to our credit, Jeremiah, we've invested in this house. A place that was our home and then at some point, for some of us maybe stopped being our home; it started being the place that we gathered to dream about somewhere else; but nonetheless even in exile we've planted and built. And meanwhile, the dream has been on hold. Which is, of course, exactly what is at stake for Jeremiah. Israel, too, had a dream, a dream that was Jerusalem. It was a dream first kindled in the throes of slavery, first conceived on the tablets of Sinai, first realized in the foundations of the city, but now lies somewhere trampled under the boots of the invading armies. It is not dead; no, much to the contrary, it is something a bit more dangerous, a dream on hold, the kind of thing I think this congregation in its generation of dreaming knows more about than perhaps anybody would have ever wanted. But I want you to hear in the deferral of Israel's dream something more than a simple problem of lifestyle: actually, for Israel, the dream deferred is a theological crisis. Because the dream of Jerusalem had always been inescapably bound up with Israel's theological convictions: that is to say, it is the dream of living in the place where God is, the dream of being in the place God calls them to be, the dream of staying on the path as God's chosen people instead of now having somewhere missed the turn and wound up lost in these woods. Jeremiah says "Well, now, build a house -- make yourself at home." But who wants to be at home somewhere on the outside of where God calls us to be? And if God is truly calling this congregation to gather and worship somewhere different than this particular building, if we are truly called to that new promised land, if God is really waiting for us over there, then how much sorrow we all must feel at so many years of living and building and planting in the wrong place.

And yet. There's a remarkable turn in this text, because of course living and building and planting are the central acts of Israel's participation in the covenant in the first place, the very foundation of Israel's historic obligation to the land God had promised to them. And Jeremiah's next instruction: to take wives and have sons and daughters, to multiply and not decrease, calls to mind almost immediately the even more foundational history of God's promises to Abraham, that his offspring would multiply and cover the earth. Jeremiah's instructions to the exiles might first sound like accommodation, or worse, like the extinguishing of that theological dream, but in actuality the prophet is doing something much more revolutionary: he's exploding the promise of God's covenant far beyond the threshold of the city that was Jerusalem. To a people whose theological identity and theological dream had been for so long centered on the one place and the one temple and that one corner of God's creation, Jeremiah says: you know, even while you are in exile. Even while you are lost. Even while you are on the far corners of the earth. Even while you are still so far away from the home you once knew and the home of which you still dream, even then, you are still the children of God. You can defer the dream of Jerusalem but you cannot defer the power of God's covenant or the power of God's promises. Jeremiah says "Don't get fooled into thinking that God is over there somewhere else waiting for you or waiting for us." Even now, even in Babylon, even and especially now, God is with you.

So don't get fooled into thinking that God is over there somewhere else. I'm not here today to refine the dream that this congregation has held for so long. I'm not here to tell you that it's a bad dream or a good dream. Nor am I here to tell you how we make that dream a reality; one of the reasons it's called exile is because the dream isn't something Israel can work to accomplish; as frustrating and painful as it is, they have to wait on God. No, this morning, I just want you to remember this: we live in a world that is already, in and of itself, a dream deferred. It is a dream first kindled in the dawn of creation, first conceived on the lips of prophets and apostles, first realized in the life and witness of Jesus Christ, first sealed on the imagination of humanity at the foot of a wooden cross; it is the dream of justice; it is the dream of redemption; it is the dream of righteousness; it is the dream of communion with the one who created us and created all things. But in this imperfect world in which we work and plant and live it is very much a dream deferred. No wonder that exile is the defining story of Biblical Israel; it is just as much the defining story of humanity: to be in that place different than the one of which we dream, to dream of a home different than the one that greets our every morning. But even so, even in that gap between the dreams we share and the world we inhabit, even so, don't get fooled into thinking that God is over there somewhere else.

If you find yourself lost in the woods, suck it up! Build a house! But don't forget: God is in the woods, too.

Jeremiah is a good thing to read in a week when the country feels like it's falling apart. Again. For the past several weeks, the lectionary has led us through the central parables of the Gospel of Luke, and so we have had occasion to think in some depth about Luke's theological relationship with money and wealth. We have attempted to do so with as much theological reason as possible. But now, as the time for reason has apparently evaporated from our national political conversation, so too has the lectionary moved us from Luke's financial advice to the powerful, passionate, probing lamination of the weeping prophet, Jeremiah. For Jeremiah, as apparently for us, the time for reason has past, and it is simply the time for mourning.

At first, it might sound a bit like anger. The city of Jerusalem is about to fall to the armies of Babylon, the exact historical event that Jeremiah has been warning them of for what must feel like years at this point. The Babylonians have a habit of removing their conquered people back to Babylon itself, and so this invasion threatens to separate Israel from the land that God had given unto her; for Jeremiah, there's no explanation for this other than that God is punishing Israel for her failure to keep the covenant they swore together upon the entrance into that land, upon the moment when they stopped wandering through the wilderness so many generations ago. And of course it's not bad enough that the Israelites disobeyed God and brought this wrath upon themselves; they haven't even particularly listened to Jeremiah, even though he did at one time have the ear of the King, but they have wanted nothing of his visions. Nobody likes the bearer of bad news. So yeah, it sounds a bit like anger: "Oh, that I had in the desert a traveler's lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a band of traitors ... they have grown strong in the land for falsehood ... they proceed from evil to evil."

If any of this sounds familiar, it may be because the current media climate in this country is saturated with this strain of Jeremiah. I told you this was going to happen - we saw it two years ago, and I said then that this was just going to keep happening, and you didn't believe me or you all still voted them into office or frankly we just get the politicians we deserve and you all get the politicians you deserve and Oh! that I might leave my people! Canada seems nice. Australia, maybe?" But there's something more than anger in the words of Jeremiah this morning, and something more than anger even in the bickering and self-aggrandizing loud-mouthing that accompanies so much of our modern political discourse. There's something more than anger: it really is mourning. It's lamentation. With the enemy very much at the gates, and hopes of some obvious deliverance dashed, as destruction of his country becomes more and more evident, Jeremiah's righteous anger descends into grief. "My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. For the hurt of my poor people, I am hurt; I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me."

And of course it's not just theoretical. Jeremiah's not just grieving over what he watches on TV. No, quite the opposite: Jeremiah's grief could hardly be more personal. With the enemy at the gates, it is his friends, his family, his home, his people: this isn't the prophet simply annoyed that he lost a political argument, though I think elsewhere in his prophecy we might find exactly that. No, here in the eighth chapter it is a grief we, too, know all too well: the grief of loss. The grief of decay. The grief of inevitability and despair and death. The place he knows is about to die. The people he knows are about to die. And so I do think we know this grief all too well but do not confuse it with the outrage over a political machine that so rarely bends itself to our collective will; no, Jeremiah's grief is nothing so remote. Rather it is the much more intimate and much more devastating grief that normally attends the daily experience of being human: the grief of loss, the grief of decay. The grief of inevitability and despair and death.

I don't know each of your stories as well as I would like but I feel sure that grief has found you in some shape or form; it may be the memory of the distant past or it may still have its grip upon you this very morning. Perhaps it waxes and wanes with the changing of the seasons; perhaps it is a day in the calendar that pushes you to some unwanted memory. Jeremiah says that dismay has taken hold of him: that's exactly how it works, of course; grief takes hold of us and will not let us go and all of a sudden the world darkens. C.S. Lewis, after the death of his wife in 1960, put pen to paper and chronicled the journey of his own grief. He published those notebooks, under a pseudonym, as the collection called A Grief Observed. He says this:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid ...At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. And grief still feels like fear.

The invisible blanket. Whether in sackcloth and ashes or simply the traditional black of the mourning widower, humanity abounds with ways of marking and making distinctive the time of grief and the activity of grief, an acknowledgement that grief separates us from the world and with that blanket wrapped around us it makes the world see us as through a fog and it makes us see the world as through a fog, as though life had somehow lost focus in our grief and as though to those on the outside we have somehow ourselves gone out of focus. It's like we think grief is its own kind of mental illness, like it brings with it some kind of irrationality that requires us through custom and costume to quarantine those who grieve. You know, David just hasn't been the same since she died; or, you know Susan just isn't herself anymore, like something of their fundamental humanness left alongside whoever left them. Be it self-imposed or simply the function of the long habit of the human race, there's something dehumanizing in how we think about grief, like those who are lost in mourning have somehow lost their equal citizenship, like even when we ourselves find ourselves wrapped in that invisible blanket that it deprives us of some fundamental standing in communities that otherwise love and uphold us. There's something wrong in how we think about grief, like grief is a problem, like grief is a disease, and like grief is a disease that only time can cure.

But let me suggest that in Jeremiah's grief there is some different vision of grief itself. Because Jeremiah's grief is not accompanied by fog or distance or some radical departure from his own faculties. That's the whole point: Jeremiah's grief, Jeremiah's mourning, Jeremiah's dismay come precisely from the fact that even in grief, especially in grief, he is resolutely still the prophetic witness to the truth of Jerusalem: that her citizens have broken covenant, that her people have been unfaithful in the eyes of God and to the laws of God, that Jeremiah alone is the one who sees the world as it is. Surrounded as he may be by a blanket of grief, it does not preclude him from seeing the reality of the world; in fact, it may be that, given the inevitability of destruction and the reality of Israel's political situation, it may be that the ability too see the world as it is and the necessity of grief are fundamentally intertwined. "O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!" My eyes a fountain of tears. We so love to pretend that grief exiles us from the reality of the world. But for Jeremiah, to see the world as it is is to see with a eyes that are fountain of tears, to see with the eyes of those who mourn, to see with the eyes of grief.

All of which means that, for Jeremiah, grief itself is not the problem. Grief itself is not the disease. No, for Jeremiah, the world, of course, is the problem. The brokenness of the world is the problem. Injustice is the disease. Human frailty is the disease. With Jerusalem on the brink of destruction, violence and hatred are the disease, and grief is the natural human result of seeing the reality of the world with healthy, unshielded eyes. Grief is that moment when we see the world as it is: not when we change the channel to find something a bit lighter than the evening news; not when we medicate ourselves with cheap entertainment or easy living; not when we do whatever we can just to tune it out. In a too-sick-and-unreasonable world, grief may be the healthiest and most rational response. Of course there are times for each of us when grief grips us and we cannot let it go. But how many more times, given a choice between seeing the broken world as it is and distracting ourselves with something so much more digestible, how many more times have we hid our grief somewhere deep inside and simply pretended not to see. So grief may feel quite a bit like fear, but in actuality it takes an extraordinary amount of courage. Opening our eyes, encountering the world as it is, it takes an extraordinary amount of courage. No wonder Jeremiah wants to run away -- "Oh, that I had in the desert a traveler's lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them!" - but the faithful choice, the right choice, the courageous choice, is to stay even in the midst of destruction and grieve.

Of course it is an impossible task and an impossible request and in this text it is only made possible even for such a one as Jeremiah by the good news of the Gospel, which is that God is in this grief. In fact you may have caught in our text this morning a deep ambiguity, which is that for the length of this lament it sounds for all the world as if it is coming from Jeremiah's voice and then at the end concludes with "Thus say the Lord." Now, given the details there's simply no way that these words of mourning are not to be heard from Jeremiah's lips. But somewhere along the line they have also become God's words of mourning, God's words of grief, God who weeps like Jeremiah for his people and sees like Jeremiah the world as it is, so much so that their words echo in unison: "For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me." There's simply no way to read this lament and not find God and his creation weeping side by side.

But God is in this grief not simply as companionship, but with purpose, because in God's hands our grief has the capactiy for transforation. Because the unhappiness of seeing the world as it is is inextricably bound to the capacity to imagine something more beautiful and more righteous and more like to the prophetic vision of God's justice. This is, of course, Jeremiah's fate in God's hands: that even as he mourns the destruction of the city, and even as he loses himself to grief, Jeremiah remains an instrument of God's promise and God's covenant and God's mercy. In fact it is precisely in his grief, in his prophetic vision of the world as it is, in his prophetic vision of the world as it could and will be that Jeremiah finds his place within the grand scope of God's providence. The words of this prophet plant themselves deeply in the imagination of his people, and with God's help, and with God's vision, and by God's grace, Jeremiah's grief becomes a powerful tool for the transformation and redemption of Israel, for the redemption of God's creation. Grief is not a detour in the journey that God calls Jeremiah to walk; much to the contrary, grief is the journey that God calls Jeremiah to walk. The question for us is to wonder how too we might serve the transformation of the world, how we might find ourselves within the imaginative scope of God's providential redemption, if we can but muster the courage to grieve?

It's this invisible blanket that we carry around with us. It's this invisible blanket that helps us see. For me it calls to mind the blue security blanket that Linus always carries with him in all of the Charlie Brown comic strips that littered my childhood. If you don't know, one of Charlie's friends is a young boy named Linus who has a deep psychological connection to his blue blanket; he carries it with him everywhere he goes, much to the mockery of his friends and peers; much to the chagrin of his parents. The blanket marks Linus as just a bit unhinged, a bit unhealthy, a bit abnormal. A repeated gag over some period of the comic strip's life was that Linus's grandmother in particular was dead-set on permanently depriving Linus of his blanket -- you see, he's too old for that kind of thing; he needs to grow up and face the world; what's he so afraid of carting that ridiculous blanket around? And so Linus would inevitably return from a visit to his grandmother's house with some harrowing story of how his blanket had just narrowly escaped capture or separation or, God forbid, destruction.

But for as much suffering as the the blanket brings to Linus, the truth is that, over the half-century-long course of the comic, Linus's blanket accomplishes some amazing things. The truth is that the blanket is never really just a blanket; in Linus's hands, it has a nearly unlimited quality of transformation. It is, on occasion, fashionable: as a neckscarf, as a cape, as a sportcoat; it is, on occasion, utilitarian: as a whip, as a flyswatter, as a slingshot; it is, on many, many occasions, an instrument of joy: as a hammock, as a kite, as, in one baseball game gone awry, a stand-in for second base. The truth is that while Linus is made to feel strange or different because of his blanket, as much as those around him use his blanket to push him aside, the blanket actually does a surprising amount of good, and the blanket creates a surprising amount of beauty. It turns out that it's only when you take the blanket away that Linus goes a bit crazy. But when he has it at his side, when he embraces it as his own, he's the most helpful and most reasonable guy in town. I wonder if the invisible blanket we carry is much the same, and not at all what it seems: that is, this thing that feels like fear but is actually the prophetic vision of what might be. This thing that feels like disease but is actually the measurement of the difference between the world as it is and the world that God calls into being. This thing that feels like horror but is actually an imaginative slice of God's kingdom. Friends, in our grief God is working for the transformation of all things. As Linus might say, that is good grief, Charlie Brown.

A man dies and goes down to the underworld. And like in most good jokes about the underworld, it starts with a tour. So, Satan is showing him around the place. They come to a set of three doors. Satan opens the first one, and the man peers in and beholds, as far as the eye can see, hundreds if not thousands of people writhing in fiery agony. Their bodies are in chains; the flames are beating around them; it's the stuff of your most vivid nightmare. He says to Satan, "So, who are those people," and Satan says, "Well, those are the Catholics who didn't go to Confession." Next door. Satan opens it up, the man peers in, and again, as far as he can see, thousands of people howling in agony. "And who are they?," he asks, and Satan says, "Well, those are the Baptists who went dancing on Saturday night." Last door. Inside, once again, thousands upon thousands in absolute torture. And Satan says, "Well, those people are the Episcopalians who used a salad fork instead of a dinner fork."

So, that joke is older than all of us. Maybe older than all of us put together. And I'm sure you know that it's part of a storied genre of guy-goes-to-the-underworld or guy-goes-to-the-pearly-gates jokes. That joke has many, many brothers and sisters. But what I want you to realize from the beginning this morning is that the whole joke -- even the whole genre -- has no real theological content. It's not like the joke is saying something about what Heaven or Hell actually look like. It's not like you would go home today -- or at least I hope this isn't the case -- it's not like you would go home and somebody might ask you what the sermon was about and you would say, "Well, the preacher says that Hell is made up of these three big rooms." At the risk of trying to explain the joke, which is always something of a fool's errand, it's not funny because of what the afterlife looks like. It's not even really about the afterlife. It's about the now. It's funny because of what we look like, right now, or, you know, what Episcopalians look like.

I give this preface because it is entirely too easy to let the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man tempt us into thinking that Jesus is talking about the afterlife, when in fact he's talking about the present. An obscenely wealthy man dies around the same time as Lazarus, a beggar living outside his gates. Much to everyone's surprise, we have something of a social inversion: the wealthy man finds himself in Hell while the forgotten Lazarus feasts with Abraham and the saints. But that's just Act 1. In Act 2, even though Lazarus is the only named character, the story sticks with the wealthy man, who uses all of his wiles to try to wiggle his way out of his fate. He calls out for Abraham: "Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames," as if Lazarus was still to be his messenger boy even despite their newfound positions. So when that doesn't work, he tries again on behalf of the family he left behind, that they might also be warned, which almost begins to sound like concern for the welfare of others until you consider that the rich man is only really concerned for the people in his immediate circle and not for the other servants and beggars and slaves that would have circulated through his household. So the persistent characteristic of this wealthy man is not simply his wealth but rather an unshakable conviction that the he should get some kind of special treatment, that he should be above the rules, and remember, lest you think that the parable is talking about who we become in the afterlife, remember that it's really about the present. Jesus is saying that one of the trappings of wealth is an insistence that the wealthy get to play by their own set of rules.

Some of you know that I first came to central Virginia about a year after graduating college as a volunteer at Innisfree Village, just northwest of Charlottesville up in the foothills of Shenandoah. Innisfree is an intentional community of volunteers living with people with disabilities, but it has a very strange economy to it. Most of the workforce there were much like me: overeducated and impoverished twenty-somethings making room and board and a $200 monthly stipend. But because the level of care provided is so personalized, the costs of sending a family member with retardation or downs to Innisfree are astronomically high, meaning that in some cases the residents we cared for belonged to families from America's super-rich. In fact one of the residents in the house I lived at was the brother of one of the founding partners of America Online, AOL, the internet before we had the internet. He existed mostly in legend; he never really came down from DC to visit his brother, until one Friday in the Spring of 2003 when he in fact did come for a visit: he chartered a small private jet from Dulles Airport, flew down to Charlottesville, hired a car, and drove out to Innisfree.

It so happened that I was planning a trip to DC for that very weekend to see some college friends. I was going to leave after lunch and beat the afternoon rush hour traffic into town, so there I was, standing outside of our house, throwing my beat-up duffel bag into a 1997 Saturn when Tom's fabulously wealthy brother overheard my plans and asked if I instead just wanted a ride up to the city. I didn't really know how I was going to get home from that, but, really, what's the point of being 23 if you're not going to say yes to that invitation, so, in fact, off we went. Back down to the airport in the hired car, but we went around the back way, through some private gate, directly onto the tarmac, parked right next to the jet. Eighteen months after 9/11, but we had no TSA screening of any kind. We just walked right on board. We were in the air for about half an hour, after which we landed at the private-plane-only terminal at Dulles, and about three minutes after touching down we were sitting in the back of a private Bentley heading towards downtown.

Now, so far, this had all gone incredibly smoothly. But I'd lived in DC for five years. I knew something about these roads, and I knew something about Friday afternoon rush hour, and since it was about 4:15 by that point I knew beyond any doubt that I was going to have to get very comfortable in the back of that Bentley. Sure enough, when we came out onto the Beltway, the traffic was at its usual standstill. But not for us. Because as soon as the traffic appeared, our driver just pulled onto the shoulder and drove past. For several miles' worth of beltway traffic, we just cruised by on the shoulder. We turned onto 66 and it was the same story -- whenever a patch of traffic would show up, the driver would find the shoulder and just cruise around it. And I'm sure that he had somewhere to be. But it wasn't a hospital. There wasn't an emergency. There wasn't a police escort. Though it's not like the man in the chauffeured Bentley would have lost much sleep over a run-in with a traffic cop. No, I'd found myself in this strange world where the rules didn't seem to apply, where you didn't have to find airport parking, where you didn't have to stand in the security line, and where even the most basic human condition of Northern Virginia life, Beltway traffic, didn't even apply. From Dulles to Capitol Hill, Friday afternoon at 4:15, in about twenty minutes. It's not possible unless you think some of the rules don't apply to you.

So when the rich man in the story asks for some special favor to be visited upon his family and his friends, some special warning so that they might avoid his fate, Abraham says: no, we all play by the same rules. Your family, your friends, just like everybody else, they have Moses and the prophets; they have all of the Old Testament law to guide them and shape them and warn them and that law is given equally to all of God's children. Everybody's in the same boat. In some ways it's an odd turn for this text; after all, Jesus has set his sights on the Pharisees, those religious authorities whose love of wealth is equalled only by their love of the law; it's not like they don't know the law. In fact they have good legal precedent for their love of wealth itself; you see, if you read the scripture just right, you can convince yourself that God rewards faithfulness and trust and good works with all of the trappings of material bounty. That's what the Pharisees believe, that the wealth they have is not a stain upon them but rather instead a sign of God's blessing upon them; it's not that they've ducked the rules. It's rather that they've followed them even better than everybody else.

We don't need America's super-rich to illustrate this one. We can just walk into some of the largest churches in this country and hear it preached from the rafters. Call it the Gospel of Wealth if you want to; call it the Prosperity Gospel if you want to, much to my amusement I found a Time Magazine article that listed the Prosperity Gospel among its "Ten Worst Ideas of the Last Decade", as if it was such a new phenomenon. But see how deep its roots go. Here's the pitch: God wants you to be happy. God wants you to succeed. God wants you to grow and and prosper and pay your bills and enjoy your life - Reverend Osteen would call it Your Best Life Now - and in fact God blesses those of us who are faithful with precisely all of those trappings of prosperity. So it's not wrong to seek out the big house and the fancy car and all of the finer, finest things in life; it's not wrong to yoke ourselves fully to that packaged vision of American material joy; in fact it's what God wants for us, and every new gadget we buy and every new fancy outfit we bring home is just further and further reinforcement of just how much God loves us.

Now, all of this may sound totally foreign to you; you've never wandered in to one of our most successful American megachurches; you've never sauntered through "that section" of the airport bookstore; and maybe you just know the smell of theological manure from a good distance. But the Pharisees love this stuff. It turns out that they have been reading a lot of Joel Osteen. And of course they love it, for the same reason the millionaire preachers of modern religious consumerism love it: it gives legitimacy to their pre-entrenched positions of political and religious authority; it gives theological cover for just going out and rolling around in large piles of money, and, of course, best of all, it's not against the rules. Or at least it's not against some of the rules. Or, I guess, if you decide to only read a small fraction of the rules, then it's not against those. But if you read this text. Where everybody has to play by the same rules. By all the rules. By all of the Jewish rules that speak about community obligations to the poor and the outcast. By all of the Jewish laws that speak about the interconnected fabric of God's people, about mutual obligation and mutual entanglement. By all of the laws throughout the whole of the Jewish story, the whole of the story of God's people, the sum total of that story that says that God's people sink or swim together. No, if you read that story, and this one, then Lazarus is not simply the character who has chosen the wrong rules. No, more than that, by his very condition, forgotten, rejected, poor, hungry, dying, by his very condition he is a stain upon the soul of a community that has not only forgotten the rules, but forgotten who and whose they are. God's children sink or swim together. So I wonder who stands outside our gates, forgotten, rejected, poor, hungry, a sign to us and to God and to the world of the parts of our story we have chosen to forget.

God's children sink or swim together. God's children prosper, or not, together. For all of the things that the Gospel of Luke despises about wealth - and that list is significant indeed - for all of the things that Luke despises about wealth, surely this is at the very top: that the most pernicious thing about wealth is not wealth in and of itself but rather what wealth does to us, that it turns us inward, that it makes us selfish, that it makes us think first and only of ourselves, that it enchants us into breaking that blessed tie that binds us all together in the single story of God's people. God's children sink or swim together, but give them a dollar, and watch what happens. You will find yourself soon enough in the back seat of a chauffeured Bentley, driving down the Beltway shoulder past hundreds and hundreds of rush hour commuters, each of them in more of a legitimate hurry than you are, and, if you're like me, you won't say anything at all. You'll find yourself wondering when God will bless you with a mansion of your own, with a little slice of that American Dream that we all know only goes to the best and most beloved Christians, and if you're anything like me, you'll twist yourself into deciding that that sounds totally reasonable. How easy we forget, when money's on the line, that God's children sink or swim together.

I suppose exhortation you might expect would be that we should better remember the poor and therefore spend some money. But I've come to think that we've got it backwards. Maybe we can't remember the poor until we spend some money. Maybe it sits in our pocket and blinds us from seeing anywhere beyond ourselves. Maybe it's the idol that makes us forget that we all sink or swim together. Last week I talked about Luke's confounding parable of the dishonest manager and invited us to imagine how we can spend the resources we have while we still have time to spend them. It was a question about what we do as money burns a hole in our pocket. But maybe there's more than that. Maybe it's burning a hole in our hearts, and maybe we can't remember the poor, maybe we can't remember the hungry, maybe we can't even remember who we are until we spend it.

I got to DC in a private jet and chauffeured Bentley and I went home on the bus. I really didn't want to go home on the bus. I'd been hoping that some other Innisfree person would find their way to DC that weekend and give me a ride back, or that I could at the very least take the train, but alas, nothing worked, nothing lined up, and so on Monday morning I took the bus. A long trip across town to the bus station, a long, meandering trip through central Virginia - I think via Fredericksburg - back to Charlottesville, and then I waited around for a ride back out to Innisfree. It took most of the day to accomplish a journey that had taken about an hour and a half not three days before, and I'm on this bus with all of these bedraggled people and in one of my less flattering moments I'm thinking "Man, I don't belong on this bus - three days ago I rode into town in a Bentley! I am so not like all these other riders. I am so above this." And I'd love to tell you that there was some cathartic moment, like somehow we all connected and discovered each other and burst into song, but no, it's a bus ride, and I sat there, malcontent, for some interminable length of time. I'm not going to lie to you: it wasn't fun, it wasn't exciting, I missed feeling like I was above it all. I missed feeling like the world had been laid out just for me. But you know, sooner or later, all God's children ride the bus. All God's children ride the bus together, because the bus is the only way home, and the powerful Gospel of Jesus Christ is that all God's children get home together.

So it turns out there's nothing like a totally confounding, totally mystifying, utterly confusing parable to make me wish for the good old days of preaching through Genesis. We've returned to the lectionary, which deals us out a series of Luke's parables for a few weeks, of which this is undoubtedly the muddiest and the grimiest, and it's enough to send me on some flight of fancy, like you does if you drive past the house you used to own or wander through the school you transferred away from. You kinda wonder what things would've been like if you'd stayed. And so I find myself stealing furtive glances at Genesis, like searching for an old flame on Facebook. But you know what, by my count if we were still preaching Genesis, this Sunday we'd be squarely in the desperation of Sodom and Gomorrah. So maybe we should just stay here in Luke and stick it out.

The parable of the dishonest manager. Or the parable of the shrewd steward. It goes by both names, depending who you ask. A fabulously wealthy man finds out that his financial manager, the guy who runs his investments, has acted dishonestly, before the parable ever begins. We never get to find out what he's done. After being confronted, the manager begins to panic; after all, being a financial manager is all he really knows how to do, and his job comes with room and board, so if he loses it he will be out on the street without any of the physical or technical skills that could otherwise land him a new job. So, desperate for shelter, and as a hedge against this looming disaster, while he still speaks with the authority of his master's fortune, the manager goes door to door checking on the loans he had made as a function of his office. But rather than just check on the loans, he goes through town and, door by door, he slashes the value of each loan. You owed my master a hundred jugs of oil? Let's make it 50. A hundred containers of wheat? Let's make it eighty. And so on and so forth, until he had made so many new friends throughout the city that he no longer had reason to fear for being out on the street. Now, no matter if he did lose his job, he'd have somewhere to land.

The master's response is hard to figure out. Much to our surprise, he commands his steward for acting shrewdly, presumably because the amount of the reduced loan obligations was less valuable to him than the cleverness of his steward. Maybe our friend even got to keep his job; we don't know and we have no way of knowing. Without that final resolution it's hard to draw clear conclusions about the master's response. But that's nothing compared to the strangeness of Jesus's response, of the editorial comment that he appends to the end of the story. He says to the disciples, "I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into the eternal homes." What? I mean, what? I mean, could you run that one past me again? "I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into the eternal homes." So, I have some questions. Is this lying/clever/cleverly-lying manager the moral hero of the story? Is Jesus telling us to be dishonest? Is Jesus telling us to get our hands on some dirty money? And more than that: in a Gospel that puts such a premium on the needs of the poor and the outcast and the oppressed, is Jesus really telling us to take the dirty money of the world and just use it to make friends?

Let's try this again, this time in the twenty-first century. A few months ago The Washington Post reported a story about a young man named Jason Trigg. Jason is an MIT graduate in computer science and could be writing software almost anywhere in the world, but he's chosen to work in the technically-demanding world of high-frequency stock trading, what the Post calls a "hedge fund on steroids." Of course it's not that unusual that a young whiz kid would get drawn into the world of high-end finance; he's probably making more money there than he would be in almost anything else that would suit his set of skills. In fact that was entirely the point, but Jason Trigg is doing it for a very different cause. Sure, he still takes home a nice paycheck. But Jason chose the world of high finance so that he instead could give away as much of his salary as possible. It's very calculated: the more he makes, the more he can give. And what he gives is no less calculated than the money he earns. He's not randomly writing checks to whatever charitable cause shows up at his door. Instead, Trigg works with the Against Malaria Foundation, which estimates that every $2,500 they receive can in and of itself save a single life. That probably sounds cheap. It probably is. But for Trigg, it means that he's maximizing the value of his charitable giving. For some tens of thousands of dollars a year, pulled from the coffers of the most notorious kind of investment banking, Trigg is literally saving real countable human lives. He's getting the biggest ethical bang for his buck.

So, again, questions. Jason could have gone to work for some NGO or some 501c3 and done direct Malaria prevention work. I suppose the calculus would suggest that he's more valuable to them as a source of constant contribution than he would be as on-the-ground support. But then, at least his paycheck wouldn't be coming from a hedge fund. So is Jesus really telling us to get our hands on some dirty money? If the rich man in the parable is in fact lending out money with interest, which could potentially be a violation of Jewish Law - it gets complicated, quickly - then it's possible to read this parable and conclude that the steward is doing just that: he's taking the dishonest wealth held by his master in the form of these loans and, by reducing them, transferring that dishonest wealth to those in the community who can do some good with it. By this reading, the whole thing is like Robin Hood without the swordplay. But that implies that, for Luke, there's "dishonest wealth" and then there's the other kind, the kind you wouldn't steal, the kind you wouldn't pass under the table. Unfortunately the Greek word that Jesus uses here has a very particular thrust. It's actually an untranslated Hebrew word, the word Mammon. Dishonest mammon. Or in better translation, unjust Mammon. The problem is that for Israel all Mammon is unjust, as a very particular legacy of Jewish law that would exclude things like financial lending from happening within the temple. In a community largely based on bartering, with the expectation of temple sacrifice largely based on agriculture, money for its own sake, currency for its own sake, was viewed with extreme suspicion, and not allowed inside the temple. You remember Jesus pushing the money-lenders out later in the Gospel? It's the same value that underscores this parable: by Luke's logic, all Mammon is unjust because it's not welcome in the house of the Lord. So is Jesus really telling us to get our hands on some dirty money? Quite to the contrary: he's telling us that the money in our hands is dirty by its very existence, no matter the source.

But here's the thing. The money's not just dirty. It's temporary. "Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into the eternal homes." I swear, this verse is like a kaleidoscope, and every time you turn it the pieces fall into a new light. When it's gone. Again, more translation: where Jesus says "the eternal homes" he doesn't use the Greek word for house, which is the word he used earlier in the parable when the steward was going door to door. Instead, he uses the word for tent. The word for tabernacle. It's the temple even before there was a temple. So this verse isn't about what happens when the money runs out; it's about what happens when we run out, when we are confronted with leaving the regular homes and regular houses of this regular life and crossing that threshold into the eternal temple of God and we can't take the dirty money with us. Time runs out before the money does. We run out before the money does. And so the moral judgment is not about whether or not we have dirty money on our hands but whether we can spend it while we still have it.

If you've ever wandered through an international airport you'll occasionally find those huge plastic tubs where you can leave behind your Pesos or your Rubles or your Euros, whatever small coins you have - presumably they weren't enough to buy a cup of coffee before takeoff. So instead, you drop your coins in the tub before you go, and some charity will compile them into something and some agency somewhere will get a check and maybe it will do some good. And of course you do it, because who wants to carry the spare change on the flight, and, frankly, because the alternative is that two weeks later you're standing in front of a vending machine and the quarter keeps not working and keeps not working until you realize that it's not a quarter and you're just trying to put a Euro coin in the slot over and over and the machine won't take it, of course, and it's frustrating on one hand because that Euro coin is absolutely worthless in your current quest to get a bag of Fritos and on the other hand because it's actually worth a heck of a lot more than a quarter and you could have done so much more with it if you had only spent it when you had the chance.

So we're playing with house money. All of it. The cash in your wallet. The money in your checking account. The nebulous market value of all the stuff we carry around. Even the investments we save and cultivate and build and plant, the stuff that our most elaborate dreams are made of. But even while we dream of a home beyond that threshold into tomorrow, this confounding text presents us with the deep conviction of the day at hand: we have to spend it while we have the chance. All of that money comes with its own little countdown, right there underneath the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury. If you look carefully, if you look faithfully, you can see it. It's counting down, day by day, and when it gets to zero, we run out.

So, then, what to buy with this money counting down in our pocket? Jason Trigg is paying $2500 for each human life he saves; think of the good we could do with just a checkbook and a sense of timing. But then every time you think this text has settled it keeps turning. "Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into the eternal homes." It doesn't say "heal the ills of the world," but make friends for yourselves. My original question still lingers: why, in a Gospel so taken with concern for the poor and outcast, why are we spending our money on friends? And Luke's answer makes the claim of this text even yet more challenging. Because Luke's version of friendship takes quite a bit of putting yourself on the line. In Luke's Gospel, friends wake each other up in the middle of the night; friends take the lowest seat at the table; friendship doesn't just make everyone better off. It takes something. It takes sacrifice. It takes vulnerability. It takes relationship. It takes this steward going door-to-door and yes, cutting everyone a deal, but also standing in front of them and exposing his own mistakes and his own dishonesty. Friendship puts us in dangerous contact with one another. It breaks us down, it exposes us, it makes us vulnerable, but precisely so that it can build us back up as community, as a community of faith, as a community of justice, as a community of wholeness. It's not that Jesus has forgotten about the needs of the poor and the outcast. But in this verse he's not just out to save them. He's out to save us. He's out to call us into community. To call us into vulnerability. To remind us that the Christian life asks us to encounter the world not just with the expiring contents of our checkbooks but also with the everlasting contents of our hearts. We can always write checks. We should write checks. There's no theological justification for not writing checks. But with apologies to Top Gun, our bodies have to cash them.

So here's the outline of a dream. Or really the outline of an invitation. I'd like to invite us as a congregation to imagine all the things we could do with the resources slowly counting down in our pocket. Yes, I know, budgets are scarce; budgets are very often scarce, and the bottom line can be an anxious place to be. It will not always feel like we have the money to spend. But the reminder in this text is that the real limit on what we can do with the resources we have is not the amount of money left in the account but rather the amount of time left for all of us to dream and do together. We can't take it with us. So in the meantime, I invite you. I invite you beyond these walls, with the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, I invite you beyond these walls - we can go door to door if we have to - to discover what new friendships are there for the making. Are there, in the forgotten corners of this community, friends in need of another hot meal, of a newly stocked fridge, friends in need of a new way of sitting at table together, friends we haven't met just quite yet? Are there, bustling across the quad at Sweet Briar, friends in need of worship, friends in need of fellowship, friends in need of a new way of being in the presence of God together, friends we haven't met just yet? Are there, strung halfway across the globe, friends in need of justice, friends in need of liberation, friend in need of a new way of beholding the peace of Jesus Christ together, friends we haven't met just quite yet? I invite you to this open-ended dream, as I hope it bounces around the corners of this sanctuary and the corners of our hearts and minds as we begin to tell this chapter of the story of Amherst Presbyterian Church. And when that chapter is written, by time it is set in stone, my hope is that it will be the story not just of the way we changed the world with the money we spent, but rather about the way the world changed us. The way God changed us. The way the Holy Spirit changed us. The way we were transformed by all the friendships we haven't made just quite yet. That's the bottom line. Amen.

I don't know that we could have asked for a more exceptionally beautiful weekend. Yesterday, as if to break in the fall, Charlie and I put some good mileage on the car -- we went up to Crabtree Falls to throw rocks in the water (his idea, not mine), and to Saunders and to the Nellysford Farmers' Market, and then yesterday afternoon I had the joy of going down to Monroe to celebrate the wedding of Chris Wimer and his new bride, Jenny. It was, all in all, not a bad day to spend driving around Nelson and Amherst Counties, and I even begin to feel like I know where most of the big roads go. And it's nice to begin to feel like we have spots that we know and return to and begin to feel like home. But for me the truest sign that I have begun to know these roads is that I have begun to fill out a mental map of where in the area I can go for the cheapest gas.

You see, I really hate overpaying for gas. I mean, it's the same stuff no matter where you go, so why would I ever pay the $3.50 up near Roseland when I know it's barely $3.25 on 29 through Colleen. Okay, sure, those pump owners are charging what the market will bear, and there's no shortage of spots around here where gas stations don't have any immediate competition, so I suppose it's to be expected. But I'll make the drive; I mean, I hate overpaying for gas. If I'm putting 10 gallons in the car for 25 cents more for the gallon than I would be elsewhere, then I'm spending, well, two dollars and fifty cents that I don't have to, which, you know, now that I do the math, isn't really very much money, but there's a principle at stake here, right? That's why my father always seems to know the prices at every pump around town, and the apple didn't fall far from that particular tree. It's the principle of the thing, and it's best if you don't think too hard about the actual money you're trying to save. That's why I have this fixation, and it's hardly rational, it's just the principle of the thing. That's why I'd gladly drive all the way across Lynchburg, and probably use three or four bucks worth of gas doing it, just for the chance to save a dollar at the pump. That's why even on the highway, even driving down some interstate that I hardly even know, even when the fuel light comes on the dashboard, even then, I will drive past perfectly open gas stations simply because I don't like the looks of those prices and maybe, probably, hopefully there's something else, two or three cents cheaper, hopefully not more than ten or fifteen miles down the road.

This is not helpful behavior; one might call it borderline self-destructive, but I find it best just not to think about it too closely. It looks rational on the outside, but on the inside it's just principle, and it says a lot more about me than about the price of gasoline. But just when I begin to think that I'm alone, just when I begin to think that I am carrying some sort of unique psychological defect, or, at least that my father and I share some kind of unique genetic misprint, just at that moment we come across the parable in our text from Luke this morning, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin, and here I find very good company for the completely irrational principles that drive me up and down the highway. In fact the very bedrock of these parables are the irrational lengths we go to when principles are on the line.

By the time of our text today, Jesus is some time into his ministry, and as tends to be the case his parable starts as a response to some misguided comment. In this case, the Pharisees and scribes have noticed Jesus welcoming sinners and tax collectors into his audience, and it causes them to grumble and complain, and the text unfolds into parable. The shepherd abandons the 99 sheep to find the one who has gone astray. The woman searches high and low for the single coin that has gone missing. In both cases Jesus clearly portrays their searching, their relentlessness, as representative of how God, too, seeks and welcomes those who have themselves gone lost. You've heard that part before; it's not the surprising part. The surprising part in this text isn't that the shepherd leaves his flock, which, by the way, would expose his sizable investment to quite a bit of risk - who's to say that two more would not wander off while he was in search of the one? - and the surprising part in this text isn't that the woman lights a lamp in search of her single coin, which, by the way, is not the most obvious economic investment - it's hard to know for sure, but ten coins is not any kind of wealth and the cost of the oil in the lamp is certainly nothing to scoff at compared to the value of the coin; no, the surprising part in this text is that Jesus paints this kind of principled-yet-irrational, reasonable-yet-crazy behavior as just the sort of thing that everybody does.

Listen to the way he poses the question: which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness? Well, when you put it that way, it just sounds totally reasonable. I mean, it's what any normal shepherd would do. Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? Well, you've gotta find it. I mean, it's in the house somewhere; that kind of thing is liable to drive you a bit batty if you don't find it; so what if it takes all day? It sounds reasonable, but it's not, not really, not in the big scheme of things, not if the other sheep wander off, not with the cost of lamp oil what it is. Jesus knows perfectly well that when it comes to our stuff, our possessions, our property, when it comes to the stuff we own, try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, we act in deeply principled and deeply irrational ways. The problem, of course, is that when it comes to people, all of a sudden we get reasonable for no good reason. Why does Jesus welcome sinners and tax collectors? That's the question that got us here. And Jesus's answer is: look, I know this sounds unreasonable to you. I know it sounds unprincipled. But here's the thing: you do this all the time. You all act unreasonable all the time. You just do it with your objects. You treat your objects like people. So why do you treat your people like objects?

Eight years ago this past month Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast with destructive power few of us will ever know. Power went out throughout the region, and, at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, the backup power generators, located in the basement, were soon flooded and themselves failed. The hospital was left without electricity for what was at that point an unforeseeable amount of time. In the wake of the power failure, and with dubious options for evacuation, doctors and nurses were faced with diabolical ethical considerations: who can you save? Who can you help? And who, with prospects this grim, should simply be relieved of their suffering? It was, by all accounts, a dark time, whose events have been brought to light largely by the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink. In her new book Five Days at Memorial, she dives into this moment when the lights went out and the ethical framework we might expect went topsy-turvy. See, when the waves first crashed towards the hospital, the staff went ahead with a fairly normal evacuation plan: babies, ICU patients, those people who might not be the easiest to evacuate but certainly would be the most at risk once the hospital actually lost power. Take a moment to notice that such an evacuation protocol is by its definition unreasonable; it's un-utilitarian; it's not about saving the people with the greatest chance for survival but rather about prioritizing people according to their need.

But once the lights went out, the ethical system flipped on its head. Once the flow of evacuation slowed to a trickle, and with no obvious hope for a widespread return to normalcy, the doctors decided instead to prioritize for evacuation those patients who were the healthiest to begin with. Fink quotes one doctor as saying that this reflected "a sense among the doctors that they would not be able to save everyone." And so all of a sudden it was the healthiest among them who got priority access to evacuation. And what's more, with the lights out, the paradigm of caregiving changed completely. Without immediate hope of rescue, some doctors began to proscribe excessive quantities of morphine for terminally ill patients, or, in some cases, simply administering excessive doses to otherwise reasonably healthy patients without their consent. New Yorker blogger Amanda Schaffer picks out this detail: "A three-hundred-eighty-pound paraplegic named Emmett Everett had eaten tuna fish, crackers, and relish for breakfast. "I knew he was sick," one staff member later said, "but, um, you know, he could talk and everything." In fact, he told one of his nurses, "Cindy, don't let them leave me behind." Then a doctor allegedly ended his life - without his consent."

More than a few of the dead bodies later pulled from the hospital included abnormally high levels of both morphine and a sedative called Versed. Whether doctors set out to relieve pain or hasten what they thought to be an inevitable death is not clear, even following the legal battles that would later ensue. What's clear is that once the lights went out, the normally unreasonable, un-utilitarian system of medical ethics - the one that first evacuates those with the lowest chance of survival - it got thrown out the window, and in its absence awoke a deeply rational, deeply logical, fundamentally broken monster of a thing. The doctors knew better. We all know better. Who among you, having ten silver coins and losing one of them, would not light a lamp and sweep the house until you find it? This is the observation that Jesus makes: that in fact searching for the lost thing, however unreasonable, is just the sort of thing that we do every day. But when it's a human life on the line. When it's one of us on the line. When the lights go out, something in us breaks. We who so lovingly treat our objects like people. And then when it matters, we treat our people like objects.

Fortunately, we are not the ones with the final say. For as much as this text speaks about our own brokenness and our own sin, for as much as it speaks about our own callousness and the nighttime turns of the human heart, it says even so much more about the light by which God searches for us and seeks us out and reclaims us as his own. For as much as the shepherd and the woman with the lost coin represent a reminder of the normal irrational ethics that we carry around with us, they even more so represent the normal and irrational ethical imagination of God. For as much as Jesus is trying to help the Pharisees realize the sinfulness by which they treat sinners and outcasts as objects, he's even more so trying to remind them that God searches for them even in their sin and even when they have cast themselves out. So it's not just that we are shepherds who have forgotten how to do our normal, irrationally principled duty; it's not just that we have fled from the risk of seeking out even that one lost coin; it's that we go missing. We get lost. We wander from the flock. We roll under the couch. We wander down by the stream. We turn out the lights. And still, God seeks us out. Irrational as it may sound. Illogical as it may sound. But our God is nothing if not a principled God. Our God who has created the earth and everything within it treats his objects like people. And his people like children.

One final story. A few weeks ago, in the Atlanta suburbs, a man named Michael Brandon Hill, armed with an AK-47, snuck into the Ronald McNair Discovery Learning Academy, an elementary school just like so many others. Obviously, at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and others, we've heard this story before. Fortunately, Michael didn't go straight for the classroom. He went to the front office, fired shots at the ground, and demanded that the receptionist call 911 so that he could negotiate his demands. Her name was Antoinette Tuff, and she's the reason this story isn't like so many others. Of course, they'd all had training for this sort of thing; in fact, in accordance with her training, once she had the police on the phone, she made a sort of secret signal to her office-mates to let them know that they could secure the classrooms and get the students to safety. That's what you have to do, of course; that's why we have emergency procedures, so that we absolutely minimize the loss of human life. It's the only rational, reasonable response. But Antoinette did something even more powerful and much less rational. She talked to him. With 911 on the line, and staring down the barrel of Michael's gun, she talked to him. It started like idle conversation: she told him about herself, about the things happening in her life. But it got personal. She told him she cared for him. She told him she'd walk outside with him to surrender so the police wouldn't shoot. By time the police finally came, never themselves having spoken to the gunman, Antoinette and Michael were discussing where he would put down his weapon and where he would lie on the floor. On the 911 call, you can hear her say "It's going to be all right, sweetie ... I just want you to know I love you, though, OK? And I'm proud of you. That's a good thing that you're just giving up and don't worry about it. We all go through something in life."

The 99 sheep will be just fine. But what amazing things happen when we believe in a God who can indeed save everyone!

Well, it seems that summer has finally come to an end. Of course some of you went back to school almost a month ago, so you may think that I am way late to the party here. And somebody else out there will want to say that summer doesn't officially end for another couple of weeks, and maybe there's a heat wave still waiting for us before the fall really kicks in. But I think we have more reliable markers for the beginning of fall than back-to-school nights and weather changes. Because you and I both know that the real sign that summer has come to an end and that the fall is upon us is that today is the first week of the 2013 season of the National Football League. Kickoff is at one, people, and so I ask you that perennial question -- are you, in fact, ready for some football?

But of course, for its players, the 2013 season has been underway all summer long. The truth is that the 2013 season really began back in April and May in the annual ritual of every team's so-called "voluntary" minicamps. A voluntary minicamp is a four or five day organized workout - there's almost never any actual football contact - for veterans and rookies alike. They're not paid much for going - maybe a few hundred bucks, a stipend, but still, however unlikely it may sound, everybody goes. See, you can be invited to a voluntary minicamp with no guarantee of a roster spot, which means that for the guys looking for a way in, the voluntary minicamp really stretches the definition of voluntary. And even for veterans, it seems every year come April or May we have some made-up scandal - probably by NFL beat writers who frankly don't have anything else to do for a few months - based on some star player's refusal to come to a voluntary minicamp. Which, on the face of it, seems preposterous. Because it's supposed to be voluntary. It's right there in the name - a voluntary minicamp. But the worst kept secret in football is that there's nothing voluntary about a voluntary minicamp. If you know what's good for you, if you want any chance of making that week one roster or even just to avoid being embarrassed in the national media, then there's nothing voluntary about voluntary.

So why not just make them mandatory minicamps? As I understand it, the players' union, understandably concerned about the physical wear and tear of a long season, wants to make sure that players don't undergo any undue exposure to injury, so it insists on the language of voluntary. In some ways, for the young guys, I understand it: they're trying to establish themselves, they're trying to compete for a spot on the team, and for them a voluntary minicamp is just another name for an audition. But if you're a veteran. If you're already on the team; if you've already been paid more than we can possibly imagine, where's the motivation to get out of bed before dawn three months before preseason even begins and go to a long grueling workout? Who in their right mind is going to do that, unless voluntary doesn't really mean voluntary? So why not call a spade a spade? Why not put it in the contract? Why not put it in the rules? Otherwise they're stuck in this ridiculous paradox, where voluntary means "You don't have to. But you kinda have to." So if for no other reason than simply the integrity of the language, can't we make it mandatory?

I ask because our text today is at its heart a question about what to do when voluntary doesn't really sound so voluntary. It's right there in the language of Paul's letter to his good friend Philemon. At some point in his travels Paul has encountered a runaway slave belonging to Philemon, a slave named Onesimus, and they have become close friends. Now, we don't know what prompted Onesimus to run away in the first place, but the rather startling occasion of this letter is that Paul is sending Onesimus back to his former owner, both of them among Paul's early Christian converts, in the expectation that Philemon will live out some of his new Christian identity and receive his former slave, in Paul's words "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother." Paul's asking a difficult thing. There's some precedence in Roman society for the friend of a slaveowner to intervene for clemency on behalf of a runaway, but by no means is Philemon under any obligation to do it: by Roman law, Onesimus is his property and Philemon is free to do with his property as he sees fit.

And of course one imagines that Paul could have said, "Well, that's all well and good, but your new Christian life has some requirements." One imagines that Paul could have said "You know, you signed up for a certain kind of discipleship and we have rules, too, and one of our rules is precisely that in Christ there is neither slave nor free." One imagines that Paul might have even bothered somewhere in here to say something about the injustice of the institution of slavery in the first place, or perhaps that he could have - perish the thought - not even sent the slave back to his slave owner to begin with. I mean, that's how this story is supposed to go, right? One imagines that Paul could have said - or done - a lot of things that would make it clear that the Roman rules are wrong and the Christian rules are right and somebody, somewhere needs to play by the right rules. But instead he makes it voluntary. He wants his friend to welcome the former slave back home, and he wants him to do it ... voluntarily.

I hope you can see the problem here. At its most sympathetic reading this letter seems to confront the horrific institution of slavery with nothing more than Paul asking nicely. It seems like the cheap and easy way out. In fact in our own history this letter has been used as a justification for slavery itself; after all, if the institution were really so evil, surely Paul would have given us the kind of theological takedown that we see of other social institutions in other of his letters. I mean, that's how the world gets better, right, when we change the rules? Slavery didn't go out the door because some people got together and asked nicely. Slavery didn't go out the door because American slaveowners decided to free their own slaves out of their own spirit of volunteerism. No, we fought to change the rules. The institution itself was abolished. In its wake, all kinds of new rules and laws went into place to prevent just that kind of systematic oppression and racism: we desegregated schools; we desegregated communities; we opened up the ballot box; we made the world a better and more just place by changing the rules, not by asking nicely for volunteers.

But here's the thing. Slavery may be gone, but racism is in full effect. As a kid I went to a magnet school in the Atlanta suburbs, which means that kids were bused from all over the county as part of the city's ongoing attempt at compliance with Supreme Court rulings on school desegregation. And I'd like to tell you that my group of friends spanned the racial spectrum, but of course that wasn't true. And I'd like to tell you that the reason I had mostly white friends was because I was friends with the people on my bus and the bus was serving largely white neighborhoods, and if only we had mixed neighborhoods then of course we'd have mixed social groups, which means that it's all really about economics and if we just fixed the economic rules then the rest of this would sort itself out. But I'm not so sure. Because mostly I just remember the day that an observer came to the school and in preparation our teacher told us in no uncertain terms that we should rearrange ourselves so that all of the tables in the classroom had some diversity to them. So many of the rules had already been changed so that we would sit at table with people who didn't look like us, and still, at the end of the day, we needed one more rule to really make us look the part. It turns out that we were not so integrated after all. It turns out that desegregation was easy compared with real true integration. That changing the laws was easy compared to changing ourselves.

So when Paul asks Philemon to volunteer, it's not that Paul doesn't care about the institution of slavery or the imposition of justice. It's that in this case he has even bigger fish to fry. It's neither the cheap nor the easy way; in fact, Paul's got his target set on the human heart itself, and he knows that the heart will always play by its own rules. For the human heart to change, we have to want it. For the human heart to change, we have to rise early with no paycheck there waiting for us. For the human heart to change, Paul's got it. We have to volunteer ... which, frankly, sounds unlikely. I mean, I like sleeping in, and if the progress of peace and justice depends on the human heart deciding not to play by its own rules then I think we are in way over our heads.

But fortunately there's still a twist in this text. Because even while Paul calls on Philemon to volunteer, he also calls himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus. And there's nothing unusual about the phrase - in fact the language of duty and obligation runs throughout Paul's theology, throughout his own sense of his own call. For Paul, the power of God acts upon us in ways that we cannot ultimately resist. He surely knew that, as one who had himself been struck down, as one who had himself been made into a new creation, as one who had himself not exactly volunteered. And he would know it to be just as true for Philemon, whom God had already called into a life of Christian service and witness. And this irresistible thing, this power that imprisons and indentures and takes us captive - of course he's talking about grace, about the power of God that wraps its arms around the human heart whether or not we ask, whether or not we change, whether or not we volunteer. For Paul, this is the great paradox of the Christian life: that we live both as prisoners of God's grace and volunteers for God's justice, as captives of God's power and volunteers for God's mercy, as servants of and volunteers for God's love. The infinitely amazing truth of the Gospel is that God's grace is upon us no matter what the laws of our land and no matter what desires of our hearts. And the paradox is that that same grace will volunteer us, whether we like it or not.

The world we meet is a particularly terrifying place, nowhere more so this week than in the conflict that has engulfed the nation of Syria over the last three years. Congress is set to begin formal deliberations over whether to grant the president's request to make a military strike against President Assad's regime, supposedly as punishment for their alleged use of Sarin gas in violation of the Geneva Accords. Even if you take the allegations at face value, there are any number of reasonable lines of opposition to this request. There's no obvious criteria for success. There's no strategic roadmap. There's no international consensus. There's negligible public support. But somewhere underneath all of the most reasonable arguments is this: if Assad is really the sort of person who would use chemical weapons on his own people, then there's no real reason to suppose that he would curb his own behavior simply because we decided to enforce the rules, not to mention that we'd have to break the rules to enforce them. So this seems to be one of those occasions when it is not the rules themselves that are at stake but rather the capricious nature of the human heart that bends and wields rules to suit its own lawless desires.

But then, it is said, we have to do something. I mean, we can't just sit here while the atrocity continues and do nothing, as if military intervention were the only option available for any of us who would care about the human cost of that war. Of course there are any number of things we can do. As millions of refugees stream across Syria's borders, this country, if it wanted to, could show something much less about legalism and military prowess and much more about human decency and human empathy and we could make sure that none of those mouths go hungry and none of those bodies grow weak and none of those spirits turn empty. This country and its people have a nearly infinite capacity to work for justice and mercy and peacemaking, if we wanted to, if we wanted to do something other than pretending our only options were militarism or nothing. But if you want to know the terrifying power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it goes like this: we absolutely can just do nothing. We are prisoners of this Gospel; it has already grabbed ahold of us; it will not let us go, no matter what we do, even if we do nothing. If you really want to proclaim that it's not what we do but what God does then it is absolutely crucial that even in those moments of human history when our action is most obviously necessary that we proclaim in loud unbroken voice that in fact the living God is at work even if we do nothing.

That being said, I hope we do something. I hope we do something for the millions of refugees streaming across the Syrian border. I hope we do something for the greater vision of peace and stability. I hope we do something as witnesses to God's vision of justice that rolls down like water, both abroad and even in this community. The world works, such as it does, not just because of the rules that bind us but because we volunteer. Those of you who do rotary, and tutoring, and serve at the community meal, and contribute to the community arts, know that Amherst works, such as it does, not just because of the rules that bind us but because we volunteer. And those of you who fold bulletins and sing in the choir and help in the preschool and serve on half a dozen committees and even those of you who put the volunteer sign-up sheets at the back of the church where everybody could see them - you know that this congregation works, such as it does, not just because of the rules that bind us but because we volunteer. There's nothing voluntary about grace, but it does have a habit of volunteering us for things far beyond ourselves. So I hope we all do something, I hope we all wake up tomorrow morning and jump out of bed as volunteers for mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation. I hope we do something, and as prisoners of Christ I know we will. That's the paradox: that we don't have to do anything for God's love, and yet because of God's love, we have to do something. We have to do everything. We have to do justice. We have to love kindness. We have to walk humbly with one another.

Well, we don't have to. We're already on the team. God's already paid us more than we can possibly imagine. So no, we don't have to. But we kinda have to.

Last Saturday night an amazing thing happened out in Los Angeles. Broadway superstar and occasional television actress Kristen Chenoweth was giving a series of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, and, as the night wore on, she reached the part of her set where she would usually invite somebody from the crowd up to sing alongside her -- usually they would sing the witches' duet "For Good" from the musical Wicked, which would allow Chenoweth to sing in the role that first put her name in lights. Now, normally, this part of the show is played just a bit for laughs. Not that we're making fun of the bad singers, but part of the bit is Kristen helping them along, helping them remember the words, providing the training wheels to get them through the end of the song. It's played for laughs, and for sentiment, and nobody really expects a virtuoso performance. But last Saturday, Kristen brought up on stage a young woman, a young musician, who knocked the song out of the park. She was, in a word, amazing. Kristen was visibly wowed and impressed. The crowd went wild. Videos went viral on YouTube - (she's up close to fifty thousand hits) The next day, the singer published her whole story up on the website BroadwayWorld. It's an amazing and inspirational story. For an aspiring performer, it's the chance of a lifetime, and in its wake you can sense her trying to figure out how to chase this opportunity as far as she can, how to get from that Saturday night to some future where her own name would be the one in lights.

The singer's name was Kellie McKay, and her story has only one problem, which is that on the night before, on Friday night, the same exact thing had happened to somebody else. On the night before, Kristen Chenoweth had picked another aspiring young singer from the crowd to come and sing the duet, and she, too, just about stopped Kristen in her tracks. She, too, brought down the house. Her video also went viral, but it's now up close to three million hits. She, too, got to write all about it for BroadwayWorld, but her testimony is now being quoted in national news. Two weeks ago she was a voice teacher at a small college; now, she's been rebooked for her next gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Her name is Sarah Horn, and it's about to be in lights. And her performance was legitimately amazing. If the video didn't cross your path this week, go and seek it out. What's most amazing about it is not just her vocal talent but the fact that she gives everything to it, without warning, without warming up, without so much as a glance at the lyrics. It's is totally inspirational. That being said, Kellie"s performance is nothing to sneer at. She, too, is brilliant at what she does, and I submit that the primary reason that there is not currently a campaign to put her name in lights is that we just can't quite handle having two of the same viral news story happening at the same time. As I have watched Sarah's video this week, more than a few times, I have thought more than once about Kellie, and how hard it must be to watch someone else take the parking spot for your dream right before you get there. As much as we might like to claim otherwise, it's not hard to imagine a future in which Sarah Horn's name is very much in lights, and Kellie not so easily found.

We'll come back to Sarah and Kellie, but I begin with their twin story because our text for this morning is very much about the value of having our own names in lights. We have drawn to the last major story of these opening chapters of Genesis, the story of the tower of Babel. Like so many of the stories we've encountered this summer, the Babel story is its own kind of origin story, this time we find Israel attempting to understand the spread and diversity of human languages. But the proliferation of language in this story is God's reaction to a human project - the building of the tower - that on its face has no obvious connection to language. Rather, the central moral arc of this story is really about success, and accomplishment, and getting our own name up in lights.

We finds all of humanity wandering, migrating through some unnamed land, much of course the same as Israel will wander through the wilderness on its way out of Egypt. And the scariest part about being in the wilderness isn't starvation or violence but rather that Israel would lose its own sense of identity, that without a city of their own or a land of their own or someplace they could call home, that the people of Israel would just kind of dissolve; slowly, over the generations, they'd become indistinguishable from so many of their ancient neighbors. It's not hard to imagine them wandering through that wilderness and gazing with some longing and some jealousy at the cities that were not theirs to live in, at the great fortifications that were not theirs to defend, and the great towers that were not theirs to boast upon. It's not hard to imagine the anxious envy borne of some desperate hope of preserving the name of Israel even with so little to show for the work of their hands. And so they would tell this story: of that prehistoric moment when all humanity, wandering through the same kind of wilderness, conspired to make their presence known: "Come, let us build ourselves a city," they said, "and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves."

It's easy to sympathize. For Israel, making a name for themselves, getting their name in lights, isn't about ego: it's about survival. It's an indictment of the political and military realities of the day, that without a city and without a tower, their survival and their name would stand on the brink of extinction. But in some ways I think our modern quest to make a name for ourselves is borne from such similar anxiety. After all, having lived this dream moment onstage with her musical idol, Sarah Horn's task, according to the unwritten rules of American celebrity and American success, Sarah's job now is to take this chance encounter and leverage it for all it is worth: she's newly on Facebook; she's newly on Twitter; having so beautifully risen to the occasion last Friday, she's now putting that same reckless abandon to the service of her own dreams. She's putting herself out there, encouraging friends and family to write-in her name for an appearance on Ellen; for someone who claimed to be a bit afraid of the spotlight, she's now working it for all it's worth. And I mean no personal criticism: in the age of reality media, this is I think how the American Dream works, that we wander through this wilderness and we look around at our neighbor's house and our neighbor's city and our neighbor's tower and try to figure out what it's going to take for us to secure our place and make a name for ourselves.

There's a business consultant and speaker named Scott Ginsberg, whose claim to fame and rise to fame stems largely from the fact that for upwards of the last four thousand days he's been wearing a name tag. Now I imagine that this would cause any number of logistical difficulties. I mean, I can barely wear a name tag for the better part of an afternoon before it begins to lose its stickiness or it just falls off entirely, and I'm not even trying to wear one while I sleep or in the shower. Apparently, and I'm taking this right from his website, apparently he actually has one tattooed on his chest for "special occasions." And surely there is something to be said for having that name tag at all times, for the hospitality that we create when everybody already knows our name without straining to remember. But it's worth noting that part of his strategy is precisely about branding and marketing his own name. His whole sales pitch is about helping you brand and market you, to help you become "the living brochure of your own awesomeness." That's the whole point; he says "if you don't make a name for yourself, someone will make one for you. And if might not be the one you want."

But surely it's more than just that. Surely it's not just that we will have the wrong name, but rather that in the great wilderness of modern life that our names will be forgotten entirely, that we'll disappear between the cracks, that we'll vanish upon the wind, that neither time nor history will ever particularly notice that we were here. So the hunt is on: for a new job, a new title, a new car, a new house, a bigger house, a fancy kitchen, all of the trappings of wealth and success. Conventional wisdom says we love this stuff because it shows our success off to the world. But I think we love it because we hope it will show off our value to ourselves, because we think it will quell that voice inside us that says "You're a small fish in a pretty big pond; you're lost in a pretty big wilderness; how can you ever hope to find your way? Why would you be worth anything more?" So when fate gives you a moment. So when chance puts you on stage with fame and glory you take that moment by the horns. You go all in. Because it's a tough, unforgiving wilderness out there, and, you either get your name in lights, or it's lights out.

The problem, of course, is that the game is fundamentally broken. How often are we just a day late for circumstances entirely beyond our control - just ask Kellie. But more than that: the game is fundamentally broken, because it never quite provides the sense of safety and security, it never quite provides the sense of value that we so desperately want. It's easy enough to wander through the American wilderness and look at our neighbor's city and look at our neighbor's tower and imagine that if only we had one of those, we would fill some hole inside ourselves, that we would discover some as-of-yet-unseen value inside ourselves, that our lives would mean something more.

But it seems to me that that hole inside us - that black hole inside us - cannot be filled by anything we do for ourselves. It just devours everything we put in its path. That new job title disappears. That new house or new car won't even make a mark. There's always going to be a better job, and there's always going to be a bigger house, and there's always going to be, and there's always going to be, and there's always going to be that hole. That's what this story is about: it's Israel reckoning with the fundamentally flawed project of humanity trying to plug that hole, trying to value itself, trying to give itself worth, trying to name itself. Because you know that even if they had finished the tower, even a tower that scratched the heavens themselves, they would look across the plain and see one even bigger. One with a two-car garage. One with a nice gas range. One with a walk-in closet. And it would never be enough to give them the value they so desperately needed. And it would never be enough to give them the name they so desperately craved.

But here's the thing. They've already been named. They've already been named. In the opening lines of Genesis 5, one of the less-remembered corners of these early chapters, the writer retells the creation story, saying that "When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God ... and he blessed them and named them 'Humankind.'" Long before humanity embarks on the construction of the Babel tower - even before the cataclysm of the flood and God's promise to Noah - humanity has already been named, has already been claimed, has already been owned, has already had its value written upon it by God our creator. The flaw in the design of the tower of Babel isn't just that it can't fill the hole inside the human heart; it's that that hole has already been claimed and loved and owned and, yes, named.

Nor is this some passing Biblical moment; in our New Testament reading this morning, in the closing verses of Revelation, in John's vision of the city of God, he sees that "nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads." Tattooed, if you like, in case we forget. Because we forget. Because the names we give ourselves lose their stickiness; they come off in the wash; they don't even last the afternoon. But the promise of the Gospel is that God's name is upon us even before we can begin to speak our own. That God's name is upon us through every moment of our wandering, through every envious and jealous thought, through every fearful and anxious and sleepless night, through every broken dream and misled ambition and deepest despair, even into the depths of the black hole inside ourselves, God's name is written upon our hearts, and it will be there even unto the end.

Many of you know that for years I was a member at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, a church that has a longtime relationship with the University of Virginia. Every Sunday, especially during the academic year, especially starting right about now, the left transept of the church is largely overrun with undergraduates. But of course once the fall starts to wind down and exams start to kick into gear the Sunday morning attendance drops off just a bit; students are forced into long hours at the library and it's understandably harder to carve out time for Sunday morning. So just before exams would kick into gear, the pastor there would always take a moment in worship to turn to the students directly and say this: "I know exams are coming, but remember this: your worth is not measured by grades or report cards or transcripts, but by the grace of God, which is from everlasting to everlasting."

Now, I was never an undergraduate at UVa; those words were never quite meant for me, but I still needed to hear them. I think we all need to hear them from time to time, because the world offers us so many opportunities to define ourselves, to be measured for our own worth, to be examined for our own value, to make names for ourselves. But from the first moments of creation, and again in the waters of baptism, and even unto the ends of the earth, we have already been named. We have already been loved. And our value is tattooed on our foreheads, as it has been since the dawn of time, and will be even into the eternal city of God. So today I say unto all of you: "I know exams are coming, but remember this: your worth is not measured by grades or report cards or transcripts, or by performance reviews or tax returns or any of the unwritten trials of modern life, but by the grace of God, which is from everlasting to everlasting." Amen.

This is a very odd little story. I bet when your kids ask you to tell them the Noah story, this is not the one they have in mind. I hope you realize that before you're halfway through the telling and they have to interrupt to ask you what it means that Mr. Noah is drunk in his tent. It's hard to get past that part, even to the bit where his son Ham looks in the tent and sees his father lying there and goes and tells everybody about his dad's embarrassment and then gets cursed and sent away, and if you can't get past the part about the drunken stupor Ham looks very much like a victim of his father's shame. So before we go any further, the problem with that interpretation is that in the context of the Old Testament it simply doesn't work. Israel has any number of prohibitions, but alcohol isn't one of them. Israel has any number of moral standards, but sobriety isn't one of them. Especially because he planted the first vineyard in creation and could hardly be held responsible for being the first to feel its effects, by Israel's moral standards, and regardless of our moral standards, Noah hasn't done anything wrong. Don't hear me incorrectly. I'm not making a case for the drunken stupor. I'm just hoping that we can figure out how to get past it. Because if Noah hasn't done anything wrong, then Ham isn't really the victim, and the curse he receives for telling everybody about his father's embarrassment isn't the product of Noah's drunken rage. Instead it's Ham's behavior that becomes the immoral act at the center of this story: that by gazing into his father's tent and publicizing his father's intimate embarrassment, that Ham breaks a moral code not about intoxication but rather about dignity, and, more importantly, privacy.

Noah's in his own tent. So if you can get past the drunken stupor, it's privacy that beats at the heart of this text. And all of a sudden a very odd little story finds a surprisingly modern rhythm. Listen again: a man named Noah has three sons. One Thanksgiving holiday, his youngest son is home from college, and checking email on his parent's computer. When he points the browser to Gmail, it automatically logs on to his father's account, at which point he sees a message from one of his dad's friends with the subject line, "How's the hangover?" Unable to resist, he clicks on it. There are a couple of funny pictures attached from some cocktail party a few weeks back -- okay, funny, and maybe a little embarrassing. But they're too good to pass up, and five minutes later the son puts them up on Facebook. "Check out Dad living the high life! Can you believe this is the same guy who raised us," at which point he tags his two older brothers. And pretty soon it gets around. You know, the family shares some mutual Facebook friends. And the next time dad logs on, he realizes just what has become of what he thought was a private moment. Not hard to figure out what happened. He had no reason to think that those pictures -- from a private gathering, shared in private emails, would ever show up on the Facebook timeline of family members and coworkers and colleagues. He's embarrassed, and angry, and maybe the son's not going to be so welcome home come Christmas. So who's the victim in the story?

Here's another one. In the mid-1960's a man named Charles Katz was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with being the middleman for an interstate gambling ring. The local branch of the FBI had gotten wind of his activities, and particularly noticed that he tended to do his business from one of a stand of three pay phones at a regular time every day. And so they had proceeded to attach wiretapping devices to the outside of the booths. For a week in February of 1965, Katz's every phone call from this public phone booth was recorded, without his knowledge or a warrant being served against him. After his arrest, while nobody would go to bat for Katz on moral grounds, his defense took up the case on the grounds of his privacy: notably, that even though he had made his calls from a windowed telephone booth in a public space, that nonetheless upon entering the booth Katz had a "reasonable expectation of privacy," and therefore that the warrantless wiretap violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. Eventually, the Supreme Court agreed, and the standard of "reasonable expectation of privacy" became the law of the land.

But times have changed. And in an age of Facebook and Gmail, and in an age of counter-terrorism and homeland security, it is very difficult to know what degree of privacy any of us should reasonably expect. Consider the following from a 1983 article in The New York Times: "It is necessary to recall once again how the computers that power the N.S.A. are also gradually changing lives of Americans - the way they bank, obtain benefits from the Government and communicate with family and friends. Every day, in almost every area of culture and commerce, systems and procedures are being adopted by private companies and organizations as well as by the nation's security leaders that make it easier for the N.S.A. to dominate American society should it ever decide such action is necessary."

1983.

And yet something has been so shockingly revolting about the series of revelations over the past several months of the degree to which the American government is literally engaged in unwarranted digital surveillance. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple. Major email providers. Major search providers. Cell phone records, GPS records. I don't think anyone in the general public is yet in a position to exhaustively detail all the mechanisms of this surveillance. But what is clear is that the standard reasonable expectation of privacy has not survived long into the new digital age.

I hear two justifications for the surveillance state in which we find ourselves. The first is that if you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't have anything to worry about, which is akin to saying that Noah simply shouldn't have been drunk in the first place. And I don't think for a moment that Genesis 9 is or should be normative for our constitutional principles, but I do think that we who claim to be people of this book have some obligation to hold its values up against the practices we tactically embrace, which is why for prospective readers of this story it's so important to realize that the text doesn't judge Noah for his drunkenness. Rather it argues that in the confines of his own tent, regardless of his behavior, Noah has a reasonable expectation of privacy that his son completely subverts. Of course if there had been some risk of harm, if we had suspicion that Noah was a threat to himself or others, then he would have to alter his expectation; that's why we have warrants and why we have due process. But if the justification for surveillance quite in excess of due process is that you shouldn't worry if you're not doing anything wrong, then it should matter very much to us that Noah's not doing anything wrong and still the text treats him like the victim of a terrible injustice.

The second justification is that privacy advocates (like myself) are living in a kind of political fantasy and not taking into account the geopolitical and jurisprudential realities of the world. The argument is that terrorist threats are real and cybersecurity threats are real and that this new frontier of privacy erosion is simply a pragmatic necessity of modern life; those who would cling to outmoded definitions of privacy and due process are trying to live in Shangri-La, but that this isn't an ideal world and some consolations have to be made. But again I find our Biblical values very much in conflict with this line of reasoning. Noah's nakedness is treated as a cause for shame and embarrassment: Ham obviously thinks so, or it wouldn't be news, and Noah obviously think so, or he wouldn't lay his curse upon his son. But it was only pages ago that Adam and Eve found themselves naked in the garden without embarrassment. In fact the story clearly says that only upon eating the fruit did they realize their nakedness and feel shame. In Eden, before the fruit, before the fall, before those first steps into the brokenness of the real world, Adam and Eve had no understanding of privacy, nor would they have placed any value in it. But in the real world, in the Biblical real world of Noah and his sons, privacy matters, not in defiance of the realities of the world but precisely because of them.

Of course, for us who are people of this book there is yet another wrinkle, which is that we might value this privacy while still worshipping a God who has searched us and known us and sees our thoughts from far away. It seems the definition of ironic, if not the definition of idiotic, to get up on our high horse about privacy while claiming a God who respects nothing of our personal space and even imploring for that same God to walk with us and journey with us and stay by our side. But nonetheless even Jesus places this value on privacy. In our Gospel text for today, his concern is that the practice of public prayer may turn his followers into exhibitionists, more concerned with how they seem to the outside world and less interested in honest conversation with their creator. And so he implores them, when they pray, to go into a room by themselves - as he does, in the garden, on the night of his arrest - so that in private their prayers might be genuine and their hearts fully open to God. So here's the paradox at the center of the text: that as people of this book, privacy doesn't mean we have something to hide; it means rather that we want to be completely open -- to God, who has searched us from the beginning. And privacy doesn't mean that we don't want to be known. Quite to the contrary: it means that we want to reserve the power of knowing and looking and seeing from far away for the one in whose hands that power truly belongs, wherein it can truly work for the good of all of creation.

All of which means that when we debate the reasonable expectation of privacy, we're not just having a legal or even moral argument. No, the argument we are having is also fundamentally theological, because at its heart it's about whether God's power of absolute knowing and looking and seeing is possible for human hands to safely wield, or whether in fact the sinful reality of the world -- which, for Jesus, has corrupted the possibility of honest, public prayer -- does not also corrupt those who would look everywhere and see everyone and know everything, even with the least of intentions, even with the best of intentions, even for the best of causes. It's a theological argument because for those of us who claim to be people of this book, to believe in the power and importance of privacy is to recognize with thanksgiving that none of us get to play God. That only God gets to play God. That when we worship at the idol of surveillance -- and do not be confused that it is anything other than precisely that -- we worship an impossible fantasy in which the total understanding of the universe is both possible and well shepherded in our hands. Well shepherded in our sinful, broken, bloody, violent, selfish hands. History says otherwise. Humility says otherwise. This text very much says otherwise. The old quote says that knowledge is power. But power corrupts. And so the power of absolute knowledge must corrupt, absolutely.

At the beginning of the 2009 academic year, the Lower Marion School District in suburban Philadelphia launched a program in which it provided an Apple Macbook computer for each of its two thousand plus high school students for both classroom and at-home use. Understandably concerned with safeguarding its investment, the school district had installed on each Macbook a piece of anti-theft software, designed to help the school monitor and locate the laptop in case it was stolen. Now, good anti-theft software is intentionally invisible to the common user, so that the casual thief can't just notice it and remove it the first time he turns the thing on. But in this case it meant the school district had distributed two thousand laptops with hidden software capable not only of tracking the computer's location but also of using its built-in camera to take photos which could be sent back to school officials without the user ever knowing. Technically, if you're building anti-theft software, you want just this kind of power. You could photograph the thief and send it right to the police. But in the hands of the administration it went terribly wrong. Soon enough, the school was using this power to subvert the privacy that its unconsenting students and their unconsenting parents would reasonably have expected. When it all came to court, photographs stored on school computers showed students in their rooms at home in various states of undress. At one point officials effectively investigated a student for recreational drug use without consulting police or any other legal authority. Many, many more images were deleted off of the school servers just as the news broke to the public, so we have no way of knowing if these were the worst of the infractions or just the tip of the iceberg.

Much to our national credit, the activities of the Lower Marion School System were a violation not only of the Fourth Amendment but also of any number of electronics communications laws. In court, the student victims won some form of justice for themselves and for their families. But, with nothing but respect and awe for the torture they must have endured, I wonder if they are really the only victims in this story. I feel confident that the administration of that high school did not en masse decide to begin a student laptop program so that they could spy on teenagers in the presumed privacy of their own rooms. They're teachers; they're not mysterious bureaucrats at shadowy government agencies. Very few of us set out for that kind of moral wrongdoing. But once the power was in their hands. Once they could look and see and know. Once you have that kind of control, it's very hard to put that machine down. It's very hard to turn that camera off. It's very hard to walk away. We are not most of us so noble; you may as well ask us to tear out our own instinct and leave it there on the table. No, in this story I think everyone's the victim, the victim of our own very human lust for power and control. Which means the importance of privacy isn't just about protecting people who haven't done anything wrong. It's also about protecting those people on the other side of the camera, those in whose hands we now regularly place a power of knowing unprecedented in human history, people who are neither better nor worse nor more or less beloved by God than those whose faces we greet every morning in the mirror. For their sake, and for ours, the expectation of privacy is more than reasonable; in fact its one of the few things that can help us all remember who we are, and, more to the point, who we are not: only God gets to play God. In an ideal world, of course, we wouldn't need privacy. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to deal with the kind of violent thirst for power that has dogged us from the beginning. But this isn't an ideal world. Some consolations have to be made.

I have to admit to you that I have been nervous about this week. From the start of the summer, from the start of this journey through the opening chapters of Genesis, this has been the week circled in proverbial red on my calendar -- not, as you might imagine, Genesis 1, with its politically-charged relationship to evolutionary science; or, as you might also have considered, the murky waters of gender and sexuality that bubble up around the edges of the Adam and Eve story. No, from the beginning, it has been Noah that has been on my mind, really I think for three reasons. First, while the story of the flood and the arc is easy enough to paraphrase for Sunday School classrooms all over creation, from a Biblical point of view, it's a long, repetitive story without any obvious section breaks, which means that it poses its own kind of logistical challenge for its would-be preachers -- hence the somewhat piecemeal nature of our reading this morning. Second, again, while the Noah story does find its way into Sunday School classrooms all over creation, from a theological point of view, as God sends the water to destroy so much of his own creation, this is really a very difficult text to hear even for the most mature among us. Even if the would-be preacher can figure out how to read the story, it's not entirely clear that any of us should want to.

All of which would have sufficed to keep me on my toes this week, but I have to admit that for me there is a third and more personal reason for my hesitation, because I could read this story every hour on the hour, every week of the year for the better part of my days and still not know as much about flood water as those of you who have long called Amherst and Nelson your home. It's a couple of generations behind us now, but not so far back, forty-four years ago this week that Hurricane Camille, having flattened the Mississippi coastline and wound its way up towards Appalachia, scratched against the peaks of the blue ridge and brought upon this land a surge of rainfall whose equal none of us have yet to witness, twenty-seven measured inches, probably more in areas where it could not be counted -- according to the National Weather Service, "the probable maximum rainfall which meteorologists compute to be theoretically possible." Flooding and avalanche followed, and the body count, especially in rural areas, reached into the hundreds. Literally, I can only imagine the terror of it. So who am I to preach about the floods? Not when the story of Camille belongs so powerfully to some of you gathered here this morning, and I just read about it on Wikipedia.

Well, not just Wikipedia. Actually just north of where we live in Lovingston, right alongside Route 29, is one of those Virginia highway historical marker signs, specifically about the tragedy of Camille. It talks about the deluge and the loss of life that flooded the town where we currently live and put so many smaller communities completely underwater. But as tragic an event as it commemorates, I like that sign. On a beautiful summer morning it can be somewhat jarring to drive past it and think of the terror that once lay claim to that very spot, especially when the memory isn't mine, especially when the memory really belongs to a generation gone before. And I think of the thousands of people who have driven past that sign, the millions more yet to do so, that in generations yet to come, when all of us are gone and no one lives who bears the real memory of that tragedy, when Camille stops being a part of our living memory and starts being a footnote in the meteorological record, when the towns have forgotten and the hills have forgotten and the trees have forgotten and even the people have forgotten, that the sign still remembers. It says something about who we are, about what this place is, even to those of us who have no physical connection to the event itself. I like that sign. It testifies against the natural forgetfulness of time.

Israel, too, knows something about tragedy and time and memory. We are now ten generations into the family tree of Genesis, long enough for the story of the expulsion from the Garden to fade into myth. Soon enough the flood waters, too, will fade away, and the family that emerges from that arc will have nothing but themselves with which to remember the world they once knew. Generations later, the brutal reality of Egyptian slavery will once again threaten Israel's very existence, and with it the story of who they are and where they came from - in fact even scripture gives us no proper account of how the family of Abraham winds its way into the hands of Pharaoh. And centuries later, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, with Israel's very identity again threatened by life in exile and life in the Babylonian cosmopolis, or even later still, after they return from exile only to find themselves living again as a conquered people, Israel will time and time again face the kind of tragedies that threaten not just the people of Israel or Israel as a political entity but rather even the entire history of Israel, the entire memory of who they are and where they have been and who they have been.

And in the face of every tragedy, in the bondage of slavery and in the grip of wilderness and in the throes of exile, in every generation and for every generation, Israel tells this story, the story of Noah. This summer we've had so many stories that feel like origin stories for something or another, for creation or for human sinfulness or for human violence, but the Noah story is something different. It's not really a very good Sunday school story; it's not really about the animals; it doesn't really explain why there aren't unicorns. But it is about tragedy and loss and survival. It asks where God is in the waters. It asks where God is in the tragedy. When Israel tells this story they ask those same questions, but even more: when Israel tells this story, they're asking whether their very identity can survive against the flood waters that surround them. The poet says that the ocean has no memory. I think this is the terror at the heart of this story: that the waters of slavery or exile or persecution or destruction will not only destroy the people of Israel, but even its memory.

I think we get this, and not because of flood waters that rose nearly half a century ago but rather because of the flood waters that are rising around us day by day. They are not the waters of exile or persecution, but for those of us gathered in this Presbyterian body, for those of us who trace our religious heritage back generations upon generations, those of us who are even newly gathered into a body whose memories span back across the centuries, the flood waters of church decline, of denominational decay are beginning to trickle under our doorframe and leak into our basement. The diagnoses are all over the place: depending on who you ask the Presbyterian Church is either dying from the natural cause of an increasingly secularized culture or from the self-inflicted wound of its own theological convictions. It's either become so liberal that it has lost touch with its own theological and scriptural heritage or it's so conservatively stuck in the past that it can't adopt to a changing world; we can't agree on a diagnosis, but we can agree that the waters are rising, and quickly. And we ask what we can do to survive. And we ask what we can do to keep our story alive. And we ask what we can do to be remembered.

Well, we can build an arc. Churches love to build arcs. My wife serves as the assistant rector at a large church outside Charlottesville, and they have a fabulous playground that includes a luxurious, wooden, probably handmade, absolutely beautiful arc playset. There's a long ramp that the kids can use to walk up into the arc, and they can walk around the bow and through the cabin and play in all its nooks and crannies. The kids love it; the parents love it. It's a siren song for that most coveted of all church demographics, the young family, and of course it is the object of envy of any visiting pastor who can only marvel at its likely price tag, and as for me I only wonder whether it will be enough for that congregation to survive the flood waters of our times. Churches love to build arcs. Think of all the things we could preserve in an arc -- if the foundation doesn't crack, and if we shore up the ceiling where it leaks, and if we double-check all of the window seals. In some ways I wish this morning we were having our scheduled outdoor worship, but perhaps it's even more appropriate here, where we can hear the sound of the raindrops on the rooftop and I can show you the walls and the ceiling and the floor ask you if you think they will hold off the water as the flood comes in, if you think that this building and that this sanctuary will preserve the memories of the faithful life of this congregation even as the world changes and changes and changes. Even inside this sanctuary, we are totally exposed, and the tradition we carry with us and the way of life we carry with us is very much under threat by the waters of a changing world. No wonder churches love to build arcs.

But here's the thing. The arc doesn't save Noah. I mean, it managed the waters for one hundred fifty days, so I suppose you wouldn't find cracks along the prow. In fact I suspect you could give that arc a completely thorough examination and you wouldn't find the first problem with its craftsmanship. But the arc doesn't save Noah. No, the desolation of the flood is merciless. The text spends eight solid verses elaborating on the theme; by time the story finishes killing off the birds of the air and the flesh of the land and all the domestic animals and wild animals and swarming creatures and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera one could almost forget about Noah and his arc. In fact that was always the threat, that Noah and his family and his story and Israel's story and all of their stories and all of their traditions and their whole way of life would vanish somewhere into the ocean that has no memory, that God in the midst of his destruction, in the midst of the frenzied wrath he sends against creation, that God would forget his promise. But then God remembers. That's what it says: "God remembered Noah and all ... that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided." It's not the arc that saves Noah. And it's not the arc that saves the memory of everything that went before. It's God who saves. And it's God who remembers. The ocean may have no memory. The waters may seek to wash everything away. But nonetheless. God remembers.

In the face of the destruction and loss, in the face of losing their very identity itself, Israel tells this story, a reminder that even if they themselves forget, even if the waters threaten to wash even the memory of who they were off of the face of the deep, God remembers. But what's more, God's memory is the ground of great promise. After the waters recede, and after Noah and his family set their feet on dry land, and after God hangs the rainbow in the sky, the promise he makes is couched in the language of memory: "When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." God says, "I will see it and remember the covenant." For all of its talk of the past, for all of the talk of not letting its memory slip away, at its heart this text is profoundly about the future, about a future in which the people of Israel, the children of this covenant, the children of God, have no cause to fear the water because God remembers, and nothing held safe in the memory of God can ever truly be destroyed. For all of its talk about destruction and desolation, for all its talk about the ravaging of all things, at its heart this text is profoundly rather about hope, about hope grounded in God's remembering of all God's children, of Noah and his wife and his sons and daughters, of all the sons and daughters of Israel, and even for us, for all our sons and daughters, for our next generation and the generations yet to come, for all of us bound by a covenant whose memory lives not in our hearts or by the work of our hands but vouchsafe in the power and grace of God who loves us even unto the ends of the earth.

So we stand here exposed. Even in the belly of our own best-constructed arc, we stand here exposed. Truth be told, despite our best efforts, it will be no match against the storm. The world is changing quickly, and the religious landscape is no exception, and as much as I want to stand here with a vision of the concrete foundation and the waterproof siding and the rigid, weather-worn building that the next generation will inherit, truth be told, it may rather look like something we cannot possibly conceive of. When the waters fade from view, it may look like a whole new world. I cannot promise that this church or any church can easily survive the flood. But God's church, God's covenant, the story of God's children, the story of who we are does not die. The story of who we are, children of that covenant, children of grace, children of God's love, the story of who we are, regardless of how dutifully we carry it forward, regardless of how comfortably it sits upon our lips, regardless of how well we plant it into the soil for generations to come, the story of who we are does not die, no, the story of who we are survives and thrives and echoes to the full contours of the future of creation, because come what may, God will remember.

A very close friend sends her children to bed each night with the invitation to remember who they are and whose they are. I love that line. Remember who you are and whose you are. I hope that as they hold that line in their memory, that it keeps out the flood. But I also know that it's only half the story. Because even if they forget, no mater what, God will remember. God will remember their story, as it is our story, as it is Israel's story, as it is the story of all of the children of God back to the first sign of the first covenant of promise, back to the rainbow that hung in the sky as testimony against the natural forgetfulness of time. It is a story built upon the foundation of God's grace. It is a story sealed by the power of God's mercy. It is a story covered by the richness of God's love. And it is a story bound for a promised land where the milk and honey flow and the water stays at bay.

Amen.

The numbers are inconceivable. Nine hundred and thirty years old. Nine hundred and twelve years old. Nine hundred and sixty-nine years old. Our Genesis text this morning may not be the most exciting text in scripture, but it is in some ways the most unbelievable. You will not remember the names of all the characters; I definitely don't remember the names of all the characters, but you will remember this one thing about them, that everyone in this seam between the stories we've already told - of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and the stories we are about to tell - about Noah and his family - that everybody in this seam lives a very, very, very long time. The numbers are inconceivable. Eight hundred and ninety-five years old. He's one of the young ones.

I admit that I haven't myself done the math, but I have it on good authority that if you try to put all of these generations on a timeline they all end up overlapping. When you have kids so young -- Adam was only one hundred and thirty when he became a father, you know -- you have a chance to see your son become a father in his own right. And a grandfather. And a great-grandfather. And so on and so on -- by my count, by the end of this text, we've got ten generations of fathers and firstborn sons and unmentioned wives and sisters and brothers all living together, no human being in scripture yet having suffered a natural death, each of them in the fullness of their days reaching out towards eternity. What joy in watching a family grow and grow and never enter the shadow of death and loss! No less a theologian than Martin Luther observes of this text that:

It was really a golden age, in comparison with which our own can scarcely be called filth, for nine patriarchs lived at the same time with all their descendants... This is the greatest glory of the first world, that in it at one time were people who were so much more pious, wise, and holy. For we ought not to think that they were simple, ordinary people; on the other hand, they were the greatest heroes.

Is this in fact what we have in front of us today, a kind of nostalgic history of the age of giants? Of a time when, unencumbered by the spectre of natural decay, the original children of Adam could and did do anything and everything? Put differently: how would you like to live long enough to meet your own great-great-great-grandchildren? And I don't mean hanging on at the end of your days as the clock ticks by -- I mean years, decades, centuries of life and vigor, something only at the furthest outreach of our own imagination? Unbothered by the shadow of death, would you also become one of the greatest heroes? How would you like to live nigh unto forever? Well, I can't quite promise you that. But here's the thing: thanks to modern science, and thanks to the modern scientific imagination, it's a bit closer than we think.

The cover of the most recent issue of National Geographic has a picture of a baby with the caption "This baby will live to be 120," which, still a far cry from nine hundred, is something of a marvel in the scientific history of human evolution. The average American lifespan has increased about three decades over the last century thanks to advances in healthcare and sanitation and diet. But the National Geographic story pushes rather into the future. The story traces current scientific research into the genetics of certain human populations that for whatever reason are more prone to long life or to immunity from some major diseases -- the argument being that our genes themselves carry the secret to radically extending our own natural lives, that maybe the legacy of that age of giants is written not only in the words of Genesis 5 but also in the nucleotide sequence of our own DNA. All of which is but one train of thought in the vast pool of research being done to slow and even eliminate the progress of time upon the human body, even to the point where scientists are seriously questioning the inevitability of death itself : so I ask you again: how would like to live long enough to meet your own great-great-great-grandchildren? It sounds like a crazy question, but maybe it's not as crazy as it once was -- and with it come all sorts of moral and ethical and theological questions that we are just now beginning to ask ourselves.

In the last decade, a futurist named Nick Bostrom published an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics that has come to have a defining place in the conversation about the ethics of our own fight against age and death. His article is really a fable, "The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant." In it, Bostrom imagines the planet plagued by a terrible dragon who every evening demands a tribute of ten thousand human beings. Unable to mount any kind of resistance against the dragon, for centuries the planet simply accepts the terms, and every evening the losses mount. But as technology advances, gradually and gradually the idea begins to circulate that perhaps humanity could in fact attack the dragon head-on. But still, debate rages, hamstrung by doubt and by the massive economy that has emerged to support those who deal with the daily grief of loss. Finally, humanity strikes, killing the dragon and ending the curse. But the cost of inaction and delay has been thousands if not millions of lives.

If you missed it, here's the metaphor: the dragon tyrant is death. And for most of the planet's history, we have been powerless against so great a foe. But Bostrom believes that we are entering into an era in which science can put death itself squarely in its crosshairs, where through the magic of genetic excavation or nanotechnology or something I else I don't entirely understand, that we will be able to forestall death itself and thus save literally thousands upon millions of lives, if only we can emerge from our own ethical quandaries and moral suspicions and scientific doubts. Bostrom means to argue that, if death is properly conquerable, that doing so is not just a scientific curiosity; it's a moral imperative. It's an ethical imperative, because of the lives that are lost day by day as we bide our time.

It's hard to imagine the implications of a world literally cured of the sting of death. And yet I think part of the significance of this Genesis genealogy is that it allows Israel to imagine the ramifications of just such a world. Adam lives longer than Israel can imagine; his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons live longer than anyone in Israel can imagine. And if Luther is right then surely the effect of this longevity is beautiful and bounteous and yet I think the text offers us good reason to be suspicious. For nine generations the pattern continues almost identically, but in the final stanza, centuries after the original curse laid upon Adam and Eve at their departure from the garden, Lamech announces over the birth of Noah, that now this one "shall bring us relief from our work and the toil of our hands." Lamech's prayer isn't thanksgiving for the bounty of family and longevity; it's a prayer of hope for deliverance from a long age of restless labor and servitude. Noah himself, of course, will harken in an age of death on an unprecedented scale, such that Lamech's original invocation seems not to thank God for long life but rather beg for the deliverance of death.

As if to reinforce this interpretation, the text singles out Enoch, the only one of Adam's offspring who quote "walked with God," and gives him a much shorter span of days, only three hundred and sixty-five years. The difference is drastic, and the reason is critical. The Old Testament is littered with figures who notably either walked or didn't walk with God, very often judges and kings whose relationship with God was often seen as a reason for the overall success or failure of their rule. Which is to say that walking with God wasn't just a question of personal faith; it was its own kind of moral or ethical imperative, because it affected the whole city or the whole kingdom or the whole nation. For this phrase to wind its way back into the prehistory of Genesis 5 suggests that Israel was thinking about Enoch's relatively short life as a kind of social good. There's no tragedy here. There's no dragon. There's no moral failure. Rather, Israel realizes that death is not only part of our own natural biological cycle but in fact necessary so that our families and our communities and our nations and our species can survive and grow and adopt and change, that death, even death that stings closest to home, can have purpose and value beyond our imagination. I think Israel would agree with Bostrom that the question of death is very much an ethical question, a question that affects us not just as individuals but in our bonds of social obligation. But they would disagree entirely about the answer.

This past week, the quest for immortality has been somewhat differently in the news in the hands of a particularly notorious anti-aging laboratory in Miami called Biogenesis. Thanks to the testimony of a former employee, thirteen Major League Baseball players this past week were suspended from the game, accused of using performance enhancing drugs provided to them by this Biogenesis lab. Foremost among the suspensions was infamous New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod, whose sentence seemed to reflect both his use of the product and also something about his attitude towards the investigation: A-Rod has been suspended for the remainder of this season and the entirety of 2014, pending appeal. One imagines that A-Rod, once owner of the largest baseball contract in history, and the Yankees, who are now free from the burden of that contract at least for one year, will both cry all the way to the bank.

Now, the problem for A-Rod is that he's never been the most likable person in baseball and now the role of cultural villain fits him a bit too closely. The court of public opinion is dangerously close to finalizing its verdict. But I think we need to be very careful about what exactly the charges are. Are the rules about steroid use in place in order to protect the health of superstars? Perhaps -- but A-Rod could hire the best doctors and trainers that money can buy. Not to mention the fact that many of the items on baseball's banned substance list can be and are used regularly outside of the sport for medical rehabilitation or legitimate strength training. There's something more here than just trying to make all of our athletes into heroes of healthy living. Nor is baseball itself some kind of victim of its own doping scandals, not for anybody who remembers the sport's own age of giants, back when McGwire and Sosa and Bonds, each of them with biceps the size of a small redwood, put their own unbelievable numbers on the scoreboard and in the seats. No, I don't think Rodriguez or any of baseball's steroid users have victimized either themselves or the game as a whole. But I do think there are victims, and they're the guys on the margins. It's the guys trying to make the team. It's the guys stuck in AAA for years on end. It's the guys who begin to get that sense that the difference between where they are and where they want to be is a needle. It's no wonder that most of the fourteen suspended players this week were people most fans had never heard of -- guys on the margins. These are the real victims -- of Rodriguez's push for his own immortality, of baseball's need for celebrities that live on and on, of our own need for unbelievable, record-breaking numbers.

The question for us, then, as we seek our own competitive advantage over age and time and death, is whether our quest will carry a similar price tag. Millions of people on this planet struggle to meet the needs of basic sanitation and nutrition. Millions more suffer at the hands of political and domestic violence, of seismic economic disadvantage; millions live in regions threatened by extinction from rising coastal waters. The wheels of science are spinning rapidly to combat these challenges, but we leave so much undone. We are literally surrounded by those whose own lives we have not yet found time to value. How can we say that the problem of human death is so much greater than the problems of real human lives? Of course you would want to meet your own great-great-great-great grandchildren. We all would. But this is where I think the fable of the dragon tyrant loses its grasp on human nature. Because even if science made us a pill that gave you fifty, a hundred, nine hundred extra years, you and I both know that it would only be within the grasp of the very wealthiest among us. And even if there were enough pills for everybody, you and I both know that our own scarcity of resources would still compel us to violence and greed and warfare. As always, it would be those on the margins who suffer. The end of death may yet be firmly in the realm of science fiction, but it is nowhere near as farfetched as the end of our own jealousy and pettiness and self-centeredness. Even if we live to be nine hundred years old. It will not so easily make us heroes.

Fortunately, we are subject to a power greater even than the human imagination. Such is certainly true for Nicodemus in the Gospel story that we read today. Jesus tells Nicodemus that the promise of eternal life is for anyone who has been born from above. Now, there's a bit of a pun here, because Greek uses the same words for "above" and "again," and Nicodemus can't fathom how he is literally supposed to be born again. "Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" His question sits at the furthest outreaches of his own scientific imagination, and even for our best scientific efforts it sits at the outreaches of ours. Fortunately, it was never the right question. Fortunately, the real promise of eternal life hinges not on Nicodemus's ability to contort himself back into the womb but rather in the majesty and power and imaginative grace of the one who contorts himself even for us. Fortunately, it's not what we do. It's what God does.

So do you want to live long enough to meet your own great-great-great-great grandchildren? The future may yet be an amazing place, and the wonders of science may yet offer you even that very possibility. The time may yet come when the universe and the genome and the nucleus bend even as far as the limits of our imagination: when the diseases that now ravage our bodies are but quaint reminders of yesteryear, when even death itself becomes subject to our command. But for everything beyond our imagination. For the intractable diseases of pride and envy and wrath; for the incurable jealousies that plague all creation; fortunately, by grace, they too will be vanquished in a place far beyond our own discovery, in the Kingdom God imagines for us and creates for us and builds for us and gives for us, for all of us, for those generations long gone and those generations yet to come and those blessed by riches and those who labor in want and those scattered to the far ends of creation and the far corners of time. Even those scattered beyond the limits of our imagination will be welcome in the kingdom that awaits each of us. The numbers are just inconceivable.

I want to start today by talking about the Incredible Hulk. Now, I was never really a comic books guy. I watched a few afternoon cartoons, but even what I watched was really more Batman and X-Men, and the old Hulk television show was somewhat before my time. So I don't stand here with much authority on the matter of the Hulk, or really of the whole Marvel universe; like most of mainstream America, what I know about the Hulk at this point comes more from the movies than from any of the original source material. So I apologize to anybody who decides to fact-check me later on. But I think I have the gist of it: Dr. Bruce Banner is a brilliant and yet somewhat socially awkward scientist who, due to previous exposure to gamma radiation, has an unfortunate tendency whenever he gets angry to morph into this giant, immensely strong, immensely powerful green monster of a thing, the Hulk. By virtue of its near invulnerability, the Hulk is something of a force to be reckoned with, especially since it seems often not to be under Banner's direct control; at times the Hulk even acts contrary to Banner's own interests, a kind of superhero-sized version of Mr. Hyde to Banner's Dr. Jekyll. While the ever-controlled Dr. Banner has a kind of meekish impotence about him, the Hulk exudes power and powerfulness, and, with them, the total absence of rational control.

As you might therefore imagine, quite a bit of energy is spent attending to Dr. Banner's emotional state, because, after all, if you make him angry, you might find yourself face- to-face with an invulnerable raging chaos monster, and nobody wants that: as Banner is famously fond of saying, "You won't like me when I'm angry." One can hardly imagine going on a date with Dr. Banner, or riding with him in the subway, or God forbid carpooling with him during rush hour; the world has to tiptoe so quietly around him, lest the inner beast unleash itself with this episode's version of apocalyptic furor. The whole point is to keep Dr. Banner as calm and pleasant as possible. It's actually one of the major threads of the Hulk's most recent cinematic appearance, when last summer he joined Iron Man and Thor and others as part of The Avengers movie. But in the climactic moments of The Avengers, it seems like the basic rules about the Hulk change completely. With the giant big bad guy bearing down upon them, Captain America suggests to Dr. Banner that this might actually be a good time for him to get angry, to which Banner responds, just before willfully transforming into the massive green beast, "Well, that's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry." Of course, this is great dialogue, but, for fans of The Avengers, it's also something of a tricky concept. From a storytelling perspective the thought of Banner not having to walk this fine boundary with anger is about as helpful as Metropolis no longer having any phone booths for Superman to change in. If Banner's always angry, there's just no more plot. But what's more, the whole point of Hulk is the danger and power of letting oneself get angry, that anger takes you over, that anger takes control. This is the anger we love to demonize, and, moreover, the anger we love to pretend makes us into somebody else. For anyone who's ever been told not to get their brother or sister too upset, or not to make mom mad, or that you won't like father when he's angry, this is pretty familiar territory: anger, the force that breaks its containment and breaks us wide open and unleashes upon the world the unrecognizable beast inside. But what if it works a little differently? What if we have a secret? What if we're always angry?

I ask because I think the question deep at the heart of the gut-wrenching story of Cain and Abel is not first a question about violence, but rather a question about anger. Cain gets angry. Now, Cain's not the only character in the Bible to get angry. It happens with staggering frequency. And it may be the case that Cain's anger, could we measure it on some objective scale, would pale in comparison to that of some of his later Biblical colleagues. But Cain has the distinct honor of being the first character in the Bible, and thus the first character in Israel's theological history of creation, to be angry. Cain has the first anger in the world. And the surprising thing about Cain's anger is that it is a righteous anger. We are not at first inclined to think so; after all, the guy goes and murders his brother in cold, dispassionate blood.

With that stain upon his legacy it is almost impossible to read the beginning of this story without prejudice, even though the text says that Cain and Abel both brought offerings of their labor before the Lord, and even though their offerings were both in equal accordance with the rules for offerings laid out in the Jewish law, and even though the text makes no great distinction between the quality or quantity of their offerings, and even though the Lord nonetheless prefers Abel's offering and grants Abel favor. Cain gets angry. And we are inclined to think that Cain gets angry because frankly, people who engage in fratricide, people who have that beast lurking within them, are probably more likely to get angry in the first place. But you have to do all kinds of narrative backflips to make that interpretation work. You have to read the second paragraph first. You have to pretend that the simplest answer isn't really the truth. But the simplest answer, and the most truthful answer, and the most honest answer, is that Cain gets angry because God treats him unfairly. God treats him unjustly. So Cain's is a righteous anger.

To say that Cain's is a righteous anger is to say that his anger is not itself the beast, but rather that his anger is a natural opposition to the injustices of creation. And in that regard scripture abounds with examples of righteous anger. Moses is livid with the Israelites following the construction of the Golden Calf. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus tells off the pharisees in the synagogue because they wanted to chastise him for healing on the sabbath; the texts says that he speaks to them with anger. But of course it's one thing to hold anger towards other people; it's quite another to be angry with God. And yet Jeremiah shakes his fists at God time after time, for the injustice of calling him to prophesy to a people whose ears God has himself closed. And more prominently, the Psalms overflow with examples of Israel's righteous anger: "How Long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" "O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?" Time after time, page after page, the Psalms give witness to Israel's anger, Israel's anger with God, the Psalmist's anger in the face of the injustice of her present circumstance. Time after time, page after page, some of the most heart-wrenching and most honest and most faithful examples of Biblical worship and discipleship come in the form of anger, of being angry for a purpose, of seeing with anger the vast difference between the world that is and the world that God calls into being. Cain's anger is just the first in a long history of faithful Biblical anger.  But we don't do this. We don't acknowledge it. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like being angry. We don't like us when we're angry. As far as I can tell, we've done one of two things with every scriptural example of people being angry with God: either we just don't read those parts of the Bible, which is how you get the abridged version of Jeremiah, or, like Cain, we demonize the people who bother to express that anger in the first place. All in the service of a life in Christian community that doesn't have to talk about anger, that doesn't have to think about anger or preach about anger or sing in anger or pray in anger, all in the service of a life in Christian community that never has to worry whether any of us will turn into the beast. I doubt any of us have ever wandered into church and gathered for the Prayers of the People and heard the pastor say something like, "Heavenly Father, creator and ruler of the universe, hear our prayer: we are so mad at you right now."

We bring everything else with such relative ease: our thanksgiving, our celebration, our suffering, our petition, our relief and joy and sorrow: We are so good at bringing so many of the corners of our lives, so many of the corners of ourselves into this place of worship and before the throne of the Lord and then we leave anger at the door. But I know it's there. I know it's there because the world is an unjust place. I know it's there because the world doesn't always follow its own rules and God doesn't always follow his own rules. How much have each of us offered unto the Lord and have we each received favor in proportionate response? Have you been sick in proportion to your discipleship? Have you been in sorrow in proportion to how much you have given? Or perhaps we ought not think first of ourselves: tell me, how much did Trayvon Martin offer at the AME church where he worshipped? And wherein was God's favor upon him? The world is an unjust place, and I know that beast is lurking inside each of us. That's the secret. We're always angry.  The problem for us, which is the problem for Cain, is that we can't quite say it. We can't quite name it. The Genesis text says that Cain was very angry, though he never says it for himself. And then God turns and asks him, "Cain, why are you so angry?," but Cain never says it for himself. It would be intimidating, admittedly: after all, you are addressing the creator and ruler of the universe, without whom you never would have come into being; it's difficult to imagine being angry. You should be grateful just to be here. And who wants to risk making God angry? You might not like him when he's angry; just look what happened to Adam and Eve. But the problem is that Cain is angry, and instead of saying it, instead of speaking its name, instead of acknowledging it to himself he buries it, he pushes it somewhere deep inside, he plants its roots down in the fertile soil of the human soul. And when Cain's anger reemerges, when the shoots begin to peak out above ground, then and only then has he truly turned into the beast. Then and only then does the story find him, out in the field, standing over the dead body of his own brother. We like to say that this story is about the inevitability of violence, that violence is the deep seed planted in the human heart. But nothing could be further from the truth. In this text, the violence isn't the seed; it's only the fruit of anger that never should have been planted there in the first place. In this text, violence is only what happens when Cain can't bring himself to say "God, I am so mad at you right now." In this text, violence is only what happens when we can't speak our anger. I think Hulk’s got it figured out. The secret to managing anger isn’t deciding when to let it in. The secret is admitting that it’s been there the whole time.

Several months ago the radio show This American Life broadcast a heart-wrenching episode centering on their time with the students and teachers and staff of Harper High School in urban Chicago. They were drawn to the story of Harper because of the staggering fact that in the year prior to their reporting twenty-nine current and recent students had been shot. As they explain, Chicago police had been so effective in dismantling large-scale gang operations in the city that, in their wake, a thousand tiny gangs had come into existence, each seemingly gunning for all the others. In the neighborhoods around Harper, students didn't so much join gangs as they were automatically enlisted, and guns just went quite literally with the territory. So that it was quite natural for a high school junior named Davonte to have a handgun in his own possession, and even more natural for him to be showing it to his fourteen-year-old brother in their home after school. Unfortunately that's when the accident happened; that’s when the gun went off, and that's when Davonte's brother's body slumped to the floor. At the hospital, Davonte’s brother was pronounced dead on arrival.

This American Life picks up six months later, when Davonte comes back to school for the beginning of the fall term. Once the class troublemaker, he's now withdrawn inside himself. Once the life of the party, he's now considerably more removed. He spends much of his time with the school social worker, who tries everything to get him to speak about the shooting, about the fact that he's not sleeping, about his guilt, about his memories, about anything related to his brother, about what almost has to be an unbearable anger. But Davonte withdraws more and more. You see, this story isn't really about violence. Davonte had no violent intentions towards his own brother. But it is about anger. Anger at the awful misfortune of the thing. Anger at the powerful injustice that would see two teenage boys training for a life of gunplay. Anger that may not have taken his brother's life, but surely, in its own way, takes Davonte's. Unable to speak its name, the anger consumes him. He disappears from school. Days later the social worker discovers that he's been picked up for gun possession and then had literally run out of the courtroom, whereabouts unknown. At the time of the broadcast, and even as of my best research this week, there was still no information on where he had gone. But I suspect you would find him in that place that unspoken anger drives us, in that place where the beast takes us when we do not speak its name, somewhere East of Eden.

I want you to get angry. The world is a terribly unjust place; no fourteen-year-old should need to know how to use a handgun. You need to be angry. We need to be angry. We need to be angry at injustice, so that we can name it, so that we can fight it, so that we can marshall the forces of honesty and truth and goodness against it. And we need to be angry at God. Not just angry; of course we need also to be thankful and joyous and wondrous. But we still need to be angry, because creation can be a terribly unjust place, and being angry with God is just part of being in full and honest relationship, and God knows what anger is like, and God will still like you when you're angry, and God will still love you when you're angry. But I don't just want you to get angry. I want you to speak it. I want you name it. Because if we can't name it, our anger will become the beast, and one way or another, even if only by sitting and watching the world burn, we will become instruments of violence.

But if we can speak its name, if we can harness its power, and our anger will be an instrument of mercy, and our anger will be an instrument of hope, and our anger will be an instrument of peace. So I want you to get angry. And I want you to speak it. Let it be no secret. Let it be said of us: we're always angry. Amen. if we can with the eyes of anger see the radical difference between this world that is and that the world that God calls us to be, then, friends, in our anger we will witness to the power of God, and in our anger we will testify to the righteousness of God, and in our anger we will fight for the justice of God,and our anger will be an instrument of mercy, and our anger will be an instrument of hope, and our anger will be an instrument of peace. So I want you to get angry. And I want you to speak it. Let it be no secret. Let it be said of us: we're always angry. Amen.

William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Act 1, Scene 2. Enter Marcus Brutus, close friend of Caesar, and Caius Cassius, senator of the Republic. In the background, the sounds of the crowd madly in love with Caesar despite his dictatorial tendencies. But Cassius is not so enamored. He worries, understandably, that the people will turn Caesar into a monarch. He worries that the republic will be lost. He worries about the decline of his own political power and influence in a senate whose relevance wanes day by day. He worries that the world is conspiring against him and his legacy, and so in turn he creates his own conspiracy. This scene is the first step in a conspiracy that will in fact end with Caesar murdered on the floor of the senate, but it begins here, by enlisting Brutus in the treasonous thought that Rome might be better off minus its Caesar, to spark in Brutus the idea that perhaps the two of them had lingered on the margins of history long enough, that perhaps Rome's destiny might lie not in Caesar's hands but in theirs. So here's the rub, in iambic pentameter: that

[Caesar] doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

If you were here last week, I hope that last bit sounds familiar. Last week from this pulpit I gave my best pitch for an astonishing book called The Fault In Our Stars, a novel whose author, John Green, pulls his title right from Cassius's words. I believe, and the record may show, that I proposed to sell five copies of the book over the course of the sermon, and have since been informed of a five-person waitlist for copies from the Amherst Public Library. So I will take that as a sign of success and I promise to tithe any check I get from the publisher. But for everything else that John Green's wonderful novel is, he purports it to be in some ways an argument with Cassius far removed from its context. That is, Green's two protagonists, teenagers who meet at a cancer victim support group and fall in love, have to learn how to operate in the world when they really have no power over even their own individual, disease-ridden fates. Through no fault of their own, one of their lives is ticking slowly away; that's the whole point: whereas Cassius wants to convince Brutus to take life into his own hands -- his life, Caesar's life, Rome's life -- Green's book wants to know how you live when nothing is in your hands, when even your own body is out of your control. Obviously, this isn't much of an argument, because cancer and political intrigue are like apples and oranges. There are some things in life that we have more say over than others. So maybe it is not so much of an argument as perhaps a gentle corrective. That for John Green, for his characters Hazel and Augustus, that the story isn't really complete if they speak only of their own bad decisions or their own indiscretions, that we have to talk about the rules of the game itself, about the fault in the stars.

And so, appropriately to the novel, last week we began the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden by considering in some part its rules. Adam and Eve are given a set of instructions that culminates with one particular consequence -- namely, that if they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they will surely die -- a consequence that, to my reading, doesn't happen. I'll spare you repeating the rest of the sermon. Suffice to say that I was intrigued by the implications of the rules that God sets for this story and the circumstances into which God places the characters. It was the sort of approach you can take when you're reading through the end of chapter two, before Eve talks to the serpent, before Adam takes the apple, before any of the human responses that we read in today's lesson. As such, last week's was by definition one side of the story. It was the story of God, of the holes in creation and the healing that binds them up, of the fault and grace in our stars. It wasn't the story of us; it was the story of things that happen to us. But of course it's not the whole story; it's not the whole of our story, and this week we have to tell the rest of it. Because of course Eden wasn't just about what God did. It's about what Adam and Eve did. It's not just about things that happen to us; It's about the things we do. So it's not just about the fault in our stars. It's about the fault in ourselves.

We would love for it to be otherwise. That's called blame, and blame is the lifeblood of this text. Having been called by God to till and serve the garden and not to eat of the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve are then met by what the text calls a serpent, one of the creatures God created. After a surprisingly sophisticated dialogue with Eve, she decides to eat from the tree anyway, and Adam follows suit without so much as a follow-up question, and in the next instant Adam and Eve are very much in this together, working to sew garments for themselves to cover up their mutually newfound nakedness. But when God finds them and questions them, they quickly turn on each other, because blame is the lifeblood of this text. Adam says, well, that woman you made, she's the one that started it, and Eve says, well, that serpent you made, he's the one that started it, and then all three of them get read the riot act.

And yet even though all three of them get punished, Christian thought has so rarely managed to escape the boundaries of this blame. Blame is the lifeblood of this text, and it's the lifeblood of how we read this text. So many of the deep roots of our own sexist and patriarchal history lie in woeful agreement with Adam, in saying it's not me – it's that woman you made, she's the one that started it – even though both ate and Adam could hardly be less at fault simply for not asking questions. On the other hand, so many of the deep roots of our images for evil lie in this misplaced agreement with Eve, in saying it's not me, it's that serpent you made, he's the one that started it, even though the serpent is identified as one of God's good creatures and not as the invasive presence of Satan or the Devil, and even though all he does is to ask what are at best some intentionally misleading sorts of questions. So much of our understanding of Adam and Eve revolves around trying to figure out who is to blame, and I find this, frankly, astonishing, because it's exactly what the characters are doing right when God decides to punish them. So could it be that for Israel this story wasn't really about figuring out who to blame? Could it be that for Israel this story wasn't really about those other people who brought sin and and death and dirt and grime and brokenness and despair into the world? Could it be that it was instead a story about the everyday temptations that nestle and fester inside the human heart? Would it therefore be a story not only about the fault in our stars but also about the fault in ourselves?

Last night I was in my usual Saturday evening posture of simultaneous sermon-writing and watching the world go by on Twitter. At about ten o'clock news broke in the Florida trial of George Zimmerman, accused of second degree murder for the killing of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin. The jury had returned a verdict of not guilty and Zimmerman had been returned his freedom and, amazingly, his handgun. Now this story was a national sensation when it first happened, and the trial has been the subject of national conversation and the verdict will be as well. And I don't know enough to know enough yet of what I think, except to say that criminal justice and moral justice play by a different set of rules, and yesterday we may have witnessed a victory for one and a loss for the other.

But what most struck me as I sat and watched the world go by was that by 10:30 I had been offered no less than twenty-five different persons, organizations, trends, legal statutes, and historical principles that, if I wanted to, I could blame for the injustice at hand. You see, the prosecution failed to make a good legal argument. Or: Trayvon's advocates failed to make a case in the court of public opinion. Or: public opinion as always was resting on a set of deeply held and deeply racist assumptions. One major national news outlet literally encouraged me to blame the state of Florida. And what struck me was how tired I am of living in a culture so consumed with its own self-righteousness that all we can do in the aftermath of tragedy is to hurl cannonballs of blame at one another until everything crumbles. And what struck me was how tired I am of the cult of personality without any cult of personal responsibility. And what most struck me was that I could sit and read about all the people there were to blame, or I could admit that I was really just sitting and watching the world go by, and that for all of us who just sit and watch the world go by, the fault lies very much in ourselves.

But the problem in the Genesis text goes a little further, because the pattern of blame-mongering in this story is entirely intertwined with the process of becoming individual human beings in the first place. After all, this is the story of the first people, the first people to differentiate themselves from God and from their environment. In the Bible this is the first time any person ever makes a decision or asks a question; it's the story of Adam and Eve coming into their own as individual persons; in some ways the most telling moment of the text is the moment just after Adam and Eve have both eaten the fruit, when, faced with the shame of their newly-discovered nakedness, they work to sew coverings for themselves. They do it for themselves, and in the logic of Genesis that coming-into-being goes hand in hand with the pettiness, the temptation, the anxiety, the fear and shame and blame-mongering that so fills the rest of the story and so fills so many of our stories. You know the old saying that the problem with finger-pointing is that one end of your finger is pointing right back at you. Which is exactly the story that Genesis tells: that our emergence as thinking and feeling people goes hand-in-hand with our endless capacity to be un-thinking and un-feeling and selfish and self-centered. That to say the fault lies in ourselves is more true than perhaps we even realized -- that in this story, and in our story, the fault lies in the very power and possibility of being a self in the first place.

Fortunately, the Eden story is not only our story. It's also God's story, and in God's story, even as Adam and Eve come into their own, they never become on their own. After everything, after they eat the fruit, after they sew the coverings for themselves, after God finds them out, after they start pointing fingers, even after God punishes them, there's a moment that I think we all to easily forget, where the text says that the Lord God made garments of skins for Adam and Eve, and clothed them. This even though they had already made coverings for themselves, coverings that marked both their shame and their newborn distinctiveness. But God makes new ones. Even after their disobedience, even after their selfishness, even after they become the selves that God had pushed them to become, God's not done protecting them. God's not done taking care of them. God's not done loving them, even with their selfishness, even with their blame-mongering, even with their pettiness and temptation, even with all of their faults so firmly entrenched. We tried to tell our side of the Genesis story, a story of temptation and blame and becoming, but of course it's not the whole story, either. The whole story includes the abiding faithfulness of God that keeps us close even as we push away. It includes the gracious love of God that remembers whose children we are even as we so often try to forget. It includes the powerful mercy of God that will not send us into the world equipped only by and with our selves.

Several weeks ago I was home in Princeton for a few nights, partly for the purpose of cleaning out some of my childhood from my parents' attic in preparation for their cross-country move. Most of what I found was of little or no surprise -- mostly I expected Legos and old discardable trophies, and Legos and discardable trophies are what I found. But a few surprises nonetheless awaited me. Nestled amidst the giant cavernous piles of Legos I found three or four of my original childhood Star Wars action figures. Now, I was never a huge Star Wars kid. The Legos were much more my speed. To tell the truth part of me was a bit surprised that I even had those old figurines lying around, or that anyone had ever thought to save them instead of helping them find their way to a church rummage sale. But the other part of me was a bit giddy, because in the age of eBay original Star Wars figurines can go for quite a bit of cash, and I'm certainly not above selling off pieces of my childhood, especially the less sentimental parts, for the right price.

But of course on eBay the market for collectibles isn't really designed for toys that have spent the last twenty-five years in the bottom of a cardboard box. They want pristine. They want mint-condition. They want new-in-the-box. They want toys that have avoided the bumps and bruises and dust and dirt of being out in the world, of being played with, of being tossed around. I suppose if I had been a far-sighted, investment-minded sort of seven-year-old, I would never have opened those packages in the first place; I would have kept them on the shelf, staring at me from behind some molded plastic, waiting for the day when I could redeem them for some small portion of Charlie's college education. But you know I don't regret that at all. Because the toys needed to become who they were going to become. They needed to be loved. They needed to be wanted. And I couldn't have done that without ripping off that plastic and letting in the dirt and the grime and the bumps and the bruises. They show on their bodies the love I must have had. And friends, I think this is the whole story of the Garden. That we could be sitting on the shelf covered in molded plastic. But instead God so loved us. Instead God so wanted to be with us. Instead God so wanted the world for us that he ripped open the box and let in the rest of creation. We may have lost some of our resale value. But what value instead in the fellowship and care and grace of God! And what beauty in a story that is not finally about blame but about how loved we have been, even since the beginning. Amen.

I loved every word of John Green's novel called The Fault In Our Stars. I loved every moment of it. But this was my favorite part: our narrator and heroine, Hazel, has just boarded a transatlantic flight. I won't tell you why; that would ruin something. I can tell you Hazel has an advanced and rare form of cancer, far too advanced and far too rare for someone of her teenage years, and that getting on board a transatlantic flight has involved no small degree of logistical planning. She happens to be sitting next to her boyfriend, Augustus, whom she met at a cancer support group for adolescents. For his part, Augustus knows a thing or two about facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, but in his particular case the tumors have receded. He's in the clear, except for the fact that he has fallen hard and fallen mad for the slowly dying Hazel. And as they're sitting next to each other on the airplane, and as the flight attendant is slowly making her way down the aisle and checking the overhead bins and briefing the folks in the exit rows, Augustus, as he is occasionally wont to do, pulls out a packet of cigarettes and pops one in his mouth.

Now, in the book, this isn't the first time we've seen Augustus do this. In fact the first time he did it Hazel just about lost her mind. You can imagine it: every single day she deals with the cold hard challenges of having a terminal diagnosis, and every single day she does everything she can to fight for every single day. She's on the respirator. She's on the oxygen. She's on the medication. Her energy is rationed; her schedule is rationed; everything in her life is rationed to help her die as slowly as possible. And she meets this boy who has already beat the odds, this boy whose lungs have only just emerged from the same fog of inevitability, and the first thing he does is put a cigarette in his mouth. The first time she sees him do it, it just about tears her to pieces. But now, sitting on the tarmac, it's something like old hat. She knows now that he never actually lights the thing, that he just likes to leave it hanging there. So when the flight attendant anxiously rushes over and says to Augustus, "Sir, I'm sorry, that cigarette is prohibited on today's flight," Hazel's got the answer ready.

"It's not a cigarette," she says. "It's a metaphor. He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn't give it the power to kill him."

"Well," says the flight attendant, "That metaphor is prohibited on today's flight."

This morning our summer journey through Genesis brings us, finally, after some weeks of working through the language of creation, to the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the oh-so-infamous forbidden fruit. Don't put it in your mouth - it has the power to kill you. Now, next week we will read the rest of the Adam and Eve text and take something of a different angle on the story altogether, but this week, in this first part of the Adam and Eve journey, we have to confront the threat, the promise, the very existence of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree at the very center of the Garden. The tree about which God makes this commandment to Adam: that he should not eat of its fruit, for "in the day that you eat of it you shall die." But of course Adam does eat the fruit. We haven't read that far ahead but I'm pretty sure you all know where this story goes. Adam eats the fruit; Eve eats the fruit; and then, from a storytelling point of view, a very strange thing happens. Or fails to happen, rather. Which is to say, despite God's most emphatic promise, neither one of them dies. I mean, if we're being honest about it. They're both very much still there when the story ends. And so the question is, is God's promise a metaphor? When God says death, does God really mean death? And is that metaphor allowed on today's flight?

Now, I know the objection. Even though Adam and Eve make it through the story intact, they do die eventually. And the objection says: if they hadn't disobeyed, Adam and Eve wouldn't have died, ever. The objection says that what we have here is the very origin of death and mortality itself, and if that's your objection, pat yourself on the back: you're in the company of centuries of Christian theological tradition, dating back to Paul or at the very least his interpreters. This is no mere tricking stream in the great river of Christian thought; no, friends, we are standing up our neck in the depths of our own tradition, and with some nod to the foolhardiness of the endeavor, I'm here to suggest that it's just plain wrong, because it's just not in the text. God promises that "in the day that you eat of it you shall die." And fast-forward a chapter and a half to the actual consequence of Adam's disobedience, the words of punishment. This is chapter 3, vs. 17-19.

Because you have ... eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Now, Adam was already created from dust, prior to his disobedience. That he should return to dust seems intrinsic to the material of his creation and not to any consequence of his behavior. Genesis has no interest in arguing that real death, physical bodily death is anything but a natural part of God's created order. And the actual punishment is rather different: the expulsion means that Adam will have to work the land for himself and not just hang about in Eden all day long picking fruit off the trees. What's more, remember that the language of God's promise put an ETA on Adam's death: "in the day that you eat of it." Not 60, 70, 100 years down the road, long enough for a smattering of kids and a bunch of grandkids. On the day. All of which means that there's a real problem in this text. God says that in the day that Adam eats of the tree, that in the day that Adam puts in his mouth the thing with the power to kill him, he shall die, but no matter how you slice it, it just doesn't happen. So when God says death, does God really mean "death?" Or is it just a metaphor?

I say "just a metaphor," but if you remember Augustus with the lung cancer in remission and the cigarette in his mouth, "just a metaphor" is an incredibly important distinction. In one sense he's channeling this rebel bad boy image, he's the heir apparent to James Dean, he's in the hot rod playing that game of chicken from Rebel Without a Cause except the other car is named cancer and it's driven by time. But it's absolutely critical that he not actually light the cigarette. The distinction means everything: if he lights it, it's reckless, it's suicide, it's laughing in the face of death, it's laughing at the value of his own life; but if he just holds the cigarette there, it shows death a healthy respect, and, moreso, it shows his own life a healthy respect. It shows his own life its own due dignity. Augustus is not the teen rebel of days of yore desperately not asking to be born. On the contrary, Augustus has something to live for, and, more to the point, he knows it.

And I think the Genesis text has a very similar logic to it. The death God promises has to be metaphorical because to be anything else would be nothing short of an affront to the dignity and majesty and labor of the act of creation that just happened. God breathed life into Adam not ten verses previous. God blessed Adam with the call to till and keep the Garden, so Adam clearly has a place of some importance and some uniqueness in the order of God's creation. Every moment of Genesis leading to this verse has pointed to the purposefulness of Adam's calling, which would have been undone in a moment had God's promised death been anything but a metaphor. All of which means that this metaphor isn't really about the spectre of death. It's really about the value and dignity of Adam's life, of human life. And of course we need the reminder as much now as ever. One has only to look at the headlines: the continued bloodshed in Syria; the brutality of sexual abuse in Tahrir Square; the grim occasion of Texas executing its 500th prisoner -- though they have a long way to go before they equal Virginia's historic total -- not to mention the thousands upon thousands of people around this country and around the world deprived of the dignity of their lives by reason of unjust incarceration, substandard medical care, insufficient housing, hunger, poverty, disease.

After all, even in the language of metaphor, something about Adam still dies. Something breaks that wasn't broken before. As the Biblical story unfolds, as the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve find their way into violence and injustice and idolatry and desperation, there's no escaping a certain nostalgic longing for the time before it all went wrong, back there in the Garden. As Israel reads this story in the midst of wilderness, or in the struggle of civil war, or in the shadow of exile, how can they do anything but mourn for everything they'd suffered and everything they'd lost? As we read this story, in the midst of our own daily struggles, in the shadow of our own despair, how can do anything but mourn for everything we've suffered and everything we've lost? Something here has broken, something here has died, and it seems we have done the deed; how can we do anything but look back at the long arc of creation and see only the blood on our hands?

Fortunately, then, in this text, death isn't just a metaphor. Fortunately the long arc of this text isn't just about the fall from grace but also about the promise of resurrection. If we take God's promise of death to be the promise of literal, physical, corporeal death, then the final scene of the Eden story, the expulsion from the Garden and the charge to work the land and the soil, if the promise of death is real then the expulsion begins to look a lot like a stay of execution, something a lot like pardon, something a lot like forgiveness, something a lot like grace. Adam and Eve should by rights be dead - actually, literally, physically dead - but instead they are set free to live into the calling that God has already given them. That's the true power of this story: that even the blood on our hands will be no obstacle to the long arc of God's vision for creation. That death itself - the very real, very literal, very non-metaphorical death - is nothing compared to the power of God and the cause of God's righteous love.

As Christians, of course we celebrate this ultimate power of God in the early dawn hours of Easter morning, as we remember Jesus' very literal, very physical triumph over the confines of the grave. But just as in the Genesis story, the power of Easter Sunday only works next to the passion of Good Friday; God's triumph over death itself only works next to God's suffering insistence on the dignity and value of human life. This is the paradox of the Gospel, the paradox of what we believe and the paradox of what we are called to do: that we insist on the dignity of human life while nonetheless proclaiming God's power even over the grave. That in the midst of violence and warfare, we fight for the dignity of life. That in the darkness of the prison and the workhouse, we fight for the dignity of human life. That in a world overrun with poverty and hunger and disease, we fight for the dignity of human life. That in the bleakness of our own human hearts, even with the blood of the world on our hands, we fight for the dignity of human life. But that we do so grounded in the hope that the fight is not ours alone to win, that the great power of God, triumphant even over the grave, is fighting through us and with us and despite us and for us and that the long arc of history is not finally upon us to write.

We've almost forgotten Augustus, still sitting on the tarmac, unlit metaphor still dangling from his mouth. "He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn't give it the power to kill him." On one hand, I get it. It's a metaphor. I don't want him to light the cigarette; his life has dignity, too, and I think we're well off-track of the Christian journey if we go around glibly inviting death just because we proclaim the resurrection. On the other hand, I'm quite sure that the power of life and death was never his to claim or to give. I'm quite sure, as he wraps his lips around that cigarette, that it's not real power he wields; it's just the illusion of control. And I'm quite sure he knows it. But in just a few minutes, we here in the real world will celebrate the service of communion. Our liturgy will proclaim that by the power of the Holy Spirit we are made present with Jesus and the disciples on the night of his arrest and on the eve of his crucifixion. The bread unites us with his dying body. The wine unites us with his spilt blood. In a very real way to observe this sacrament is to join across the expanse of time and with the vast household of saints in the suffering, and the dying, and the death of Jesus the Messiah. We put the killing thing in our mouths. It's a metaphor, of course. Neither the bread or the juice we serve today will actually kill you. But still: we put the killing thing in our mouths, and we swallow, knowing that the power of life and death is in more gracious hands than ours.

It has been something of a momentous week in the life of our country. On Monday, the president announced ambitious new executive branch policies to combat domestic carbon emissions. On Tuesday night I stayed up into the early hours of the morning with several hundred thousand online spectators and watched a Texas state senator named Wendy Davis stave off the adoption of anti-abortion legislation using a brutal eleven-hour filibuster. On Wednesday, while I was fighting to keep my eyes open, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision cutting away sections of the Voting Rights Act; on Thursday, of course, the Court ruled against the Defense of Marriage Act; and, finally, on Friday, the Senate passed immigration reform legislation by a more comfortable margin than I think anybody is recently used to seeing from our congressional bodies. I doubt anybody here is happy with every one of these outcomes. But I hope you can take some comfort in the seriousness, the meatiness of the week we just had. So often our political landscape feels like the worst kind of theatrical fluff; I, for one, found it refreshing to be in a week where it felt like my time wasn't wasted and everybody's cards were on the table.

By contrast, at this point last year we were smack in the middle of a presidential campaign. Presidential campaigns, as I'm sure you know, are the principal breeding ground for theatrical fluff. Which candidate is more likely to be taken up in the rapture? That's a real poll question from May 2011. Which candidate's wife has the best recipe for chocolate chip cookies? That one happens every cycle, hosted by Family Circle magazine. It makes for great reading, of course, something different to break up the agonizingly long election process, but so much of the fluff seems entirely irrelevant to the question of who ought to sit in the Oval Office. After all, we're not electing a cookie-baker-in-chief; why on earth would it matter which recipe prevailed? But of course my favorite, and I still the gold standard for campaign fluff, comes from August of 2004, in the dog days of the Bush/Kerry campaign, when Zogby released a poll in which 57% of undecided voters claimed that they would rather have a beer with President Bush than with Senator Kerry. This despite the fact that Bush is and was a recovering alcoholic. This despite the fact that beer-drinking is not just irrelevant to the office of the presidency; honestly, it's probably counter-productive. Despite the very real sense that going to a bar and having a drink with somebody in no way reflects on his or her ability to make executive decisions and represent the republic at home and abroad. Nonetheless. The beer test.

Now, in the poll itself, the presumption is that the beer test is an index of likability: that is, 57% of undecided voters simply liked the former President more than his opponent. In fact Zogby followed with that exact question, and the numbers on likability were even higher -- Bush was in the 60's. But I think there's more to it than likability alone. Whatever you thought of Kerry, or think of him now, he never quite dodged the perception that he was just a bit out of touch with the needs and dreams of everyday people. Even though Bush came from just as wealthy a family, against all odds he did manage to hold on to a kind of folksiness that eluded Kerry from start to finish. I think it entirely possible that you could like Kerry a great deal and not particularly want to have a beer with him; it just didn't seem like the sort of thing he would do, or the sort of thing he would want to do. Beer is a pretty grounded thing. It's a pretty down-to-earth thing. And, no matter what you think of the man's legacy, and frankly, no matter whether you even like the man, Bush always seemed like a pretty down-to-earth guy. I'd have a beer with him.

Well, maybe a Dr. Pepper.

Did his being grounded or down-to-earth make him into a good president? Into a good ruler? Well, for that one you need a historian, not a preacher. But in a general sense it is the question asked by our text this morning, which more than anything is interested in the groundedness, in the down-to-earthiness, of leadership. We continue our summer reading of Genesis right where we left off, and today's story from the beginning of Genesis 2 finds itself stuck between two really big chunks of story. Just beforehand, obviously, is the story of the seven days of creation that we have been wading through ll summer; and just after today's text we emerge fully into the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, a story we shall now have several weeks to digest. But today we are a bit caught in the middle. Obviously on one hand it is the first scene of the Adam and Eve narrative; we have the introduction of the man who will be Adam, and of the garden of Eden; we have the identification of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But on the other hand the content of this text feels much more like the creation story that went beforehand: God breathes life into the dust to form Adam; God plants the trees to form Eden; the whole passage introduces itself by way of "in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." So in some ways this is really a creation story. It's a sequel to the creation story we already heard. It's "Creation, Part 2."

And the most striking thing about "Creation, Part 2" is that the character of God is altogether different. It's like they made the sequel and recast the protagonist, and the new guy is a lot more down-to-earth than the original. You will remember the character of God from the seven days of Genesis 1: God who exists before the foundations of the earth; God who but speaks and the waters part and the earth appears; God who seems to reign above all things and transcend all things and rule all things. But in the sequel, God creates not by the power of his speech but by the power of his breath. Here, God forms Adam by scooping the dust out of the ground; here, God works the earth to plant the garden that Adam and Eve will inhabit. There's a striking difference. If I were to ask you where the God of Genesis 1 was hanging out while creation was happening I suspect you would have a very hard time answering the question, because it's not something the text really considers. God is just kind of "out there," infinitely removed from us and infinitely different than us. But here in the sequel it's quite obvious that God is much closer to home, that God is wandering through creation just like us. The key verse actually comes later in the Eden story, when Adam and Eve hear the sound of God "walking in the garden." The ten-dollar word for this is anthropomorphism; it means that the key difference between Genesis 1 and its sequel is that God has taken on these dramatically human characteristics. But the net effect is a kind of scriptural whiplash, that we have gone from the holy, exalted, creator-and-ruler-of-everything to a character who is, to put it simply, much more down-to-earth.

And this is all academic unless we ask the question, "Why?". Why do we have two creation stories, or, at the very least, two characterizations of God within the same story? Conventional scholarly wisdom suggests that these may in fact be two different texts from two different time periods in Israel's history, knitted together into what you now have before you. But, to echo something I said a few weeks ago, that's not the answer to the question "Why?" At best, it answers the question "How." Granting that these may be different texts stitched together, why was it important for Israel to hold those two different versions of God in juxtaposition? Why is it important for us to hold these two characters -- the transcendent and the down-to-earth, the God who speaks the power of creation and the God who plants and walks the garden, the God who talks the talk and the God who walks the walk -- why and how do we hold them side-by-side?

I want to spend our remaining time this morning offering two broad answers to that question The first answer is to observe that these two characters of God seem to correspond with the two primary ways in which Israel fulfills its obligation to the covenant. Put simply, just as God both talks the talk and walks the walk, so too Israel is called to a life of worshipful song and praise and also a life of work and service and sacrifice. It's no surprise that Israel held to the image of a God who wielded the power of speech over creation, since Israel's life of worship was so bound into the spoken word of prayers and poems and proclamation. But it's probably even less of a surprise that Israel also held to the image of a God who planted and gardened and walked alongside them, since Israel's very survival depended on its cultivation of the soil, and since its covenant with God had no end of provisions for how that cultivation should happen. Israel understands that its theological identity is not one of these things or the other, but rather both of them, both talking the talk and walking the walk, both in proximity and collaboration.

I think we need to hear this, because I think it is all too easy for us to conclude that our life of Christian covenant can be contained within one or the other of these descriptions. It's really easy to sing a closing hymn and hear the words of benediction and then walk out the door and let the echo of those words slide off of you on the way to the car and forget, and you walk through the six other days of the week, and forget that God has called you not only to a life of song and proclamation but also to a life of service. It's easy for all of, myself prominently included, to forget that the path we walk through the week ahead says just as much about our Christian journey as do any of the words we use on Sunday morning, no matter how loud we sing them. It's a tough, broken world out there. In our homes, in our community, in our country, around the world, the cries of hunger and pain and injustice are real, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed, and it's easy to feel terrified, and it's easy to feel like giving up. In fact it's quite easy to spend our days talking about all the good we're going to do. But we can't just talk the talk. We have to get out there. The shape of what we do may change over time, but not the claim upon which we do it, the claim that God is out there walking in the garden, that the worship and witness of this living God doesn't end when the music stops, that we, too, have to walk the walk.

So that's the first answer. The second goes like this: Genesis holds these two versions of God in such strange juxtaposition not only because neither of them can encapsulate what we are called to do but also because neither of them can encapsulate who God is. For Israel, the arc of the covenant or the Jerusalem temple are real and literal houses for the Lord, which means that Israel worshipped a God who spoke the words of creation but who had also walked with them across the wilderness. And for Christians, this is at the very center of what we believe. Listen to the words of today's reading from the letter to the Philippians: that Jesus Christ emptied himself to be born in human likeness, in human form, and that therefore God exalted him with the name that is above all other names. For Christians, it's should come as no surprise to open scripture and find God walking around in God's own creation: in fact it is the centerpiece of the story we tell, that, in Jesus Christ, God not only talks the talk but walks the walk. That the God we worship is quite literally a down-to-earth sort of guy, a man who took the cries of hunger and pain and injustice and bore them upon his body and bore them upon his soul and bore them into the very essence of who God is, so that when we feel overwhelmed, God knows what it's like. And when we feel terrified, God's been there before. And when we feel like giving up, God gets it.

In this ever-broken world, being human is no easy task. But God quite literally knows what it's like. More than that: God wanted to know. God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten son to come walk in this garden and find out what it's like. Which means that the real Gospel here isn't that Jesus is so down-to-earth that you would want to go have a beer with him. I take it as given that, if only out of sheer curiosity, most of us would go have a beer with Jesus. The real Gospel is that Jesus wanted to come have a beer - or a Dr. Pepper - or a meal of bread and wine - even with us.

As we said, it has been a momentous week in the life of our country. Lost among the big headlines of the week was a story I almost missed, namely that Thursday was the last broadcast of a weekday show on National Public Radio called "Talk of the Nation." Now, I've been a longtime NPR listener. It tends to be the default station on my car radio, to be overridden only case of Atlanta Braves baseball. But I also get why NPR doesn't always rub everybody the right way. It can be a little snooty. It can be a little condescending. Some days NPR leaves me feeling better-informed about the world, and other days it leaves me feeling embarrassed for all the things I don't understand. But "Talk of the Nation" was different. "Talk of the Nation" was an afternoon call-in news show. Its host, Neal Conan, was different. Neal had a way of making every caller, no matter how bizarre their question, no matter how unconventional their politics, no matter how out-of-bounds their disposition, Neal had a way of making every one of them comfortable. He was the most down-to-earth voice at what can be a very pie-in-the-sky sort of network.

Several months ago NPR announced that it was canceling his show to make way for more traditional news programs during the day, and I am not alone in counting this a serious loss. Because when the President announced a new plan for global warming, Neal could talk to the people and find out what it was really like. When Wendy Davis went on her landmark filibuster, Neal could talk the people and find out what it was really like. When the court struck down part of the Voting Rights Acts, Neal could talk to the people and find out what it was really like. You knew that for two hours every weekday afternoon NPR wasn't just a voice from on high. You knew that for two hours every weekday afternoon "Talk of the Nation" was a place where the lives of real people were heard and claimed and loved for who they were. You knew that, whatever crazy thing you had to say, that Neal wanted to listen to and to learn from and to laugh with you. You knew that when Neal spoke, it wasn't just talk. Of course it's just a radio show. But imagine the power of God wanting that very same thing: to listen to you. To laugh with you. To love you, to love us, all of us. To call us to a place where the lives of real people are heard and claimed and loved for who they are: here, in this sanctuary; here, in this household of God; God has been here before. God knows what it's like. So that when God speaks, it's not just talk.

Amen.

When Sarah and I signed the lease on the house we are currently renting, we took on responsibility, as one often does in such leases, for the upkeep of the lawn - basically, we agreed to cut the grass. And I will admit that this task loomed somewhat large in our imagination - but not because cutting the grass was such a difficult job, but rather because we were signing on to a decently-sized lawn and we didn't have anything like a riding mower. And so we signed our lease with the understanding that we could, as needed, walk up the street to our landlord's house and borrow her John Deere, put some gas in it, and bring it back when we were done.

And so, along about early April, once the weather turned and the grass in our yard sprang to attention, one Sunday evening I broke in our arrangement with an inaugural cut of the grass. I filled up the tank and put the mower back in its place and considered everything to have gone about as well as it could have, all things being otherwise equal. Sunday passed and the week began and a few days later my landlord and I got to talking about the lawn and the mower and its quirks - we're trying to hammer out the details of our little arrangement - and she said, very casually, very gently, she being a kind Christian woman who knows full well what Sarah and I do for a living, she said almost in passing, "you know, around here most folks try not to cut the grass on Sunday. It's just kind of what we do."

Of course my first reaction was to feel a deep sense of panic and shame. Not that I had broken some unwritten rule, but of course that I had instead broken one of the rules literally carved into stone, that the new preacher had moved to town and the first thing he did of any consequence was to go prancing about violating the fourth commandment by doing work on the Sabbath. Way to get off on the right foot. Especially when the truth is that I have no problem complying with her request. I haven't mowed on a Sunday since. In fact I'm happy not to mow the grass on Sundays. Really I'm just happy not to mow the grass, period - that's the real issue here, that the last thing I needed was another excuse not to get yard work done.

But of course you don't get to casually say things like that to a preacher and not expect some reflection, and in the weeks since I've made a few casual observations. One is that, sure enough, try as I might to find folks on their lawnmowers as I drive up and down highway 29 on Sunday afternoon, I'm not having much luck. It does seem to be the case that around here we refrain from these Sunday afternoon public displays of labor. But the other observation is that, in the course of a typical Sunday, whether or not I cut the grass, I do a tremendous amount of work. It's my job to be here on Sunday morning doing the work of leading us in the worship of the Lord; but this is the easy part of my Sunday workday, because I have a toddler, and any day when he is not in preschool is a day when his parents do a tremendous amount of work. Of course on top of that we are shopping for the week ahead and cooking up elaborate meals destined to be leftovers and doing all of the household chores that two working parents do in the scant hours they have together. You may not be able to see it from 29, but if you drive past our house on a Sunday evening rest assured that we are inside busily and willfully violating the 4th commandment, and more than once I have fantasized about how nice it would be instead to go and sit outside on the riding mower and lazily navigate around the lawn. It would seem that a lot rides - or not, as the case may be - on how you define work. And a lot rides on how you define Sabbath.

So, this particular Sabbath, we continue our summer discipline of reading and preaching through Genesis by reading the account of God resting on the seventh day of creation. And we will get to that text. But before we do I think we have to take something of a detour through the fourth commandment itself. It's a necessary detour because, even though the language of Genesis 2 doesn't contain anything like a commandment, the two texts are so closely intertwined in our imagination that if we pretend to read one without the other we'll just end up in knots. So, the seventh day, by way of the fourth commandment, Exodus 20, vs. 8-11.

"Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns." This last clause is critical; it means that the sabbath is to be observed by the entire economic community, even including foreigners or slaves who wouldn't necessarily believe in the God that gave these commandments to Moses in the first place. And the provision isn't meant as an undue burden upon those outsiders, as if to restrict them from seeking their own prosperity; quite the opposite: it was meant to ensure that Israel wouldn't simply conscript its underclass into doing the work that it wasn't going to do for itself one day in seven. It's meant to ensure that the Sabbath would be a just practice of the whole interconnected community.

That was the theory. But when Israel became a minority - in Babylon, or later under the heel of the Roman empire, the practice of the sabbath changed. As a minority, Israel no longer had "foreigners in its midst;" rather, they were the foreigners, and the observation of the sabbath became a way for Israel retain its sense of identity. You all go on, have your market, have your festival, have whatever you need; for us, it's the sabbath, it's different. And when the first Christians emerged, they shifted the Sabbath to Sunday, ostensibly in recognition of the day of Jesus' resurrection, but just as much for the same practice of self-definition, as they tried to navigate the problem of living as outsiders in a Jewish area and and Roman world. It's no surprise that the Sabbath helped the church, as it helped Jews before and since, to define themselves up and against the world around them. The problem in both cases is this persistent gap between theory and practice: that a commandment which was in theory designed to remind a faith community of its obligation to protect those on the outside was used in practice so that our theological ancestors could protect themselves.

Even though the strict observation of the Sabbath has largely evaporated from Christian life - social norms for mowing the lawn in Nelson County notwithstanding - the difference in theory and practice of the Sabbath will hit remarkably close to home. As mainline churches and denominations have shifted from being the cultural majority to the cultural minority, and as Sunday morning attendance has begun to dwindle across the board, much ado has been made about trying to recover the holiness of the Sabbath as a way of reinstating the importance of Sunday. Numbers are down; we're fighting with employers who demand weekends; we're fighting with sports leagues that have tournaments and meets and scrimmages; we're fighting with all of the self-imposed distractions of the modern age; but really I think we're fighting the very idea that we're not quite on the inside anymore. We claim to be distressed at our membership skipping church for the sake of lacrosse, but really we're anxious about losing not our numbers but our sense of definition, our sense of who we are. And I imagine the hope to be that observation of the sabbath might function as the same kind of wedge issue that it did for the early church and for the Jews in exile; that is, that we might, by recovering the definition of Sabbath, by imagining a Sunday of putting down our toil and driving to church and going home and putting up our feet and instead of laboring in the kitchen just ordering take-out, that we might protect ourselves from history, that we might recover a sense of who we are.

But as we've seen, that's not how the Sabbath works. The problem is that driving to church violates the fourth commandment, because driving is a interconnected behavior that assumes some policeman in Amherst County to be out on the job. The problem is that putting up our feet violates the fourth commandment, at least it does in my house where some technician at Appalachian Power has to monitor his dials for my interconnected television to work. The problem is that ordering take-out really, really, really violates the fourth commandment. Yes, worship attendance is dropping in our churches, and that's important, but not because it's on Sunday. It's important because worship is important, no matter what day we have it on. And yes, we may even be losing our sense of self-definition, our sense of who we are in a world after Christendom. But the fourth commandment speaks to our responsibility to protect others, not our responsibility to protect ourselves. In the absence of us embarking on a large-scale reimagining of our commitment to social and economic justice, the fourth commandment is woefully ill-equipped to help us recover a sense of who we are.

Fortunately, the seventh day of creation is an entirely different thing. For six days God lays out the full scope of his work, and the text says that "the heavens and the earth were finished." But God hasn't entirely finished with creation. On the seventh day, God rests. And it's unnecessary. It's excessive. The heavens and the earth don't need God to rest; the text says they're finished. Nor is there any reason to think that God needed to rest. No, the whole thing smacks of unnecessariness. And yet the creation story is incomplete without this accounting of excess, this final day; in all of the creation story of Genesis, this is the moment that most reveals God's character, that God has not made the world sufficient only for its own needs or even sufficient only for his, but rather that God has made the world with excess, with bounty, with pleasure, with grace. Here at the end of the creation saga, here at the dawn of the last day, here is God's signature on the act of creation itself, with a flourish. Israel adopted the story of the seventh day into the practice of Sabbath, and as we've seen the practice of Sabbath became a way for all of us to try and define ourselves in a diverse and sometimes confusing world. But the real story of the Sabbath isn't about us defining ourselves; it's about God defining us. We are children of a creation that God has made excessively sufficient to its need. We are children that God has made excessively sufficient to our calling. In short, regardless of who we think ourselves to be, regardless of what the world thinks us to be, we are who we have always been: children of God's grace. That's the Gospel of the seventh day; that's the Gospel of the Sabbath.

How to honor it? One of the members of the 1924 British Olympic track team was a Scotsman named Eric Liddell. The name may sound familiar if you have seen the movie Chariots of Fire, which was based largely on his story and that of a few of his teammates. In the movie as in real life, Liddell was the son of Scottish missionaries to China and himself a devout Christian. He rose through the ranks of the English amateur track system while attending various boarding schools prior to Oxford. But at the Olympic games he became something of a controversial figure for his refusal to run in a heat for his primary event, the 100 meters, because the heat fell on a Sunday. At least in the movie, this is cause for some social discomfort; coaches and teammates seem occasionally to imply that Liddell is more interested in protecting his personal identity than he is in making sacrifice for the sake of the team. In the movie as in real life, Liddell refused to budge, and switched into the 400 meter sprint, where he unexpectedly broke Olympic and world records. And I think this is the story of Sabbath that we like to carry around: that Liddell's refusal to run on Sunday was a way in which he could define himself and mark the difference between his life of Christian witness and the lives of those around him.

But there's another side to his story, at least in the film, and it's the other side where I think Sabbath really lives. In the film, Liddell not only has to navigate the pressures of his coaches and teammates; he also has to navigate the pressures of his own family. Missionary parents and a missionary sister are waiting expectantly for Liddell to come to China and take his rightful place at their side, doing to the work of the Kingdom. Time after time they look upon his running as a distraction, as a waste, as something unnecessary to the proper story of his calling. But Liddell is just as stubborn with them as he is with his Olympic teammates. In his defining scene, after missing a church meeting because of his running schedule, Liddell explains that while he has every intention of coming to China, he also has every intention of running in the Olympics. He says "I believe that God made me for a purpose. For China. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure."

And when I run, I feel his pleasure. Friends, Sabbath is about the great pleasure God feels in all creation. It's about the great excessive love of God for things beautiful beyond their purposes. It's about the bounty of God's grace that flows through us beyond our calling. And so I would invite you to a Sabbath discipline, but it's going to look quite a bit different than any Sabbath discipline you've ever done. I'd like to invite you to find the part of your life where you feel God's pleasure. God's pleasure in all creation. No matter what day of the week it is, I'd like to invite you to the find the part of your life where you feel God's excess. No matter whether it looks like work or looks like play, I'd like to invite you to find the part of your life where you feel God's joy, God's delight, God's pleasure. I'd like you to find that part of your life and just roll around in it. Soak it up. Lift it up. Rejoice in it; it is witness to the grace and beauty of all creation, and for us to delight in it is to honor our Sabbath. It can look like work. Not everything that looks like work feels like work. My father works 120 hours a week but at least 60 of them are in the garden and good luck to the poor soul who tries to pry him loose. It looks like yardwork to me but you can't tell me he's not honoring his Sabbath. God made him for a purpose. But he also made him a gardener. And I know that when he plows, and when he plants, and when he reaps, and even when he weeds, he feels God's pleasure.

I can't tell you where your Sabbath is. But I can tell you mine. Come by on a Sunday evening. The grass needs mowing but I won't do it today. Half a dozen tasks to do around the house but I'll get to them tomorrow. Right now I'm in the kitchen. We need to eat dinner, but this isn't really dinner. I mean, if we just needed "dinner" we could have boiled some pasta and opened a jar of sauce and we'd be done. To me, this is something more. This is a production. You'll find half a dozen spice canisters with the lids flung around the room. You'll find a sink full of discarded kitchen tools and maybe some batter dripping off the countertops. I've made a mess quite out of proportion to the needs of the day, and the honest truth is it's probably all just an experiment. There's no guarantee that the final product will not make you wish that instead you had simply boiled pasta and opened a jar of sauce. Things go wrong all the time. I am not a culinary mastermind; God made me for a different purpose. But he also made me a chef. And when I cook…

Amen.

Two Sundays ago, when we began this summer-long voyage through the opening chapters of Genesis, we read and talked about the foundational principles of creation, the purposes of God even before the dawn of the first day. Then, last week, when we read through the days of God's creative acts, we talked about the ways in which God's ongoing creation happens even here and now. Which is to say that we first spoke about the distant past of creation, and then creation in our present day and age. So this Sunday, much like being at the second intermission of A Christmas Carol, you know what's going to happen now: we've got to have a visit from the ghost of creation yet to come; we've got to talk about the future, the future of creation.

Now, it seems lately that, whenever Christians talk about the future, they're inevitably talking about some kind of fire-and-brimstone-fueled vision of the End of Days. But there's another end of the Christian spectrum, wherein talking about the "future of creation" has much less to do with a rapture-style apocalypse and much more to do with the long-term impact of our current ecological crisis. Whether you believe it or not, I'm sure you know this version of the story. After generations of breakneck industrialization, human society has reached the point where the hidden costs of our industry have begun to assert themselves. Over the past century average global temperatures have increased by about .8 degrees Celsius. The 2009 Copenhagen Accord, drafted at least in principle by the United States and signed on to by almost every major industrialized nation, asserts the growing consensus that anything greater than a two degree increase would be effectively irreversible, a number we are now poised to blow through with barely a notice. Whether it happens in ten years, twenty-five, or fifty, we are approaching an invisible line in the geological sand. Which means that, on one hand, we can acknowledge that ecologically-driven Christian conversation about the "future of creation" is no less accustomed to watching the clock than its more fiery, brimstone-y counterpart. But on the other hand, with scientific consensus bearing down upon us, as we gather this morning in the fresh air and with the beauty of Creation beaming down upon us, we have to acknowledge that the future of the very thing we are doing is in jeopardy. And just as we asked where God was before the first day of creation, and where God is in the ongoing present of creation, we have now to ask where God is as we count down the clock on creation's future.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I started to considered myself an "environmentalist" when I first began to learn what the term meant. I have vague memories of putting together one of those three-panel middle school project boards about the impact of greenhouse gases on the ozone layer. I remember having to use the word ChloroFluoroCarbon but nothing about what that term actually means. I've purchased more than my fair share of locally-sourced, organic, heirloom, artisinal what have you. But it is neither my job nor my intent to preach at you today about environmental best practices. It is my job, however, to interpret scripture in light of the environmental conversation that surrounds us. And while Christian debates about an apocalyptic future tend to revolve around interpretation of the book of Revelation, debates about our environmental and climatological future tend to revolve around the verses we read this morning, from the sixth day of creation. "Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

Let them have dominion. Does God really mean for us to be the masters of creation? During the 19th-century heyday of accelerated industrialization, this exact verse, the so-called dominion mandate, was often cited as justification for the technological subjugation of the earth. Has God made creation simply as a pool of resources for our advancement? It's hard to imagine a word in scripture whose interpretation has greater current global consequence. There's an ethical question here: what are we to do with the gifts we've been given; how are we who were made on the sixth day supposed to behave ourselves in the presence of all the things made beforehand? But there's also a theological question: if this earth really is our dominion; if God has really given it to us to do with as we see fit, then where will God be on the day we cross the invisible line in the sand? The ethical question is whether we can and should save the planet. The theological question is whether God will nonetheless save us.

Somewhere along the line, probably about the time I was doing tri-panel projects on greenhouse gases for science class, an english teacher taught me about the four major kinds of stories. There's man vs. man, your classic tango between hero and villain. There's man vs. society, which in my imagination always resembles something from the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There's man vs. nature, inevitably introduced by reference to something by Jack London. And of course there's man vs. self: Hamlet, locked into his own personal torture, its effects spread halfway across Denmark. And I hope you understand that I take my gender language directly from some long-ago middle school classroom. I have no doubts that man vs. woman is another entirely valid and entirely universal kind of story. But I want to suggest this morning that we have been telling the story of the dominion mandate, and, by association, the story of the current ecological crisis, using each of those four classical types, and with no shortage of controversy. First, of course, when the mandate is taken as a rationale for environmental subjugation, we can tell a very simple story of man vs. nature; one pictures the story of John Henry fighting against the mountain, the refrains of railroad and progress urging him on. Second, and somewhat more complicated, is the naturalist backlash against the dominion mandate and against the entire notion of human distinctiveness. If we are out to save the planet and not subjugate it, then logically our enemy must be those on the side of technology and industry. It's the definition of a man vs. man conflict. In my lifetime the political and legal arenas have seen no end of arguments: conservationists on one side trying to save the planet; industrialists on the other trying to save the humans. In my lifetime it seems that fewer and fewer of those conversations get very far at all.

The temptation, then, is to frame environmental stewardship as a matter of personal choice -- that is, to take the third option and write the story as a story of man vs. society. I can't get Washington to rethink fuel economy standards, but at least I bought my Hybrid! I can't get industrial farms to back off of genetically modified foods, but at least I can buy local! I can't change the system, but at least I can create a kind of cloud of green-friendliness that follows me around. I can buy my way into a feeling of environmental self-satisfaction, and that's good enough for me. The problem, of course, is that we end up pitting ourselves against society when society itself is the thing at stake. The problem is that rejecting the concept of dominion in favor of all-natural consumerism ignores our ethical obligation to the rest of the global community. Our population has come to close to outstripping the natural yield of the planet. I love a good farmer's market. I really do. I say this with great affection. But people at farmer's markets claiming that what the world needs is for everybody to shop at farmer's markets simply don't understand the numbers. The Los Angeles Times this week reported on a study comparing Indian farmers who had planted natural cotton with those who had planted a variety genetically modified to stave off infestation. This is an area of the world where entire populations routinely flirt with famine. But the farmers who planted the modified cotton consumed on average 18% more calories every day, drastically reducing their likelihood of being labeled "Food Insecure" by the World Health Organization.

Of course the economic interests behind genetic modification have not always acted charitably. But the point nonetheless stands: going all-natural is a luxury afforded only to the very few. If we're serious about issues of economic justice, poverty, starvation; if we're serious about our ethical obligation to one another and to our survival as a species, then I think we have to stop pretending that "all-natural" is a panacea. After all, the real story here isn't that we're destroying the planet. The real story is that we're destroying ourselves. Really, this is classic man vs. self kind of material. Ten, twenty-five, fifty years from now. The planet will be just fine. The planet will recover. Over a long enough time horizon, ecologies will adapt and species will evolve and the planet will continue. But long before then, we will have destroyed ourselves: through starvation, or through war over scarce resources, or through disease brought about by subhuman conditions. The problem isn't that we've failed to locally-source our produce. The problem is that we have locally-sourced our sense of mutual obligation.

This is the problem of dominion; it's the problem of our relationship with this piece of scripture. Having dug ourselves such a sizable hole preaching a Gospel of human distinctiveness and the God-given right of subjugation, we're now in the process of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But let me suggest that we instead seek to recover our call to dominion by considering it in its context. "Let us make humankind in our image ... and let them have dominion..." Ancient Israel is no stranger to the concept of images of gods. Throughout the Ancient Near East, kingdoms would regularly be littered with statues and busts of their current monarchs, even and often revered as deities. These statues had some provisional power, maybe a kind of custodianship; really, they functioned as reminders of the proper source of regional authority. It's a marked contrast with the practice we find in Israel itself, where statues or other images of God were strictly forbidden by the third commandment. Instead in the language of Genesis Israel reinterprets the practices of its neighbors in the most radical way: by claiming that God has endowed humanity with this provisional custodianship of creation. It's not ultimate authority; quite the opposite: it's designed as a reminder of where ultimate authority properly resides. Israel understood that its ability to exercise dominion was tied to its recognition of the values and principles and authority of the one who was actually in charge.

Of course, for Christians, the relationship between image and dominion has to be shaped by our understanding of what the dominion of Jesus Christ actually entails. In today's reading from Matthew, Jesus offers a telling response to several disciples who are clamoring for positions of honor in Christ's Kingdom. He reminds them, as he reminds us, of the model of servant-leadership found consistently throughout the New Testament. For Christians, to have dominion as images of God is to exercise that custodianship as servants: servants of creation, servants of humanity, servants of one another, and primarily as servants of the values of peace and justice and human dignity that bleed off of every page of the Gospel. It means that our relationship with the future of creation is not simply about our relationship with nature; no, more than that -- as images of the God who fed the hungry and healed the sick, as images of the God who spoke for the voiceless and welcomed the outcast, as images of the God who gave his life as a ransom for many - as images of this particular God, our servant dominion extends not just across the face of the planet but across the faces of every one of its inhabitants. Which means that the question is not whether or not we can save the planet. The question is whether or not we can save ourselves, every one of us, together.

And the answer is yes, we can - with God's help. As much as the language of dominion gives us the ethical imperative to be responsible for one another, it also gives us theological grounds for hope. It reminds us that we are not finally the ones in charge, but mere images - that the custodianship we serve is trivial compared to the power and might and Providence of the one who created all things. I don't have science for this part. I don't have numbers, either. But I do have faith in this double-edged sword called dominion. In one direction, it cuts through all of our nonchalance, all of our self-centered idolatry, all of the excuses we've made to ourselves for why we haven't fought harder for the future of this Creation. Standing out here in the beautiful light of a Virginia morning, it is entirely possible that the very thing we are doing is in jeopardy, not because we have exercised our dominion but because we have failed rightly to do so. But the other side of the blade is just as sharp, and it cuts through isolation and desperation; it cuts through hopelessness and fear; it cuts through that creeping sense that this is all somehow inevitable; it is a reminder of the power of God who is the Lord of Creation and made us in His image. One edge makes clear just how massive is the task before us. The other reminds us that we do not face it alone.

One final story. In 1649, just as the Virginia colony was really getting up and running, England broke out into Civil War. Parliamentarians executed King Charles I and forced his son into exile, and the country was led without a monarch. Nevertheless, in protest of the actions of the insurgents, the governor of the Virginia Colony issued a statement proclaiming the exiled Prince Charles as rightful King, which then prompted England to send an armed fleet to the Virginia shoreline to demand its surrender. All of which is background to the following legend: that in 1660, when the monarchy was restored and Prince Charles was named King Charles II, that he thanked the Virginia colony by proclaiming it his faithful old dominion. While England had many colonies, the crown only counted as dominions England, Scotland, Ireland, and, strangely enough, France. It was a term of honor, one that carried no increased degree of self-sufficiency; if anything, the latter was true, such that Virginia being a dominion of the crown only increased the King's authority even on this side of the pond. But it was nonetheless a statement of value, of distinctive value, of recognition for Virgina's steadfast loyalty, and Virginians took to it quite amicably. It's hard to know exactly how quickly the phrase took root, but suffice to say that in a 1700 letter to the King, the state General Assembly referred to Virginia as "his majesties ancient colony and dominion."

Now obviously history gets in the way of this metaphor pretty quickly. But it's fair to say that we've been carrying that word around so long that we forgot where it came from, and what it stands for. It's not about our authority and our autonomy. It's not about our rights of subjugation. At the end of the day, it's not even principally about any kind of ethical responsibility. Rather, at its theological core, it means that we are called to proclaim the right Lordship of the King - the King of Creation. It means that our hopes are ultimately and always in the hands of the one who reigns from above. And it means that we serve with pleasure the entirety of this most ancient colony, which is the whole household of God. Amen.

About a month ago I preached on the difference between Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica as a way of trying to understand the apocalyptic imagination of the book of Revelation. Several weeks ago I used a new HBO series called Family Tree as a tool for thinking about our relationship with scripture. And yes, this week, yet again, knowing full well that I run the risk of transforming the Sunday preaching act into an issue of Entertainment Weekly, this week yet again I want to talk television. But instead of talking about the bright-eyed fantasy of Star Trek or the gentle comedy of Family Tree, this week I want to talk about something a bit more dramatic and a bit more intense: the lengthy run of the Fox action drama called 24. 24 debuted six weeks after 9/11 and ran every year up until a few years ago; if you never watched it, you still might know something about it. The show, which followed the actions of a pathologically committed agent for the fictional Counter-Terrorism Unit, was famous for its depictions of torture, its indifference to personal and constitutional rights, and a general win-at-any-cost kind of mentality. But those pieces had to evolve over time. The real conceit of 24 was its unusual format: that each season of the show would take place over the course of one day, one 24-hour period, and that each of the season's 24 episodes would take place over the course of one fictional hour. Thus at the beginning of the first episode of the show, we see the tagline: "The following events take place between midnight and 1:00 a.m.; events occur in real time."

Events occur in real time. So if a character gets in their car to drive fifteen minutes down the street, they won't arrive until fifteen minutes later in the broadcast, commercial breaks notwithstanding. Whenever the camera is focused on one scene and one group of characters, it's leaving open the possibility that something unseen is happening elsewhere, because the clock ticks steadily and evenly for everyone involved, including the viewer at home. It was a groundbreaking kind of dramatic realism, and, in hindsight, just absurdly ambitious. In fact several episodes into the first season of the show, the writers dropped the tagline itself; now, the following events would take place between 4:00 and 5:00, but there was no promise that they would take place in "real time." Without that tagline, the editors had a kind of implicit permission to do the sleight-of-hand that regular television drama craves. Maybe two scenes, shown back-to-back, but really happening at the same time. Maybe a slight allowance for a commercial. Maybe a slight allowance for somebody on the show to ever have a sandwich, or a cup of coffee, or even a trip to the restroom. Without that tagline, there's just the hint of flexibility; that's the problem of asserting that "events occur in real time." It creates a nearly impossible standard of storytelling. There's just no way that Jack Bauer could drive from one side of the city to the other in the time allotted, no matter the absolute demands of the plot. And so a narrative premise designed to create the most "realistic" experience actually ends up undercutting the realism of the show; the more realistic it tries to be, the more obviously fantastical it becomes.

I submit that one could say the same thing for today's account of the days of creation: namely, that by ordering creation into these discrete twenty-four-hour periods, that the Genesis text makes the unlikely story of God's creation of the world seem wholly fantastical. The daily cycle of God's actions -- one day the fish and the oceans, the next day the birds and the skies -- it's supposed to ground God's actions, make them seem realistic, make them relatable to the Jewish audience that first encountered this text as well as to us. God gets up in the morning and does his task for the day and the next day he does something else and on the seventh day he takes a breather, and that's very much like what we do; it's supposed to make creation seem relatable. But of course it has quite the opposite effect: the idea of Jack Bauer getting from one side of LA to the other during a commercial break is trivial compared to the thought of God creating the dynamic, interconnected, evolutionary history of global marine life during the course of a normal workday. The more realistic it tries to be, the more fantastical it becomes.

Of course, the last two centuries of Christian history are full of some fairly imaginative workarounds to this problem. Yes, there are still Christians who fundamentally deny the scientific reality of evolution, who can hopscotch through scripture and prove to you that the earth is 6,000 something years old and that any empirical evidence to the contrary is either human conspiracy, divine planning, or the devil's trickery. There are others who hang their hats on a particular verse in 2 Peter, where the apostle writes that 1,000 years in the sight of the Lord are like one day, thus giving us the interpretive room to believe that each of the days of creation is actually approximately 1,000 years - never mind that adding another 7,000 years to the history of creation wouldn't even put a dent in the discrepancy between the Biblical-literalist picture and the timeline offered by evolutionary and geological science. And of course there is the growing interest in the so-called theory of Intelligent Design, which argues that back in the beginning of the universe God set things in order, that a universe of such rich complexity could only be understood to be the intentional creation of the Almighty.

Intelligent Design is a runaround. It circumvents the best critiques of the scientific community by admitting to facts like the evolutionary process or the existence of dinosaurs. But it also circumvents the Biblical text; there's no attempt in Intelligent Design to understand Genesis 1 in anything but the most vaguely metaphorical language. And frankly, I think we can do better. And I think we can do better not by abandoning Genesis but rather by confronting it even in its nuance and even in its historical context. Genesis 1 is not God's autobiography; it's not God's account of creation; if it were, we surely would have legitimate questions about the reality of the daily cycles of creation. Instead, Genesis 1 is Israel's account of creation. It's Israel's story, and the story that Israel tells about God in creation is based on the God that Israel has already come to know. In Israel's memory, God separated the waters of the red sea, and so Israel writes a story of creation wherein God separates the waters from the dry land. In Israel's memory, God ravaged pharaoh with plagues ripped from the far corners of the natural world, and so Israel writes a story of creation wherein God sets all of those creatures in their right places. In Israel's memory, God works powerfully for the order of the kingdom and the preservation of God's people, and so Israel writes a story wherein a powerful God orders creation and preserves it day in and day out. The power of our text this morning is not as an account of the days of creation; its power is as an account of God's faithfulness to Israel, to the people who composed these words, to the people whose everyday experience of God led them to imagine God's involvement even in the first days of the world.

Of course, we are in exactly the opposite situation. One of the reasons Intelligent Design has gained such traction is that it is far easier to imagine God's involvement in the first days of Creation than it is to imagine God's involvement in our everyday lives; regardless of what you think of Intelligent Design, my hunch is that many of us share that part of its belief system. In our lives, how much easier is it to imagine God's hand in the curvature of the mountains, or the hue of the blue ridge, than in the everyday struggles of the people who now call these hills our home? In our homes, how much easier is it to imagine God's hand in the original architecture of our own human bodies than in the daily struggle of decay and disease that they inevitably carry? In our churches, how much easier is it to remember God's commission to disciples long ago than to imagine God's call to us, here, now? How much easier is it to believe that God created Heaven and Earth than to believe that God might still have something new to create? And yet such promise is precisely the good news of this text: the Genesis story is Israel's testimony about God's faithfulness even in the midst of the everyday. The Genesis story is Israel's witness to God's power even in the midst of disaster and destruction. The Genesis story is Israel's conviction about God's authority over creation even when creation itself seems to turn its back. Read from the perspective of the people who first lived this story, the events of Genesis 1 are not the events of some far-flung, long-ago fantasy. Quite to the contrary. These events occur in real time.

God's creation occurs in real time. Paul knew it. In the famous words of the second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul asserts that anyone in Christ is a new creation, words that we said today in the assurance of pardon - words that we use with the understanding that God's forgiveness of our sins occurs, week in and week out, in real time. And Paul's theology of creation extends far beyond our own personal relationship with Jesus. It has cosmic consequences. In our New Testament reading for today, Paul gets it. All of creation has been in longing, bound by the sufferings of the present time, groaning in labor pains - but now, for Paul, now, in the aftermath of the cross, in the aftermath of Pentecost, with the power of the Holy Spirit set loose over the waters, now God's creation occurs in real time. The problem that Young Earth creationism and 1000-year creationism and Intelligent Design theory share isn't first and foremost in their somewhat suspect relationship with scientific evidence. It's that they've assumed creation to be something that God did a long time ago. But instead we proclaim something even more astonishing, something far more realistic and therefore far more fantastical: that God's creation occurs in real time.

In our lives, God's creation occurs in real time. With the brokenness of the world laid bare, with the struggles of God's children for justice, peace, equality laid bare, even and especially then, God's creative power is happening in real time. In our homes, with the brokenness of our own bodies laid bare, with our own struggles against disease and heartache and grief, even and especially then, God's creative mercy is happening in real time. In our churches, as we ever and always measure ourself against what once was and what used to be and what we have lost along the way, as we look for God's call on us even into an unknown future, God's creative faithfulness is happening in real time. God who created Heaven and Earth; God who divided the waters from the dry land; God who separated the light from the darkness; that selfsame God is working, calling, leading, loving, forgiving, healing, imagining, and creating here, now, and I can only dream of what new creation we will be.

Stephen Hawking opens his 1988 best-seller A Brief History of Time by retelling something of a famous illustration in the history of science. In his version, a well-known philosopher - allegedly though almost certainly not Bertrand Russell - had just finished a public lecture in which he described how the earth orbits around the sun which, in turn, orbits along with the collection of stars called the galaxy. Afterwards, in Hawking's telling, "a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you had told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle.'" At which point the scientist dutifully and thoughtfully asks what the turtle is standing on. I like to think that the women here replied that the turtle was clearly standing on top of another turtle, and so on and back and forth. But at the very end, the final answer is never in doubt: "'You're very clever,' says the old lady, "But of course it's turtles all the way down!"

It's a story about beginnings, of course - how did we get here? Where did the turtle come from? Where did the turtle underneath come from? How did they get to be standing there? Where, exactly, are they standing, all stacked on top of one another like that? Which is to say that it's not just a story about the beginning of time; it's a story about the beginning of knowledge, a story about the things underneath all the things that we think we know, a story about foundations. As I said last week, this summer at Amherst Presbyterian Church we will be reading and preaching and thinking and praying our way through the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, the so-called primeval narratives, the stories of the beginning of God's relationship with humanity prior to the call of Abraham and the emergence of Abraham's family as the centerpiece of the Genesis text. And as I said, one of the purposes of this exercise is simply to get us to read Scripture together, and one of the purposes of picking this text is simply that it seems a section of the Bible appropriate in length to the length of a summer. But the other reason for starting at the beginning is that it's a story about beginnings -- and not just about the beginnings of time, but really, about the beginnings of knowledge, about foundations, about the things underneath all the things that we think we know.

So, a story about beginnings, about how we got here. "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." But now we're two verses in to the Bible and already we have a problem. "In the beginning when God created...." and yet there already seems to be a formless void, darkness covering the deep; did God create those, too? Or did God just kind of rearrange the things that were already there? We've barely begun and already the story doesn't entirely make sense. But of course if you wanted a story about how we got here that made sense you might reasonably expect Scripture to say that in the beginning, a super-heated, super-dense region of matter experienced a massive outburst of energy, causing rapid expansion and forming the original molecular building blocks of the universe. That's what we call the Big Bang, and by reasonable scientific consensus it is the prevailing explanation for how we got here, and frankly, next to that story, ours begins to look a little frail. And it goes on. Our story tells of the seven days of creation. But all credible scientific evidence points to the reality of the long, slow process of evolution. Our story tells of the fateful Garden of Eden and the mythical Arc of Noah, but despite what some corner of the internet might want you to believe, no modern archeological consensus exists to suggest any such location or any such thing. Frankly, next to emerging scientific narrative about the origins of the universe and of planetary life, our story begins to look a lot like turtles, all the way down; if the opening chapters of Genesis are really meant to answer the question of how we got here, then by any modern rational standard they have completely failed, and by any reasonable standard, we ought simply throw them out the window.

The only problem is that the text itself asks a very different kind of question. The opening of Genesis doesn't present itself as the origin story for humanity; instead, it presents itself as the opening act of God. In the beginning, when God created. Before we were there. Before we began. Before the waters had been separated from the dry land, before the light had been separated from the darkness, even before the Spirit blew across the abyss; in the beginning, when God created. And so the question that emerges from this text is not so much "how," not so much "how" God created -- whether by speech or by hand, whether from nothing or from the void, whether through scientific forces we already observe - no, the question is not about how God created or how we got here but rather, simply, "why?" Why? Before any of it, there's no need for creation, and yet God creates. The formless void, the darkness of the abyss, all of it seems content unto itself, and yet God creates. God, whom we worship as All-Powerful and All-Knowing, why create this?

Now, "why" and "how" are easily confused. I remember sitting in a philosophy class at one point in my education and having the teacher ask a kind of trick question, the sort of frankly dumb trick question that one finds in poorly-taught philosophy classes. The question was simply to ask us why we would go across the quad to the cafeteria for lunch o that particular day. And if you said that the answer was because you would be hungry and wanting something to eat, this purveyor of trick philosophy questions would instead reply that in fact you would go to the cafeteria because your brain relayed some series of signals down your spinal column alerting your knees and thighs and feet to make the contractions and movements necessary to bring you across the quad. And I will say now what I said then, which is that that's not the answer to the question "Why." That's the answer to the question "How." When it comes to the scientific question of "how" God created, Genesis 1 has little to no standing, particularly because it's not even the question that the text asks. Instead, the question is, "Why?"

Of course, we ask this question all the time. The world is a difficult and broken place, in ways which perhaps this morning need no enumeration: in tragedies of mass scale, and despair much more intimate, in pain happening across the world and in the unsafe places of our own human hearts; how can we not ask why? Why did the storm hit? Because pressure systems collapsed upon each other in just the right moment given the surrounding atmospheric conditions? No, not "how"; why? Why did the disease work so quickly? Well, at her age the system simply can't create the kind of antibodies necessary to fight back. No, not "how." Why? How can we not ask? It is the most fundamentally human of questions, notorious enough even on the lips of toddlers; certainly, then, as well on the hearts and minds of the Israelites for whom this text was first formative. In the aftermath of slavery; in the midst of abject poverty; with enemies at every side and warfare an everyday reality of life, Israel nonetheless asks, "In the Beginning, when God created. Why? In the midst of exile, in the voice of lament, Israel repeatedly asks the question, "Why?" And yet the scandalous thing about the question "why" is that to assume it has an answer is something powerful indeed. The scandalous thing about the question "why" is that even to ask it is to affirm something like purpose. In the beginning God created, with purpose. Nevermind the mechanics. With purpose. And when the question passes our lips, as it has passed the lips of believers for so many countless centuries, the question "why" affirms a purpose for creation, even one that we cannot fully know or understand, a purpose that rested with God somewhere back with the formless void and the dark abyss, a purpose that existed well before anything we can observe or conceive; a purpose that existed well before we even begin.

Of course, as Christians, we view that beginning from a slightly different angle. It's no coincidence that John appropriates the language of Genesis for his own account of the incarnation - that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. It's a history of creation centered on the promise and life and reign of Jesus Christ. Does John mean to imply that Jesus was already there alongside the formless void and the dark abyss? Perhaps; when we say in the words of the Nicene Creed that Jesus Christ was eternally begotten of the father, we agree with the victors of ancient arguments about this exact verse. But regardless of whether this is a story about the beginning of time, the opening of John, much like the opening of Genesis, functions as a story about the foundations of the world. And here, John not only asks the question, "why," but in the person of Jesus Christ, he finds his answer. For John, this is nothing less than the great purpose of creation: that "in [Jesus Christ] was life, and the life was the light of all people; that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." For John, God created so that darkness might be overcome. God created so that the void and the abyss might be brought to order. God created so that the world might be taught and loved and served and redeemed by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; that the great purpose of God is redemption, the great end of creation and its great beginning, the great arc of history that bends backwards towards the cross and will yet bear us home. Of course, it's not the answer to every question. We still ask why the storm has to hit. In the weeks ahead, as we read through some of the most famously harsh stories in Scripture, we will repeatedly have to ask why, and of course the entire answer has never been ours to have. But even the question gives witness to a purpose beyond our total comprehension, a purpose whose great arc bends, however impossibly, towards redemption.

Several weeks gone now is one of my favorite rites of spring, which is the annual running of the Kentucky Derby. Now, I have no personal or family connection with the institution of horse-racing. I've never been to a race. I've only once been on a horse, and at the time the horse was older than I was. But I love the Kentucky Derby, even though the relevance of the institution of horse-racing in a postmodern age seems each year more and more suspect. It is hard to imagine that if the Kentucky Derby did not exist we would resolve to invent it. So one could reasonably ask why it happens at all. What is its purpose? Does it happen because horse-racing is just the inevitable result of wealth needing some way to spend its money? Does it happen because racing through the dirt and the mud is genetically wired into the animals themselves? Does it happen because the Louisville Jockey Club and the Churchill Downs racetrack work year after year to put the event together? Surely these things are true, and yet they're really only mechanics. The purpose - the "why" - is something different altogether.

I can tell you the reason I watch. I don't watch it for the race, or for any of the overproduced backstories about the horses in the field; I actually watch for the moment just before the race when the University of Louisville marching band leads the entire gathering in a singing of "My Old Kentucky Home." There's something so joyous and connective about that moment, some tens of thousands of fans joined in bourbon-soaked unison. It celebrates the gathering. The resilience of the voices celebrate that we have made it once again through the winter. The words of the song celebrate the promise of some homecoming yet to be. For me it totally overshadows the actual race; for me, that moment is why we run the Kentucky Derby, that's the why. Of course you still have to run the race; somehow, it would be empty without the race; nobody would come, it wouldn't make any sense, something wouldn't work. But the song. The song gives it purpose. Even before the race even starts, even before the horses even come into the arena, the song gives it purpose. So no matter what you think of the race. No matter whether you find yourself in the dust and the mud. No matter whether you are leading around the bend or stuck behind the pack. No matter your urge to be faster or stronger or wiser or leaner; no matter how you find yourself in the illusion that the universe might bend to your will, such has never the been the case, because God created with purpose. And that song still echoes. Sung even before we began, nonetheless it echoes through the dirt and the grime. It echoes through the constellations of time the purposefulness of God and the great promise of redemption. It echoes from the cross, it rings from the empty tomb, it thunders from the foundations of the earth, down there underneath all the turtles.

A few years ago I was wandering through an airport terminal on the way to my gate. I don't remember which airport it was, what my destination was, whether I was with anybody, what airline I was on; apparently there was nothing memorably about this trip except for the moment when my eyes wandered past the display case of one of those airport bookstores and the title that greeted me was called The Bible Cure for Diabetes. Now, this project struck me as being beyond strange on a number of levels. First, though I claim no expertise in some of the Bible's more labyrinthine passages, I'm fairly sure that nowhere in the text is there something like a patentable scientific or pharmaceutical discovery. Which is not to say that nobody in the Bible had diabetes, but then, the only Biblical instances of something like medical healing would be Jesus' driving out of the possessing demons. Which, even if it worked on diabetes, would surely be hard for someone to implement in an airport concourse unless you actually were Jesus. At which point you surely would not need the paperback.

Part of me wanted a great deal to sit and leaf through this book and compare its contents against what at this point were the vivid contents of my imagination. But the other part of me did not want to be seen, even in the relatively anonymous space of a major airport terminal, purchasing and carrying and God-forbid-reading a copy of a book called The Bible Cure for Diabetes, and so I have to admit to you that I do not today carry with me knowledge of its finer points. I can, however, tell you that it is part of a remarkable series. The Bible Cure for Arthritis. The Bible Cure for Heart Disease. Even The Bible Cure for Cancer. And of course there's a part of me that desperately wants to believe the promise implicit in those titles, and I would not fault anyone for so believing. But there's another part of me that is somewhere beyond skeptical and something closer to offended. I'm offended on behalf of the countless number of scientists, who have worked countless years at the cost of countless millions of dollars for the cause of actually curing cancer or actually curing diabetes - who now have themselves to walk past a book making the insulting claim that the answers were there in front of them the whole time, if only they would have opened the Bible to the right page. And I'm just as offended on my own behalf, on behalf of Christians everywhere, on behalf of all of us who believe in the particular power and uniqueness of this book; I'm offended to see the Bible turned into a kind of cheap panacea, like one of those old tonics that could supposedly heal anything. I have it as a central conviction that the Bible is something more complicated than a cure-all and that what we proclaim to the world is somehow more profound than just the current price of snake oil.

But it does present a question. Which is to say, the deep-down premise of The Bible Cure for Diabetes seems to be, as you have undoubtedly heard it said elsewhere, is that there is no problem so intractable that its answer cannot be found in the pages of Scripture. That there is no obstacle in our own lives - no disease, no bad relationship, no personal demon, no natural calamity - nothing that cannot be solved with the right attention to Scripture; that, when perfectly read, the Bible teaches us how to live perfectly. And if the Bible isn't that - if what we have here isn't just the first edition of Life's Little Instruction Manual - then what are we doing reading it? What are we doing carrying around this old collection of ancient manuscripts, picking through them with a million fine-tooth combs? What are we doing with these stories of people with no connection whatsoever to the lives we live? Frankly, if reading the Bible can't cure diabetes - and while I'm no medical doctor, I'm fairly confident that it can't - if the Bible isn't just a cure-all for whatever ills we present before it, then why bother?

Today's two scripture readings seem at first glance to present two drastically different answers to the question. In the Old Testament reading, we find ourselves buried in the history of the Jewish Kings in Jerusalem before the period of the Babylonian exile, specifically during the reign of a king named Josiah. Josiah is remembered, and not only in this particular text, as a good King, a wise King, something of a reformer and a crusader, a King who lived and ruled according to the best ideals of the day. But the starting-point for Josiah's reign, the inciting event of his reforms, is today's story of the rediscovery of the Book of the Law. Josiah has dispatched workers to make accounting of the sum total of wealth stored within the Jerusalem Temple. And during the course of their work, one of the workers stumbles upon a scroll that in all likelihood resembles what we call the Book of Deuteronomy, one of the major books of the Jewish Law.

A reasonable question to ask of this text, given the central role of the Jewish law in Biblical history, is how is it could have come to pass that the Law itself, the physical scroll itself, could have been lost underneath a pile of coins? And yet I suspect we are no less guilty of the same behavior: for as often as our culture talks about Biblical values or uses selected verses to argue for the preferred social policy of the day, for as central a role as something called "The Bible" has in American society, for as many airport bookstores stay open simply on the promise of selling things that claim some vague association with the Bible, we actually don't really read it that much. We don't read it that carefully. We don't read it that well. We may have buried it just as deeply underneath our own pile of coins. But the more pressing question of this text is not "how did Jerusalem get to this point?" but rather "What happens now?" And what happens now is panic. The contents of the Book are nothing short of startling. As Josiah is presented with this long-forgotten Scripture, as he holds the Law up and against the real problems of His Kingdom, as he hears all of the covenantal rules and obligations that his people have so flagrantly ignored or defied, as he realizes the total accounting of their transgression, he concludes that the day of God's destruction must surely be at hand. The text says that "when the King heard the words of the book, he tore his clothes," which is what you do in the Old Testament when the end is near.

It's panic. And it's panic because the Jerusalem Kingdom understands Scripture to be fully and completely about law, fully and completely about telling God's people how to live. Which, if you've ever tried to read Deuteronomy through from one end to the other, makes total sense: the book is largely composed of legal codes for every aspect of community life, wrapped in only the thinnest veneer of a narrative. It promises God's protection especially to those who obey His commandments; it weaves God's actions and reactions into the everyday lives of ordinary people; if there really is a Biblical understand of diabetes, it is surely somewhere in the Book of Deuteronomy. But Josiah's response is not the only understanding of Scripture that we find in Scripture. Remember again the argument from today's other text, from Paul's somewhat testy letter to the Galatians. The early Christians in Galatia were not Jewish converts; they had no ancestral connection to the Jewish people nor any social history with the Jewish law. More than likely, they were worshippers of the Roman emperor. But when they converted to Christianity, they adopted the Jewish Scriptures as Law, as rules to live by, as the ultimate cure-all for whatever ailments befell them, as the ultimate arbiter of who could be included in their new Christian community.

Paul, of course, will have none of this. Paul, himself raised Jewish, notes that those who have become followers of Jesus have not done so because of any legal code but because of an act of faith, and therefore that that the Galatians have no business using the law as a blunt object against others who have similarly come to believe. "Having started with the spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so much for nothing?" Now, I should note that Paul elsewhere presents a much more complicated argument about the role of the law, but even here, even in his most severe critique of the relevance of the Jewish Law for Christian living, Paul is nonetheless reading Jewish Scripture. He uses the Biblical story of Abraham, who came to believe in God before the existence of the law, and before God required any particular work of him in return. Paul's using the Biblical story even as he is undercutting the importance of Biblical law - he's including his Gentile audience in the Biblical story of Abraham even as he sets aside the importance of Biblical law - which means that, for Paul, reading Scripture wasn't just about learning the rules. It's not just about learning codes and commandments and principles and practices that would supposedly make us into good people or give us better lives or answer our questions about the world or cure our diabetes. It's about connecting us to the long history of God's people - much like, in his own way, Josiah's rediscovery of the law connects him to his long-lost ancestors, his too-young-departed father, and the long history of his own people. So for Josiah as for Paul, Scripture isn't first about telling us how to live. It's about telling us who we are.

I've seen two episodes of a new comedy on HBO called Family Tree, and I'm kind of in love with it. Unfortunately my free HBO trial period just ended. But nonetheless. Family Tree is a half-hour fake-documentary style comedy about a British man named Tom, somewhat adrift around his thirtieth birthday, whose great-aunt dies and leaves him a trunk full of old family oddities. At first it seems like nothing but the most random collection of trash, like all of the antique dealers in London conspired to offload the rubbish at the bottom of their desk drawers, like someone took the leftovers from a two-day church rummage sale and packed them all into a single compartment. But it turns out that some of the pieces in the trunk are actually connections and relics from parts of Tom's own family that he barely knew or never knew existed. A simple photograph piques his curiosity, and sends Tom on a quest to discover a grandfather he never really knew; each subsequent piece ends up sending Tom onto some new chapter of discovery. It's a comedy, because Tom's family is just as full of bizarre, off-kilter relatives as any of ours are, only moreso, because it's television. But my hunch is that the show is just as much coming-of-age drama as it is comedy; that the real story is Tom's journey to weave together not only the disparate pieces of his own family but also the disparate pieces of himself, of his place in the family that brought him into the world, of his place in the story whose next chapter is his to write.

And so one of my priorities for our life together at Amherst Presbyterian Church is that we read Scripture together. Not just in the Sunday-morning sense of it, where I read Scripture during worship and we all kind of tune out until the sermon actually starts - yes, I know how church works -; no, my priority is that part of the lifeblood of our gathering is in the reading and recovering and rediscovering of Scripture. Which means that this summer two different things are going to happen. On Wednesday afternoons at 1:00, for anybody with an hour of time and a drop of curiosity, I am going to host here a very informal Bible study. We will quite literally begin at the beginning, reading Genesis together in a spirit of discovery and with plenty of room for questions and uncertainty. Bring all your doubts and all your wonders and all your hesitations; bring a late lunch if you want; bring a Bible if you want, though we have some around here as well. Then, on Sunday mornings this summer, I will likewise be reading and preaching through the first major section of the book of Genesis, the first eleven chapters - creation, Adam and Eve, Noah - the so-called primordial narratives before Abraham and Sara enter into the picture. My hope is that by concentrating on this one corner of the Biblical story, that by settling down for the summer instead of jumping each week from place to place, that reading together can begin to seep into the lifeblood of who we are.

And it seem to me that there are two ways this can go. If we read Scripture as Life's Little Instruction Manual; if, like Josiah, we expect to discover in the words of this book all of the things we've done wrong and all of the things we should be doing right; if we treat the Bible like the the ultimate how-to guide for successful Christian living, then we will soon find ourselves, much like Josiah, bogged down in a panic. But I think there's another way, and my hope for our time together is that we can read Scripture not to find out how to live but to find out who we are. To sort through the oddball trunk of stuff that we call "The Bible" and find those pieces that pique our curiosity. To discover the threads that connect us to the people and places and off-kilter characters that populate its pages. To find ourselves woven into the story of God's people and the story of God's faithfulness. So come with me, and let's read together. Let's read with wonder and imagination. Let's read with skepticism and doubt. Let's read with intelligence and grace and faithfulness and love. We will not find a cure for diabetes. But we might find out who we are, children of creation, children of God, children of the story of God told in the words of this book, children of the story whose next chapter is waiting to be written. Amen.

You may have noticed that I have now done what is almost unthinkable in most congregational settings. That's right, I've changed my regular seat. You know as well as I do that church people get very attached to their seats; I suspect most of you have sat on most Sundays in exactly the same place for most of the years you have been coming into this sanctuary. I suspect that exact part of the cushion has become your best friend; I suspect the wood on the pew has now permanently absorbed something of your aura. I suspect you would notice rather quickly if, on a regular Sunday morning, some of your number just spontaneously showed up in another section of the church without explanation. And so you may likewise suspect any number of things about me; after all, I was well informed when I arrived that your former pastors took residence in the center seat, just here behind the pulpit. And being a new pastor who was completely uninterested in change for its own sake, I had no objection to sitting exactly where I was told to sit. But genetics and circumstance have conspired against me. With apologies to those of you who have heard this already: the pulpit at its historic height is just a bit low for me; it pulls my eyes down too far for my own taste. And so the building & grounds committee obliged my request for something like this riser, which elevates the pulpit and makes my preaching task that much easier. But the unintended consequence of the riser is that if I sit in the middle seat to which I was assigned, I can no longer see any of your bright shining faces. And so I've changed my seat.

I've changed my seat even though I knew full well that there might be a handful of you with some vested interest in having the pastor sit in the middle, for reasons I couldn't venture to guess, perhaps symbolic, perhaps theological, perhaps simply as an overture to tradition. But as you now know that the change has no theological or symbolic motive; it's just a consequence of having called a reasonably tall pastor. It's a change occasioned more by who I am than by some agenda I might have. In fact the only agenda I brought with me was to come and listen and learn and begin to be able to tell the story of Amherst Presbyterian Church; I did not come with an agenda of change; and yet, as I sit here this morning in what is by all accounts the wrong seat, I realize that a season of change has nonetheless been upon us. Yes, graduation is in the air; and summer is around the corner, but here in this congregation the season of change started long before the weather turned, as you reached out to welcome a new pastor and his family. Your welcome has been extraordinary. But I know that even though I did not come here to change everything, that just by being here, that just by entering into this season of transition with you, that change has nonetheless been let loose upon us. And so the question is: are we afraid?

Are we afraid of change? Today is Pentecost Sunday; it marks the changeover between Eastertide and what liturgy refers to as Ordinary Time, the vast swath of Sundays that will occupy our attention between next week and the beginning of Advent. But it's not only a seam in our church calendar; among the disciples originally present to the story we heard today in the second chapter of the Book of Acts, the event of Pentecost was the most drastic kind of changeover, a seam in the very fabric of Creation. For them as for us, it has been some time since the miracle of Easter Sunday. The resurrected Jesus has come and gone, ascended now and leaving behind disciples who have had no recourse but to hide. In the solitude of that upper room, Jesus's promise has rung in their ears -- the promise of of a Holy Spirit who would come to empower them for the ministry and discipleship to which they had been called. And so the story that we read on this critical Sunday is the story of the arrival of that Spirit: "And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability."

It's easy to get lost in the distractions of this text. Yes, the disciples suddenly find themselves speaking in languages they didn't previously know. Yes, they find themselves understanding languages they had never learned. But don't take your eye off the ball; Pentecost isn't just all talk; the real force of Pentecost is the arrival of the Holy Spirit into the selfsame world we occupy. In its own way it is no less a seismic event than Christmas morning itself, in the sense that both events mark God's unlikely and unrelenting entrance into the world. As the fulfillment of Jesus's promise to his disciples, Pentecost should be very good news indeed, a welcome change if there ever was one. And yet the language is filled with the most frightful imagery - a sound like the rush of violent wind, flames and tongues of fire. In his sermon to the crowd, Peter interprets the Pentecost event through the words of the prophet Joel, who foresaw the day of the restoration of Israel as a day of blood and fire with the sun turned to darkness. And so the question is, if the disciples are indeed witnessing the day of restoration; if they are indeed witnessing the coming of Jesus's promised Holy Spirit, if they are indeed witnessing the fulfillment of God's promises for all Israel, then why do they seem so afraid?

It's tempting to imagine that the disciples might fear change for the same reasons that we fear change. You know that refrain, whether you agree with it or not: that we like the way things are; that we're used to it; that it's comfortable; that I don't know, I just kind of got into this habit and it's worked out okay for me so far. Better the devil I know than the one I don't. The conventional wisdom on the fear of change is that inertia is just a powerful engine of comfort; that we like things well enough the way they are to be bothered. But note that this is defiantly not the case for the disciples. They've already walked away from the lives they once had; they've already given up everything. In the aftermath of the events of Holy Week they have clung by their fingertips to what must seem by this point to be Jesus's threadbare promises. They have been ostracized by the Jews and criminalized by the Romans and at this point in the story have nothing left to lose. I would think that the winds of change would be sweet relief. I would think that the flame and fire and sun turned to darkness, that the signs and portents of the day of the Lord would be for the disciples signs of hope and victory.

The problem is that none of those things have actually happened. Again, it's easy to get lost in the distractions of this text, but note that there's no real wind, and there's no real fire, and there's certainly no real blood or darkness. The author uses the language of Joel's prophesy as metaphor to dramatize something much less, well, dramatic. It's just a sound -- like the rush of violent wind. But there's no storm. Tongues -- as of fire. But, our red colors for Pentecost notwithstanding, there's no real fire. It's just the sound, the sound from the Heavens, the sounds of the disciples talking in so many new languages; for all our talk of the Holy Spirit as wind or the Holy Spirit as fire, Pentecost is an audial event, it's the event of a sound, and for the disciples who heard it and then expected wind and flame; for the Jews who heard it and then expected the total force of Joel's prophecy, the total restoration of Israel in blood and darkness, the total fulfillment of all of God's promises; for all those present who heard the sound and then kindled that dream of what the promised day would look like, how could they not be disappointed that nothing else happened? How could they not think Pentecost to be, as the poet says, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing? How could they not think Pentecost to be, as we might say, just talk?

Note for a moment that we've flipped entirely our opinion towards change. This here is the kind of change we can get behind. God promised it; the world needs it; that much we can agree on. The problem is that God's promise just feels like talk. Injustice and despair and wrath are the orders of the day. Things are not as they ought to be; everything is in its wrong place. Just this past week another mass shooting erupted, this time in New Orleans, where two gunmen opened fire on one of the city's famed Second Line parades, sending twenty to the hospital. And with the promises of Easter so freshly on our minds, how can we not ask, "Where is God's fire, the fire of judgment?" Just this past week a series of tornadoes of historic force ravaged several towns in North Texas, killing at least six people, wounding dozens, and leaving hundreds homeless. And with the day of Pentecost so freshly at hand, how can we not ask, "Where is God's storm, the storm of mercy?" Just this past week, in every hospital or funeral parlor or nursing home you know, the darkness struck, leaving countless families wounded in despair. And with the promises of the Day of Lord ringing freshly in our ears, how can we not ask "Where is God's light, the light of hope?" The disciples thought Pentecost would change the world. How can we not understand?

It's true that there was no Pentecostal flame or violent wind; it's metaphor, meant to convey the force and power of the sound that shook all Jerusalem. But that doesn't mean that Pentecost lacks an enforcement mechanism. Quite to the contrary: the Spirit of Pentecost appears and rests upon each of the disciples. At first, of course, this new power manifests in speech, as they converse in languages they never thought they knew. But it's not just talk. In the chapters ahead, armed with the new power of the Spirit, these disciples will go on to perform miraculous acts of healing throughout Jerusalem. In the years ahead, they will follow God's call as disciples throughout Israel and to the far reaches of the known world. The Holy Spirit enables and empowers them to deeds far beyond anything they might have previously imagined; it uses them for purposes beyond their comprehension; it shapes them into tools for God's work upon the landscape of creation. All of which means that Pentecost absolutely changed the world. Just not entirely as the disciples expected. They expected God to fulfill His promises, and He did - in and through them. They expected God to change the world; and He did, by first changing them. They expected on that Pentecost morning for the world to change; instead, God expected them to change the world.

For several of my teenage years I played a variety of instruments poorly for the high school orchestra. I had been in violin lessons from a young age, but it had never entirely taken, and by time ninth grade rolled around I was the orchestra equivalent of a utility infielder, someone you brought in off the bench to play triangle in the desperate hope that nobody would notice. But there was a particular concert where none of that mattered. We were set to perform in some regional orchestra celebration and competition, up and against other orchestras from high schools around the state. And we had practiced and polished some fleet of classical favorites, with one exception: a modern, minimalist nightmare of a piece whose name and composer I have blessedly forgotten. It was abstract and repetitious to a fault; the beauty of thing I suppose would only have emerged if we had landed every note exactly in its right place, but of course we did not run around with that kind of skill. We needed pieces where 85% could get you pretty far.

After weeks of practice, we were getting nowhere. I mean it sounded awful: abstract, repetitious, and soupy. Not a winning combination. And so the day of the competition, our conductor decided to change the rules. A sort of experiment. Instead of following the music to the letter, we were meant to improvise. He organized our improvisation: so many measures of this, so many measures of that. We used the sheet music as a harmonic guide while he counted off the measures, but the rest was entirely up to us, as if he were saying, "Alright, we're all in this together -- what do you want to do?" And so off to the competition we went, newly empowered, newly terrified, and deeply amused. When the time came, he stood before us and counted with faithfulness. He counted with grace. He counted with love. And we sounded ... terrible. I mean, terrible in a way that at least seemed amusing to the people listening. Terrible in a way where they didn't bother to tell us that we hadn't won. But the thing is that I'm not sure that we sounded any worse than we would have if we had just followed along with the printed music. It's not like the score was doing us any more favors than we were doing it. And at the very least we had been empowered. At the very least we had rethought our individual relationships to the whole. We had not really changed the music - it was as it always had been, the sound of a violent wind filling the house - but at the very least we had, ourselves, been changed.

This is the rub. Pentecost doesn't really change the world. It changes us. It is the Holy Spirit not only claiming us for God's purposes but empowering us for deeds beyond our imagination. It changes us so that we can change the world. It is, as it always has been, no small task. You may ask how we can possibly manage, and I tell you that God nonetheless stands before us and counts with faithfulness. You may ask how we can possibly succeed, and I tell you that God nonetheless stands before us and counts with grace. You may ask how we can possibly go unafraid, and I tell you that God nonetheless stands before us and counts with love. You can ask all of these questions and more, but on the day of Pentecost, on the day when God's promises are brought to life in and through us, the only real question is: "Alright, we're all in this together - what do you want to do?" People of Amherst Presbyterian Church, friends, this is our season of change; what do you want to do? At brunch this morning you heard from Blue Ledge Meals on Wheels: Amherst County has double the homebound and disabled rates of the state as a whole. The need is there. What do you want to do? You know that even in our own midst, in hospitals and funerals and nursing homes, the the pain of grief and mourning are as acute as ever. The need is real. What do you want to do? Around the world, injustice and despair and wrath are the orders of the day. Everything is in its wrong place. But this is our season of change: what do you want to do?

I'm sure you all know what today is, the day when we worship the one "far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come." That's right, it's Mother's Day. But of course today is also the day in the church calendar that we call Ascension Sunday - when we remember this text from Acts and the story of the resurrected Christ ascending in the cloud to reign at God's right hand. And so I suppose you can decide for yourself which one of those occasions you'd like to hear in the words of the letter to the Ephesians. Maybe it's just because my mother is a Biblical Scholar, but that's actually how I inscribe all of her Mother's Day cards... "Dear 'one above all rule and authority and power and dominion...,' please enjoy these chocolates..."

The primary text for Ascension Sunday, however, comes not from Ephesians but from the opening of the Book of Acts. Now, the Book of Acts and the Gospel of Luke are widely assumed to be written by the same person; they're meant to be read as as one story in two parts; however, they overlap in this very strange fashion, which is to say that the last appearance of Jesus in Luke's story of his life is not the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke but rather the first chapter of the Book of Acts. So here we are, forty days after the resurrection, and the disciples finally press the question: "Lord, is this the day when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?" And Jesus gives a typically evasive answer - "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority." - honestly, it's not like being resurrected has made Jesus any better at transparency. But then the next think they know, Jesus was lifted up off of the ground, and Luke tells us that a cloud came and took him from their sight. Which is, that one minute he was there, and one minute he wasn't. Which is, at least in the opinion of this Biblical scholar, kinda crazy.

At this point the disciples are doing what I think is the most rational response to the situation, which is to say that they are standing on the ground staring into the sky and not having the foggiest idea what to think. One minute he was standing there talking, and right after that a cloud came along and made him disappear. And I think what you do in that situation is that you stare at the sky for a while, because you don't want to miss whatever the next crazy thing is that might happen. It would have been far stranger if, just moments after Jesus's disappearance, if Peter had turned to the rest of the disciples and said, "Well, I guess that's that. Who needs a drink?" Which is all to say that the disciples are engaged in an entirely rational response, perhaps the only rational response, and yet just then a couple of men in sparkling white clothes appear and ask them why they're acting crazy: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go." And I just don't get it. I mean, he went up. They're staring up. It's totally reasonable. And the men in sparkling white treat them like they're crazy.

Maybe I could let go of it if it weren't a repeat violation. You may remember them from Luke's account of the empty tomb: the women come and find Jesus's body missing and then two men in sparkling white come and ask why they seek the living among the dead. And of course it's a beautiful Easter morning question but it's also just kind of insulting; of course they expected to find him in the tomb. It's the only reasonably expectation they could have. Of course they brought ointments for the treatment of his body. It's what custom dictates then to do. The women are acting in completely reasonable and rational ways, and the men in sparkling white treat them like they're crazy. Which is about the point when I begin to wonder if they are not so much the men in sparkling white as they are perhaps the men in white coats here to take them away. Maybe everybody here is a little crazy. After all, the women at the tomb run to the disciples and say some crazy-sounding things: that the man crucified has risen from the dead. And after the ascension, the disciples go back to Jerusalem and say some crazy-sounding things: that the crucified and risen Messiah went up into sky and vanished into a cloud. It sounds crazy. And maybe the men in white coats are exactly what they need.

But of course the problem is that we stand here and say the exact same crazy-sounding things: that a virgin-born son of God wielded supernatural powers over nature and human disease and vanquished demons and resisted Satan and resurrected the dead and rose himself from the grave and then vanished into a puff of smoke. We say some crazy-sounding things. And with all due deference to real diagnosable mental illnesses, and not meaning to take the term lightly, I ask you seriously, are we crazy? Are we crazy for standing here on Sunday morning and proclaiming the power and love and forgiveness of an invisible God? Are we crazy?

Now, I suspect we could agree that there are people who do crazy things in the name of Christianity. Or perhaps you would prefer to think of it as though yes there are crazy Christians but thankfully we happen not be them. A Huffington Post essay in the early days of the 2012 election seems make this clear enough, asking "the moderate Protestants, liberal Catholics, open-minded Unitarians, and the generally NOT crazy Christians to get up, stand up and make it known that not all who believe in the doctrine of Jesus Christ ... are narrow-minded misogynists, sexual repressionists, moral dictators, delusional cultists," etc., etc., etc. Doesn't that just get you excited for the next election? I mean, isn't it great, being the sane kind of Christian? And yet what sane Christian could possibly say what we say week after week. What sane Christian could come into this sanctuary from the brokenness and bitterness and hostility of the world and proclaim the Lordship of a gracious God and the hope of the fullness of time, week after week? They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

We're so desperate to fight this battle. No, you see, they're the crazy Christians, not us! In an increasingly secular, increasingly rational world, we're so desperate to fit in: No, you see, we're rational, too! We're the good guys! We're the reasonable ones! We like evolution, we like astronomy, we like all science! We can even talk the language of science, say about the evolutionary benefits of religion or the neuropsychological advantages of spirituality. Did you know about the prosocial effects of being in a faith community? What about the microbiological effects of prayer? Here on the reasonable end of the Christian spectrum we can do our best evangelism with a copy of The Bible in one hand and Scientific American in the other. We can map it all out for you; we can lay it all on the table for you; we can sell you on all of the best possible reasons for believing, never stopping for a moment to consider that the thing we believe just isn't that reasonable.

I think Luke knows it. I think Luke knows that the story he's telling just sounds crazy. Yes, it's true that the men in white coats come along and ask questions that make the disciples sound crazy, but in fact those same men for Luke's original audience would count as a kind of evidence. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Jewish Law requires the presence of two witnesses to corroborate the commission of a crime, like, for example, the theft of a body. The number becomes something of a mandatory minimum; in order to tell a credible story, you need two witnesses. And so it's no surprise that these two men appear just when Luke needs them, at the most critically insane moments; they appear to make it all seem credible. But of course we are reasonable enough to know better: the men in white coats are just obscure figures in a Bible passage; in and of themselves, they don't prove anything, except this: that even Luke knew that the story he was telling was just a little crazy. That the story of the empty tomb and the story of the ascension on a cloud are stories that touch the very boundary of the natural world, or, more to the point, stories where the unnatural world breaks through and touches us. Luke knew that there was something a little crazy in this story; no wonder he sends for the men in white coats.

All of which is to make two points this morning, the first of which is that, as reasonable as we may also be, it's okay for us to be a little crazy. To admit that this thing we believe - no matter how many layers of scientific inquiry and deductive theology we put on top of it - to admit that the cornerstone of what we believe isn't a reasonable thing. It's not a matter of evidence or logic or proof; quite to the contrary: it's a leap of faith. And of course there are degrees of difference; of course there are ways of being Christian that are crazier or less reasonable than others, and to say that the first step of Christian discipleship is a leap of faith is not to say that reason itself is the enemy or that the two cannot coexist. But I do think every once in a while we need a reminder that what we do here, that what we say here, that the radical and revolutionary claim that Jesus Christ is Risen, that it's all just a little crazy. But of course, in its own way, the world is also a little crazy. Just because we are children of the age of reason does not make the world a reasonable place, not beset as it is with brokenness and bitterness and hostility, not overrun as it is with the the violence and avarice of the human heart. Just because we're a little crazy doesn't make the whole world sane. Who's crazier: the disciples staring reasonably into the clouds or the men in white coats asking them why they bother? I guess it depends on your perspective. I guess it depends on who's running the asylum.

That's the turn in this text. It's just a few lines earlier, in that evasive answer to the disciples' original question. Remember what Jesus said: "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority." It's not for them to know, not because Jesus just feels like keeping some things confidential but because there's something about God and something about God's love is beyond what we can understand, that God is not ours to discover or describe or imagine or investigate. That's the turn in this text, and the other point for this morning: that we're a little crazy, and everybody's a little crazy, and the world's gone mad, but thanks to be God for having some perspective. Thanks be to God for having some authority. What we celebrate at Easter Sunday is Christ risen from the tomb; what we celebrate on this Ascension Sunday is Christ risen above us: above the craziness, above the insanity, above the the slings and arrows of our mad fortune, above the brokenness and bitterness and hostility of the world, above the violence and avarice of the human heart. "One above all rule and authority and power and dominion," Christ Is Risen!

One final story. In the early 1850's, in Barbour County in what is now West Virginia, there lived a woman named Ann Marie Jarvis, though she had moved as a young girl from just up the road from here in Culpeper. She'd married a pastor's son, but young Ann Marie was not content simply to raise their children and show up in church on Sundays. Instead, she poured her energy into the community. She began an campaign to improve the health and sanitary conditions in Barbour County, largely by motivating other young mothers in the area: together, they began the organized inspection of milk, long before state or federal requirements dictated it. They raised money for medicine and secured training for themselves in physical evaluation and treatment. They called themselves the Mother's Day Work Clubs.

Soon enough, however, the war broke out. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Barbour County, along with the rest of modern day West Virginia, refused, meaning that Ann Marie's life now teetered precariously close to the front lines. But instead of picking a side or running for the frontier, she instead called on the Mother's Day Work Clubs to declare neutrality. Throughout the war, she and her clubs provided food, shelter, and medical attention to soldiers on both sides. But even after the war officially ended, tensions nonetheless ran high, and so state and local officials began searching for a way of providing some visible sign of reconciliation or unity. Lo and behold, they called on Ann Marie. And so it came to be one day in 1868, at the Taylor County Courthouse, that Ann Marie organized a "Mother's Friendship Day," inviting local soldiers and families from both sides of the fighting: Union Soldiers on one side, Confederates on the other, the fog of battle still hanging heavily on the ground. The band played "Dixie" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" and, appropriately to a season of new beginnings, "Auld Lang Syne." I suppose the idea was that a nation divided by the madness of war, a country divided brother against brother needed the intervention of one unquestionable authority: their own mothers. History failed to record anything that Ann Marie may have said but I imagine it to be something like "I don't care which one of you started it; you're both going to end it, right now." It was, by contemporary report, a great success -- so much so that, several years later, reconciliation between the states having been soobviously accomplished, the annual ceremony was ended.

Decades later, after Ann Marie's death, her daughter, Anna, embarked on a crusade to enact a holiday for mothers in her own mother's memory, a crusade that found its success in 1914 when then-President Woodrow Wilson signed Mother's Day into law. This is the holiday that we now celebrate, the modern occasion for the sending of carnations and the delivery of breakfasts into bed and no shortage of long-distance phone calls. Certainly it is an honorable occasion. But when it began, the world didn't need carnations or greeting cards or eggs benedict. When it began, on that day at the Taylor County Courthouse, the mad world needed somebody with anything like perspective; somebody with the authority to take charge. Suffice to say that on that day at the Taylor County Courthouse, the world needed its mother. Amen.

We have been in wartime, in some fashion or another, for as long as I can remember. Of course there are some degrees of difference. The Cold War, for all of its diplomatic intensity, blessedly never had the sheer bloodshed that we associate with the so-called "real" wars, but it was wartime nonetheless. I can remember watching the first American war with Iraq, Desert Shield and Desert Storm; I can remember as a child realizing that I had never lived in a country during wartime, and that something was going to change. Now that particular war was over almost in a heartbeat, but of course it was the same era as the fall of the Soviet Union and my own realization that I had in fact always been a child of wartime, cold though it may have been. In the intervening years, in the vacuum created by the eclipse of the Cold War itself, we have been stuffed to the gills with warfare: in Bosnia and Rwanda and Somalia, in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention wars fought tooth and nail in the public spaces of our own modern age: the war on drugs, the war on terror. It has become so fashionable to declare war on abstract concepts that we now find ourselves at war as well with cancer and with poverty -- valiant causes, of course, but in a generation that has lost its memory of anything but wartime, for a generation whose first recourse in problem-solving is to declare war even on the broadest and most intangible of ideas, for a generation in which warfare is not just a persistent state of military affairs but rather something like an intractable cultural disposition towards anything we find objectionable; in this present generation, what do we do with this so-called "Peace of Christ?"

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you." Our text this morning comes squarely from what we call the Farewell Discourses, a prolonged section of the Gospel of John in which Jesus, sitting at the Last Supper with his disciples, tries to outline for them the reality of the world that awaits them after his death. In the face of the pressing reality of Jesus's departure from their midst the disciples are understandably perplexed: honestly, we thought you were going to be King of something, or take over the army, or march on the palace. Now you're just leaving? Not to be selfish, but what about us? You're just leaving us here alone? What are we supposed to do now? And the confounding, mystifying, dumbfounding answer that Jesus gives is this: well, I leave you my peace. My peace, I give to you. And at first glance, it's a terrible present. It's like the box is totally empty. Because "Peace," which Hebrew tradition would understand as "Shalom," was something like a common everyday greeting in Jewish life. When someone entered into your shop in the middle of the afternoon, you might greet them with a word of "Peace. Shalom." When they departed again for the busy street, you might repeat, "Peace. Shalom." You might rightly expect to hear it in return. It is, as common greetings inevitably are, something that we find easy to say and difficult to consider, and so for the disciples, what righteous frustration, that Jesus would disappear and leave them with so little but "So long."

But in the next line Jesus is quick to clarify: "I do not give to you as the world gives." Which is to say, the peace that I give is not merely a passing thought, a word whose force has somehow evaporated. There's a critique here: the world has forgotten what real peace is, the world has watered it down into pithiness or simply forgotten its real power. It's not unlike the critique that Jeremiah makes in the text we read just beforehand. There, the Israel that Jeremiah describes has not only watered down the word of Shalom but in fact betrayed its very conditions. Because Shalom isn't just about the absence of warfare; properly understood, it imagines Israel in full covenantal relationship with God, respecting the desires of God's law, especially and particularly including treatment of the poor and the outcast. It imagines the citizens of Jerusalem as citizens of the whole, diverse, honest, faithful and majestic household of God. And instead, in God's words on Jeremiah's lips, "from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace." For Jeremiah, the passing invocation of Shalom isn't just a matter of everyday courtesy; it's a problem of the entire citizenry of Jerusalem engaging in a kind of public hypocrisy - "everyone deals falsely" - a widespread public forgetting of who they are and where they came from, of the covenantal promises they made and the covenantal people that they were called to be. For Jeremiah, the central problem of the day is that, by forgetting the poor and the outcast, Jerusalem has clearly also forgotten its own values. And so what Jeremiah imagines for his people is not first and and foremost real legitimate Shalom but at the very least, at the very minimum, the least you could do is to remember who you are. The least you could do is to face facts. The least you could do is to stop saying Peace, Peace, When There is No Peace. Because telling yourself the lie of Peace over and over will in no way make Peace happen. It will only instead generate the false illusion of Peace called "security."

For Jeremiah, when the world says "peace," what it really means is "security." In the fall of 2001 I was living in Georgetown with a freshly-minted college diploma and very little else to show for myself. My day job was in an office complex in Vienna, so every morning I walked across the Key Bridge across the Potomac and got on the DC Metro at the Rosslyn station, and took the orange line twenty-three minutes west into the suburbs of Northern Virginia, at which point a shuttle from my building would find me and whisk me to my cubicle. Which is precisely how I got to work on the Tuesday morning of September 11. By time I arrived the first plane had struck. My boss had the only television in our corner of the building, and so we huddled on her floor and watched in shock and horror. We tried to call loved ones with mixed success. I reached my girlfriend at the time, who was at first livid with me for making her get out of bed. And then at some point later that morning, as rumors swirled around DC about any number of other secondary attacks - at the State Department, at the White House, at the offices of USA Today - and of course as news emerged about the very real attack at the Pentagon - at some point that morning I realized that if I was going to take the Metro home, I needed to leave, now, before somebody shut the whole thing down. And twenty-three minutes later I emerged at Rosslyn, and walked back across the Key Bridge, and there on the far side, parked at the northeast corner of 35th and M Streets, displacing the usual crowd of lunchtime shoppers and hungry undergraduates, there instead was a full-scale Army Hummer, manned by soldiers with loaded fully-automatic weapons, just waiting and watching.

It was there for days. And in all the most important ways, it's still there. You and I both know that in and months and years that followed we traded something of our national character, something perhaps of our moral fiber, for what we call security. We don't like to talk about this, but the toll is astounding. We invaded three countries, if you count the incursions into Pakistan, in the confidence that our security was to be found in the dismantling of hostile foreign states and the central operating theatre of Al Qaeda. We cost tens of thousands of lives, many of them American. We traded our own principles of due process for the indefinite detention of presumed terrorists at Guantanamo and for the emergent reality of remote drone warfare and its inevitable collateral damage. Here at home we built an entire domestic apparatus around the promise of security; if you've tried to board an airplane in the last decade, or gone to the doctor and signed over your medical privacy under the auspices of the Patriot Act, or given a second thought to what you said in one phone call or one email because you wondered who might be listening, then I think you and I both know something of what we traded away. And there's no question that we did get security in exchange; there's no question that Al Qaeda is diminished; there's no question our borders are more impenetrable; there's no question that our authorities are better informed than they were fifteen years ago. There's no question that we have found security. But by Jeremiah's standard, security is only the illusion we create for ourselves when there is no real peace. It's a lie, mutually agreed upon; it's a veneer spread then across the surface of everything we've forgotten: the principles we've forgotten to hold, the conversations we've forgotten to have, the people and places we've forgotten to acknowledge. It's a convenience so that we don't have to be honest with ourselves about who we once were and who we've now become and the things we've lost along the way; by Jeremiah's standard, the most tragic cost of our security is the integrity of our conversation.

Of course the argument has been and continues to be that we are, in fact, in wartime, and that wartime demands certain concessions. Certain sacrifices, even by those not fighting on the front lines. The First and Second World Wars demanded tremendous material sacrifices from those on the home front, and that time passed, and history remembers it with valor. During the American Civil War Lincoln suspended all manner of due process as a necessary means to a greater end, and history remembers him with honor. But those wars were fought against enemies who could surrender. Those wars were fought against armies that could lay down their arms. We are instead engaged in a great battle not against a particular military entity but rather against the ideology of terrorism. Our enemy is an idea and therefore can never surrender. And so the things that we quickly and readily set aside as a courtesy to the temporariness of war have now begun to settle into permanence. And I'm not just talking about taking your shoes off at the airport. There's something lost in this new permanent war, something about being a people of hope, something about being a community of justice and principle, something about being a nation of promise. At this point I don't remember entirely what it was. At this point I'm not sure any of us can. At this point, I think we've all largely forgotten.

But Jesus does not give peace as the world gives. If security - if the security that the world gives is predicated on all the things that we've forgotten, the peace of Christ is first and foremost that which helps us remember. After all, the disciples are being confronted with the impending reality of Jesus's death. How can they continue in his absence? How can they continue to be a community of witnesses without the theological power of Jesus in their midst? How can they remember to be who they were already called to be? With the peace of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit. The two go hand-in-hand, of course: it is here in the Farewell Discourses that Jesus first introduces the disciples to the Spirit he will send to them, the power he will grant them in the aftermath of his death and resurrection. Which means Jesus's gift of peace is hardly the empty word of passing greeting, and not even just an idea about how the world ought to be, but in fact its own kind of theological force. It is the living, moving, ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit; it's not a concept or an illustration or a nice idea for a rainy afternoon; the peace of Christ is nothing less than the cosmic work of God claiming and re-claiming God's people, of God loving and redeeming God's people, of God imagining some reconciliation for us that we have long since lost the inclination to pursue, of God remembering for us all of the things we've forgotten. Note that this is not always good news: we don't always want to remember. But it is the Gospel, and it is the force of the Gospel, that the Peace of Christ remembers for us who were called to be: citizens of the whole, diverse, honest, faithful and majestic household of God.

The tradition in this congregation has been for the pastor to do the rounds of home communion one Sunday every quarter, and today happens to be the first of those Sundays. For that reason it has been circled on my calendar for many weeks now, but it was only about Wednesday when I realized that in order to take home communion this week I would probably need something like a home communion kit. They don't just give you these things when you graduate. And so, in something of a scramble, and not having what I would call a clergy supply store in downtown Amherst, I did what any reasonable consumer of my generation would do: I went to Amazon and bought a communion kit. Of course, the problem of buying a communion kit on Amazon -- or I suppose the problem of buying anything on Amazon -- is that now Amazon knows that I am the sort of person who shops for communion kits online, and so every Amazon advertisement, even when I'm reading other web pages, every Amazon ad I see is for portable communion kits.

All of which is the background that you need to understand how it came to be, on Friday afternoon, that I was reading a story in the news. Not just any story: I was reading about the ongoing hunger strike at Guantanamo. For at least a month now, at least one hundred of our Guantanamo inmates - men for whom we have conveniently forgotten due process in the interest of security - at least one hundred of our inmates have refused food of any kind. At least twenty-one of them are now being force-fed: a tube thrust into the nasal cavity, past the sinuses, and down through the throat into the stomach. One of the hunger strikers, a man named Fayiz al-Kandari, is among the eighty-five at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but never discharged, an interminable political and personal limbo that has left him with no recourse but to protest with his own body. It's not pleasant. Al-Kandari says that each stage of the tube insertion is accompanied by its own distinct kind of pain, but none of them as bad as when the food actually begins to enter the stomach. As described in The Guardian, that's "the most painful moment of all: the return of feeling hungry." The memory of being human again - It doesn't take much to trigger it, just the tiniest drop. And as I scrolled down the page, there it was, just next to descriptions of the most abject hunger: one more Amazon advertisement. Customers like you also purchased this home communion kit. They're really very small. Six tiny glass cups. A petite container for the wine. A small serving plate. But it doesn't take much.

Amen.

This morning's sermon is largely about the difference between Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. I just felt like I should go ahead and come out and say that up front. I thought long and hard about how to try and weave Star Trek into the sermon, and it turns out that there was really no way of approaching it that had any kind of subtlety to it at all. I like a good, subtle, transition, but it turns out there's not really any way to say, "Brothers and sisters, our Gospel lesson this morning is kind of like Star Trek" and not feel like the train has just come completely off the tracks. So I thought instead I'd let you know up front.

Now, when you think about Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Battlestar Galactica, or anything that we might call popular science fiction, you might have certain stereotypes. You might be tempted to lump all those movies and shows together. You might be tempted to lump the fans of those movies and shows together. But let me suggest for a moment that the differences mean something. When I was growing up, we were fully aware of the differences between Star Wars and Star Trek. We didn't really have Battlestar Galactica; it was on the BBC before I was born, and didn't really make the jump across the ocean until maybe ten years ago. No, basically, I grew up in the original golden age of Star Wars, and you could be a Star Wars kid, like everybody I knew, or you could be a Star Trek kid, like me.

So here's the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. Star Wars happens to other people, a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Star Trek has always been about us. Just a short time from now, really, just a couple of hundred years into our own future. Star Wars has always been about escaping the boundaries of real life; Star Trek has always been about imagining its possibilities. Imagine what we could do, the things we could learn and the places we could go, if we had ships that could travel faster than the speed of light; it's not that far off, really, or so the the show would have us believe. Imagine who we could help, how we could grow, how we could thrive with machines that could beam our bodies hundreds of miles across interstellar space, or, my favorite, with machines where you just press a button and it replicates whatever you want -- hot tea, or a cheeseburger, or a flashlight, or whatever the moment demands. And in the universe of Star Trek, these technologies don't just make life easier; they actually make us better people. If you can feed everybody, if you can transport everything effortlessly, then we become better people, new people, people we might not even recognize as ourselves. In the universe of Star Trek, humanity doesn't even bother with money anymore - what's the point of it if you can just replicate anything you need? - instead, we have committed ourselves to the betterment of the species, to discovery, to advancement, to exploration, to boldly going where none of us have gone before. Star Trek is the aspirational dream of who we might possibly be, so much better than the people we currently are, if only but for a couple of small scientific discoveries.

Now, if there is some justification for preaching at length about Star Trek this morning it is that the strangeness of Star Trek - or Star Wars or Battlestar, for that matter - is surely and equally met by the strangeness of the book of Revelation. The vision given to a man named John on the island of Patmos resonates with all kinds of strange and fantastic imagery of what to John would certainly be not unlike science fiction. His science looks like a lot different than ours, of course; he has no more of a concept of a spaceship than he does of space itself. But John's vision triggers the same kind of imaginative questions that the best science fiction does: namely, what will the future look like, and who will we be when we get there?

And not to cut too quickly to the point, but John's vision for humanity's future is not entirely rosy. It abounds with images of warfare and cosmic battle, of the judgment of God sweeping across the face of the earth in all kinds of terrifying forms. You know this part well enough, it's the highway billboard version of Revelation, the sort of stuff that sends people flipping through their own calendar and marking the date when the end times will commence. It's a far cry from being aspirational. More like the sort of future to be avoided at all costs. But then, just at the very end of the vision, we come across our text for today, one of the most poetic pieces of scripture anywhere in the canon, and one of the most aspirational: "Then," John says, "Then, I saw a new heaven and a new earth ... And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem ... And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
See, I am making all things new."

It's an amazing vision of what we could be. Of what we will be, a humanity without death and pain and sorrow. "See, I am making all things new," like God will just press a button on the Star Trek replicator, and we will emerge, entirely new, new creations; we won't even recognize ourselves, not without tears and mourning and crying, not without all the sorrow that attends the regular state of affairs of being human. Never mind the violence and despair and destruction of the twenty chapters that went before; never mind the bleak landscape of cosmic warfare that John devotes so much of his letter to describing; here at the end is the only part we should really pay attention to, the part with all the new things. No wonder this text has such hold on our imagination; who doesn't dream of being, more improved better version of ourselves? Who doesn't dream of who we might possibly be. Who would't aspire to such a future?

The only problem is that that's not what the text says. New Testament Scholar (and Union Seminary President) Brian Blount notes that here "God is taking what is old and transforming it. Out of the destruction that occurs in the various plagues and battles for creation, God will weave God's new thing. The old will remain a constituent part of the new, but it will be fiercely transfigured." He goes on to quote another scholar: that there's a big difference between making all new things and making all things new. It's tempting to pretend that this moment of John's vision erases everything that went before; after all, what's the point of having new creations if the old ones stick around? And don't we know the pain of creation well enough to understand that the only way to fix it is to throw it out and ask the replicator for a new one? Who wouldn't want to do that, to throw out all the broken pieces of humanity and start fresh, to take all the guilt and and violence and jealousy and decay, to take all the anger and hatred that increases in us day by day, to take all of it and just throw it out the nearest airlock and press a button and start again? Who wouldn't want that future? But John's vision isn't about starting over with all new things. It's about making the old things new again. Which means that it has a lot less to do with Star Trek and a lot more to do with Battlestar Galactica.

Now, Galactica is the furthest thing from an aspirational universe. Most of humanity has been destroyed and those that remain are in permanent exodus, fleeing their persecutors across the galaxy in a fleet of ramshackle ships. And while the show has its small share of technological innovations, there aren't any replicators, and there aren't any transporters, and the people aren't better versions of ourselves. They're just us, in worse and dire circumstances, and instead of hoping to improve themselves or navigate the stars, they simply and only want to survive. Because they're in exile, all they have is what they've carried with them, and new creations don't just happen at the touch of a button. In fact in one episode, one of the ship engineers, desperate to create something amidst the bleakness of his existence, pieces together scrap metal and electric components from all over the fleet, scavenging and bartering and scrounging for every ounce, and then he actually builds a new ship, a new fighter, built from scrap, a new creation, built from the pieces of the old one. Surely this is the future that John sees; surely when he he writes that the home of God is among mortals, that God will dwell with all of us; surely this is the version of us he sees: that our future is not to be reborn at the touch of a button, but to be rebuilt, piece by piece. That God is not interested in throwing us out and starting again. That our future is not simply to be subjects of the power of God, but to be creatures of God's grace. That's a future worth our imagination.

But we're not quite done. Because we've ignored the first rule of science fiction, as applicable to the book of Revelation as it is to anything you'd find on late-night reruns. The first rule of science fiction is that it's never really about the future. That's it's always about the present. That no matter how many flying spaceships or super-intelligent robots or alien civilizations show up, science fiction is first and foremost a way of understanding the hopes and fears and dreams of its own place and time. Author Cory Doctorow calls this effect "radical presentism." As he puts it, "Science fiction writers don't predict the future ... but if they're very good, they may manage to predict the present." What he means is that George Orwell was a lot less worried about a future society of surveillance and a lot more worried about the wartime growth of totalitarianism that he read in the papers. That Isaac Asimov's utopian vision of helpful, obedient robot servants said a lot more about his own faith in technological progress than it did about what the actual future would look like. Science fiction is always about the present. Science fiction is about the now. Which means that Star Trek, at its core, is about unfettered faith in technological progress. It's about the now. Battlestar Galactica is about understanding what makes humanity distinctive in a networked and computerized age. It's about the now. And yes, even the book of Revelation, strange bedfellows to be sure with Asimov and Orwell, but even the futuristic visions of the book of Revelation are fundamentally and foundationally about the now. It's not about what God will do. It's about what God is doing right now.

So how's this for right now? If you tuned out the first time I said Star Trek, this is a good time to come back. Last week in The Washington Post a woman named Elsa Walsh wrote a piece describing her own struggle to understand her professional and family identity in the wake of some of the promises made by the feminist movement. Walsh adds her voice to a debate that has sprung up, particularly in the wake of Marissa Mayer's ascendancy as the CEO of Yahoo!, as to whether we have come to the point where women really can have it all; Walsh, rather than taking the bait to say yes or no, instead questions the premise, arguing in her words, for "why women should [instead] embrace a 'good enough' life," that is, that no matter what you think of the economic and social structures of women in the workplace, that it's okay for women to make compromises, especially in the name of family, friends, and the intangibles of life. Now, I have no wish to add to the specific debate about the state of women in the workplace. Instead, I want to submit that Walsh's comment can be much more broadly applied than she perhaps realizes. After all, the dream of "having it all," is not a man's dream or a woman's dream. It is perhaps the most quintessentially human dream, the dream of bettering ourselves, the dream of improving ourselves, the dream of making ourselves into new creations. It is why the future has such a grasp on our imaginations: because this time next year, I'll be such a better employee, or such a better parent, or so much thinner, or so much healthier, or so much less angry, or so much more forgiving, or so much more Christian. That I'll be such a better version of myself, you won't even recognize me. We live our lives clinging to such aspirational dreams. The future is going to be amazing, as soon as I press this button!

But this Gospel isn't about the future. It's about the now. It's about what God is doing right now - God who has already made a home with mortals, God who lived and dwelt among us, God who claimed us long before we could even begin to dream of anything better: right now, God embraces our "good enough life." Right now, God loves us just as we are: broken, sinful, scarred, bitter, tired, all of it. No matter what, right now, God loves you just as you are, no matter what dreams haunt you, no matter what visions stoke your imagination, no matter how you're going to do it all or live it up or keep it together or make it work, no matter what future version of yourself gets you out of bed in the morning, no matter the guilt and and violence and jealousy and decay, no matter the anger and hatred that increases in us day by day, no matter what, right now, God loves you. Yes, God's love will change you. Yes, God's love will grow you. Somewhere, somehow, even as we speak, God's love will take all of the pieces inside you and put them together again and you will be, as we all will be, all things new, going where none of us have gone before. But this isn't about the future. It's about right now. And this, right now, is the radical present, that God loves you just as you are.

Amen.

Well, for the first time in a while, it's just kind of a regular Sunday service. No communion. No sunrise service. No receptions, no big ordination service this afternoon. Just a normal Sunday service. Everybody take a big deep breath in, and let it out. There you go. Everybody take a moment to relax and save your energy. Make sure you put a little extra in the tank, because next week we will once again be a long way from normal. Next week, as you heard in the announcements, is preschool Sunday here at Amherst Presbyterian, which means that the teachers and parents and children from our weekday preschool will be here to join us in worship. I can't wait for all of them to have a chance to spend time with this congregation that so graciously makes its building available. I can't wait for all of you to spend time with the amazing teachers and children that bring such joy and life to this building Monday through Friday. I can't wait for all of us to offer thanks to our outgoing director for the servant leadership she has provided for nearly twenty years.

But mostly I can't wait for the singing. I know they've been practicing. About Ten O'Clock every morning, the whole neighborhood can hear them practice: "Jesus Loves Me," "This Little Light of Mine," and one I didn't know just called "The Bible Song" that is sung at a volume I thought only reserved for football games and jet engines. They don't lack for enthusiasm, is what I'm saying. And maybe none of this will be new for you; maybe they sing the same songs every year. I don't know. I don't really care. I can't wait. Though I suspect they will not in fact do my favorite part, not with so many people here, not with so many adults here. It wouldn't really make any sense at the time. But my favorite part is at the end of chapel time, when the two-year-old class departs from worship, and they have this comically-large plastic foam chain that they all have to grab onto. It's like a rope to tie them all together, but somehow in the novelty oversize category, and of course it's not like the two-year-olds are going very far. They're walking out this door, turning right towards the fellowship hall, turning left towards the classroom, and there you have it. It's not complicated. And it's not like they don't do it every day. But I also have no illusions about the wanderlust of toddlers. Who can say where they each might end up if left to their own devices? And so the giant foam plastic chain rope comes into being, and each of them takes up a link as they make their long journey from one end of the hallway to the other.

If I'm honest, I think that is very often what childhood felt like, the feeling of being led even when I thought I already knew the way, the feeling of not having the freedom to choose my own path. What is it to be a child if not to be in that time of life when your journey is not yet entirely yours to choose? Nothing so dramatizes my memory of going through school than the actual process of getting from one class to the other: when I was in grade school, we would all go from classroom to classroom in these choreographed lines, so that if you stood in the hallway intersection between classes the traffic of third-graders would look something like a great convention of snakes. And bit by bit the restraints came off, so that by high school, of course, it was complete chaos, and nobody knew where anybody was supposed to go or when they were supposed to be there, and everybody in the hallway was entirely alone, and there were no giant plastic chains in sight. Growing up tasted like freedom, and we loved every second of it.

This is an easy story, and I think it is the story that children tell about childhood. It carries with it the great hope of the future: that when I'm old enough, that when I'm an adult, that when I grow up, I will have the freedom to choose for myself, the freedom to make my own path, the freedom to lead myself down the hallway to any destination I choose. There is such hopefulness embedded in those words. And then we read Jesus's words, the words to Peter here at the end of the Gospel of John, and, if we're honest, they tell a very different story: Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.

All of a sudden, this isn't the child's version of the story. All of a sudden it has the nostalgia that only adulthood knows: when you were younger, Peter, you could do whatever you wanted... but when you grow old. Forget the giant plastic foam chainlink rope; forget the traffic jam running through an elementary school hallway; that's just what it looks like on the surface. Underneath, in the adult version of the story, underneath all the hand-holding of childhood is great vast potential of what might yet have been, the great freedom embedded in choices we had not yet made. There was a time when we could have done anything... But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go. This is the adult version of the story. Immediately after this verse John notes that this is to indicate the kind of death Peter was to die, and readers of this passage for generations have concluded that Jesus is here predicting Peter's own capture and crucifixion, that he would be bound and led through the streets and taken to the death where he did not wish to go.

But certainly we need not also be crucified for the adult version of this story to still take hold of us. How can any of us - and yes, I recognize that I am younger than many of you, but surely the hour hand keeps the same beat for everyone - so how can any of us read these verses and not think on the slow march of time that haunts us all in equal measure, that gradually fastens its belt around each one of us, that with total disregard for our illusions of freedom and independence marches us towards that place we would rather not go. Sarah shared with me an image from a recent visit to a nursing home where a family had come to visit a woman bound to a wheelchair. When the family visit was over, the woman clearly wished to stay right where she was, but couldn't make her desire known, and instead she found herself wheeled back to her room by I am sure a most well-meaning grandson. Someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go. And in this text the resurrected Jesus is prophesying to Peter about his own pending martyrdom and death and so the adult version of the story strikes our imagination and stokes our fears, because we all know that at some point the great plastic foam chainlink rope will wrap itself around every one of us.

But for my part I am not convinced that Jesus is only interested in prophesy. Historians have interpreted the image of Peter stretching out his hands as a prediction of Peter himself being physically bound and tied. But the stretching out of hands is an image with vast consequence throughout scripture. In an invocation of Divine power, Moses stretched out his hands and commanded the Red Sea to get out of the way of the fleeing Israelites. Meeting one of the unclean lepers, Jesus stretched out his own hand and touched him, and the man was made clean. In our reading from Acts today, after the villainous Saul of Tarsus is struck blind on the road by a visit from the resurrected Christ, he is led by outstretched hand back into the city. And after Saul is reborn as the apostle Paul, he actually combines the two words together to indicate the divine appointment -- the ordination by outstretched hand -- of his friend Titus to the Corinthian churches. So for Jesus, too, even here at the end of John, especially here at the end of John, especially since the next words out of his mouth to Peter are "Follow Me!," the vision of the outstretched hand is much less about being bound to the inevitability of time and much more about being bound to God. Which means we're not really talking bout decay. We're talking about discipleship. And we're not really talking about getting old. We're talking about growing up.

There's a difference, of course. The infinitely wise Maya Angelou puts it this way: "Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging." We're talking about growing up. We all age; yes, the hour hand keeps the same pace for everyone. But the resurrected Christ -- Christ who has already claimed victory over that same deathly inevitability -- the resurrected Christ is much less concerned with the time left on Peter's clock and much more concerned with how Peter spends it. There was a time when you could fasten your own belt and lead yourself where you wished. But, now, Peter, follow me. Rock upon which I build my church, we are going where you do not wish to go. Follow me. So yes, the hour hand keeps the same pace for everyone. But in the meantime. In this Eastertime meantime, even as we age, it's time to grow up.

It's time to grow up. And in this text, growing up doesn't come with the freedom and ability to make our own way and choose our own adventure. Instead, growing up, spiritually; growing up in faith; growing up as a congregation of resurrection witnesses to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ means one thing and one thing only: it means following Jesus; it means listening for God's call, even and especially to the places where we do not wish to go. Of course it would be convenient if discipleship instead came with a range of acceptable options. If you're really into doing justice but not so big on loving mercy, that's fine, we can accept that. Or if you're not really into justice or mercy but mostly interested in walking humbly with one another, that's fine, one out of three ain't bad. It would be remarkably convenient if discipleship didn't come with this absolute demand, if we could approach God's call on our lives with the sense of freedom and possibility that adulthood was supposed to be. But this story isn't about adulthood. It's about growing up. In a world crying out with hunger and despair, growing up will take us beyond these privileged walls bearing offerings of more than we think we can afford. In a world overcome with injustice, growing up will take us into the highest corridors of power as witnesses to God's righteous judgment and overabundant mercy. In a world set through with deception, growing up will make us ambassadors of truth, even into our own homes and to the lies we have chosen for ourselves. It may not be comfortable. It rarely is, being pulled along by our outstretched hands to places we'd rather not go.

This past week two Augusta county students went through an ordeal I'm not sure any of us could imagine. Sean Wies and and Amy Guevara were driving down Interstate 81 to get to class at Blue Ridge Community College when they realized, in trying to make their exit, that the car's brakes had simply died. Amy's driving this old Mazda Protege with a full tank of gas in it and all of a sudden she just can't get it to stop at all. In the passenger seat, Sean calls 9-1-1, and the transcript will chill your bones. The dispatcher tries everything to get the car to slow down, but nothing works: it turns out that not only are the brakes dead, but the engine is locked in; even if they hit an incline, the engine starts to rev back up to ensure that the car doesn't drop below fifty. But over time, with the gradual slope of the highway, the speeds begin to climb. 60. 70. 80. They can't use the median or the shoulder to stop, because at those speeds they'd easily flip the car. Amy is screaming in fear on the other end of the phone line, and Sean is desperately trying to stay calm while repeating over and over that it just won't work and it just won't slow down.

Eventually state troopers come and begin to escort the car down the highway, hoping at least to clear the road ahead as the Protege's speed climbs. As the 9-1-1 call escalates, the dispatcher exhorts Sean and Amy over and over to trust the police cars around them, to just concentrate on following the trooper, but Amy says over and over that they're about to run into him, that he won't get out of the way, that they don't understand how fast this is all happening, that they are now accelerating down a course that they would much rather not be on, and how could we possibly ask them to trust the voices in their ears. Now, this story ends remarkably well. As the car crests over 100 miles an hour with no signs of stopping, Sean and Amy make the rational decision to simply jump from the vehicle. They hang up the phone, undo their seatbelts, open the doors, and go, and they walk away from the scene with only cuts and bruises to show for their effort. And I am so relieved that they made that rational decision; it almost certainly saved their lives. No one could reasonably ask them to stay behind that wheel, not with the car leading them uncontrollably and far beyond comfort down a path they do not wish to go. No one could reasonably make that demand, but it is precisely the demand that Jesus makes of Peter, and of us: to follow him beyond comfort; to trust him beyond reason; to live our lives as witnesses to the Lord of all Creation. It is the question that rings through these words: when we leave this church today, will we go home in comfort, or will we grow up? The choice has consequences. You may at times be overcome with fear, and you may at times be undone by doubt, and you may at times feel terribly alone.

But when you are afraid. And when you are in doubt. And when you feel alone. Remember that God is the one leading you with outstretched hand. Remember that God who created the universe and set the Heavens themselves in their orbit is the one who pulls you on your way. Remember that Jesus Christ who followed even unto death and now stands victorious over fear and doubt themselves; remember that he is the one who beckons you: "Follow Me." Remember that no matter how much you age, and no matter how much you grow up, you are still children of God and inheritors of the covenant of grace. Yes, the call of discipleship is absolute, but no more so than the love and the power and the mercy of God who leads us forward. This is the truth of the Gospel: that the great foam plastic chainlink rope has already wrapped itself around every one of us. Its name is providence. Its master is Jesus Christ. And it surely will lead us home. Amen.

I have a bone to pick with a man named Sam Holbrook.

Now, Sam and I have never met. He wouldn't know me from Adam. It's entirely unfair of me to carry around this grudge. And yet here we are, opening week of the 2013 Major League Baseball season and I am still a bit hung up on the way 2012 ended, and it has more than just a bit to do with Sam Holbrook.

Last year, my team, the Atlanta Braves, lost the first one-game playoff series in baseball history. In the eighth inning they were trailing the St. Louis Cardinals 6-3 when Atlanta shortstop Andrelton Simmons lofted an easy fly ball into shallow left field with men already on first and second base. Just as the ball landed unexpectedly - and, one might argue, providentially - on the ground between two apparently confused Cardinals, Holbrook signaled to invoke the Infield Fly Rule. Now, if you don't know what the Infield Fly Rule is, don't worry: you are in the company of many a professed fan of the game, and, as our luck would have it, at least one of its umpires. Suffice to say that in Sam Holbrook's hands, a rule that normally protects the hitting team instead ended Atlanta's best hope for a rally and, by extension, their season, and so, even with that new season here, I admit that I do carry a bit of a grudge.

Of course I am sure that Sam is a lovely man with whom I would get along smashingly were our paths to cross in any other circumstance. Which is why it's vitally important that we not actually meet: the part of me that nurses this grudge, the part of me that wears it proudly as a badge of fandom, the part of me that could just as easily show you the dozen other wounds that twenty-odd-years of Braves baseball have inflicted: that part of me needs an occasional villain, and, until further notice, Sam Holbrook will do nicely. On the other hand, last weekend was Opening Day: when the entire league, for one brief moment, is tied for first place; when the smells of stadium hot dogs and possibility waft across the grandstand; when even that most perennial non-contender fixes its gaze upon a summertime of what might yet happen. Opening Day bursts with our most fervent hopefulness, and so this grudge I bear does seem contrary to the spirit of the season. It does seem woefully out of place, and so it is hard to avoid the suspicion that in having this grudge I am somehow doing it all wrong, that Opening Day has once again offered me the joyful gift of possibility and instead I just can't let go of the past.

Last weekend was also Easter, the original season of hope and possibility. The women came to the tomb, and the stone was rolled away, but despite that most excited whisper in the air, our text today finds Peter with his own bone to pick. The disciples have been dragged before the council of Jewish high priests for working and preaching and healing in Jesus's name, and the Sanhedrin is not exactly in an excited mood: We told you not to do that. But you just couldn't help yourselves, could you? And Peter's reply is very simple, and very much to the point: Our allegiance is to God and not to any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus! And that might very well have been the end of the argument. But Peter's got a bone to pick. Even with the full power of the spirit of Pentecost alive in the city, even with the angel of God having only moments ago stood before Peter to free him from his prison chains, Peter can't quite get into the spirit of the season, he can't quite let the past go. He says: God raised up Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.

Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. Now, we might have cause to dispute Peter on the facts of the case. The Luke-Acts account of the Passion has more than enough blame to go around: Jesus is tried before the Sanhedrin, yes, but also betrayed by Judas, and victimized by Pilate, and demonized by the crowd -- not to mention denied by Peter himself. For him to now stand before the council and accuse them of a singular role in Jesus's death would seem to demand not only daring but a certain amount of strategic amnesia. But then again, any fan knows never to let the facts get in the way of a good grudge. Every wound needs a villain, and by this point in Acts, the Sanhedrin will do nicely. It's convenient, of course, that by fixing blame Peter distracts attention from the mercilessly bureaucratic Passion story that Luke tells: it's convenient to name one villain when the alternative would be to name everybody, and Peter has no more interest in unpacking this complex web of responsibility than I do in sifting through the errors, miscues, and missed opportunities that left my Atlanta Braves pitting their miracle hopes on a routine fly ball. So we might dispute Peter on the facts. But doing so will get us nowhere near the heart of the matter.

No, the question instead is this: why can't he move on? Doesn't he believe? Easter is here, and the full force of the Gospel with it. Peter's own words lay it out as clear as daylight: God raised up Jesus that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. Repentance! Forgiveness! Everything a new creation! -- except you guys. You killed him by hanging him on a tree. Why can't he move on? For that matter, why can't I? Opening Day is here, the young season alive with possibility, but mine is a hope calloused by age, wisdom, and the brokenhearted aftermath of the Infield Fly. What would it take for me to believe? What would it take for us? Easter is here, the young season alive with possibility, but ours too is a calloused hope: the winter too long with us, a world too long with us, a world strewn with anger, bitterness, regret, a world where the wounds of every bygone season fester and linger. You killed him by hanging him on a tree! And through the pages of time I want to shout, "Peter, he rose from the dead! Why can't you move on? Peter, he preached forgiveness! Why can't you forgive?" But I, too, have a bone to pick: with disease and despair. With injustice and intolerance. With heartache and loneliness. I carry this grudge against the brokenness of the world, and I know you carry it, too. So on this second Sunday of Easter, with the full chorus of Hallelujahs still echoing in the rafters, maybe we can't just let go, and maybe we can't just move on, and maybe we can't just, can't quite, believe.

So instead of demonizing Peter for his little outburst, I wonder whether we might find comfort in knowing that he is just as wounded as we are. Even though he had witnessed the resurrected Christ, and even though he had stood before the Pentecostal flame, our story today finds Peter still capable of this all-too-human moment of blame-mongering. He's wearing his wounds on his sleeve. I wonder if we might find comfort here, knowing that even Peter doesn't always act like a Saint. And more still: after all, in our Gospel text from today, it is the wounds in Jesus's hands that reveal him to the incredulous Thomas, wounds that make it clear that even the Resurrection doesn't wipe away the past. Jesus stands before them with his wounds still intact. Peter stands before the Sanhedrin with his wounds still intact. And now we who can't quite let go, we who can't quite move on, we who can't quite believe, we too stand before God with our wounds still intact and we do so in good company. God has always called wounded people. God has always loved wounded people.

But this story is yet about something bigger than comfort. At the end of the day, it's Peter's confession - "We must obey God rather than any human authority" - that echoes through the season, a reminder that the Eastertide power of God is bigger, mightier, more intractable and steadfast than anything we have to offer, even our most persistent wounds, even our most persistent disbelief. God's authority is the first and last Word: God who became flesh, God who rose from the grave, God who left the tomb open for the world to see. At Easter, God not only offers hope to our wounds; God becomes hope; God lives as the hope that vanquished death itself. So bear your grudges as you may, bear your disbelief as you may, bear your wounds as you may: we bear them in good company, with Peter and the first disciples, with every trace of Christendom that gathers around the cross. They are the wounds that mark us as children of creation. But they will not bind us! For even when we are bound to despair, God is hope! And even when we are bound to hatred, God is forgiveness! And even when we are bound to disbelief, and even when we are bound to decay, and even when we are bound to death, God is alive! Christ is risen! The stone has been rolled away! Thank God for opening day!

I still have a bone to pick with the Infield Fly Rule, and I'm not the only one. If you had walked through the concourse at the Braves opener last Monday you would have seen people wearing all manner of "Worst Call Ever" t-shirts. Being a fan means living this faithful paradox that embraces the hopefulness of the new season while wearing last season's wounds on your sleeve. And the truth is that the Braves have a good team this year; possibilities are sky-high; all grudges aside, there are folks all around the league who really believe this could be our year. But for lots of teams, hopes are not so high. Expectations are not so optimistic. After years of incompetence, mismanagement, or sheer mediocrity there are any number of teams whose fans can only watch with their eyes closed, their hopes long since withered away. But you never know. Anything could happen! That's the miracle of opening day: even when nobody believes, there's still hope!

Amen.

The women in my family have always been a mystery.

No, wait, I'm sorry, I read that wrong: the women in my family have always loved mysteries. Yes, that's right.

Sarah and my mother both, as long as I have known either of them, have had a soft spot for cheap dime-store mystery novels or your run-of-the-mill hour-long television procedural. I don't even know the names of the ones Sarah reads; she goes through the novels so quickly that she will occasionally be halfway into a new one before realizing that she's already read it, and I know that when she has the house to herself it's more often than not an occasion for a few episodes of Elementary or The Closer or any of those shows where a dead body shows up and then other people figure out what happened.

My mother loves them, too, and she raised me on a steady diet of mystery novels and Matlock and Murder, She Wrote. And I did love them for a while, and I read all the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twin books, but then something changed. I think I became a purist. What I really wanted from a mystery was a smart detective, someone who could put all the evidence together and figure out the answer; I was in it for that moment of epiphany when the camera would zoom in on Jessica Fletcher's face and she would course-correct the conversation with some dramatic flair and announce, "I think I know how the good Doctor met his end." To me, that's what made a mystery a mystery. And that may all sound perfectly obvious. But trust me for a moment when I say that half of the things that we call call mysteries never do that at all. The Hardy Boys might find a couple of clues, but only rarely do they figure the whole thing out by themselves; more likely the clues lead them to the old abandoned mine or that lighthouse outside of town or whatever it is, and the bad guy is there waiting for them, and it starts to feel a lot more like an episode of Scooby-Doo than a real mystery, like we're just waiting for the end of the chase scene so that the bad guy will rip the fabric mask off his face and give us the whole confession. It's not a mystery; it's a thriller, because the bad guy ends up doing half the work of getting himself caught. In a real mystery the detective has to figure the whole thing out. That's what I wanted.

And that's why my first mystery love, forget Hardy Boys or Jessica Fletcher, my first mystery love was a boy named Encyclopedia Brown. Encyclopedia Brown is basically the Doogie Howser of detectives, but the books are more puzzle than plot. Each one will have maybe a dozen discrete episodes in which somebody in the neighborhood avails themselves of Encyclopedia Brown's homespun detective agency. I always imagined it looking a bit like the psychiatry booth where Lucy treats Charlie Brown. And then Encyclopedia Brown will investigate for half a dozen pages, and then, just as he is about to pronounce the solution to the mystery, the text cuts off. Now, the book says, it's up to you! Can you figure out who stole the postman's bicycle? Can you figure out where Ms. Violet's dog has run off to? Read it over, look through the evidence, make your own decision, and then flip to the back of the book to check your answer against Encyclopedia Brown's conclusions. And it was straightforward enough. There was always some hole in the evidence. Someone's testimony never quite added up. I remember one in particular where the testimony rested on a sword that had been engraved after the First Battle of Bull Run, and observant readers were meant to figure out that nobody in the immediate aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run would have called it that, because nobody would have known that there would be a second one. That sort of thing. Holes in the evidence. It was my first love. It was a real mystery, a purist's mystery.

There was only one problem, which was that I was absolutely terrible at it. I mean I had no idea. I could read over and over and get nowhere, and the evidence, in my hands, was totally unhelpful. Either everybody sounded trustworthy or they all sounded suspicious; any one of them could be liars or just plain confused, and none of them could possibly be as confused as I was, staring at the last line of any of those mysteries, trying to suppress the desire to flip to the end of the book and see the answer, and yet totally dumbfounded. So eventually I just gave up, caught between my purist standards for what mysteries should be and my fundamental inability to solve any of them. Mostly these days I read nonfiction. Because at some point I started to despise the feeling of having all the evidence in front of me and yet feeling totally perplexed.

I suspect that Mary and Martha and the women who come to the tomb in Luke's Gospel might have felt much the same thing. It has been the customary three days since the crucifixion, and since Joseph of Arimithea carried Jesus down from the cross and laid him into a newly-cut tomb in the side of the rock. It hads been the customary three days and the women have brought the customary ointments and perfumes with which to adorn and treat Jesus's body. Three long days, and they arrive first thing in the morning -- and there's nothing there. Joseph had rolled a large stone in front of the opening, but the stone has been rolled away. Joseph had laid Jesus's body within the grave, but the body itself is gone. It's a mystery. In some ways it's the funhouse-mirror version of a mystery; instead of security guards finding a dead body in the opening of any episode of Law & Order, we now have these women expecting to find a body and instead finding nothing at all. And Luke says that they were totally perplexed.

The women are totally perplexed. In Luke's hands the word doesn't have a negative connotation; it doesn't mean they were skeptical or critical. It just means they didn't know what to think. And they don't know what to think despite having a pile of evidence to work with. They've got the evidence at the scene, of course: the stone is rolled away and the body is gone. But if they could flip back through the pages of the story they'd find all new kinds of evidence, the prophesies that Jesus had made, the promises he had made, the story he had told about how he would die and be buried and then be raised from the dead. Now, it's true that in the next moment angels appear and remind the women about all of Jesus's promises. But it stretches credibility to think that they wouldn't have already remembered what he said. If your friend told you he was going to rise from the dead, that's the sort of thing that sticks in your head, right? No, these women had all the evidence at their fingertips, and the evidence perfectly fits the story, and even they who saw the tomb for themselves couldn't believe it. That's the hole in this evidence; they're the hole in this evidence; even though they're right at the scene of the crime, in the hands even of its best eye-witnesses, the resurrection of the Messiah is something close to un-believable.

And frankly, if they can't believe it, what hope is there for us? According to the most recent numbers I could find, about seventy percent of Americans believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. But that's got to be one of those questions that people answer "yes" to even while having their doubts. Sure, on one hand, we stand here every week in worship and in the words of the Apostle's Creed claim that on the third day Jesus rose from the dead, but, do you believe it? Do you believe it? Do you believe that the man Jesus Christ died and was buried and lay in the tomb and on the third day was raised from the dead? Now, there are any number of voices out there who claim to be able to prove that the resurrection happened, beyond the shadow of our doubts or disbelief. As far as I can tell, they claim that the evidence is overwhelming: that the testimony of the four Gospels, combined with Paul's account of seeing the risen Christ, combined with some scattershot archeological records about a burial site -- they claim, and I've even seen it done with equations marking the probability of the resurrection as a function of textual attestations divided by the elapsed time -- they claim that somehow, as holders of all of the relevant evidence, that we can work out the solution to this mystery beyond a shadow of a doubt. But I ask you, if these women, who had themselves seen Jesus work miracles beyond explanation, and who had themselves heard Jesus prophesy about his own resurrection, if these women found the tomb empty and stood nothing but perplexed -- if they couldn't figure it out, what hope is there for us?

Do you believe it? Every Sunday when we say the Creed, do you believe it? 100% of the time? Maybe 70%? Maybe that's too high. Do you really believe that death has been defeated? How could you, when the evidence to the contrary is so overwhelming. Exhibit One: read the headlines. In February the United Nations estimated that seventy thousand Syrians had died since the outbreak of that country's civil war, hundreds if not thousands of them women and children, much of the fighting done in the name of the God we worship this morning. Has death really lost its sting? Exhibit Two: the images of last December, when twenty children and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook elementary school. I would add "for no reason" but that seems redundant: how could there possibly be a reason? Remember the pictures of parents screaming in horror, an Advent season turned unspeakably tragic. Has God really come into the world? Exhibit Three: you tell me. Day by day the natural toil of our lives bids us closer and closer to the end, and I know that last Easter there were people in these pews whose places are now empty. You tell me the toll, the cost, the heartache of trying to put Easter back together again in the wake of loss that will never leave us quite the same. In hospital rooms, at hospice bedsides, in funeral parlors and gravesides, do you believe it? Considering the evidence, how could you? How can we say anything but that the in the light of the evidence before us, that death wins every time? Or with this evidence in one hand, and the Gospel in the other, how can we be anything but perplexed?

And yet.

And yet, "while [the women] were perplexed, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The men said to them, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.'" The men in dazzling clothes -- tradition calls them angels -- proceed to remind the women of all of promises Jesus made concerning his own resurrection, and the women become convinced. But again, there's no way that they could have forgotten those promises. It's not their own re-examination of the evidence that gives them clarity, as if they could just flip back through the pages and have their own self-contained epiphany. No, it's not the message that makes them believers. It's the messengers. It's the angels. It's the men from God come to bear this news. It's that while they were perplexed, even while they were perplexed, God was working to make them see. And it's a pattern we see over and over in the resurrection stories: that even though the disciples have been told that Jesus has risen from the grave, even they can't quite push aside the evidence of the world: they don't recognize him, or they don't believe him, or they simply hide in their rooms and refuse to face the day. Every single Biblical character faced with the mystery and majesty of Easter morning ends up nothing but perplexed. And every time it is God who opens their eyes, God who breaks down the door, God working to make them see.

We cannot be anything but perplexed. The evidence of the world is too much upon us. But while we are perplexed this Easter Sunday, God nonetheless comes. While we stare at the empty tomb is confusion, God is nonetheless at work. While we are are stricken with doubt, while we are paralyzed with disbelief, while we just don't know what to make of any of it, God is at work, making all things new. This is the glory of Easter Sunday: that it's never been ours to figure out, that it's never been ours to decipher, that it's not an equation to be solved or a thesis to be proven, that if you linger at the tomb in doubt or confusion, that if you woke this morning not knowing what to make of any of it, that if when we rose to say the creed you thought to yourself, "I just don't even know what to think of any of this" here's the good news: that even while we are perplexed, God is still at work, rising from the grave. So Easter doesn't need you to figure it out. Easter isn't even a very good mystery. It's more like a thriller. And this is the moment when God tears through the fabric of creation itself to announce in no uncertain terms: "You are mine, and I am in charge."

The evidence of death is staggering. Day to day, week to week, year to year, time runs its course and the broken world seems to crumble in around us: in hospital rooms, at hospice bedsides, in funeral parlors and gravesides, in headlines and heartache from another year that has slipped so quickly away. The evidence is overwhelming. But this morning, this sacred morning, when God rolls away the stone from his own earthly grave, when God tears through the fabric of creation itself, when the light of the Almighty pours through that tear into the darkness of this unforgiving world, this morning we proclaim holes in the evidence. Though we hear everywhere the cries of those who suffer and mourn, we nonetheless stare through the open tomb and proclaim "Death Shall Have No Victory!" Though we see everywhere the lingering shadow of decay and despair, we nonetheless stand in the empty spot where his body lay and proclaim "Darkness Shall Not Bind Us!" The story of death and despair, the story of the brokenness of all things, the story of inevitability itself: in the wake of the great power of Easter Sunday that story can no longer hold, and it can no longer hold us. Herein lies our hope: that Jesus Christ is Risen Today! Alleluia! Amen.

I'd like to ask you, in response to this Palm Sunday text, the story of Jesus's entrance into the city of Jerusalem, to find yourself in the story. The scene is chaotic: the crowd presses close to a narrow path towards the city gates, Pharisees shout over the noise of the Hosannas, disciples follow him close beside. I'd like you to wonder where you are this morning as you watch the savior ride in on a donkey.

The Presbyterian Book of Worship tries to answer that question for us; it makes a suggestion for Palm Sunday that "if possible, the congregation gathers at a designated place outside the usual worship space, so that all may enter the church in procession." Now this is a very Palm Sunday sort of thing to do. Palm Sunday is, among other things, the day in the life of the church when everybody gets to have a procession, even those of us in denominations that tend to avoid that sort of ... choreography. And I have nothing against processions as a general rule, and we had a very lovely one this morning. But this particular suggestion - that we all should have gathered outside and processed in together - makes a number of ambitious assumptions. It assumes that we who tend to avoid choreography would manage to rise to the occasion and not just trip over ourselves walking down the aisle. It assumes that late March in Virginia would feel a bit more like late March in Virginia a bit less like mid-February in Ohio, or maybe it assumes that we would have more of a narthex, more of a gathering spot outside the sanctuary than we actually have, lest instead we find ourselves blockading the traffic on Second Street waiting for the bell to call us inside. That's a handful of ambitious assumptions, and my high school geometry teacher was very clear on what happens when you "assume," and if you don't know what it is I'm sure there's somebody here who can explain it to you after the service.

But to me the biggest assumption in that piece of stage direction is this: if we're all in the procession, then nobody has to be in the crowd, the crowd that welcomes him into the city with song and ceremony and yet will turn, and forget, and by Friday morning will be calling for his crucifixion. So who would want to admit to being in the crowd? Who wouldn't rather be in the procession? If you were in the procession, that was for the real disciples. The ones who had been there, man. The ones who had broken bread with him and drunk wine together with him and suffered with him at the hands of an unforgiving world, the ones who had left everything to follow him. Have we really done all of that? Or do we assume too much? But we're not yet out of options. Many of us, particularly those of us who count ourselves as religious leaders, are occasionally stuck playing the role of Pharisee; it might do us well to find ourselves uncomfortable in this story and still hope for the Gospel.

But then off to the side, there at the back, at something of a remove from the whole scene, are my favorite characters in this whole parade, characters we have yet to mention and yet characters I think we really understand more than any of the others: a couple of farmers who have just had their donkey stolen.

You heard me. The heart of this story, what Luke spends his precious detail on, is the forcible acquisition - the theft - of a donkey. Jesus tells some of his disciples to go on to the next village where they will find an unridden donkey, and to take it and bring it back, and if anyone asks them why they are shoplifting a donkey, they should simply say that the Lord needs it. And all of this happens just exactly as Jesus predicts: the disciples go on ahead and find just such a donkey - though how you tell an unridden donkey by sight I have no idea - and proceed to untie it and lead it away, and then the text says that the donkey's owners approach them and ask them what they are doing.

Which would seem a very polite rephrasing of what they perhaps actually said. After all, this is no small thing: a new donkey could represent untold economic opportunity and stability; it would be no small investment and no small loss. But the disciples inform the donkey's owners that the Lord needs it, and that's the last we ever hear of them. You might want to assume that sometime later in the day one of the disciples brings their donkey back. You might want to assume that that the owners of the donkey were offered fair market value in compensation for their loss. But we don't know any of that. For all we know, these guys are in the crowd later in the week, looking up at Jesus on trial and thinking "hey, that's the guy who stole our donkey!" And knowing what we do, how could we not sympathize?

Now, it is true that the donkey's original owners are victims of a bit of wordplay. The word for "Lord" here has a kind of double-meaning: on one hand, of course, it has the theological force that we invoke in our own Sunday liturgy; on the other, it has the same sense as it does in your favorite Jane Austen novel, or, let's face it, Downton Abbey, referring to whatever local landowner happened to be at the top of the feudal pyramid. The double-meaning that we have in English is right there in the Greek, so that when the disciples invoke the power of the Lord they seem to be invoking a kind of economic privilege, a right of ownership based on political power and legal authority. It should be a bit surprising that a Gospel so consistently passionate about the rights of the poor and socially outcast should all of a sudden start wielding political and economic power just to seize real property from working farmers. But if you take the other meaning of it, with the capital-L Lord and his capital-P Purposes, it gets even easier to sympathize, and even easier to understand, because the Lord needs things from us all the time.

God needs things from us all the time. And I'm not just talking about money, though I am also talking about money. God needs things from us all the time. God needs our attention, but how many hours do we spend in worship and how many more in distraction? God needs us to do justice and love kindness, to love one another, but how many hours do we spend in service to our community and to the world and how many more serving only ourselves? God needs our time and our talent and, yes, our money, but how much do we really give? How easy it is to say only "That donkey is mine! I have some right to it. I have some need." It is not easy being in relationship with such a needy God. Certainly not when our needs seem so overwhelming. The world seems such a fragile place, Lord; what about our need for safety and stability? The past haunts us; our relationships suffer; what about our need for fellowship and joy and forgiveness? The future seems so uncertain, Lord; what about our need for hope?

But the scandal of this text is that there's no theft at all. Actually the word that we translate as "owner" here is also again the same word for Lord; yes, it shows up everywhere in this text, and at some point the translators just didn't want to repeat themselves. But what it means is that the donkey's owners have exactly the same authority over the donkey that Jesus does over the entire story. They are its lords; but He is The Lord, and if they are the owners of this donkey; then he is the owner of all things. Or as the Psalmist would say, "The Earth is the Lord's, and everything that it is in it!" This Jesus who processes into Jerusalem is one and the same with the God who created Heaven and Earth and holds dominion over all things. And in fact the story reminds us at every turn of his Lordship: the crowds remove their cloaks to make for him a soft path; he tells the Pharisees that if the people were quiet the stones themselves would shout out to him; not to mention that he predicts exactly how and where his disciples will find the donkey itself. Jesus's authority over Heaven and Earth is writ large over every inch of this scene, and surely he cannot steal a donkey that belonged to him the whole time.

The donkey was never theirs. And so for us: our time, our energy, our attention, our money, our talent and devotion, none of it has ever been ours to keep. This is the Gospel for Palm Sunday: that the earth is the Lord's, and everything that is in it - and not just the things we don't need, and not just the extra time we have at the end of the day, and not just the spare change left in our pockets - but that everything we are and everything we have belongs to God. This Gospel is an affront to our selfishness, but also a comfort to our fears, because it means too that our needs are never finally our own. That our worries and disbeliefs, that our exhaustion and weariness, that the fragility of the world and the shadows of the past and the spectre of the future are themselves never really ours, but rather safe in the hands of the one who has authority over all things. This story is a reminder that the power of God gives comfort and discomfort in the same breath, and that the two cannot be separated: for good and bad, in strength and weakness, on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, everything we are and everything we do, belongs to God.

The scene outside Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is something akin to chaos. It would be a winding, narrow road up from the valley to the city gates, lined with crowds of people streaming out of the city, men, women, and children alike, breaking into the old songs and remembering the old heroes and wondering with vast hopefulness about this new King of the Jews. Pharisees, terrified and astonished to see such fervor, shout to make themselves heard over the din of the multitudes. And disciples follow behind him, exhausted from the long journey, unsure of what awaits them in the Passover celebration about to begin, unsure of what Jerusalem has in store.

And this Sunday, as we gather around this table, the Lord's table, we stand on the brink of this Holy Week. You may be standing with the crowd, excited and eager and alive with hopefulness. You may be standing with the Pharisees, terrified and astonished and heavy-set with disbelief. You may even walk in the procession, weary from the long work of following where Jesus has called you and unsure about what awaits you in the week ahead. But no matter who are you this morning, you are the Lord's, and no matter what burdens you carry, they are the Lord's burdens, and even everything yet to come in this long week ahead is under the dominion of the one who has created heaven and earth. So no matter who you are this morning, you are, in some small part, the donkey, owned and needed and called by the Lord of Heaven and Earth, no matter what else you assume.

Amen.

It's an odd thing, to lead worship in the morning and then get ordained in the afternoon. It's a big day. And in part because I won't actually get the chance to say much at this afternoon's service, let me take one moment to thank everybody here who has worked to help put it together. Thank you.

That being said, just to be honest, I kinda thought that it wasn't going to happen. I kinda thought they were going to ask me to be Pope. I had a sneaking suspicion. Just a bit of gut feeling. Would I have done it? I don't know; I mean, on one hand, it's an incredible honor, and you get to travel all around the world; on the other hand -- well, you think I'm going to say that I wouldn't do it because I'm not even Catholic, and I suppose that's part of it, though I did go to a Jesuit college, so I've got that in my corner. But what jumps to mind right now is that I really just don't like the smell of incense. It's so overpowering; there's no such thing as something that smells just a bit like incense. And it's so unnatural; like, why can't the room just smell like the room? But I suppose that's just part of the Papal package: the incense, the gold, the jewelry, the lavish decor of everything: I've been to St. Peter's; it's all very beautiful, it's all incredibly ornate, you can hardly see any of it without trying to calculate the cost in hours and riches, and then they let that incense burn on top of everything and it just seems a bit excessive. I like to think of myself as a man of somewhat simpler tastes.

So you can imagine my surprise when, by all accounts, the Conclave of Cardinals did in fact choose a Pope of similar disposition. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergalio, now known of course as Pope Francis I, has made headlines over the past few days not only for his election but for his simplicity. As the archbishop of Argentina, Bergalio famously refused to live in the palace, choosing instead a modest apartment where he could cook his own meals and ride the bus to work. Upon assuming the Papal office, he appeared in public wearing only a simple robe and cross, and refused to be seated above his fellow cardinals in the traditional throne. A cousin of his told one reporter that "the last time he visited, he arrived [on one of those discount airlines]. He always travels like that. No waste." And so the news coverage has run with the story of the new, simpler, more ordinary, more down-to-earth Pope, a real man of the people, a real man who can somehow cut through all of the ritual, all of the ceremony, all of the excess. I don't know for a fact how he feels about incense, but you can begin to paint a picture.

And I think for us it is a very attractive picture. Given the scandal and intrigue that have hounded the upper floors of the Catholic church in recent memory, and given the cloud of secrecy that has accompanied it, there is no question that we are inclined to see the new Pope's simplicity as something of an antidote. But Francis' aura of modesty doesn't just dovetail with the needs of the modern catholic church. It also brings up long-standing cultural, liturgical, and even theological debates, many of them dating back to the Reformation, about what church was supposed to be like. Look around this sanctuary. Does it seem lavish? Does it seem excessive? Of course, there are objects here that we hold sacred: the table, the font. Bibles and Hymnals given in memory of the dearly departed. But there's very little here to compete with the gold and the jewels of St. Peter's. There's very little here that we would call extravagant. Those of us in the Reformed church, and Presbyterians in particular; well, we tend to be a people of white walls and wooden pews and simpler tastes, a people of ordinary things, and I would wager that very few of us like the smell of incense.

Which means that today's Gospel lesson should challenge us to the core, because John's account of the anointing at Bethany is nothing but a celebration of excess and lavishness. Jesus and the disciples have returned to the home of Mary and Martha - and Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead in the previous chapter. A great dinner is thrown, during which Mary takes a entire bottle of expensive perfume and pours it, every drop, onto Jesus' feet. With her hair she rubs it into the skin and cleans off the dust and dirt of the road, and the house is filled with the sweet overpowering fragrance. Now, there's an argument to be made that using an entire bottle of the perfume is undoubtedly excessive. There's an argument to be made that to wash Jesus's feet Mary would have needed but a few drops. And there's an argument to be made that neither Mary nor Martha are in a financial position to afford to use such an expensive bottle all at once. And in John's telling of that story, that argument is made by no less a Biblical figure than Judas himself.

"Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?," Judas asks. It is not an unreasonable question. Jesus has commanded them to love and serve the poor, to give up all that they had, to sell their possessions. Jesus has called them to a simpler life of ordinary things; you can hear the wheels turn in Judas's head: Why did she even have such a nice bottle? I didn't think Jesus associated with the sort of people who own such expensive stuff. And then just to pour it out, all at once, on his feet? It's not just absurd; I tell you what it is: it's poor stewardship. It's too easy to picture the session meeting, or Presbytery meeting, or finance committee meeting where Judas would stand up and take Mary to task for the selfishness, the irresponsibility, the failure of Christian witness and discipleship involved in spending such an outrageous sum on a simple foot washing. Did you not even consult the rest of the budget? Are you not aware of how close we are every day to financial ruin? Have you even paid attention to how much it costs us just to do the ordinary things that we do? John tells us that Judas himself was the keeper of the common purse, meaning that he, certainly, would be the one to know, and one to chide: Do you have any idea what we could have done with that money? It is not an unreasonable question.

But in the Gospel-writer's hands, we are left with no choice but to reject Judas's question and take Mary's perspective. Of course we are predisposed to reject Judas himself, knowing as we do what fate awaits him in the days to come, and John reminds us even here in this text that Judas is "the one who is about to betray" Jesus. But in John's Gospel, Satan has already "entered into Judas", and John even gives us a particular detail about Judas's own stewardship, namely that he has been stealing from the common pot for his own benefit. So by this point the reader can have no ambiguity about whose perspective - Mary's or Judas' - we are encouraged to occupy, almost as if the question itself -- "why was this perfume not sold and the money given to the poor?" -- almost as if the question is so reasonable, so seductively reasonable, that it becomes necessary to discredit the one who asks it. And so we are forced to join with Mary in pouring the perfume on Jesus's feet; John leaves us no choice but to invert the bottle ourselves until every last expensive drop has been spilled out; John leaves us no choice at all but to revel in this moment of unbridled and unreasonable excess.

So how are you feeling now about these white walls and our simple wooden pews? But more than that: how are you feeling about the very reasonable questions that make up so much of the bulk of our congregational life, like "how do we make this work within our budget?" or "doesn't the church already have something like this that we could just reuse" or "can we really afford to be so extravagant when we have to think about the next generation?" It is central to our sense of Christian stewardship that we do not go around indulging ourselves on splendor; it is central to our sense of Christian discipleship that we answer God's call to the ordinary, to the church boiler, to the parking lot, to the very regular and routine deeds of community service woven into our own self-understanding - "you will always have the poor with you." Surely, we tell ourselves, surely it is there that God calls us, into the discipleship of the everyday and the stewardship of the ordinary - surely we are never meant to find room in our theological budgets for something as extravagant as an entire bottle of perfume only to be spilled on the floor. It's not an unreasonable conviction for the everyday work of ordinary people living together as the church of God.

But Jesus' trip to Bethany is no everyday trip. Remember that the last time he was here, his friend Lazarus, their friend Lazarus had turned sick and died, and Jesus had raised him from the grave. It was a formidable demonstration of his power, but it also evoked the wrath of the Jewish authorities. So they have been searching for him high and low, and so this time, when Jesus comes to Bethany, it's like returning the scene of his crime. The last time he was here, he was a wandering prophet, the sort of figure that was not unfamiliar to Roman-occupied Israel; this time, he's something far more dangerous; this time, six days before Passover, six days before Jesus will ride into Jerusalem and begin the final chapter of his earthly ministry, this time is no ordinary time; this time Jesus who raised Lazarus from the grave is preparing for his own death. That's what he finally says to Judas: that's why she bought the perfume, Judas: she bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. Last time he was here, nobody would have seen this coming. This time, Mary can see all too clearly where the story ends: if he came back to Bethany, he's ready to die. If he rides to Jerusalem, the story can't end any other way.

What's more: the last time he was here, the house smelled like death. That's what Martha said when Jesus proposed to roll away Lazarus' stone: He has been dead four days; Lord there is already a stench. But this time, Mary covers over the stench of death the only way she can: with the whole jar of the richest perfume, with the sweet smell of excess. That's so important we have to say it again: the last time, Mary's house smelled like death, and it's one of those smells that you can't just wash away. But this time, for this one moment, on the precipice of Jerusalem, on the brink of the cross, Mary fills the house with the sweetest fragrance she has, obliterating - if only for one passing hour - the lingering stench of death and decay. In so doing she anticipates the very extra-ordinary, the very immodest, the very extravagant event yet to come: that Jesus himself will overcome the grave, that Jesus himself will break free of the everyday bonds of life and death, that the very event upon which God's house has been built, the very event upon which this church and this congregation have been built, is the very definition of unreasonable and the very heart of lavish.

We sit here on the precipice of Jerusalem. Our Lenten journey is nearing its end: next week, we will march in to the city, and the clock will wind its way towards betrayal in the Garden and death on the cross, and before we know it Easter will pass, and Pentecost with it, and we will find ourselves once again in the season of Ordinary Time, and we will turn to the business of ordinary things, of simple white walls and wooden pews. Surely there is great room in our shared Christian journey for the ordinary, for the modest; more than that: surely we are in fact called to be reasonable stewards of our Christian inheritance: our families, our congregation, this church, this community. Surely we are called to make prudent decisions within budgeted amounts, to safeguard what we have for the generations yet to come. And yet this reasonable work, in this ordinary time, is everywhere marked by the stench of death. This ordinary time, this very human time, is nothing but the occupation of our fleeting lives, and the stench of death attends us at every turn. It soaks into the fabric of our relationships. It gets under the skin of our own bodies. Even down into the foundation of who we are and what we believe, and every one of us this morning has come into worship bearing that stench of death. It smells like heartache and desperation. It smells like grief. It smells like loneliness and fear. It smells like pain and despair. It smells like the brokenness of the world laid bare in very ordinary ways.

But here on the precipice of Jerusalem. Here in the climax of our Lenten journey; here in this time outside of ordinary time, here as we draw near to the cross, the promise of the Gospel of Jesus triumphant over the grave pours down upon us like the sweetest perfume. Not just a single drop, though a single drop would do; no, the promise of God comes with abundance. It comes with abandon. And it fills the whole household of God with the smell of the sweetest perfume. It seeps into the pews. It soaks into the walls. It smells like the lavish grace that attends God's forgiveness. It smells like the extravagant love that attends God's faithfulness. It smells like the promise of a kingdom excessively far beyond this ordinary time. It's so overpowering that the stench of death, if only for a moment, if only for a passing hour, is nowhere to be found. Amen.

If you haven't already heard, this week the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its all-time high. As of the close of trading on Friday, the index closed at roughly 14,397, ending a week in which it finally reached and surpassed the previous high water-mark, set before the economic collapse of 2008. Now, I am hardly an economist, but I know at least three things about the Dow. The first is that, unlike more sophisticated indexes, the Dow tracks only a handful of companies, thirty out of the 2300 listed on the New York Exchange, barely one percent. The second is that the Dow is not adjusted for inflation, so that a closing mark of 14,000 means markedly less in 2013 dollars than it would have fifty years ago. But the third is that, despite these caveats, the Dow number has a particularly firm grip on our imagination. We love ourselves a number, especially when it suggests that the hard times of the past five years are beginning to turn.

But the suggestion of economic fortune is not the same thing as national recovery, and there are no shortage of reasons to think that the fortunes of the Dow -- of this 1%, if you will -- are at some disconnect with the economic situations of real people. Jobs lost in the blink of an eye five years ago have not so easily returned. Entire industries have been decimated, leaving in their wake a new generation of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and debt. When you see headlines about sequestration, austerity, and generational financial ruin across the page from jubilation about the Dow's latest plateau, and if you believe in some conception of the common good, it is hard to escape the conclusion that some 1% have not been good stewards of our national fortune, that some among us have this unpaid debt, that somewhere along the race to the top, some fortunate few have committed the grievous sin of leaving so many others behind.

But of course, the "common good" is not the only value by which we tell the story of this country. America holds dear to a strong tradition of individual achievement and personal liberty, a tradition that, far from chiding those who reap the windfalls of the bull market, instead values their entrepreneurial drive and personal investment, while hoping that any one rising boat augurs a better tide for everyone else. I once heard a local Jersey politician say that America faced a choice between being a nation of individuals or a nation of community, but in point of fact this country has always held those two choices in juxtaposition. And so whether you think the Dow's record is an occasion to celebrate financial success or to confess our corporate sinfulness depends entirely on which of those American values you prioritize: the value of the community or the value of the individual.

Just as that value choice affects how we read the headlines, it also affects how we read scripture, particularly today's very familiar parable. A man has two sons. Presumably a wealthy man: the family has any number of servants, farmland, and and livestock, an inheritance worth thinking about. But something about this is insufficient to the younger son, and so he makes an entirely unconventional and controversial request: he asks his father for his share of the inheritance. His father obliges, and the son takes the money to a distant land, a non-Jewish land, I imagine something a bit like Vegas, and he spends it. Now, he might very well have enough money that spending it freely would have little consequence, but then a famine strikes. Presumably food prices skyrocket. The son is reduced to working in the fields, feeding the pigs food he himself would gladly have eaten. He is left alone: "no one gave him anything," Luke says. And so he determines to go home, to speak to his father, to make his confession: "I have sinned against you and against God."

"I have sinned against you and against God." And now, pick a value -- pick the value or the community or the value of the individual -- and tell me where the son went wrong. Tell me what his sin was. It turns out that if we read this story from the perspective of race-to-the-top American individualism, it's very hard to make sense of his confession. From this perspective, the son asks for and receives the inheritance that will be his eventually regardless. Sure, he makes poor financial decisions, in that he spends his money foolishly -- but it is his money to spend as he wishes. Sure, he makes poor moral decisions, in that he spends his money on what the text calls "dissolute living," but the crisis that provokes his confession is not a moral crisis. It's an economic one. He runs out of money. He could have done so just as easily by playing the market. From an individualist perspective, he's hardly broken the rules. He's acted foolishly, perhaps, But sinfully? At best, he's sinned only against himself.

Nonetheless: he confesses to his father: I have sinned against God and against you. And so I submit that the only way to make sense of this text, the only way to understand what it is that the son does wrong, is to change perspectives, to change values, to think not in terms just of the individual but in terms of the community. From this perspective the son's journey is not a journey from affluence into economic poverty but rather the journey from connection and family into solitude: "no one gave him anything." It's a journey motivated by the illusion that he is beholden only unto himself, that not only the money but in fact his very life and his very life choices are his entirely to have and to use and to abuse. But his confession reveals this to be entirely in error; his confession reveals that he has been beholden to something much bigger the whole time, that he has a real debt to pay, but not to the loan sharks who have been financing his lifestyle. No, his debt is to his community, to his family, to the father who loves him and calls him into being, to the God who loves him and calls him into being.

The parable of the prodigal son is not an economics textbook. It does not easily proscribe how we are to read the headlines or stand before the marketplace, nor will it decide for us whether to be a nation of individuals or a nation of community. It cannot so easily tell you how to be citizens of a republic. But it has something very specific to say about what it is to be a citizen of God's household, namely that here in this congregation, we are none of us beholden only to ourselves. Here in what John Calvin called the great invisible church of Christendom, we are none of us free to our own selfish ends. Here in the great fellowship of all God's children, we are inexorably, we are inevitably, we are indisputably bound to one another, baptized together by one Spirit, seated together at one table, gathered together by Almighty God at the foot of one cross.

One of the reasons I'm excited to be back in the Blue Ridge is that I love hiking, or, rather, I love day hiking, and one of the reasons I love day hiking is that in my younger years, during my dalliance as a Boy Scout, I had to do an inordinate amount of overnight hiking before I realized that you could do basically the same thing without having to carry forty pounds on your back. That's when I started day hiking. But there is something to be said for hiking with scouts: I remember the large group of us, preteens and 18-year olds and dads and scoutmasters, some of us (well, some of them) athletes in their prime and some of them (well, some of us) perpetually racing to catch up, I remember starting up a steep mountain path with two bowling balls strapped to my shoulders and having the scoutmaster strictly inform us that we would be going at the pace of the slowest hiker.

Of course, a whole scout troop strapped with gear and probably loaded with donuts is also likely to be loaded with testosterone and pride. Go at the pace of the slowest hiker? Yeah, alright, except that that's a terrible idea. There's a trail, there's a mountain, this is obviously a race to the top. We all complained bitterly. It was important to complain. It was important to go on the public record opposing this ridiculous policy, because it meant that you were one of the strong ones, that you could look out for yourself, that frankly you weren't one of the unpopular kids who straggled behind. And I think that the stated purpose of the rule was about safety: by holding the group together, the adults could more easily supervise and guarantee that we would all get to the mountaintop at the same time. But of course what the rule also did was to raise even the slightest possibility that we might think not only of our own race to the top, but might also open our hearts to the welfare of our companions, to something like the common good.

We are now only two weeks away from Palm Sunday. The season of Lent grows long, and time time left on our liturgical journey grows short. Much like the prodigal son on his journey home, we travel this path weighed down with our own individual burdens, our own individual sins, envy, greed, pride, I'm sure you don't need me to spell them all out. But we don't just travel as individuals. No, instead, we travel as a gathered community of faith; we travel as the gathered children of God. We travel with debts not just to ourselves, but to each other, to the communities that call us into being, to God who calls us into being. Of course, a feast awaits all of God's prodigal children, a feast of grace and fellowship and joy and the forgiveness we so desperately seek. The light of the promise of the cross shines brightly from the mountaintop.

But as we make our way up the path, we travel at the pace of the slowest walker. At the pace of the poorest among us. At the pace of the hungriest. At the pace of the outcast. At the pace of the most prideful and most arrogant. At the pace of the most hated and the most powerless. At the pace of the person in your family, or in this church, or in any church, or in any room in the vast sweeping household of God, that you find the most despicable. The scandal of this Gospel is that they will get to the cross at the same exact moment that you do. God calls us to travel together to raise even the slightest possibility that we might open our hearts to the welfare of our companions. And so we travel together, we bear our sins together, we bear our debts together, we lay our heaviest burdens together at the feet of our one common savior. We travel together, and we will all get to the mountaintop at the same time. After all, it is our most common good.

Amen.

I want to start this morning with a sincere word of thanks. It isn't the first, and it won't be the last, but I'd be remiss, upon the occasion of stepping into this pulpit on the first of many Sundays yet to come, I'd be remiss if I didn't offer up my sincere thanks to all of you for welcoming me and my family with such open arms and with such generosity. From the moment that I first began to read about this church, I sensed the life and livelihood of this congregation, I began to kindle my hopes that God would indeed call us together, and I now find myself very blessed indeed to be here. Blessed that you have already opened your homes to me, blessed by the moments when you have already stopped by to say hello, and certainly overwhelmingly blessed by the small dry goods store I could now open using only the reserve contents of my pantry. I know I speak as well for Sarah and Charlie when I say "thank you" for being such generous stewards of the community we now call home.

I do have one regret, which is that I started work just in time to miss last week's chili cook-off. Now obviously there are no shortage of opportunities to eat together in Amherst. But as a cook, and as a lover of spice, chili is near and dear to my heart. In fact it's probably nearer to my heart more often than is really healthy. Suffice to say that next year's cook-off is already on my calendar. I'll bring my own recipe. It's a bit different, I make a Cincinatti-style chili, it's a style famous for using cinnamon and allspice and cloves instead of the piles of actual chile peppers that go into most southwestern recipes. But it's also prepared a bit differently. See, with most traditional chili recipes, you start with the meat, whether it's ground beef or cubed up chuck or whatever, most recipes have you cook that up before you ever add tomatoes or broth or spice or beans. But with the Cincinatti-style, you just start with water. It's just water. Sure, soon enough there's meat and spice and tomatoes and all the things that make chili into chili. Eventually it winds up looking a lot more like the Virginia mud that we now track through the house on a regular basis. It smells like Heaven -- but it looks like mud! But before it was mud, before it was chili, before it was anything so delicious or anything so messy, before it was warming up a crowd on a midwinters day or flung all over the wall by a precocious toddler, it was just water. And I suppose you'd have to decide for yourselves whether it had been improved.

"Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters." Now, when Christians read the Bible, we have this tendency to put water up on a pedestal. Water, life-giving water, like the water that Moses draws out of the rock in the desert; water, cleansing water, like the flood waters of Noah's age or the streams of justice and mercy on the lips of the prophets; water, sanctifying water, like the Jordan river where John baptized the crowds and baptized Jesus himself. Our image of Biblical water has a quality of perfection to it, like we've gone to one of those nice restaurants where they ask you whether you prefer sparking or bottled or tap, and they say the last one with such condescension as if no one in their right mind would lower themselves to such a thing. We've put our water on a pedestal, so that when in our text this morning Isaiah says "everyone who thirsts, come to the waters," we have a whole series of images all ready to go. But Isaiah has something quite a bit different in mind. "Come, buy wine and milk, without money and without price... come, delight yourselves in rich food!" Wine and milk, the staples of luxury, but certainly altogether different than water from the rock. Rich food - some translations even call it "the fattiest food" - something altogether different than manna in the wilderness. So Isaiah's up to something altogether different, and even the purest bottled tap-water that we bring with us won't help us understand what it is.

The first thing that will help will be to understand a bit about the context in which Isaiah is writing. One of the reasons that water imagery is so pervasive in the Old Testament is because of the foundational narrative of Israel wandering through the desert on its way out of Egypt. But Isaiah is writing at a much different moment in its Israel's existence: centuries later, as the nation joyfully anticipates returning home from exile in Babylon. Now, Babylon isn't the wilderness: it's a vast, cosmopolitan city, the center of a massive empire, and the Israelites have been living there for several hundred years. Though they arrived as a single conquered people, by this late date, Israelites can be found throughout the Babylonian social spectrum, they're insiders and outsiders, rich and poor, powerful and powerless. Centuries of exile have created divisions in what had once been such a united people. And so when Isaiah writes, "Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters! You that have no money, come, buy and eat, delight yourselves with rich food!," it's not merely poetic. In fact it's probably a real invitation to a historical event in which the barriers that had sprung up among the Jewish exiles would now fall by the wayside. Rich, poor, those in the court, those in the jail, those with power and those without, those who were living in the lap of luxury and those for whom wine or fresh milk or fatty foods would have been a sheer pipe dream, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. In this sense our text is a powerful reminder that the only qualification that gathers us into worship, the only qualification for walking through those doors on a Sunday morning is not class or status or power but rather thirst, that the doors of the church are open for everyone who thirsts.

But Isaiah's argument isn't just about how we engage one another. No, this text has something far more powerful to say about how God engages us, and again, it circles back to water. Listen again, later in the same text: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose." In Isaiah's image, God's purposes are accomplished when this water we hold on a pedestal falls like rain and mixes with the earth. In that fertile soil plants will take hold, among them vineyards that can produce the finest wine in Babylon, and livestock to produce the finest milk and the most fatted calves. For Isaiah, it's all well and good to speak of the purity of water as the purity of God's purposes, but none of it comes into being without mixing in pieces of God's creation. Nothing happens unless it gets a little muddy. As Christians, we know this all too well as the meaning of the incarnation itself: nothing happens unless the Word falls like rain and is made into flesh and dwells among us, and so when Isaiah says "everyone who thirsts," it's not just a universal invitation to drink from God's sky-high promises but rather a universal recognition that God's purposes are real, incarnate, grounded, that God's plans come into being in and through real pieces of creation, in and through real human beings, in and through us. And so it gets a little muddy.

I have thirsted, for a long time, for this moment. I have thirsted for the chance to wear the robe and the stole, to be welcomed into a loving and gracious church, to take this monumental step towards becoming the pastor that I have long sensed God calling me to be. I have thirsted through session meetings, presbytery meetings, interviews, ordination exams; I've been the agenda item at least a dozen times, each one of them an opportunity for somebody else to say no, and throughout my thirst it has been the promise of this moment that has pushed me forward. I am so glad to be here. And I don't want to speak so easily for all of you, but I think I know that you, too, have thirsted for this moment, for the moment when the next chapter of the life of Amherst Presbyterian Church would begin in full. You thirsted through your own meetings and your own discernment, you thirsted in anticipation while this PNC slogged through piles and piles of paperwork, and through all of it it has been the promise of this moment that has carried you through. I am so grateful for it.

But before any of us puts one single moment on too high a pedestal, let's remember that in order for the waters of the promises of God to do anything at all, they have to get a little muddy. Sometimes it smells like cinnamon and allspice. Sometimes it smells like Heaven. But sometimes it's just mud. That's what church is: God provides the water, but we provide the seasonings, and sometimes it's just mud that we track throughout the house. Sometimes you've been planning a chili cook-off for months on end and afterwards chili is the last thing you ever want to smell again, even if it is just water underneath. Sometimes you get a little sick of it, three hours in to a 45 minute meeting, sometimes, when you can't believe you've been roped into one more potluck, sometimes, when you can't believe what the preacher said that morning, sometimes, when you can't believe any of it, sometimes, it gets a little muddy. This is the crux of the whole thing, friends; this is what church is: that we are all broken and sinful creatures and despite it all God loves us, and despite it all God calls us into community, and despite it all God uses us for the great purposes of creation.

So let's make a covenant, you and I, right now. Let's make a covenant to be fertile soil for the waters of God. Let's covenant to open the doors to everyone who thirsts. Let's covenant to yearn together and discern together and learn together what is the next chapter in the story of this place, a story of people who thirst for the waters of justice and righteousness and also feast together on the rich fat of grace and mercy. We will make mistakes. I will make mistakes. We will not always get along. Church is not life on a pedestal. But that's okay. In fact, it's better than okay, because God has claimed us, stubbornly human though we may be, for purposes beyond our imagination. So let's covenant to track mud all throughout this house. It's a sign of the rain. It's a sign of the waters. It's a sign that the promises of our Creator have mixed with the rich soil of Amherst Presbyterian Church. It's a sign of the living God working in and through every one of us. So come, everyone who thirsts! Come to the waters! Let's find out what God will grow!

Amen.