God you see met me when I was very young, in wild birds pecking seed out of my mittened hands as I sat stock still in the snow, in the spill of the Milky Way and the green ribbons of the Northern Lights that made me feel as if I were about to fall straight off the world and into infinite beauty, and curled up beneath my covers wrapped in unseen arms that I could name as only a Grandmother older and wiser and more loving than even my Grandmothers (who were both deeply loving, and wise each in their own way).

And every year, serving as an acolyte, or singing in the choir I listened as Good Friday told me that God demanded his (always his) son to die, so that I wouldn’t have to. And I am infinitely grateful for the theological inoculation of my early life, because it did not matter what any biblical author, or clergy person said: I knew it was not true. Deep down in the cells of the bones that let me carry that heavy cross down the aisle.

Especially as I grew older and could read for myself I found myself over and over again meeting in the stories a God who turned the rules of the universe upside down to rescue a bunch of people who seemed no more worthy than me. And of course as I came to learn more about how those sacred stories came to be, and how they were transmitted and translated I also gained a healthy dose of suspicion about just how much of the blood and judgement wasn’t human beings writing our own worst instincts onto God (please note the authors of Christian scripture are just as often doing this as the authors of Jewish scripture, Christians just read the New Testament as loving and gentle because of bias).

Every Good Friday, no matter how progressive a Christian you are, you are confronted with a Church that whole heartedly proclaims that God committed child murder as the good alternative to the eternal punishment of a the very limited mortal beings that same God created and endowed with free choice. And frankly it’s the story of an abusive relationship. “Do you see what you made me do?” the God of Good Friday says each and every year.

Today I came across this recent sermon from Diana Butler Bass and it resonated deeply. She posits that our focus has been on the wrong thing all along. That the Table (Eucharist) was always the point, not the cross. And that sermon neatly slotted in for me to the instinctual theology of my youth. Years ago I began to ask people “what if the cross wasn’t something God needed or wanted at all? What if it was just the logical response by Empire to someone proposing we all sit down together, share what we have, heal the sick, lift up the downtrodden, give away our possessions and power?” Some people get really uncomfortable in the face of that question. And some feel liberated by it.

Now, I realize it will be heretical to many. That’s OK, I don’t mind being a heretic. I’m on the side of a God who doesn’t need to beat and kill her children, and on the side of those children trying to build a more just and gentle world. And I have serious doubts that we get there through an instrument of torture, execution, and terror. It seems far more likley that the God who fed the Israelites in the wilderness on divine food would spread a table for Gentiles, than need a human (divine) blood sacrifice to balance some kind of cosmic scale. This is the same God after all who multiple times in Hebrew scripture rejects sacrifice and asks instead for the sacrifice of a contrite heart, of a just society.

What if the resurrection wasn’t the original plan, what if it was God’s gentle response to the worst that human ideas of power and privilege could cook up. What if the resurrection tells us that the God that Jews have known for thousands of years, that Gentiles were invited to meet through the followers of Jesus is not (despite our blood soaked imaginations) marching into anywhere with a heavenly army armed to the teeth? What if the resurrection is the gentle exhale of the parent tired beyond words but who refuses to lash out at their melting down toddler?

And as Diana points out, Jesus goes back to the table (or the breakfast on the beach). After the resurrection Jesus’ followers most often meet him in the breaking of the bread. They continue to do so to this day. What would it change if we were brave enough to imagine a God who is better (even a little bit) than a mediocre human parent? Who could never, ever imagine condemning their beloved child, no matter how hurt and disappointed they became. This Holy Week my meditation is on the hope that we could become other than we are. That we might raise our eyes and our imaginations to the horizon and wonder if we can follow God out of our fear and vindictiveness and into the hope of a world awash in wide open tables, in laughter, and friendship. If we put down the cross for good and followed Jesus into something different.

The more things change, as they say, the more they stay the same.

Amos is on fire today, calling out the way our society tramples on the vulnerable. How we will do anything to make a little more money, to get ahead, to do what we want to do. After all here we are, in the middle of a global pandemic and you wouldn’t know it from looking outside these doors. Since May, in the US an average of 3,000 people have died every week from COVID-19, in August alone 15,284 Americans died of COVID-19.

But you wouldn’t know it from the back to work push. From requirements that people work sick and contagious. From schools pretending it is still 2019. From a complete removal of mitigation strategies in our public places which have effectively turned our immunocompromised, elderly, and disabled neighbors into prisoners in their own homes. When I went to get my booster at the local pharmacy I found an elderly woman waiting who cried with relief when she saw my mask. Who was terrified as the only other masked person that she would die because she got boosted. Who hasn’t even been able to grocery shop since mandates went away. Because in our rush to normal we forgot about people like her, or honestly we never really cared. Disabled Americans have been forgotten and pushed out of view from long before COVID.

Climate change is reaching a critical tipping point. The latest data tells us to keep Earth habitable for us we need to peak our global carbon emissions by the end of this year. But even the most aggressive climate goals don’t peak those emissions until at least a decade from now. Meanwhile how many of us suffered from smoke this last week as a fire burned on the once wet Western slopes of the Cascades?

I feel Amos. We need his voice in our world, we need a lot of Amoses calling us out for our complacency, our greed, our lust for comfort.

And then we have 1^st Timothy. Which tells us to pray for the powerful because really who doesn’t want a quiet and peaceable life? And whew. Jesus isn’t here for it folks. There’s a reason our lectionary committee put these lessons next to each other.

Just before Jesus’ strange teaching today in Luke (in Chapter 15) Jesus told a parable of another fellow who squandered what wasn’t entirely his: the prodigal son. That is a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. Characters grow and develop and getting a nice Aesop’s fable meaning out of it is easy. Which makes is really different than this one.

In both there is a rich man.

In both there is someone who has been given charge of part (or all) of his wealth. The son has been given his inheritance (before his father dies, so it is still his fathers’ sort of) and the manager is in charge of the master’s estate. Both frankly, screw up.

The son realizes his mistake, and comes home ready to take his lumps. He is willing to accept the position of a servant in his father’s household. His father meets him with forgiveness and reconciliation.

The manager however does no such thing. He is confronted with his actions and he doubles down on his duplicity. He got in trouble for wasting his master’s resources. So now he wastes them even more, changing the debts of his wealthy neighbors and shorting the master who is firing him. And he doesn’t do it because of generosity, or as an act of repentance, he does it to get something out of it, he wants to lay a sort of honor debt on them that he can call in later. He wants to worm his way into their homes. (Greek: oikous)

And then Jesus has this inscrutable and weird saying about the children of this age and the children of light. And tells us to make friends by dishonest wealth so we can be welcomed into the eternal homes, but the word used there is not oikous. Nearly every translation out there renders the word here “homes.” The same as the parable just before. But it isn’t the same word. Jesus says “so you can be welcomed into the eternal tents.” (Greek: skenas)

And that is quite a difference.

A tent isn’t stable. It rather implies that you will be moving around, changing, traveling. The steward sought the stable home of one who has possessions, security, and place. He wanted normal. Jesus doesn’t promise that, his choice of words might even imply that to have that sort of stability/normality goes against the Kingdom his followers are meant to seek.

Jesus’ promise is the home of a refuge, a nomad, a wandering Aramean. He promises a life of change.

The steward got buddy buddy with the rich and powerful by doing them a sneaky favor on the side, in hopes of getting something out of them down the line. (Those debts he was making smaller were large, not something you’d lend to a person without means.)

What if the issue was what the manager wanted for himself (stability, certainty, and safety (sound like 1^st Timothy))? What if instead he had scattered around that generosity without any thought of being repaid? What if it he called all the poor people who owed small amounts that were crushing them and canceled their debts (knowing they couldn’t pay him back)?

In the wilderness Israel ate the bread of angels, but when they tried to hoard that treasure for comfort it became moldy and rotten. Again and again throughout scripture we are shown that God’s gifts are meant to be held gently, given freely with no thought of return. Like Jesus’ instructions in Luke to invite the poor and the sick when throwing a party. Like his instructions to take for ourselves the lowest place, instead of the highest.

We live in a world of money and power, so did Jesus’ followers, and the churches for whom Luke wrote. There’s no way around that.

But Jesus wanted to be sure they understood what mattered.

Jesus wanted to be sure it was clear that we tend to have our priorities backward: seeking comfort for ourselves at the expense of others. In the end Jesus states it plainly: we cannot serve God and make the “normal” of our world our highest goal. The two are incompatible.

So much of the values of the Kingdom seem upside down to the modern Western world, even I’m afraid, to the church.

We are called to build a “normal” that protects the poor, the sick, the widow and orphan. To throw in our lot with those who have been forgotten and pushed aside, to confront the powerful, the wealthy, the corrupt in every way that they harm God’s children.

Our lectionary committee today did a wise thing, wedging our desire for comfort and ease, between two radical calls for anything but. So that we might see that impulse in our own hearts And hear the call to God’s way. Lest in hoarding and grasping the things we most desire turn to rot.

What is scriptural context and why does it matter? For that matter what is your context and why does it matter? What does any of it have to do with your spiritual life or your faith? Turns out, a lot.

So let’s start with context. It’s dictionary definition:

The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. (From two Latin words which together mean “to weave together.”)

Dictionary.com

Context matters because without context you cannot fully understand a thing. We all know this, anytime we say that something is an inside joke we are referring to a joke that can only be understood if you understand the context. And yet for the last hundred years or so some religious groups have tried to claim that when it comes to scripture context doesn’t matter.

I’m here to tell you that’s a bunch of malarkey.

The Three Worlds of a Text

When it comes to texts we study there are generally three contexts that matter.  (This is true for all texts but we’ll stick to sacred scriptures here.) Which sounds like a lot perhaps, but once you get the concept down it actually makes dealing with a text easier. Context gives you a framework to explore and question.

In literary scholarship this whole concept is called the Hermetical Circle. That’s a fancy name for a simple concept. Three circles, three contexts that we need to pay attention to anytime we’re study a piece of literature.

Background Context

Also called the world behind the text this is the context that exists in the author’s life. Author’s (even of scripture) lived in the real world. And the real world is always changing. So understanding (even a little) what the world of the author was like can shed enormous light on the text you are dealing with.

This is things like the political climate in which the author is working, religious practices, culture. Things like: can women own property, or is slavery common place are important things to be aware of when studying a text. All of the unconscious things that a writer brings to the text they are creating are living there, behind the text waiting to trip us up.

The further we get from the context in which the author worked the more we need to be careful to be aware.

For example: at the time of the writing of the four Gospels women did not have standing as full adult humans legally. They didn’t count for the minimum number of people required to do prayers, they (generally) could not own property or choose who they would marry. Understanding this will make passages that count people and list only men. There is a passage in Luke that comments “about 5000 men were there.” When we understand context we realize there were probably women and children there as well, but the author wouldn’t assume it mattered or needed to be said.

In Story Context

This is a little complex sounding at first, but it is important to understand that the world an author creates in the text may or may not have similar context to the author’s own context. This is often quite a subtle distinction, though an important one. But here’s a really obvious example.

Tolkien was an Englishman writing in the early and mid twentieth century. It is clear that the context of his own world (two world wars, mythology, etc) informs the world of his books. However the context within the books set in Middle Earth is clearly quite different than his own context. England may be a magical place but it’s trees do not walk and talk (no matter how slowly) and it does not in fact contain giant owls (among other things.)

Being able to differentiate between the world of the author and the world the author has created is vital for understanding their meaning, often the differences between the author’s world and the one they create in their text are our biggest pointers to what they value or the meaning they wish to convey.

Our Context

Finally we must be aware of our own context because it informs everything we read, think, and do. You cannot read a piece of scripture the way a 3rd century Roman citizen would read the same work. It is simply not possible and that is due to your context as a reader.

But like a fish trying to describe water most of us would have a hard time describing our context. It is simply the reality we inhabit, it is so much a part of us it can be hard to see. And so most people tend to assume they approach a text from a neutral point of view, we don’t.

Everything about you is your context, where you were born, raised, your educational level, your ethnicity, your parents’ educations, your values, your sex or gender, your sexual orientation, your various levels of health or disability, and the list goes on.

Why Context Matters

Why does all this matter? Well think about it this way: the things an author chooses to include (or not) in a story are part of their context. The fact that very few women are named (or get to speak) in scripture (compared to men) isn’t because the Divine doesn’t really have much to do with women, but because the culture in which those stories were told was male dominated.

Limiting Factors

The authors of most of scripture (there are some bits that are debated) are absolutely male. And so they tend to write about things that men were concerned with. They tell stories about men in which women have supporting roles. They completely ignore all sorts of things that women might have considered important because those things were completely outside their context and experience.

And that matters. Because it allows us to read behind the text, to propose alternate readings (and tellings) of stories from another point of view (like maybe a woman’s). And because it helps us know when we need to draw a line and say “this story is helpful up to this point, but because of it’s context it simply cannot speak to X.”

Checks and balances

Our own context matters because it has just as much impact on how we interpret and apply meaning to a story as the author’s original work. All reading is interpretation, there is no way to interact with scripture (or any other written work) without interpretation. And our context as readers mattes. A straight white man and a queer black woman are going to read the same text quite differently.

A woman from Ghana is going to read a text differently than a child in China. That is the richness of human experience and the miracle of the written word: it is alive, malleable, and each new generation of readers adds to it’s tapestry of meaning.

Exploring Context

Tread carefully…

So. If context is so important why don’t you hear about it more often? The answer is probably complicated but there are a few factors.

First there is the simple fact that exploring context is more work than ignoring it. Doing the research to find out what the world was like in say the 4th century BCE takes time. Digging into your own past and the culture around you takes time. It is straight up easier to ignore the whole thing and pretend it doesn’t matter.

But I suspect there is a deeper reason. Ignoring context let’s you proclaim once and for all that you know the truth. There are a great many pastors and religious leaders out there who will happily tell you exactly what a passage of scripture means for now and always, which is only possible if you completely ignore context.

That works out great for them, but not so hot for their followers.

Here there be dragons

Your own context is the most accessible right now, and can have a huge impact on your reading and study. Becoming aware of what influences your reading does not require study, or a trip to the library. It’s a simple matter of answering some basic journal questions.

It can help you to see your own blind spots, or understand the reasons you are so wary to certain literature. Basically it can tell you where you might be wrong (or at least blind). And it can tell you where your context might be sounding alarm bells to protect you from something legitimately dangerous.

Get the journal here.

What to Do Once You Know?

You’ve taken the context quiz, you’ve journaled your way into greater self awareness, now what? The rest my dear is up to you. Most of all keep reading, keep wrestling with scripture, history, and tradition. Keep experiencing new things. You have the advantage now, and the responsibility, to apply your understanding of your context to the things you experience.

Speak up when you are aware that perhaps the comfortable interpretation of a text comes out of white, middle class experience rather than say Divine inspiration. Speak up especially if it will cost you some of your comfort. Feel free to wrestle with texts that you now know are problematic. Can your context reframe, refresh, or turn them on their heads?

Call out context when you see it. Especially when you see someone’s context being tossed about as absolute truth, gently but firmly call out what’s happening. You’ll be giving a great gift to those whose context differs but who are often silenced by the assumption that a certain context is “normative.” (This context is nearly always straight, white, male and middle or upper class.)

That God has deigned to adopt us as well does not lesson God’s relationship with Jews one bit. A fact that the Vatican and the Archbishop of Canterbury has affirmed in official statements. We don’t have to look far to see how the words of 2^nd Corinthians have caused deep and lasting harm to our Jewish neighbors. Whoever wrote what we call the second letter to the Corinthians, be that Paul or someone else was, is simply wrong. This letter was written in a time of conflict as the early Jesus movement sought to define itself as something new and separate from Judaism. We can understand why that author might write such a thing, and we can also acknowledge how such statements have hurt and killed real people.

When we find places where our scriptures get things wrong, we are duty bound to call that out, to always (as Jesus did) put the welfare of human beings, whom God loves, first. 

But that isn’t what I want to talk about today, not really. I want to talk about revelation and what it demands of us. Because the story from Exodus, and from Luke today are both stories of revelation.

In Exodus Moses speaks with God, face to face. And the experience is so transformative that it is as if his skin has absorbed the power and majesty of God. His face glows, as if lit from within. And it is by that miraculous light that the Israelites know he has been with God, and has brought the word of God to them. After Moses talks to God, he is different. He’s been changed. 

And the lives of the Israelites have also been irrevocably changed. They can never go back to who they were before. Their journey from now on will lead them onward as partners with God, joined forever by the covenant.

It is almost certainly this story of Moses being transfigured by his encounter with God that Luke means us to think of when he tells of Jesus’ transfiguration. Here we again have a mountain top (a common theme of meeting the Divine in such high wild places), and we have Jesus meeting with the great Jewish prophets Moses and Elijah, both of whom brought revelation from God for the people of their time.

And Jesus is transformed. Like the Israelites who were awed by Moses’ transformed appearance the disciples are utterly dazzled by Jesus’ as well. Like Moses we hear that Jesus’ “face changed.” And even his clothes are made bright and dazzling.

Now, too often we’ve equated white with good, white with divine, and we’ve seen the harm that has done to those who don’t have fair European skin. I think it is important to note Luke does not say anywhere that Jesus is white and dazzling. There’s some Divine bleach for his clothes, but his face is just changed. The key here isn’t that white is good, but that direct experience of the Divine changes a person, changes a people.

And there’s something to be said about needing to sit down and absorb all that. Peter says essentially: we’ve met God here, let’s setup camp and figure this out! But God, being God, has other ideas. God doesn’t chastise Peter, or shame him. God simply redirects the disciples toward action: listen to Jesus, God says, listen.

I don’t know about you all but I like my routine. We’ve got our favorite restaurants and I’m likely to order the same one or two things every single time. My days have a routine to them, and if that routine gets interrupted I tend to feel out of sorts and out of balance. I hang out with the same small group of friends, watch the same TV shows, have prayed out of the same prayer book my whole life.

Setting up camp in the places where we’ve experienced goodness, especially where we’ve experience God is an understandable urge. All Saints has a very set rhythm. We even joke about how we always do things at 9:30am or 7pm. Our life together is predictable and for the most part pretty comfortable. Hopefully you meet God in this community. And it makes sense to not want to rock the boat of something that is working of us.

But. Notice something about our sacred stories? Who in them gets to sit comfortably where they are? Especially once they’ve met God. 

Abraham? Nope.

Joseph or any of his relatives? Nuh uh.

Moses? Definitely not.

The Israelites from leaving slavery to life in the promised land? Nope.

Even the Kings of Israel don’t get to sit comfortably on their bums.

The disciples definitely don’t.

Jesus’ first followers get sent out into Gentile territory to take all these stories to totally new people.

As a community we are soon to become wanderers too. And it would be all too easy for us to want to just recreate as closely as possible what has been for twenty some years. But is that really where God is calling us? 

I don’t know the answer to that question yet, right now probably none of us do. We may each be having different reactions to this season of discernment and change. Some of us might want to stay put as long as possible. Some of us might be ready to set off in a totally new direction, excited for adventure. Some of us might be feeling anxious, afraid. Some of us might just be tired, and can’t imagine what comes next. Some of us are looking for a comfortable promised land to settle in and rest. And all those reactions would be totally normal to our sacred stories.

God doesn’t need us to have all the answers before our journey begins, but to listen carefully, and follow where Jesus goes, even (or especially) when that leads us to places we never imagined. We are invited on a journey, and like the Israelites, like the people of God down through the ages God promises to go with us wherever that journey might lead. Often revelation has rooted our forebearers out of what was comfortable, what was familiar, but it has led them on ultimately to where they needed to be, to a destination only God could see. May we too find God in the midst of our lives and boldly listen and follow wherever God may lead.

I desperately wish we had the letters that Paul is responding to. Because I suspect the struggles and questions from those early communities would look a lot like the struggles and questions of our current communities. I suspect, reading Paul’s response, that not a lot has changed.

This resurrection thing matters to Paul, and it definitely matters to us. And the Corinthians aren’t unique among Christians for having trouble with resurrection. We talk about it a lot, enough that you’d think we’d have it down but the church still consistently misses the mark when it comes to living it.

Because, we’re afraid of death. We don’t like endings, we’re scared of change.

Maybe a major part of the reason that we rehearse Holy Week every year, that we have fifty days of Easter every year is because we remain human, we continue to hate endings. I once served a church where the ECW (Episcopal Church Women) was down to a handful of women all over 70. They were tired, younger folks should have taken over long ago, they should have been in the role of wise advisors. But when the other clergy and I suggested, gently that maybe we could let the ECW end with thanks for all it had given to the women of the parish they didn’t respond with relief and gladness, but with anger and bitterness. They couldn’t see that a season had ended.

The root of that anger was really fear. We fear death. And we deny it with all the power of our little mortal souls. But death comes regardless. In the case of that church the ECW limped on, its members angry and hurt that younger women didn’t want to join them. The younger women didn’t live lives in which the ECW made sense anymore, and a wedge was driven between the generations of women in that place. Finally the ECW died without fanfare or recognition when its last members died. It wasn’t the end that it, or they, deserved.

But, in its place, eventually something new has flowered. The ECW had to die first. And as a leader I learned a lesson in that place, death is inevitable, we have a choice about whether or not that death will be good.

Paul knows this. He knows that death isn’t the end, just an end. And that from the ashes of the old something new is raised. Both he and Jesus use the image of a seed for a reason. Most of us can understand that the seed has to cease to be a seed to become something new. The idea of clinging to a seed and not allowing it to be planted, well that just seems silly.

And yet, it is what humans do over and over again. We fail to see the ways in which our lives are full of seeds because they don’t start out that way. Human life is strange. We plant something, and a whole new thing grows from it, it bears fruit that feeds and delights us, it gives us shade and shelter. And then, at some point, all that remains of it is a seed; the seed of the next new thing. But we often can’t see it as a seed. We still see the fruit of years past, the shade of its youth.

And so we deny the next new thing, we fail to plant the seed, to let go of what was. And we deny ourselves the gift of what could be. Paul deals with this in the churches he planted. Sure he’s talking about the theology of bodily resurrection here, but that’s not all he’s talking about. 

As he does in so many other places in his letters he is trying to get a bunch of humans to see that the old ways they have known need to be released and let go, to be remade and reshaped by God into something new. This idea is everywhere in Paul’s work, from his instructions on how the community should eat together, to how they should study and worship. It reaches all the way to their identity in his famous teachings on the way God has wiped away our old identities, and given us knew ones in Christ.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)

Who we were before baptism was just a seed, a seed that was planted in the tomb with Christ, a seed that has grown into who we each are now. We have been through the waters of death and emerged transformed, but for most of us it happened so young we cannot remember becoming a seed, falling to earth, dying, and being reborn as something other. Perhaps that is why we find death and resurrection so hard, so frightening.

The things we cling to are all too often the things of this world, beloved yes, good, certainly. But passing away. Paul points us to what remains, to the truth of the Body of Christ, to something that cannot die. This is the good news wrapped up in the hard moments of our lives, when change feels frightening, even devastating.

The Body of Christ remains, the Kingdom of God does not fade. All else might be utterly transformed, unrecognizable. The works of God in our lives remain. The love of God which catches us and will not let us go, remains. 

Paul entreats us to remember that our earthly bodies may fail, God will not lose us. That our earthly institutions (even the church) may fade away, God will not lose us. That change and death are but seeds. That endings are never the last word. And that we must practice our trust in the resurrection each and every day of our lives.

I love Luke, whoever was the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts was a consummate story teller. The whole of Luke’s account of Jesus has been a spreading melody from Mary’s prophetic song:

“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *

    and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, *

    and the rich he has sent away empty.”

Luke’s Gospel lives into the hope that Mary’s song is possible. That God’s dream doesn’t include kings and subjects, doesn’t look like a hierarchical org chart. In Luke’s vision of God’s Kingdom there is no mountain top revelation, no pronouncement from on high. 

Instead there is a song of hope, rising up from the valleys. There is a teacher seated on a level place. This teacher, sent from God does not look down on anyone.

Jesus echoes his mother’s words. I like to think he was raised on her song. Because today he sits down among a multitude, power flowing freely. Notice: unlike the healing of the women with a hemorrhage of blood here people touch him, and power goes out of him and there is no questioning, no surprise. Jesus expects that all will come and drink of the well, all will come and partake of God’s power, all will come and be healed. 

And that’s the scene as we join the story this morning. I imagine we have just come upon Jesus, on that wide open place, sitting on the ground with a healed child in his lap. Because the next moment he looks up at the disciples. Literally in the Greek, he focuses his eyes (ophthalmoi) on the disciples. He sees them.

We talk a lot of being able to see God in Jesus. Of how God is revealed (this is Epiphany after all) in Jesus’s life and teaching. But here, in this story and in this flat level place Jesus sees us.

There is something about being really seen. Not the face we offer to the world; the face inside our skin, the private face we might not have even shown ourselves in years. Most of us are afraid of that self being seen. Whole industries are built around helping us present the face we want to the world. And yet, we are seen. God focuses on us.

Here is a Jesus who stands on our level, who touches us, who walks among us and who sees us. And our worst fears do not come true. When we are seen, we are not rejected. God does not wrinkle up God’s nose and turn away. Jesus does not throw up his hands in disgust and head off somewhere with a better sort of people.

Jesus gives it to us plain to turn a particularly bad pun. Jesus sees our hearts. He sees the shame and judgement that all too often accompanies poverty, illness, and hunger. And he promises that God will heal those things. He sees the false pride, the gluttony, and the hardness of heart that walks hand in hand with worldly wealthy, plenty, and success. And he promises that God will heal those things, he does not promise that this healing will be comfortable.

Jesus sees us, and he gets how our hearts work. It has been said that for those with privilege equality feels like oppression. For those who have gorged themselves on rich food while others starved just enough might indeed feel like going hungry. For those who mocked, taunted, and rejected others? The full knowledge of what we have done may indeed make us mourn and weep, this is the way to healing.

Years ago someone did the math, that Mark Zuckerberg could end homelessness in America and still be a billionaire multiple times over, these days you could add in ending child poverty, and hunger and he would still be a multiple billionaire. It is that obscene imbalance, that divide that Jesus sees on that wide plain. And none of us are exempt, with our warm houses, and our full fridges. But here is where God and human beings diverge.

Human beings get revenge. Human beings want to inflict the same suffering on others that we experience ourselves. It’s what every oppressing power throughout history has been most terrified of. But our scriptures today paint a different pictures. The wealthy, the full, the powerful, yes there is woe coming, yes they have a reckoning to face but it isn’t the wicked who God rejects, it is their ways.

The way of the wicked is doomed. God does not doom people, God dooms the corrupt twisted ways we build our world. Because God sees us, straight into our hearts. God sees the fear that keeps us stuck, and loves us enough to want us to be better.

When God sees us, God really sees us. All the broken bits we obsess over, all the hurt, fear, anger, or bitterness or whatever it is we’ve got buried down deep. But God sees more than that. God sees the bright light of love God made us out of. 

God sees every bit our potential, every bit of our beauty. God sees what we were, and are, and will maybe be. And because God has seen us fully, because God has known us fully: God chooses to see less than we see. To see us spotless and beloved.

Jesus’ sermon on the plain shows us the world in which we live. But more than any sermon: what Jesus does shows us what could be. He shows us a world where the sick and made well, where we all stand on the same level (even he), where we are seen and known and safe.

We expect the sermon on the mount, Jesus above us, and we humans arrayed at various heights all very orderly and proper. The sermon the plain though, that is the promise of Mary, Isaiah, and the other prophets. And it is our invitation.

In the challenge and invitation of the Gospel remember: God sees us, all of us, and loves us.

Our readings this Sunday are full of unexpected calling, upheaval, and change.

There’s Isaiah who starts out this whole prophet thing convinced he is absolutely unfit for the job. God choses him anyway, and this section of Isaiah includes God (through a seraph intermediary) burning away any and all excuses ole Isaiah might have had, removing the interior barriers to accepting God’s call.

In first Corinthians we hear Paul rehearse how last and least he is among Jesus’ apostles. He glosses over his own “knocked off his ass” experience and how his life pivoted 180 degrees there in the dust, but we know the rest of the story, and so did the Corinthians.

And finally in the Gospel today we have Luke’s account of Jesus’ calling of some of his closest friends and disciples, Simon (who would become Peter), and James and John. His inner circle as it were. In a few verses these hapless three go from just doing their jobs to dropping everything and setting out after Jesus into the unknown.

It is almost as if there is a pattern…

There’s an annoyingly glib saying that tends to bounce around discernment processes and nominating committees in the church. “God doesn’t call the qualified, God qualifies the called.” And as much as it annoys me for being so glib it is also kind of the pattern of scripture. 

Over and over again God waltzes into the lives of people who are minding their own business, who are otherwise entirely unremarkable and turns everything upside down for them. As the kids today would say: rude. But in all seriousness, God asks.

It is one of the things I find most striking in our scriptures. Sure God totally overturns people’s lives but there is the implication in our stories that those folks could have said no. In the text from Isaiah the voice of the Lord isn’t heard saying “Isaiah you shall go,” but asking the question: “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah might have surprised himself by shouting “send me!” But he said it.

And Simon and James and John, well they could have said: “listen Jesus, the was amazing and all but our parents are old and need our help, we’ve got families and kids to feed. We just can’t.” But they didn’t. They set down their nets and they chose to follow.

We too get a choice. Because never fear, God is constantly walking into our lives and offering to overturn them. The question is: will we take off our shoes and approach the burning bush? Will we let the seraph touch us with a coal from the altar of heaven? Will we follow when we are called out of our expected future?

Stories of call are almost always told with 20/20 hindsight. They weren’t written in the midst of the messy middle when the prophet is wondering what the heck they are doing there, when the disciples are despairing in some upper room while Jesus dies. We have the advantage in scripture of long hindsight. Of people who lived through the upsets God invited them into and years later could look back and say “ah, I see what you did there God, I get it now.”

We are in the middle of our own invitation to upset. We don’t yet have the luxury of hindsight. We don’t yet know where the story leads for us. But I believe we can look to scripture, to all those people called by God in scripture for assurance that God is with us. As our lives and community changes, as we are invited to let go of what was and imagine something new.

It is what people who encounter God have been called to since the first human had that first flash of revelation. God moves, God is going somewhere, and we might not be able to see that destination, we might not ever finish that journey but we are invited to come along. 

 The journey itself will probably be full of highs and lows which I think we’ve all been around enough to know is true. There will be dark valleys and high stunning vistas. What we must remember is that none of them are the destination. The destination God’s got in mind is somewhere further on. 

Beyond the lakeside, beyond the mountain, beyond Gethsemane and Golgotha, and the garden of the empty tomb. The road winds on, and God invites us to go too.

You aren’t alone, and if today’s lessons make you feel like you’d skipped ahead a few days you also aren’t alone. This Second Sunday in Christmas is always weird. It doesn’t really have its own identity, instead stealing the story from Epiphany or skipping straight over epiphany for either the flight to Egypt or Jesus as a kid in the Temple. 

And there are years that really bugs me. I love liturgical time specifically because it makes us wait. Advent is Advent right up until it isn’t anymore. Easter cannot be rushed, and once here it hangs around, and hangs around. The reliability of that calendar becomes a sort of anchor for our lives. It keeps us grounded if we let it and that’s good in a world that’s often too fast, too chaotic, or during a pandemic that’s too much all the same day in and day out.

But this Sunday is the weird exception to that carefully regimented, predicable rule. There are not good Gospel readings for this Sunday. It is always an awkward, out of time, insert into the last 1/4 of the Christmas season. And I wonder if that isn’t its gift.

Because time isn’t always predictable, measured, logical.

Sometimes, and 2 years of pandemic might be the best example ever, time just stops making sense. That weird period between Christmas Day and New Years when no one can quite remember what day it is, those long blurry days of summer vacation that are over too soon. And the Second Sunday of Christmas, hanging on awkwardly. 

The rest of the world has moved on from Christmas, but we’re still here. Singing carols, eating cookies, maybe even baking new cookies. Our Christmas trees still glow against the long night for a few days yet. This long awkward Christmas season that has seemingly fallen out of step with the rest of the world is a reminder, yet again, that God’s time and our time are different.

There isn’t a neat story for this week, the way God moves, and the way we move doesn’t always line up. And I wonder if perhaps God isn’t extending to us an invitation. To both imagination, and to stepping out of time, just for a bit. 

After all, we’re still hanging about in a season the rest of the world doesn’t even acknowledge exists. It’s still Christmas loves. And there isn’t a nice neat story for this week. After all, there’s really only one Christmas story in our scripture, Luke’s. Mark isn’t interested in Jesus’ birth or childhood at all and Matthew tells us the Epiphany story. Jesus isn’t born in our story today, he’s 2 to 3 years old, the whole story takes place after his birth.

And John, well bless him John does his own thing.

And so there is quite a bit of room for imagination. The non-canonical Gospels have a few birth or childhood narratives, weird ones. If you’ve read the modern novel Lamb you’ve got a taste for some of them. 

But perhaps this time if for us. There isn’t a neat story for this week of Jesus’ life but there are stories of our lives. Of the way that God is still being born into the world year after year. Of the way we’ve each and together met Jesus in this community and others from other seasons of our lives. 

Maybe, just maybe this little odd Sunday is the right time for us to ponder our own little gospel stories, our own encounters with God made flesh. To fill in the story a bit. To create with God, by becoming sacred storytellers. Here in this time out of time. 

The rest of the world has moved on to resolutions and productivity and goals. And we’re invited to sit down with Jesus who is smiling for the first time, or learning to laugh, or maybe starting to crawl (we are close to Epiphany after all). To spend some time in the expansiveness of what isn’t said in the Gospels and maybe to find ourselves in that story that is just waiting to be told.

And bring to God our frustrations, our weariness, our sorrow, our just straight up it has been 2 years of this weirdness. And let God hold it with us, because God has been there, and done that. In a body, in the body of Jesus. And that, even if this week is weird, is good news.

This year, gathered once again in this dispersed sanctuary, surrounded by the fragile flickering of candles I hold fast to the promise of God that good things begin in the dark.

The gentle cadence of Luke’s birth story is so comforting. There’s a reason we read these words year in and year out. Doing so makes them into a sort of song, a liturgy all their own. When we hear “in those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus” we are children again in a darkened church with stars in our eyes, and joy in our hearts.

Our most ancient of religious ancestors gathered in catacombs, huddled together in the dark to listen to the stories of God, surrounded much as we are by flickering candles, beset as we are, by danger. It was in the darkness, the hiddenness where they could gather, hear the stories of their faith, feed their souls. And here we are, gathered in the dark in a strange and hidden way.

It was in the darkness of a rude stable, in the depths of night when Mary, cuddling her newborn child, heard the story the shepherds came to tell. Saw the stars in their eyes, the wonder shining in their hearts. And she tucked all of those things away: stars, and angels, and wonder deep in her heart as treasure.

Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth was written for times such as this, as a reminder that good things begin in the dark. That hope breaks dormancy in the depths of night, that we can only see the wonder of the stars when the sun is shining on the other side of the world. That God comes to us in the places we least expect.

When we talked about the “magic of Christmas” as kids I thought it was the candles, or the presents, or the beautiful service, or even the snow. But no. Here in the darkness of this long, long winter the magic is that Christmas remains. And we remain. Changed, but here. Shaken, but here. Mourning, but here.

Here in the dark, huddled together in our digital catacomb, among the flickering light of our hope. God is born.

Not in a blaze of glory, not with angelic midwives or a swelling orchestra. Not with sweet incense and sounding trumpets, and silk blankets to wrap the Divine Child. In a dark stable, by the flickering light of a few simple lamps. In the quiet where cattle chew, and a donkey sighs. And a baby, much like you and I, takes his first breath of rude cold air and wails his first “I AM.”

Here in the dark that holds all our unknowns, where our future is beyond the horizon. God is born into the world, and laid in our arms. By the flickering lights of our fragile lives we can see the Love that gave up everything to nestle against our hearts.

Tonight a little family shelters in a stable. It wasn’t the place they expected to give birth anymore than we expected to be here, again. But here they are a little island of warmth and safety in an uncertain world. Here we are, a net of flickering lights spread across this sleepy uncertain world. 

Tonight hope is born again, we don’t have to understand it, we don’t even have to be able to feel it. Tuck it away in your heart as Mary did. Plant it deep down in the dark soil of your soul and let it sprout and grow there, because good things are born in the dark. The best things, are born in the dark.

Tonight, on a lonely hillside an angel walks among the sleeping sheep whispering good news.

Tonight, a young woman smiles into the eyes of her son.

Tonight, the old old words work their magic in our hearts, planting seeds of hope and new life in cold hard soil.

Tonight, for just a few hours, all is well as we cradle Jesus in our arms and God rocks us to sleep.

I think perhaps the Advent theme of upheaval and change seems particularly appropriate this year. Here we are, toes hanging over the edge of a new world, while we still mourn the old.

Advent cuts through the old year like a scythe through wheat. Something ends today, something begins today. Something that has already happened, is still happening, has not yet come to be.

Jeremiah cries out with the first birth pangs. Jesus, deep in his ministry counts the contractions. This is Advent. It is many things, a threshold, a door. A new thing, and old thing. The birth pangs, and the baby.

Our lives hang here in the dark of winter at the edge of what was, of the world that will be.

Did you notice? Christmas decorations went up very early this year. No waiting until after Thanksgiving, the stores were decked as soon as the Halloween candy went on clearance. Our society rushes for cheer, for excess, for something that feels familiar. But Advent begins with a litany of our sins and failings, with a reminder that this tired world is weighed down with brokenness. And yet, because we are who we are, we speak aloud our brokenness into God’s ears today. Because even our brokenness is transformed by beauty as we sing in anticipation of what isn’t yet.

While all around us the rush and press of the season pushes us faster and faster, grasps for an old world that doesn’t exist anymore, Advent sits beside the birthing chair counting contractions that  cannot be hurried.

One of my favorite carols for this time of year is the Canticle of the Turning by Roy Cooney. It is a paraphrase of Mary’s prophetic Magnificat, and the refrain cries out:

My heart shall sing of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears,
For the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn.

This is Advent. The moment before the sun breaks above the horizon, when the sky is grey with potential but the fog is still thick as soup around us. We cannot see the shape of the new day, but we know it is coming. We trip over the moment of stillness and potential before the turn.

Here is the truth of Advent that speaks straight to our experience over the last two years: suffering is real. Human beings have been struggling and suffering and dying for generations.

But today both Jeremiah and Jesus look into the face of our pain and offer us a glimpse, a promise that there is another reality possible. It is a world of justice, a world where every tear is wiped away from very real cheeks, where the sick are made well, where fear is gone. Neither of today’s prophets offer us fantasy though. They do not promise that if we endure the suffering of this world in just the right way the next one will be different.

They promise something better, that this world can be different.

It is a promise of a world where fiery eyed young women like Mary and steel-spined old women like Elizabeth become God’s partner’s in a new creation.

Where the stories we have always told grow silent in the inhalation before someone new speaks.

This is Advent.

This is the strange season where we practice being time travelers. Waiting for something that has already happened; for the birth of a tiny helpless baby long ago. And we wait for something that is still happening, for the birth of the new thing that baby represents. Creation has been reborn; and creation is pregnant with something waiting to be born.

Jeremiah speaks to a people all but destroyed. To desperate people crying out for home, safety, peace. Jeremiah speaks to the climate refugees, the families broken by plague. He speaks to the homeless, under overpasses and blackberry brambles. His promise cries out to children sobbing in their mother’s arms, and lonely elders.

Advent is an invitation. To not cling to a dead old world. To let go of what has passed away, even if it was familiar. To become midwives for the new creation. Advent is an invitation for our lives to be different.

Instead we are offered a chance to live out the hope we have, to give ourselves (not just our money, not just stuff, ourselves), to share, to demonstrate what it looks like to live in hope even in the face of suffering, to sing even in the face of chaos, to stand together as siblings in Christ for the good of all. Advent invites us into a different kind of waiting.

We know what we are waiting for, because the prophets, from Jeremiah, to Mary has showed us the way. It is a way of imagination, of trusting that what seems wild and impossible is indeed a future we may dream with God.

This Advent let us imagine something new, let us tell the stories of God breaking into the world. Let us be lights in the darkness of this broken world, sharing healing and possibility with our whole lives.