Imagine yourself in Jerusalem at the turn of the millennia. You are perhaps returning with food from the market, or with a few items from a shop in preparation for the Passover. Or perhaps you are simply pausing for a few moments, watching the crowds flood into the city—people from across the country, and indeed, from around the Mediterranean and Roman Empire: the faithful and the not-so-faithful all mingled in one massive line that extends beyond the horizon.

But at this moment you choose to look, something changes, a ripple of excitement rolls through the crowd. A man on a young donkey has captured the attention of others. He is surrounded by a group of people—perhaps a wandering prophet and his disciples. Someone jumps in front of the rider and lays down a cloak. You see the dust fly up as the cloth settles on the ground. And to your surprise it is followed by another, and another, and another. The fervor of the crowd grows more intense, and the murmuring is broken by a hoarse shout. At first, you can’t quite hear the words, but as more people begin to repeat it, you recognize the words of the prophet Zephaniah: Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! The crowd waves branches and swells with shouts—it’s no longer just the disciples saying it, now others are saying it too as they creep along the road below. “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!

Many of us know this story, or perhaps have heard the basics before—even two thousand years later. Perhaps you’ve taken part in a reading of the passion narrative previously, or maybe heard it read for the first time and wondered “is this ever going to finish?”. Even for those who don’t attend church, processions of Christians with palm branches isn’t an unusual sight to see—from the streets of Virginia to Times Square to Jerusalem itself, Palm Sunday is a significant moment in our church year.

Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!, the crowds say.

And we sort of know how this goes… Jesus is a king who isn’t entering like a king. Jesus is entering the city to break bread with his disciples and give up his life for them, rather than ascending to a throne or kicking out the Romans. The very crowds that praise Jesus later mock him, and even the disciples mostly flee by the time of the crucifixion. And we know that in this Holy Week that begins today, we will walk through the heartbeats of this passion story: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. And we know that at the dawning of the Great Vigil and Easter Day, there will be the resurrection, and life, and hope.

So what does it matter, really, that we’re observing Palm Sunday, given that we already know the whole story? What can this story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem give to us today?

Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!

I keep returning to this refrain  because in Luke, unlike the rest of the Gospels, there’s a slightly different ending to what the crowds say after this: “Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” If you pick up a commentary, many of them would say that Luke is intentionally trying to mirror the words that the angels said when they announced Jesus’ birth to the shepherds. “Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” But what grabs my attention is that singular mention of peace: the king is coming? How? With peace. Peace, which seems so far away, as daily reports of war and atrocities in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia flood our headlines. Peace, which seems so far away, as we grapple with partisanship and violence in our own states and country. Peace, which seems so far away, as we wonder if there will ever be an end to the enduring pandemic.

And still, the crowds say, in a time of violence much like ours, “Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven! Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

 In an ancient third-century homily credited to St. Methodius (which this sermon is based on), the peace that Jesus brings is described as “unconquerable peace”, a peace that outlasts every attempt to silence it. Blessed is the king—he who brings peace.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord: that good and kind Shepherd, voluntarily to lay down His life for His sheep.

This hope of resurrection, hope above all hopes is what we cry out today, when we say blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Every year when we raise our voices with our palm branches, we shout in the face of war, and plague, and violence that we believe not in death, but in a God who brings resurrection.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord: the King against the tyrant; not with omnipotent power and wisdom, but with that which is accounted the foolishness of the cross.

The foolishness of the cross is the foolishness of hoping for peace in a time of war, the foolishness of hoping for an end to all wars through Christ coming again.

Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord: the True One against the liar; the Saviour against the destroyer; the Prince of Peace against him who stirs up wars; the Lover of mankind against the hater of mankind.

This good news, even, and especially, in our broken and strife-filled world is worth hearing again and again. Because when Christ rides into Jerusalem on a donkey in order to die, we are reminded not to look for hope in displays of might and aggression. It is instead the foolish humility of the cross that changes the trajectory of the whole world. The foolish, humble, death of Jesus gives us the power to laugh in the face of death, to believe against all odds that evil will never have the last word.

Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!

Now, I’m not going to ask you to identify yourself if you’re one of these people, but I think this is a great example of the way that we as humans sometimes have a really hard time accepting something good that seems objectively true to the people around them. And if you find yourself with difficulty accepting good things, perhaps this is the parable for you.

Today we read the parable of the prodigal son. Of all Jesus’ parables, this might be one of the most well-known. We hear it all the time—from the common usage of “prodigal son” in the English language, to music like Amazing Grace: “I once was lost, but now I’m found”.

This parable is, in fact, so common that I often find myself immediately identifying with either the prodigal son or the elder son—it does seem to invite you to figure out where you fit in, sort of like a personality test on the internet, where you’re categorized as a 3 or 6 or 9, or an ISTP or an ENFJ, or your least favorite character in a popular novel. (Thanks, Buzzfeed.)

But this immediate urge to place ourselves in the narrative, to figure out where we fit, ignores the whole purpose of the story in the first place. Jesus tells us this parable, not for us to figure out who we are, but to tell us about the extravagant generosity of God, portrayed as the Father. The Father in this parable is so permissive that he seems almost foolish. Doesn’t he know that the youngest son will take the inheritance and go off on his own to spend it? Doesn’t he realize what will happen? Theologian Hans Von Balthasar writes that “the impressiveness of the story begins already with the fact that the father grants the son’s request” (Light of the World, 281). It does seem impressive—how many people do you know who would distribute inheritances to their children before death? This action of the Father’s contradicts the very notion of inheritance.

We see again the extravagant generosity of the Father in this parable by what happens when the prodigal son returns. The father sees him when he is still “a long way off, and the father comes running to meet him. The son has prepared a speech, a whole litany about what he’s done what he’s done wrong how he squandered money, and is just prepared to ask to be a servant in his father’s house. But the prodigal son never gets a chance to even say these things. He starts, “father I’ve sinned for her for heaven and before you I’m not worthy to be called your son”, and he never gets a chance to finish. His father responds by throwing an extravagant party, and celebrating. This extravagance seems foolish. Or at least it seems foolish to the elder son, who comes along and expresses his disbelief. How could the father do something like this? The person who should know the character of the father the best, seems to know it the least, to be alienated from the loving parent who he has lived with.

But ultimately in Jesus’ parable, the prodigal son and the elder son are just examples of two different responses, two different relationships to the father. The main character of this story is in fact the father: who seems kind of foolish, certainly unwise by any accountant’s standards or therapist’s standards or what have you. But perhaps because this behavior seems so strange to us means that it’s worth paying even more attention to. Because, the picture that we get in our gospel today is a picture of a God who loves us extravagantly and foolishly. This is a God who sees the worst mistakes we make: the ones we’re afraid to name aloud, the ones we don’t really like to think about or are haunted by… this is the God who sees all of that AND sees us a long way off and runs towards us with open arms.

This is the truth, the great grace of the gospel–God’s expression of perfect love towards us, which we see in the work in person of Jesus. It may look foolish, or maybe it just seems impossible. But as the poet Malcolm Guite points out about this parable, the father is love doesn’t change or waiver “throughout the son’s alienation and exile. The son’s welcome home does not depend on the special speeches and penitent status he had imagined for himself. Instead he is restored absolutely by his father’s loving choice” (What Do Christians Believe?).

As Christians we read this parable as a parable of God’s love towards us, a love that seeks to reconcile us to bring us home. A love in which we experience the freedom of choice—the ability to go squander our fortunes, the gifts God has given us. But in this love there is always the option of going home, not as a servant, or like a teenager slinking back after curfew, or like a working adult trying to tiptoe in and not wake the rest of the house after another late night. There’s no backdoor entrances or shameful return—not when God is watching, anxiously scanning the horizon until God sees us a long way off and comes running to meet us, and throws us a party like no other.

This reconciling and welcoming love is the cornerstone in this new creation that Paul talks about in the epistle. Because of God’s extravagant generosity and love everything has become new—including us!… because there is NOTHING that can separate us from the love of God. There is nothing that we can do that will make God stop watching for us, stop waiting for our return, even when we’ve been away for a while. This is the reconciliation that changes everything, that changes us. And it will change the whole world when we live like it is possible for us to be loved with such extravagance.

So, I invite you to close your eyes, and hear these words that God speaks over you.

And the Father said, “Quickly, bring out a robe–the best one–and put it on them; put a ring on their finger and sandals on their feet. And lay out a feast, and let us eat and celebrate; for this child of mine was dead and is alive again; was lost and is found!

Welcome home. May you receive the love that God has been so desperately waiting to pour upon you today.

Every rustle is magnified in cavernous echoing walls of stone, the last bit of daylight peeking through stained glass windows. The noise of traffic outside dims, as people go home from work, have dinner, and begin to think about going to sleep.

Sleep is on our minds also, as we quietly shuffle into our choir stalls for this last service of the day, hiding a yawn or two with bowed heads.

And when the clock strikes 8:30pm, the superior of the Society of St. John the Evangelist stands up. The rest of the monks and interns follow, beginning the last ritual of the day: compline.

We fumble for our office books, and begin to pray, to confess. Then we sit for the chanting of the psalms—words I now know by heart. “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High * abides under the shadow of the Almighty. He shall say to the Lord, you are my shelter and my stronghold * my God in whom I put my trust”.

One of the things I learned while I was an intern at the monastery was that upon the death of one of the monks, one of the brothers, at the conclusion of the burial service was part of what we prayed each night. At the end of each day, and at the end of a brother’s life, is the singing of compline: “because you have made the Lord your refuge * and the Most High your habitation. There shall no evil happen to you * neither shall any plague come near your dwelling”.

And this tie between the ending of the day, and the ending of our lives, and how the brothers of SSJE live that out liturgically sticks with me, particularly as we begin the season of Lent. Our lives are begun and ended in Christ. On Wednesday, we began our journey into Lent remembering this very fact, that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. As T.S. Eliot says so well, “home is where we start from… (in our end is our beginning)”. (Four Quartets)

I find it very interesting that this first Sunday of Lent is dedicated to the themes we find in today’s lessons, exemplified in this excerpt of psalm 91. And I find it sort of ironic because I think we all have this sort of stereotype of what Lent is supposed to be, living in our heads. I don’t know about you, but when I think of Lent, I think often about penitence and fasting. I think about what I’m going to give up, or spiritual practices I need to be better at. I think of fish on Fridays as a child with my catholic aunts. In short, my own stereotype of Lent is that it’s a sort of time when I give up things or take on things that will help me be a better person and better disciple—a sort of glorified self-help season. Perhaps this is different from your conception of Lent, or perhaps you’re thinking “well, isn’t that what Lent is?”.

But regardless of our own stereotypes of this season, today’s lectionary manages to subvert it over and over again. Instead of immediately lambasting us about our sins and failings, we instead begin with a surprising amount of reassurance. Our collect prays: “Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save”. While we acknowledge the many temptations that assault us, there’s a confidence that God knows our weakness, and that we can find help and refuge in God. As the epistle to the Romans says, the Lord “is generous to all who call on him”.

“For he shall give his angels charge over you * to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you in their hands * lest you dash your foot against a stone”

Psalm 91 has long been used in both Judaism and Christianity. Fragments of text have turned up in archaeological sites like Qumran (where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found) and other sites from the ancient world—these texts don’t often look like what we’d see today in our BCPs—many of these fragments simply include the first letter of each line, and were likely carried around with an individual like an amulet, as a sort of ward of protection.

“You shall tread upon the lion and adder * you shall trample the young lion and the serpent under your feet”

In the fourth century, Augustine uses this psalm to encourage his listeners to hope, in a world of trial and tribulation. He says “Do no be afraid when you are thrust into tribulation, or think it means that God is not with you. Let your faith stay with you, and then God is with you in your trouble” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 342).

I don’t know how many times you’ve wondered where God is, over these past few years, months, or days. I know I’ve asked myself that question sometimes. It’s been a world of trouble, even for those of us who have been shielded by job security or healthcare access during this pandemic. And even now, we watch war and brutality around the world, seeing in just the last few months and weeks refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine fleeing home and country.

The lections this week don’t back away from the hard truth that it is difficult to be a human. They don’t offer answers that always make sense to us—the bible isn’t really interested in the post-enlightenment question we so often ask of why God allows suffering to happen in the world. But what scripture does offer to us is a promise of hope and life even when things seem at their worst.

And so we enter into Lent again, perhaps particularly mindful of our own mortality, and of the frailty of the things we rely on for security and sustenance.

And maybe the lectionary gives us what we really need this first week of Lent, a reminder not just of our own human mortality, but a reminder of the bigger and truer thing that we Christians believe: that God is our sustenance and hope, for all of us, for all time.

“Because he is bound to me in love, therefore will I deliver home * I will protect him, because he knows my Name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him * I am with him in trouble; I will rescue him and bring him to honor”

So, at the beginning of our Lent, I hope you will take these words of the psalm to heart—keep them by your bedside, pray them throughout your day. For, as St. Augustine reminds us, “when anyone imitates Christ in such a way as to bear all the vexations of this world, hoping in God, and being neither entrapped by a bait nor broken down by fear, that person dwells within the help of the Most High.” (317).

May we dwell always in the shelter of the Most High, whether in life or death, enfolded in the arms of the one who, indeed, shows us our salvation and our hope.

Right off the bat, we start off with a passage from the Song of Solomon. It may sound familiar—part of it is sometimes read at weddings: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”. And on the face of it, the Song of Solomon is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a collection of love poetry, largely a young woman and young man speaking to each other, interspersed with natural imagery. These lovers are in a world that is lush and green, where life is good and love is law.

But we haven’t really answered our first question: what is it doing in the Bible, let alone in our lectionary on a Sunday morning?

In order to talk about why, we need to do a super quick run-through of how the Song of Songs has been interpreted as a part of scripture… in biblical studies, we’d call this “reception history”, or how scripture has been received across the centuries.

In the 20^th century, one of the dominant tools that we started to use for interpreting the bible was historical-critical studies. Scholars began to realize how important it was to understand the context of the individual books of the Bible. Modern interpretation of Song of Solomon sees it as a collection of love poems, with two main characters speaking to one another. It’s not really a book of the Bible that explicitly talks about God, so this particular kind of contemporary interpretation wouldn’t necessarily try to talk about it as a religious text.

But that doesn’t answer my question either! If it’s not religious, or talking about God, why is it here?

So let’s keep going back another few centuries… all the way back to the medieval period.

Medieval interpretation of the Song of Solomon looks very different from how we typically interpret scripture today. One of the major modes of interpretation was allegory. Now, if you’re in middle school, you probably know what allegory is, but some of us who haven’t had an English class in a while might need a refresher. An allegory is an extended metaphor… basically using one story to tell another story. We see these all the time in Jesus’ parables in the New Testament.

Patristic and Medieval interpreters were obsessed with allegory, particularly when interpreting the Old Testament. Bernard of Clairvaux, a monk and scholar who wrote eighty-some sermons on just the first two chapters of the Song, interpreted this book as an allegory of the love between Christ and his bride, the Church. “Look, he comes, leaping over the mountains… gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice… ‘arise my love… and come away’”. You can almost hear Christ saying “come, follow me”.

I don’t think I can overstate both how contentious this book of the Bible was, as well as how important it was for interpreters in the early and medieval church. Rabbis in the first century of the common era argued about whether it should be included in the canon… but advocates for the text won. In fact, another name for it is “song of songs”: the preeminent song, the most important song, the song to trump all songs. Rabbi Akiba once wrote that the “Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies”.

So what’s going on here, that both Christians and Jews have historically valued the allegory in the Song? What does it tell us about our faith and world today?

In order to read today’s passage, we must start at the beginning. The actual beginning—in Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and darkness covered the face of the deep. But God created and said let there be light, and leaf and land. God created animals and humans, and called this world, us, very good. We desired God and God desired us, and we cared for the world until it all went wrong. Theologians like Sarah Coakley sometimes talk about sin as perverted desire, where we can’t even want what is good and right and holy. In this good and holy garden, all went wrong, our own desires were alienated from our being as children of God.

The Fall, as you will hear it called, has defined our relationship with God ever since, and this is the pattern that we see in scripture. The whole of the biblical story might be summed up in this sentence from our Eucharistic Prayer C: “Again and again, you called us to return”. According to biblical scholar Ellen Davis, the Song of Songs is actually most biblical because it is a conversation with the rest of scripture, with this story of being called to return.

The lovers in the Song of Songs, in this reading, are in Eden 2.0. “For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come”. We again find ourselves in a garden where all is… well. If The Fall is desire gone wrong, then the Song is desire restored to its fullness and perfection. When banished from the garden, Eve is told “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”—so begins generations of inequality and injustice. But in the Song of Songs chapter 6, the woman says “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me”—a reversal of the punishment, and a return to mutual love and honor and yes, right desire.

The rest of our lessons today teach of the importance of obeying God’s law, not only with our lips, but in our hearts and minds and bodies. It’s not just logical obedience: obedience to God’s law looks like all-in, extravagant love and commitment… not something like a checklist, but something more like this picture of human life and love as it should be, given to us in the poetry of the Song of Songs. The Song teaches us that our commitment to God and justice in the world should pervade every part of our selves, even our most intimate relationships and deepest desires.

So whether you hear it in the voice of Jesus, who says “come follow me”, or in the voice of God, calling out to Adam in the garden, listen again to the Song:

The voice of my beloved!

Look, he comes,

leaping upon the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

My beloved is like a gazelle

or a young stag.

Look, there he stands

behind our wall,

gazing in at the windows,

looking through the lattice.

My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away;

for now the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove

is heard in our land.

The fig tree puts forth its figs,

and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away.

May we, even in the midst of fears and change, be rooted in God’s extravagant love, returning always, again and again, to the Holy One who is the beginning and end of all our desires.

At the conclusion of the trilogy, I was reminded of one particular scene—when our hero, a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins who wants nothing more than to be away from battles and home with his books, has a final conversation with Thorin, a dwarvish main character who is dying after a battle, after finally coming to the realization that his selfish greed over a hoard of dragon gold was, in fact, wrong. Thorin, in his final breaths, tells Bilbo that “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

We are in the midst of a several-week cycle in our gospel lessons, in the Gospel of John. Until the end of August, we’ll be spending our time in the 6^th chapter of John, beginning with last week’s miracle of the feeding of the 5000, and continuing on with the theme of bread. Seriously… SO much bread. And while last week’s bread connection is relatively straightforward—people are hungry, let’s feed them, we move into different territory this week. And what we discover today is that Jesus gives mysterious answers to simple questions

Listen to this: “When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him ‘Rabbi, when did you come here?”

They just ask “when”, but Jesus responds by telling them why they’re there in the first place. It’s a non-answer to their original question, but gets to the core of the issue: who is Jesus and how do they know he is who he says he is?

And he keeps moving the goalpost. Instead of bread, you should be looking for the bread of eternal life… instead of a sign, you should be searching for true bread from heaven. And finally, instead of bread the object, it is bread the person, as Jesus says his famous I am statement: “I am the bread of life”.

It’s a bit of a deescalation, quite a different thing from what they were hoping for. Instead of physical food, miraculous proof, or manna in the wilderness 2.0, it’s just… Jesus. The Galilean from Nazareth, the wandering teacher, the maybe-prophet.

In fact, when Jesus says “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”, I wonder if a disciple or two rolled their eyes—yeah, right. Following Jesus around the dry desert and foothills must have been full of both hunger and thirst, and weariness. It must have tested their patience, and sometimes made them wonder—why the heck am I doing this?

Perhaps it’s just me, but I sense in this text a great weariness. The people asking Jesus about this bread must have come a long way—we know that they came via boat across the sea, after spending the whole day before listening to Jesus teach. And as Jesus keeps moving that goalpost, rewriting the questions, and completely reframing what they mean by “bread”, I can only imagine that some of them felt tired. “This is going to take a lot more time, more work, than we thought”. “This isn’t going to happen immediately, after all.”

Perhaps you too, feel a sense of weariness this week. I know I do. Watching all the news reports, as COVID cases once again climb, and we move back into a pattern of life that we thought we’d left behind… I just feel tired… and maybe you do too. I really empathize with the people who find Jesus in our lesson today: “oh right, this is going to take a lot more time, more work, than we thought”. “This isn’t going to happen quickly after all”

There’s nothing easy or quick about the road that we must tread, even after all this time.

So the question I have is this: how do we live, when we know that Jesus is the bread of life, but we are still hungry and thirsty and really tired of walking? How do we persevere?

To answer this question, we must turn our gaze to Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians. There’s so much to dig into here that we could spend hours on just this reading, but for now, let’s consider his opening line.

“I… the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” It’s a long sentence, but what sticks out to me is that first line: lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. And what matters to Paul about this life, our witness, is not how loudly we can talk about ourselves, or how many people come to our church, or how many banners we fly for this cause or that cause. What matters about this life is our… humility, gentleness, and patience.

Humility, gentleness, and patience. In older translations, we find it phrased differently: “lowliness, meekness and patience”. St. John Chrysostom, a 4^th century father of the church, from Constantinople, wonders “how is it possible to “walk worthily” with “all lowliness”?” He considers this, and then continues—“meekness is the foundation of all virtue. If you are humble and are aware of your limits and remember how you were saved, you will take this recollection as the motive for every moral behavior”. In essence, Chrysostom is saying that meekness—humility, gentleness, should be the guiding force behind every choice that we make, every thing that we do. What does such a life look like? He describes this: “You will not be excessively impressed with either chains or privileges. You will remember that all is of grace, and so walk humbly”

The result, then, of leading a life worthy of the calling to which we are called, is that we are not excessively impressed with chains or privileges, restrictions or freedoms. We refuse to idolize them as ultimate goods or evils, we refuse the claim that such things have over us, prioritizing our true identity as members of one body in Christ, the bread of life.

How do we persevere, when we are tired, and hungry and thirsty, and just want to go back to normal? How do we face fire and flood and never ending plague, again and again, when our advocacy and action doesn’t seem to do much either quickly or easily?

The answer from Paul and John Chrysostom is this: to remember that all is grace, and so walk humbly. To remember that every breath of air and walk outdoors and hug from a friend is grace, and so walk humbly. To remember that every meal shared, every gift given, every relationship built is grace, and so walk humbly. To remember that even amidst fire and flood, death and plague, that all is grace, because we are loved and sustained and saved by a God who says “I am the bread of life”.

And so we walk humbly, leading a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called, being reminded by grace that life is more than just chains or privileges, restrictions or freedom, things or gold. May we, in our humility, value Christ the true bread above hoarded gold and idols of our own making, remembering that all is grace, making this a merrier world.

There’s something magical about the Olympics. Perhaps it’s the presence of so many different sports events and talented athletes in one place, for a short time. Perhaps it’s seeing 206 countries—both fierce enemies and strong allies—come together in one place. But for me, it’s not so much the big displays of patriotism, or torch relay, or celebrities singing “Imagine”. What always stands out to me are the small moments—one fencer immediately bending over their rival on the ground to make sure they aren’t injured, or a country’s tiny delegation, who knows that they don’t have much of a chance of medaling…, but are just so elated to be there and to play their sport.

One moment in particular struck me while watching the opening ceremonies this year, during the final torch relay. Before the fire finally found its home in the ornate brazier in the middle of the arena, the torch was passed by several groups of athletes, slowly jogging: each group deeply symbolic. One group, however, did not jog. Three baseball players walked slowly down the aisle, keeping pace with Shigeo Nagashima (SHU-ge-oh Na-ga-SHI-ma), an 85 year old stroke survivor. Hideki Matsui (Hi-DECK-ee  MAT-sue), another baseball player, supported Nagashima all the way. And so, the torch slowed down—the entire world slowed down—from a symbolic jog, to a slow, intentional walk. The focus was not on the torch, and getting it from point A to point B, but on Nagashima and Hideki—their camaraderie, care, and love. The world stopped and loved Nagashima by waiting for him, reminding us that the torch is only as important as the athletes carrying it.

But let us set aside these exemplars for a moment, and turn to today’s lectionary texts.

By in large, today’s lectionary is full of lessons in what not to do. Don’t shirk on your duties as a king in war, don’t sleep with someone else’s wife, don’t try—badly, to cover up your mistake. And definitely don’t use your political power to kill her husband when your cover up doesn’t work.

The gospel has a few more: don’t follow a traveling teacher into the middle of nowhere without packing lunch, don’t make people listen to a lecture without feeding them, don’t try to make Jesus an earthly king, and definitely don’t be afraid of people walking on water.

Whew. That’s a lot of things not to do—some more serious than others. You’re probably sitting there wondering—well, what’s the good news in all of that? But to find that out, we need to do a little thinking about what all of these “don’ts” have in common.

All you need is love, except when we go looking for it in the wrong places. That’s what happens to David, who should be off leading his armies in battle, taking leadership of Israel, and God’s people. Instead, he’s at home, and finds himself defeated by lust—one bad decision leading to another bad decision, and another. The Bible is clear that this is love as it should not be—love that abuses power and privilege is not what God intends.

In contrast, we have in the gospel, Jesus continually showing us a different way to love. In the face of a hungry crowd—hungry for good news, for relief from sickness, for knowledge… and for food—Jesus miraculously multiplies bread and fish, providing for physical as while as spiritual hunger. When the people would reward him by making him king, he withdrew alone—the goal of love is not power. When the disciples glimpsed in him the creator of the world, who created and calms the seas, Jesus said “do not be afraid”, for fear is not love.

All you need is love. Not the grand, selfish and self-defeating narrative arc of David and Bathsheba, nor the fearful, reactionary response to Jesus that would make his love fit into the loves and lusts and powers and principalities of this world. Jesus calls us instead to a different kind of love—love that does not seek earthly power or selfish ambition. In fact, Christ’s love only seeks… our love.

Julian of Norwich describes this sacrificial love in her visions, Revelations of Divine Love, where Christ says “It is joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me that ever I suffered the Passion for thee; and if I could suffer more, I would suffer more.” She comments that “to die for my love so often that the number passes created reason, that is the most exalted offer that our Lord God could make to man’s soul” The love of Jesus that Julian sees in her vision is one of sacrifice and suffering, giving again and again, even when it’s not practical or popular or even rational.

All we need is love. Not the grand love of spotlights and superstars. Not even of the big screen and grand parades and torch relays. As our final hymn today says so well, Jesus calls us from the worship of “the vain world’s golden store”, from each idol that would keep us, saying “Christian love me more”.

Jesus calls us…

to the kind of love that happens when the world stops and waits, for the slow walk of one person helping another,

to the kind of love that would give itself up again and again,

To love that recognizes God as creator, and our right place in the created order

to love that sees each person as a child of God, equally worthy of care.

And so, “by thy mercies, Savior may we hear your call. Give our hearts to your obedience, to serve and love you best of all”, that we may bring true love—love as it should be—into every part of our lives and world.

“Lift up your heads, O gates!”, sings one side of the choir, and the other answers: “Who is the king of glory?”—and in this repetition, you can almost hear the voices of singers thousands of years ago, as people flooded into the temple: “Lift up your heads, O gates!”, “Who is the king of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory”.

And so today, I invite you all into the world and worldview of the psalm. Psalm 24 is a psalm of praise, but it is more than just a few poetic lines of worship. In order to discover what riches are there, we need to think a bit about the structure of the psalm itself.

The first two verses begin by contextualizing, well, everything. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it”. We start off with an acknowledgment that God is the creator of all things. It’s a short few verses, but they frame everything else in the psalm—in order to understand the rest, we need to begin with this understanding that God is creator of all the world and all of us.

The next four verses begin with a question: “who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?”. Given that God is the creator of everything… who can approach God? Who receives a blessing from God? We might expect that the answer would look something like a list—a list of dos and don’ts, something like the Ten Commandments. But the answer that Psalm 24 gives us looks very different: those who have clean hands and pure hearts. The verse goes on to describe that having clean hands and a pure heart consists up not lifting up “souls to what is false” and not swearing “deceitfully”. It’s not a legal code—rather, it’s an invitation into “the company of those who seek the face of the God of Jacob”. It doesn’t tell us what we have to DO, but it tells us the kind of people we need to be.

In order to enter into God’s space, we must accept this invitation to a new way of being, a new way of seeing the world.

The final four verses—where we have that repetition—shifts into something new. Instead of us entering into God’s space, we have the opposite: God enters into human space. “Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors! That the king of glory may come in.” The writer of the psalm is using a literary device here—giving instructions to gates and ancient doors that are actually meant for us to follow. “Lift up your heads, and be lifted up”. Faithfulness looks like looking up, and honoring our creator who is in our midst. Rolf Jacobsen puts it well, that “this reverent and faithful attitude, metaphorically commanded of the Temple gates, is the proper stance of all life toward the Lord”

To recap, Psalm 24 has three sections: an acknowledgement of God as creator, an invitation into a way of BEING in the presence of this creator, and what should happen when God enters our world.

As Christians, we might choose to read this psalm with a different lens than our Jewish siblings. For us, the idea of God coming into our world is a deeply familiar one—one which we spend whole seasons of our church year grappling with: the incarnation of Jesus Christ. For centuries, Christian writers have read this psalm through the lens of the incarnation. Take Augustine, in the 4^th century, who writes “Who is this King of glory?… The answer is given, The strong and mighty Lord, whom you thought to be weak and vanquished… Handle his scars and you will find them healed, see his human weakness restored to immortal strength. This glorification of the Lord was owed to the earth, where he did battle with death, and it has been paid in full” For Augustine, Jesus—crucified and risen—is this King of glory.

“Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors! That the king of glory may come in” It is a noble sentiment, this verse, and describes an entrance by God which should be magnificent. But Jesus’ entrance to this world was not full of splendor and processions. Few acknowledged the Son of God, this King of glory. We see that in today’s gospel reading, as Mark tells us who people thought Jesus was—John the baptist, Elijah, a prophet. The unnamed “they” thought he was many things, but could not see him as he truly was. Even Herod could not imagine a world where he was not ultimately in control.

Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon write in their 1989 book Resident Aliens that “we can only act within the world which we see. So, the primary ethical question is not, What ought I now to do? But rather, How does the world really look?”

If we can only act within the world which we see, then it matters, a lot, what and who we see. Herod will never accept Jesus because he sees him as John the Baptist.

If we understand Jesus to be just a prophet or a good teacher, or some 2000 year old guy, rather than the Son of God who saves, redeems, and restores us, then that will shape our ethical worldview, and we will act accordingly.

If we believe that inequality and injustice is caused by God’s blessing rather than human sin, then that will change how we treat our neighbors, particularly those who look or act differently from us.

If we think that the church is just a great place to make friends and live out values that align with one or another political parties, rather than a place of communal encounter and transformation by the living God, then that will shape what we do with our time, talent, and treasure.

How does the world really look? Psalm 24 asks us to hit reset, and remember that we are called to see the word as it truly is. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it”

How does the world really look? Ultimately, that is the question that our psalm puts to us, today. Who is this King of glory?… or, how does the world really look? Do we know ourselves to be created and loved by God, to be living in a world that is created and loved by God?

Who is this king of glory? Jesus, the king of glory has entered. May this song, seared in my memory, and perhaps now yours, invite us into renewed ways of seeing, loving, and being God’s people, in a world that, more than ever, needs to see itself as it truly is.

Now, I know that’s a very oldest child thing of me to say, but it’s true to some extent, right? The youngest child gets to have the most fun, and has the fewest rules that apply to them. It’s always the youngest, and perhaps we roll our eyes a bit when we say that, or if we’re youngest children, perhaps it’s that familiar feeling of “oh man, why are they blaming me for everything again—it’s not my fault?!”

It’s always the youngest. At least, it’s always the youngest in God’s economy of surprise, where our expectations of who succeeds, or who is chosen, are so often thwarted.

It’s always the youngest, even from the beginning of Genesis, where Abel wins God’s favor with his first fruits, or in the Abraham cycle, where Jacob triumphs over Esau and Joseph’s dreams of ruling over his 10 older brothers eventually come true in Egypt.

This theme continues throughout the prophets—where Jeremiah is named a prophet despite his protestations that he is “only a boy”, and in the New Testament, with the parable of the prodigal—younger—son, and Paul’s lifting up of Timothy.

It’s always the youngest. This is especially true in today’s Old Testament lesson from 1 Samuel, where we read that famous story of David the shepherd boy. He is the youngest of the youngest: the eighth son, from the tribe of Benjamin. The youngest child from the least significant tribe, and nobody expects very much from him. Perhaps in time he will own sheep and marry well, and live in the same town as his father.

Perhaps nobody expected very much of David, but they certainly expected a lot from his predecessor on the throne of Israel. Saul, who we heard about last week, was put on the throne after the Israelites begged God through Samuel to give them a king. God said yes, but only after warning them: “you’re not going to like this as much as you think you will”.

As God expected, things didn’t go so well. Saul fails his first major test, disobeying the commands of God on the battlefield, resulting in his immediate loss of favor. And it is in this context that we find ourselves today, where Samuel grieves over Saul.

What is this prophet grieving over? Perhaps he’s grieving over Saul himself, that he really liked Saul so much that his disappointment is real and tangible. Perhaps he’s grieving over the hope of peace and stability and a leader who would do the commands of God: all of which the text suggests are lost when Saul disobeys. Perhaps he’s grieving over this loss of potential, over the many things that could have come into being, over dreams of success and prosperity.

Regardless of the reason, we know that Samuel is grieving. He goes home, retreats, and wants to be done with this king stuff for a little while.

And I don’t know about you, but I really understand Samuel in this moment, especially after this year of pandemic. After a year of real, deep trauma within our community and world, it’s really tempting some days to hide away, and think about the things we have lost: perhaps grief around losing an opportunity or experience, or missing out on the chance to be in relationship with someone who lives far away, or even loosing a loved one. There’s real grief in our world right now, a communal sense of loss over what the last year plus might have been. Perhaps you find yourself in grief over what has and is changing, or how you have changed. Do I remember what it’s like to interact with people again? How do I rid myself of this or that habit or coping mechanism, now that the world is changing again? What will church be like, in June, or September, or December—what will feel normal? Will I want to go back to my normal routine? What if that normal routine isn’t there to go back to?

It’s always the youngest that surprises us. God tells Samuel to get up, to stop grieving over something irretrievably lost, and go to Bethlehem. This makes me think about that passage in Isaiah, when God talks about the restoration that is to come, saying “do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” In Revelation, he who is seated on the throne says “Behold, I am making all things new”. God calls Samuel, in his grief, into this new thing that God is doing.

I can imagine the huff that Samuel was in: “okay God, surely this is the one, right?” You sort of get this sense that Samuel just wants it to be over already. But it’s not. It goes on and on until it seems like there are no more sons left. What are you doing, God? You’ve exhausted all the options?!

It’s always the youngest. When all other options are tapped out, here comes David. The youngest son who God has chosen to rule Israel. In a world where Samuel thinks there are no other options than grief and failed hopes, God reminds him, and us, that in God’s economy of surprise, there is always new hope and life coming, even when we don’t expect or particularly want it.

As we stand on the cusp of so many things, we may find ourselves experiencing many feelings: reluctance, impatience, grief, anxiety, excitement, and even hope. Perhaps you are preparing to go see friends and family for the first time in months, or returning to church for the first time, or grappling with all the challenges and possibilities presented to the parish in last week’s Ministry Architects report.

Wherever you are, in this moment of regathering and return and revisioning, I hope you hear the voice of God calling to you, like Samuel so many centuries ago, saying come to Bethlehem, to see this new thing that I am doing. May we respond as the shepherds do, so many years later, “let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place” as we follow and partner with our God in this work, even, and especially in, the most unlikely of places and people.

ethics are trampled as officials chase after trade deals that line the pockets of those in power,

people are dying of plague and poverty in a world that doesn’t seem to care,

partisan politics and dehumanizing opponents is the norm in a world where the powerful and those who aspire to it are too proud to admit when they are wrong,

promises are made over and over again for unity and peace, promises that are broken time and time again,

and a God who fits an ever-changing list of attributes and vaguely supportive images is presented in support of this side, or that side, or this proposal or policy, or that one.

In case you’re wondering, you’re reading the newspaper—not in 21^st century America—but in the kingdom of Judah, in 738 BCE. We find ourselves there in today’s Old Testament lesson, “in the year that King Uzziah died”. The death of King Uzziah brought about political turmoil—turmoil that would topple the Northern Kingdom of Israel just a few years later by the Assyrians, and would eventually consume the Southern Kingdom of Judah, which fell to the Babylonians over a century later. But the book of Isaiah is very clear that the trouble started much earlier, with a people who forgot their Creator, who forgot the very God who led them to this land in the first place.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to us from the kingdom of Judah, in the year that King Uzziah died, with a vision of this God. Not the God of greeting cards and saccharine sweet images and metaphors, but a terrifying God, whose attendants are seraphs with six wings whose voices shake the thresholds. At the very least, this God is terrifying to Isaiah, who cries out that he is a man of unclean lips, who lives among a people of unclean lips, who has somehow seen “the King, the Lord of hosts!”

And so Isaiah stands before God, in that famous passage, where he is cleansed and annointed a prophet of a hopeless cause: to warn a people who have forgotten the holiness and fullness of the God who created heaven and earth, to speak to them of the inescapable downfall of their kingdoms and powers and principalities.

Why today, of all days? Why, on this Trinity Sunday, do we read this call narrative from Isaiah? The authors of the lectionary chose this passage for Trinity Sunday because of this mention of “us”—one of the references in Scripture that we believe points to the God who is three in one.

And so like Isaiah, we find ourselves standing before God in America, in 2021, on this Trinity Sunday, a Sunday where our readings remind us that we worship a holy God, whose power, mercy, and love is in all and above all. I know some of you are waiting with baited breath for me to unpack the mysteries of the Trinity in this sermon, while others of you are trembling at the very thought.

But I don’t want us to think about the Trinity as merely an academic exercise that preachers undertake several times a year. The Trinity—Father, Son, Spirit—is not something that exists merely to be defined, but is the way that God chooses to exist in time and space, in relationship with us. God: one in three, unity in community, is not an exercise in minutiae, but is a key part of our faith that asks us to imagine power and authority differently…

We are asked to imagine in God—not what we wish we could or couldn’t see in our earthly rulers—but the strange and awesome holiness of our Creator who just won’t stop loving us, no matter how far we try to run.

And run we do, even when we don’t realize it. Like the people of the Kingdom of Judah, we live with injustice, pride and a love of easy wealth that dooms us to ever repeating the same mistakes. Our offertory hymn, “O God of Earth and Altar”, lifts these things up as a cry to God, lamenting how “our earthly rulers falter/our people drift and die/the walls of gold entomb us/the swords of scorn divide.” It begs God to “take not thy thunder from us/but take away our pride”. Rulers, walls of gold, swords of scorn, and pride. The hymn text—a poem by author G.K. Chesterton—is a biting condemnation of the very things we hold on to in this world: this or that political message, or money, or just stubbornness that surely doing the same thing again will get a different result.

So where is our hope? Where is our hope when our present reality seems so far from this heavenly vision of Isaiah? Where is our hope when the Lord of hosts, sitting on a throne high and lofty, seems so terrifyingly far away and distant? Where is our hope when there are wars, and plagues, and famines, and pointless death and suffering?

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Whom shall I send?

One of the most shocking things about this text is the fact that God—this Lord of hosts, the very image of majesty and power—asks this question.

Whom shall I send?

Surely a God surrounded by seraphs shaking the very pivots on the thresholds with praise doesn’t need to ask who to send. Surely(!) there are angels and beings beyond description, who could be sent?

And yet God asks, whom shall I send, and who will go for us?

The authors of the lectionary chose this passage for Trinity Sunday because of this mention of “us”—“Who will go for us?” But it is most remarkable because we find that this God, who exists in community, in relationship, is a God of sending. We find that God needs us, and it is through this sending that we are folded into relationship with the Trinity.

Whom shall I send?

If you are in the middle of making a decision: a decision about what the next right, faithful thing is in your life—in whatever stage of life you find yourself—you are answering that question. I answered that question when I said yes to a college, then again when I said yes to the church, said yes to becoming a priest, and then answered it again when I said yes to a curacy program in North Carolina.

You, God’s people at the Chapel of the Cross said yes too, when you agreed to take part in the Reimagining Curacies Program, to take on a new curate every year. You took a risk that is bigger than just me, or even bigger than us three curates. You said yes to a new way of doing church—letting go of the pervasive “each parish for itself” mindset, and said yes to being in a community of three churches, and tying our lives more closely together through shared curates, services and programs. You said yes to experimenting, and trying new things to see if they’d work… and got a pandemic thrown in on top of it. You said a hearty and enthusiastic yes to our work over the past year, as we explored the many ways that love does indeed dwell here. We have taken steps towards tying our lives more closely with one another—through pastoral care of one another, and care of the poor and outcast.

Because ultimately, it’s not about you or me or this church, or this program, or powers and principalities of this world. Our hymn makes this very clear in verse 3.

Tie in a living tether

the prince and priest and thrall,

bind all our lives together,

smite us and save us all;

Tie in a living tether…. bind all our lives together.

Our God, who sits enthroned in the heavens, whose Christ came to redeem us, who sends the Spirit to accompany us, invites us out of our pride and love of wealth, invites us away from our love of earthly rulers and tolerance for injustice.

The Triune God invites us into a new national allegiance, where we are tied in a living tether with all of God’s people… those in Orange County, and those saints past present and yet to come.

God: Father, Son, and Spirit, invites us into relationship that will change our lives and hearts if we let it, if we say yes to this new allegiance.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

May we all have the grace to know how to say “Here am I, send me”

It’s just a year since I left St. Paul’s as your seminarian, though perhaps you’ll agree with me that it feels like maybe two or three or five years has passed

A year ago, I drove to the church and packed up my office—a few months later I would set off for North Carolina, for a new town, a new job—all amidst a pandemic with no end in sight.

And despite the allure of new things, of new places, of new adventures, I remember being very unsure, and not at all excited. A new place, where I knew nobody, a new job via Zoom. It wasn’t what I’d envisioned or been trained for in seminary—who knew that we’d need to learn how to be virtual priests, after all?

In those months, I didn’t even know what to hope for… too much worry and uncertainty has a way of overwhelming fragile, and half-formed hopes, and perhaps you know this feeling too.

In a world where the future is uncertain, it’s easier sometimes to go smaller, to just focus on the next 24 or 48 or 72 hours. That’s what I did, and perhaps you did too.

It was hard to know what to hope for.

And this experience of hope that resonates with so many us over this year, I think teaches us something about the nature of hope itself. That hope cannot exist in a vacuum, that the feeling of hope and vague positivity cannot be sustained in the midst of crisis without a definition of what it is we are hoping for.

And so on this Sunday, where we observe the Ascension of Christ, I invite us to think about hope.

Not the vaguely positive, undefined hope of greeting cards and picture-perfect social media posts.

Not the frozen hope of so many paintings of the Ascension, with adoring disciples staring upwards and fluffy clouds and cherubs and the tips of Jesus’ feet as he disappears out of sight.

Not even the hope of the disciples themselves and their first followers, as they worked slavishly to tell the Good News to others, hoping that each day would bring the return of Christ and the kingdom of heaven on earth, a hope for immediate return that died with them.

Not that kind of hope.

Instead, I invite you to the stunning and glorious hope that Christ sits at the right hand of God, interceding constantly for us.

I invite you to the real and present hope that Christ died and rose for us, so that, as the writer of Ephesians says, you may know that you are forgiven and loved and freed, to be part of the church, “which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all”.

I invite you to the difficult and gritty hope of the communion of saints, who in the years since this Ascension, have labored long for a new heaven and a new earth, without knowing its time, or season, simply because they have come face to face with the God of love, arms outstretched on the cross, who calls each of us by name.

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.”

The thing that matters about the Ascension is not the tips of Jesus’ feet in a painting, or the disciples on the ground staring upwards, or the fact that somehow he was taken up into heaven and we don’t know when he’s coming back.

What matters is the words that Jesus spoke before this moment, the opening of the disciples’ minds to understand the scriptures. The incarnation, the cross, the grave—empty, and death and despair defeated. This is the hope that Christ spoke to his disciples in today’s lesson from Luke, before sending them out as witnesses of these things to all the world.

The disciples knew, in this moment, the hope to which they were called.

And perhaps now, this spring—one year later—you too remember what it is like to hope for something.

Hope for a world where we are no longer separate from one another,

hope for a pandemic ending,

hope for a new world where the safety and dignity of every human person is preserved.

On this Ascension Sunday, I invite you into this hope. Not just the hope of this year in our lives, but into the Christian hope that is so much bigger, so much better than anything we can imagine. For each of us, this hope may look different. But as we remember what it is like to hope for something real and tangible in our world, perhaps this is a time where we can also remember that we are witnesses to hope in Christ, sent to a world in desperate need of… hope.

What is the hope to which you are called?