In its most basic telling the parable is fairly straightforward. Something small, a seed, grows into something unexpectedly large. The lesson? “Don’t despise the day of small beginnings,” to quote the prophet Zechariah. On the surface it seems like a classic “don’t discount the small things” or “great things come from small and humble beginnings” kind of message. While there is a seed of truth in that idea, I always love a good pun in a sermon, it isn’t that simple. If it were, this wouldn’t be a parable, what the prophets called a dark saying.

A closer reading reveals a number of surprising elements in this compact parable. First, a note that too often gets overlooked, or at least did in the readings I absorbed growing up, that this is a parable about the kingdom of heaven. This parable is not about us, our work, our dreams or aspirations. This is a parable about God and the kind of rule and reign He has. That involves us, no doubt, but how, or where, we put ourselves in this little parable makes all the difference.

I’ll come back to that in a bit but first let’s look closer at the strangeness of the parable.

We are told the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds. It is true the mustard seed is exceptionally small, but it isn’t the smallest seed. That small seed, we are told, is sown by a man in his field. This too is strange because the mustard plant was not considered a garden plant, let alone would someone have planted fields of it. It was considered a wild plant, a kind of weed essentially, that was largely unwanted in that time in gardens or fields.

Additionally, the mustard plant is not even a tree, it’s a large bush. We are told this “tree” is the “greatest garden plant”. You’ll even notice that, within the parable, the seed is first referred to as a garden plant and then it “becomes a tree”, indicating a kind of transformation from an herb into a towering tree. If you take “great” to refer to size, that is obviously not true. The mustard “tree”, which is really a bush, is sizeable, with some varieties getting to be 10 feet tall. If you take “great” to refer to overall impressiveness and reputation that also would be a large stretch of the imagination. Clearly there is some hyperbole going on here but hyperbolic language doesn’t ease the tension created within the narrative.

Again, not only is it not a tree it isn’t something people planted in their gardens at the time. This great tree, in the end, is said to become a home to all the wild birds of the heavens. This too is a contradiction, as mustard trees were, and are, not particularly hospitable to birds.

One last note on the strangeness of the parable. Notice how the whole thing is told in the singular. It is a single man, sowing a single seed, that yields a single plant.

So what should we make of all this strangeness? And what does it tell us about the way God rules in the world today? I want to offer three small reflections for us to consider.

First, this strange parable, as all the parables do, reminds us that we cannot contain or control this God because He Himself is strange. He is unlike any other. He is holy. He is the God who desires mercy and not sacrifice. He is the God who would rather give than receive. He is the One who comes down as a means to be lifted up, dies to give life, and serves those called to serve Him. The Father revealed by Jesus is wild and untamed, like a mustard plant. He breaks our conventions, presuppositions, and imaginations. “Who is like You, O Lord?,” the psalmist repeats. The swirling oddity that this parable thrusts upon us is what we are pointing to when we speak about God as the living God. He is both living and lively. Living, in that He is the source of life itself, the ground of all being, and lively in that He is uncontrollable and beyond our ability to box Him in. To put it succinctly, He is like Aslan: on the move.

You’ll notice that throughout the Gospels Jesus calls people to “follow” Him, not serve Him, because He is on the move taking them to all kinds of unexpected places that break norms and conventions. He is the friend of sinners and someone who saves the best wine for last. We follow this wild God because that is the only way we can keep up with Him.

We do serve God, but what we mean by serve is something different from what we mean when we say a servant serves his or her master. Our service to God is not like a servant to a master because God is not like any other master. He is, in the conventional sense, no master at all, but the servant of all. And what He teaches us is that true mastery, true lordship, is bottom up not top down. The mere strangeness of this parable reminds us that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is wild and free, strange and holy, rather than domesticated and polite. As such, to be a Christian is not simply about doing or believing the right things but about allowing the living and lively God to make us into a wholly and holy new creation.

Second, this parable reminds us that Christ alone, as the Word of God, is the singular seed planted by His Father and thus God’s work in the world ultimately belongs to Him. Remember what Paul tells the Corinthians. One man may plant and another may water, but ultimately it is God who brings the increase. Who can thwart the plans of God? Or, as Paul says in this week’s New Testament reading from Romans 8, “What can keep us from the love of God?” Or, as the great musician John Mark McMillan puts it, “Nothing stands between us but love.”

The good news for all of us today is that the great gardener has sown His only beloved Son into the world so that the tender shoots of divine love would spring up from the soil of our hearts. There is nothing that can keep us from the love of God because that is what God’s kingdom and rule in the world looks like, love making all things new. Today, when we come to the table in just a few minutes, we will feed upon that love with our bodies and with our hearts. We will look anew upon that tiny seed which was planted, grew up and became a tree on Calvary.

The kingdom of heaven is shaped like that tree. The reign of God is cruciform. The power of God flows from a cross. We should never let the awe and peculiarity of that fact slip from our hearts and minds.

Last year my language teacher in Kurdistan, a Muslim man, began having profound dreams of Jesus and pretty quickly our language lessons turned into theological discussions as he was trying to make sense of these dreams he was having. Eventually he told me he would like to come to one of our little home church services we do every weekend. He, very typically, showed up 45 minutes late and we had waited for him to arrive before we started. When he finally arrived I gave him a very brief rundown of the service, what would happen, and how he could follow along. Finally I told him that when we take communion we would come and say a prayer of blessing for him.

Well, once that time came, I left him and went up to the front of the room to lead the liturgy of the Lord’s Table. Once I finished the prayer of consecration and as I was beginning to distribute the elements my friend leans over to my eldest son, Kelles, and asks, “Kelles, what is in the cup?” To which he gave the most nonchalant and wonderfully theologically astute answer possible, “The blood of Jesus.” At that exact moment he looks over and sees the first person dip the bread into the cup and sees the deep red hue and he about falls over as he genuinely thinks we are drinking blood. And of course he is at the very far side of the room so he has to watch in horror as roughly a dozen people dip their pieces of bread into the blood of Jesus and then eat them.

After the service he sheepishly approaches me with a look of utter shock on his face and asks if we really just drank blood. This is the peculiarity and the wonder we must never lose. While we may have the ritual and the language and even the theological understanding of what is happening every time we come to the Lord’s Table it should still shock our system that we are eating the fruit of that tree, Calvary’s tree. That Christ has come so close to us that nothing can separate us from the love of God. And the proof that is true is in our hands and in our mouths as we partake of the bread and wine.

So the parable reminds us of the strangeness of this holy God. Second, it reminds us that the crucified one is the seed of God lovingly planted in the world, which grew up and became a tree for our sakes.

Thirdly and finally, this parable reminds us who we are. I said we would come back to where we find ourselves in this parable. We are not the man or the field or the seed or the tree. We are the wild birds who have found a home in the most unlikely of places.

I said earlier that the mustard plant/tree was typically thought of as a kind of wild growing weed rather than a desired garden plant and that it wasn’t particularly hospitable to birds. And yet, somehow against all odds, they have made their home there. If we took the time this morning we could spend the next three days going around and telling our stories, all the things we have endured, all the tragedies that have befallen us, all the twists our lives have taken, and all the confounding things that have happened to us. By the end of our story most of us would say something like “and yet, against all odds, somehow, here I am today with you all.”

The truth is that the tension within this parable, the strangeness of this God, mirrors our lives which look like tangled threads and knots. From the one side the threads make no sense and seem to have very little rhyme or rhythm to them. However, if we flip that tangled mess over we realize that God has been weaving a tapestry of grace, a living witness that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. One way to describe that tapestry of grace is to say that we have found our home here, with each other, in Christ Jesus.

The image of a tree with the birds of the heavens making their nest in it would have been a familiar one. In both Ezekiel and Daniel, the great empires and kingdoms of the world are depicted as mighty cedars which spread over the whole earth and the birds of sky come and make their nest under the shade of their branches. If we aren’t careful, if we fail to keep the wonder of the crucified Christ in the center of our sight we too can easily succumb to the leaven of Herod and the Pharisees and our religion will devolve into worldly politics dressed up in spiritual language. But we are not those crows nesting in the tree of political powers or economic might. No, we are the people of God, those following Jesus through this life being surprised at every turn. The people who against all odds have been brought here together as the one new family of God, invited to eat from the table of the Lord together; people from all different places, races, social circles, economic status, and cultural backgrounds. While those distinctions remain we have found our home in the God who has made His home in us.

So, as we prepare to come to the table of the Lord today, may we see with renewed eyes and hearts the God who is holy, strange and unlike any other. May we feed upon Christ by faith in our hearts, as the only begotten of God, our tree of life. May we see each other as we truly are, brothers and sisters in the family of God. And lastly, may our very presence this morning together at the table be a witness that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

Where is God? What should I do? What does this or that mean? Who am I? Who is God? Why?

These universal questions are often answered slowly over time, bit by bit, as we wrestle with God and with ourselves. And it is these questions that in many ways mark our lives most deeply, leaving us like Jacob, with a limp.

In 2014, I embarked on what has come to be a life-altering and defining spiritual journey. I didn’t realize that’s what was happening at the time, as we rarely truly comprehend what God is doing in our lives, but now ten years later I have begun to understand more and more of the Spirit’s work in my life. That journey started with what seemed like a simple and innocent enough question, “What is God like?”

That question was the undercurrent of my life for the next 7-8 years. Then, just a few years ago, after a few years of living in the Middle East and around the time I began my journey into the Anglican priesthood, I felt the wind beginning to shift. As I prayed, studied, and reflected on my life and work in Iraq and what it will mean when I am ordained as a priest, set apart to serve Christ’s church, another one of those universal questions began to come up from my heart: “What does God want?” And it is that question I want to reflect on today.

That is the title of my sermon: What God Wants.

As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he arose and followed Him. Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard that, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

Matthew 9 opens with the story of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector to follow him. Previously, Jesus had gone across the lake and healed a man who had been tormented by many demons. After coming back to Capernaum Jesus is met by crowds, among them is a paralytic man being carried along on a stretcher. Jesus heals the man and forgives him of all his sins.

As he continues to walk, still in Capernaum, Jesus sees a man named Matthew, a tax collector. Like the fishermen before Jesus calls this man to leave his booth and follow him. Matthew, we are told, “got up and followed him”. Where did the call of Matthew lead first? Back to his own house. The very next thing we see is Matthew hosting a party with Jesus, his disciples, sinners, and a bunch of his other tax collector buddies.

This scene immediately catches the attention of the Pharisees who then come to the disciples and ask how is it that this man, who proclaims to be sent from God, and whom the crowds are saying is a prophet, is eating with these kinds of people? Hearing this, Jesus inserts himself into the conversation and states simply that he is a kind of doctor and has come to heal the sick. Then he gives the Pharisees and lawyers a command. Quoting the prophet Hosea, He commands them, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’”

Hosea was a prophet to the northern tribes of Israel roughly 800 years earlier. We don’t know much about Hosea other than what he wrote in his prophecy. What we see is that during his time, Israel was deeply unfaithful to God. They had made all kinds of political alliances which betrayed their trust in God, had erected idols all over the country, and were taking advantage of the poor and needy who lived among them. For their sins Hosea begins to preach that God was going to come and judge Israel by sending her into exile via the kingdom of Assyria unless they repented.

The beginning of Hosea’s book however doesn’t start with Israel’s sins but with the story of Hosea marrying a woman named Gomer. Gomer, we are told, was a deeply unfaithful woman who was continually leaving Hosea to go be with other men. They end up having three children together. Despite this Gomer continues to leave Hosea to be with other men.

Hosea’s marriage is a sign, a mirror, showing Hosea what God was experiencing with Israel. They were like Gomer, going astray after other gods, and He, like Hosea, was heartbroken. What was God going to do?

He declares He will bring Israel back to the wilderness like He did when she came out of Egypt and remove all the names of false gods from her mouth so that Israel will no longer call him master, but “my husband”. Chapter 2 closes with God boldly declaring that those who had not obtained such mercy would indeed be showered with it and those who were far away would bear the name of God and be His people.

How would this all come to pass? Israel, like Gomer, is still wandering, the people giving their bodies and soul to other lovers. God continues to call Hosea deeper into this mystery by telling him in Chapter 3 verse 1 to “Go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover”. God’s solution? Keep pursuing, keep going, keep loving, keep drawing her back. This will be accomplished by God’s unflinching mercy and unwavering lovingkindness. This work is God’s and God’s alone. His mercy, unconditional and persistent, is what will heal Israel. It rests on Him, rises and falls with Him. Hosea’s story, and that command to “go again,” at the climax of it acts as the linchpin of the whole book.

What Hosea learns that day, in those few words, “go again”, which plays out throughout the rest of his book, is the same thing that Jesus tells the Pharisees they must go and learn: God wants mercy and not sacrifice. Put another way, in the end, our God doesn’t want anything from us, only something for us. And what He wants for us is mercy. Hear the words of Hosea again. God doesn’t want sacrifice, which is something we give to God; He wants mercy, which is something He gives to us. What Hosea learns and acts out is that God would rather give than receive. When Jesus says, “it is more blessed to give than to receive”, that is a word about God. We tend to hear that as a moral lesson for us to adhere to. In truth it is another way to hear the words of Hosea and catch a glimpse of this God who is humble, not wanting or needing to be center of attention.

God doesn’t desire our sacrifices, no matter how meaningful they are. What could He want from us anyway? The Psalms tell us that He owns the whole earth. Does God get hungry that we could give Him food? Is He weak that we could offer Him help? Is He in need that we could supply something for Him? Is He incapable that we could give our strength? Is He poor that we could lend Him some money? Would any sacrifice we could offer be grand enough, costly enough, wonderful enough to garner the attention of the Almighty who sits above the circle of the earth? The idea is laughable. Only a god with needs requires sacrifice, but a god who needs is no god at all.

Hear me clearly, what I don’t mean to say is that following Jesus revolves around us and our desires. This isn’t about God giving us what we want, our best life now, or working on our behalf so our life is pain free or “blessed”. Those are flimsy and shallow distortions of the true scandal of the gospel that God would rather give than receive, wants mercy for us rather than sacrifice from us. What we discover in Christ is that this God would rather come low in order to join His life to ours than be lifted up over our lives. To reduce the Father of Jesus, the God of scandalous grace and unflinching mercy to a cartoonish caricature who simply gives us our dreams, acclaim, ease, comfort, and a successful life in the eyes of others, is to reduce the glory of God to an idol of man.

That kind of distortion puffs us up, makes us grand in our own eyes and the eyes of others. That kind of religion is self-serving, turning God into something we can grasp and use for our own purposes. But the true mercy of God, rightly received, humbles us and brings us to our knees because such goodness disarms us and frees us from all our delusions. It breaks us, paradoxically, through the gentle hands of our pierced and wounded Savior.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” says the Lord. God doesn’t want anything from us, only things for us. Is this really true? How can this be? You may be thinking what about our lives? Our talents? Our money? Our time? Doesn’t God want those things from us? Aren’t we supposed to give them to Him? Aren’t we commanded time and time again to offer ourselves and all of our lives as a kind of sacrifice to God?

Yes of course. All of that is perfectly fine biblical language. However, when we listen to those commands in tune with the rest of the symphony of scripture they sound different than we first imagined.

What do the Scriptures tell us? If we lose our life, we find it. If we die, we are born again into everlasting life. If we sell all, sacrifice all, you can buy the field in which the treasure is hidden. That is to say, and this is the key point, anyone who has given anything to God finds out on the other side of that sacrifice that they are actually receiving from God. When we give our lives to God we are in truth receiving His life. Any sacrifice we give to God turns out, in the end, to be no sacrifice at all but to be Him giving to us. Our sacrifices, efforts, and gifts are nothing more than proof the Spirit is already at work in our lives, making a way for Him to give His life to us again.

If all this sounds to wild too be true or too preposterous to be correct to your ears, pay attention because you’re being touched by the scandalous and scandalizing mercy of Christ this very moment. That is the gift of God knocking on the door of your heart. All you need do at this point is open your heart to receive that mercy.

Let’s look at two stories which demonstrate this reality.

First, in Luke 12:35 and following Jesus tells a parable of a master who has gone away to a wedding feast. His servants have their lamps burning, keeping watch throughout the night, not knowing at what hour the master will return. We can imagine what will happen when the master arrives home. Those servants will spring into action, open the door, and welcome him home with a warm meal at the very least. Whatever the master wishes it is their duty to oblige. His needs are their work.

It should strike us then to hear Jesus tell the story when He says, “Truly I say to you that he (the master) will dress himself for service and have them (the servants) recline at the table and will come by and serve them.” The Father of Jesus is the kind of master that serves his servants rather than be served by them. Because, as we’ve already been saying, our God doesn’t want or need to be the center of attention of our sacrifices. He would rather give than receive, serve than be served, show mercy than consume our sacrifice.

The second story is one more familiar to us but that familiarity often stands in our way. In John 13, on the night before He was crucified, we read that Jesus, knowing that His Father “had given all things into his hand and that he had came from God and was going away to God, he got up from the dinner and took off his outer clothing, taking a towel, tied it around himself. Then he poured water into the washbasin and began to wash the feet of the disciples, and to wipe them dry with the towel which he had tied around himself.”

Simon Peter protests, as we often do, and some of us may be right now, and refused to allow Jesus to wash his feet, just like John had initially refused to baptize Jesus, demanding instead that Jesus baptize him. Here, as was with John, Jesus replies, “Unless I wash you, you do not have a share with me.”

“Go and learn what this means”, and unless we do we do not have a part with him. The truth is for most, if not all of us, it is easier for us to serve God than to allow ourselves to be served by God because it gives us a sense of control over what happens to us. If we obey we will be rewarded, if we give it will be given, if we sacrifice God will see and favor us. Although costly at times that sense of security and self-esteem makes it is easier for us to put on the servants towel and offer our services to Jesus than to welcome Him to our bare dirty feet. But we must learn to let go of that deep desire of control, that quid pro quo version of Christianity, and trust His mercy or we have no part in him.

We must learn to allow the fire of his kindness and mercy to strip us of the cloaks we use to cover our fears and insecurities. Many of us are afraid we aren’t enough for God, that He isn’t pleased, that our love is too weak and fickle to garner His approval and so we sacrifice in order to prove to Him and ourselves that we are worthy. Others of us are deeply insecure in the smallness of our lives, the normalcy of them, the brokenness of them so we do our best to do all God commands of us to lift up our own heads and spirits from the pits of discouragement and despair. And hear me, we should obey, we should do our best, we should walk in holiness. They must only spring up from the soil of God’s rich mercy, not from the sacrifices we offer.

Holiness, it turns out, is our learning to receive from God the mercy He so earnestly desires to give us. This is precisely what makes Him holy, His deep desire to give mercy. We often offer mercy to someone against our desires, as an act of obedience, often begrudgingly because we know we are supposed to. This God is holy because He is not like that. He desires to give us mercy. He is longing for it. His heart aches to lavish mercy upon us like a healing balm upon an open wound.

He is unlike all others because He is the servant of all despite being the creator of heaven and earth. He is not like Zeus or Apollo or Athena, or Rome or Babylon or America, or any Caesar, President, or Prime Minister. All of these demand we sacrifice for them. It is only this one, Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s son and Pilate’s victim, that bends down to wash us in the sweet waters of mercy.

Poet Malcolm Guite writes about this moment in John 13 in the following sonnet:

For here the earth herself gives bread and wine,

the air delights to bear his Spirit’s speech,

The fire dances where the candles shine,

The waters cleanse us with his gentle touch.

And here he shows the full extent of love

to us whose love is always incomplete,

in vain we search the heavens high above,

the God of love is kneeling at our feet.

Though we betray him, though it is the night,

He meets us here and loves us into light.

The night continued on until they all came to the table. The same table we come to still today. In the Anglican Eucharist liturgy the priest offers the following prayer at the beginning of the liturgy:

We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Recalling his death, resurrection, and ascension, we offer you these gifts.

At the table of the Lord we bring bread and wine made with our own hands and offer them back to Him as a thanksgiving offering, a kind of sacrifice of praise; but they don’t remain that. After the bread and wine are lifted up, blessed, and broken the very last words the priest says before the church eats and drinks together are:

“These are the gifts of God for the people of God.”

Do you see what has just happened? Our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, in the end, turns out to be the gift of God given to us; none other than Christ Himself. We come to the table only to find out that He is not our guest, we are His. He is the host serving us, not the other way around. This is why traditionally when the church comes to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ they do so by opening their hands to receive; they don’t reach out and take the bread and wine. By opening our hands we embody the truth that the salvation we are receiving in that moment is pure gift.

And we must learn what this means. We have been so conditioned to believe that the Christian life is one in which we give up our lives to God. That is only partly and penultimately true. As we were just saying, our gifts and sacrifices to God turn out to be His gift coming to us all over again. To follow Christ then we must learn to receive. We must yield to His mercy and allow it to cleanse us from the idols we sacrifice to, especially the ones we call God. Unless we allow Him to wash our feet we have no part in Him. So our union with God, our life in Christ, is rooted in nothing more than God’s mercy over us. It is pure gift.

What does God want from you today? Nothing but to open your hands and receive of His mercy. Go and learn what this means, God doesn’t want anything from you, only something for you, His mercy. Let us all receive of that mercy today. Amen.

Genesis tells us that in the beginning there was nothing but the void of total darkness. Into that darkness a voice, the voice of the Creator God, spoke. John’s prologue tells us that the word uttered in Genesis was Christ Himself, who is the very utterance of God. 

Good Friday returns us to that same darkness. The Last Supper takes place late into the night. Judas the betrayer leaves, returning to the shadows to complete his dark and evil deed. Once the meal is finished, the remaining group also leaves the upper room and walks through the quiet streets of Jerusalem, passes by the Temple complex, and exits the city down into the black garden they often frequented. 

Jesus still goes further into the darkness, leaving his disciples behind to go and pray. Here stands the Son of Man all alone in the blackest of nights. 

After wrestling in agony for some time, his strength is weak. He has already begun to invade the deepest of all horrors and blackness: death. It’s here a light shines, approaching from the entrance of the garden. Although this appears to be light it is only so in the same way Satan appears to be a angel of light, and yet his light is nothing but darkness in disguise. The torch of Judas approaches, and with him a Roman unit. 

They approach and the voice of the Word rings out into the midnight air, “Who are you looking for?”  

“Jesus the Nazarene”, they reply. “I Am”, and they all fall down before the living Burning Bush who stands before them. 

He asks again, “Who are you looking for?”  And they again give the same reply. 

This is the question I want us to sit with tonight for just a moment. As we look upon the cross, as we gaze into that impenetrable darkness that exists in our own hearts as well as in the world, and as we look upon the dying and dead body of “Jesus the Nazarene”, let us ask ourselves this same question. 

“Who are you looking for?” 

Are you looking for a healer? He is here, broken and beaten, so that you may be whole. Are you looking for a deliverer? He is here, taking captivity captive from the inside out. Are you looking for hope? It is here, in the One who makes His bed in the same darkness and despair that surrounds you. Are you looking for mercy? It is here, forgiving the sins of the world even though they don’t ask for it? Are you looking for a leader? He is here, high and lifted up so that all will follow Him. Are you looking for a king? He is here, wearing a crown of thorns with a royal edict above His head. Are you looking for new life? It is here, in the death of the only Son of God.

But where is God? This was the question the crowds were asking, both in the hearts of the scornful and in the mournful onlookers. The question that arose from Jesus’ lips as he hung, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” 

Where is God on Good Friday? Was he in the washed hands of Pilate, giving Christ over to the vicious crowds? Was God in those crowds, calling for the execution of an innocent man? Was God in the violent revolutionary Barabbas, whose name means “Son of the Father”? Was God in the hands of the Roman soldiers, nailing his son to a tree? Was God in the onlooking crowds, standing by, unable or unwilling to do anything? 

 Paul tells us, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” Where was God on Good Friday? There, hanging on Calvary’s tree.

Who are you looking for? Are you looking for God? Here he is, in all his splendor and glory, remaking the world in the darkness. 

Who are you looking for tonight? Turn your eyes to the cross and see, he is there revealing himself to you. 

Isaiah 58 is one of the great calls to charity, generosity, and justice in the Old Testament prophets. The Lord openly rebukes His people for their religious zeal and devotion because they, as Jesus would later say, neglected the weightier matters of the Law. As the passage continues, the set of commands given by God gets more and more intense. It begins with a question, “Is this the kind of fasting I want?” From an inquiry, it moves to a stated desire; in verses 6 and 7, God tells His people, “I want you to…”. From a stated desire, we move to an outright command, “You must…” Five times He tells the people what they must do. They must remove each other's burdens and quit pointing fingers of accusation; feed the hungry; observe the Sabbath; find joy in the Sabbath; and refrain from selfish pursuits on the Sabbath.

Question, desire, command.

This represents a way to talk about our growth and progression in and through the Christian life.

First, we examine our own lives and ask ourselves, “Is this really what God desires?” Oftentimes we may even hear the voice of the Spirit ask us, “Do you think this is what I desire from you?”

Soon enough the questions get answered as we discover what God desires. As we grow up in God, mature in the life of the Spirit, God touches our hearts and sets them ablaze with His desire. God’s heart is filled with desire for every one of us. He has thoughts and dreams about us and our lives. He has those same thoughts and dreams about our neighbors, the suffering, the forgotten, the poor, and the lonely. God’s heart is alive with desire for them and their well-being.

As our growth in the Christian faith continues, we come to the commands of God. “You must”, He tells us. But what we see here in Isaiah is that God’s commands are one and the same as His desires. Twice we are told “I want” (v. 6 and 7). These two statements of desire are identical to the first two commands and their reward.

But why are God’s commands listed here in the final place? Shouldn’t we live from God’s desires? Yes, we should. However, a mature child can obey his father’s commands even when He doesn’t fully comprehend what exactly He wants or why. Or, sometimes, although we know the desires of our father, yet our hearts and weak and dull, and we must, through faith, like an obedient child, do what we have been commanded to do.

While speaking about God’s commands in relation to His desires, C.S. Lewis called duty a “substitute for love”. It is “like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg”. It is not a leg, not the thing meant to carry us, but it is necessary from time to time when our legs are broken.

Each of us will face times in life where our legs seem broken and we struggle to follow God, times when God feels distant, or times in which we are confused as to what we should do. In those moments, we can lean upon the commands of God, knowing that they will lead us straight back into His fiery heart.

When we follow God’s commands, notice this promise alone comes after the pair of commands, to feed the hungry that we are fed by God. We should not read this as a kind of quid pro quo; if you do this for me, then I’ll do this for you. No, what Isaiah is telling us is that God’s commands are always and ultimately for our own benefit and good. That our care for others and God’s care for us as linked together because when we care for others, we truly find ourselves and thus find God.

C.S. Lewis again on God’s commands and our good:

“Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go to the wrong side and gets his head looped round the post. You see that he can’t do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the same thing—namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: though in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.”

“My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go.”

“God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil—the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach.”

“But [the thirst] will never be quenched as I tried to quench it. If I refrain—if I submit to the collar and come round the right side of the lamp-post—God will be guiding me quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the time.”

And what about the final three commands about the Sabbath? You’ll remember that the Sabbath was the pinnacle of God’s creation in Genesis 1 and 2. Sabbath was the time in which God and man come together. What are we do? Be with God, enjoy God, and share that life with others. Those are the final three commands.

Be with God.

Enjoy Him and His gifts.

Share it with others.

“Then you will find joy”, the prophet tells us. We will be brought back to that time and place where the desires of God come alive to us, and our hearts burn like His. That progression, and the ebbs and flows between question, desire, and command, is what the Christian life is.

But rest assured, we “know for certain that the Lord has spoken” these things for our good and the good of the world.

The opening lines of Isaiah are a scathing rebuke to the people of Israel. In a book that has so many famous passages, poems, and images, the opening chapters of Isaiah are often overlooked. We tend to read Isaiah like his oracles start in chapter 6 when he is commissioned by God via a burning coal.

Before there is the burning coal from the altar of God however, there is a fiery accusation that Israel is no different than Sodom and Gomorrah. When we think of those two infamous cities we often though of debauchery, promiscuity, and their ultimate demise through the burning limestone hailstorm that fell upon them.

Isaiah likening Jerusalem to those cities is a serious accusation to levy against God’s people. What would lead him to say such a thing? We are immediately thrown for a loop by what the stated reason is not, namely, a lack of religious fervor and practice. On the contrary, the prophet goes on at length to describe all that Israel is doing. They are offering sacrifices, keeping feasts, observing the Sabbath, and praying to the Lord with their hands raised.

And yet, we are told in the most brazen terms, God has rejected all of their religious practice. He doesn’t want the meat of any more animals, he doesn’t want to hear their prayers anymore, nor does He want them to gather in His name any longer. Why? Aren’t these the signs of a healthy and obedient spiritual life?

The Lord gives Israel two commands:

Wash the blood from your hands

Promote justice among the poor and oppressed so they can celebrate

Israel, despite all its religious zeal, has become like Sodom in that they have forgotten to be hospitable to their neighbors, especially the poor and oppressed. You’ll remember that when the men/angels came to Sodom in Genesis, it was only Lot’s family that offered any kind of hospitality. Their willingness to open their door to strangers, to people unlike them, people in need, was their salvation in the end.

Isaiah is giving this same warning to Israel, and now to us. Open hands of prayer with closed hearts towards the needy is like idolatry to God. Gathering together in His name while never learning the names of our neighbors is like an abomination in the eyes of God. Coming to eat at His table while withholding our tables from the most needy is to betray the very faith we profess.

Our God does not need anything. He is not hungry and therefore needs us to provide a sacrifice. He is not anxious that He needs to make our requests known. Nor is He selfish and proud that He requires our attention. God is full. In His essence and being, He is full and lacks nothing.

What we see is that our God is not the master who requires service, but a servant who serves the least among Him. He is the Lord and yet prepares a table for us, for sinners, to come and dine with Him. God is hospitable. His hospitality is such that it gives us a reason to celebrate. The presence of God is such that it always leaves joy and celebration in its wake. Jesus is the kind of God who goes to a wedding and saves the best wine for last for no other reason than to keep the party going. He is the kind of savior who does not sin but is repeatedly mistaken as one because He is so full of life and joy that people assume He must be drunk.

Jesus isn’t just a participant in the party; He is the reason for the party. His presence causes feasting and laughter to erupt.

This, according to Isaiah, is a picture of the justice of God in action. God’s justice looks like enemies sharing a meal together and forgetting why they hated each other. God’s justice looks like strangers laughing together as they realize they share many things in common. It looks like survivors of tragedy and horror being given their dignity back as a community treats them like family.

God’s justice is a table. It’s a meal. It’s laughter and a glass of wine among long-lost friends who had a falling out.

Isaiah’s promise to Israel is that if they open their hearts to the poor and oppressed God will feed them the goodness of His grace. But if they refuse and continue to feed themselves, they will be consumed. The picture is an ironic one. Open your table and give away your food, and you will eat the bounty of the Lord. Close your homes and hearts, and you will be eaten by the very thing meant to be a blessing to you.

These words, although intense, are an open door for those who will hear.

“Come let us consider your options…though your sins have stained you like the color red (i.e., blood in verse 15), you can become white like snow.”

Clement, one of the very first writers in the history of the Church, references this very passage in Isaiah and calls his readers to take Isaiah’s advice and repent. He continues to string together a number of stories that all show God’s salvation by hospitality. He writes:

And Abraham believed God, and this was reputed to him for justice.’ Because of his faith and hospitality a son was given him in his old age, and it was through obedience that he offered him as a sacrifice to God on the mountain which He showed him.

He continues:

Because of his hospitality and piety Lot was saved from Sodom, when the whole region round about was judged by fire and brimstone.

And finally:

Because of her faith and hospitality Rahab the harlot was saved. For when spies had been sent to Jericho by Josue the son of Nun, the king of the land knew that they had come to spy on his country and sent men to capture them, so that when they were taken they might be put to death. So the hospitable Rahab received them and hid them in the top of the house under stalks of flax… And they gave her a sign, that she should hang from her house something scarlet in color, clearly indicating beforehand that through the blood of the Lord will redemption come to all who believe and hope in God. You see, beloved, that not only faith but also prophecy is found in this woman.

Abraham and Sarai prepared a meal. Lot opened his door. Rahab helped a stranger. These acts didn’t earn them salvation, but they did make space for salvation to walk into their midst. God didn’t reward their openness with His blessing; hospitality is simply the ground from which the blessings of God grow, and therefore, every time we open ourselves up to the needs of others, the blessing of God, the power and salvation of God are at work in our midst.

What Clement sees is that Rahab, and surely the other stories as well, prophesy to us what Christ would and has accomplished. In His coming, Christ has opened His home to us, made us His friends, has given us a reason to celebrate. So now we are participants in that grace. Christ has made possible for us everything that we are called to. His life opens the way for us and energizes us to be the people of God, the people we were made to be for the sake of the world.

This isn’t a matter of going out and doing more or trying harder. This is first about receiving the gift of God given to us and allowing that grace to lead us out into the world. God has truly served us first, so that everyone we serve after comes from the overflow of our receiving His grace. As the Gospel writer says, “Those who are forgiven much, love much.” And Paul, “Forgive just as you have been forgiven.”

So this week, as you come to the table of the Lord, do so a a celebration, with joy and glee, and then go out in that same Spirit and give someone a reason to celebrate.

Today is the 11th anniversary of the Yezidi genocide at the hands of ISIS. As you can imagine, it is an extremely heavy day filled with grief and tears and all kinds of horrid memories. What happened 11 years ago is unspeakable; thousands of men and young boys were slaughtered, thousands of women and children were taken as slaves to be abused sexually, physically, and psychologically. As of now, 2600 Yezidis are still unaccounted for.

Over the past almost 5 years of living here, the questions that continually get asked by Yezidis are: Why did God allow this, and does anyone see us?

I don’t believe in a God of control, a cosmic lever-puller who decides what happens to whom. That kind of God is not worth our devotion because he would be no more evil than the perpetrators of such crimes. To suggest that God has some secret master plan that justifies his allowance of such atrocities is not only grotesque it is to make a mockery of the revelation of God in Christ. God is not the wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtains of our senses, pulling the strings of the world to accomplish a hidden agenda. God doesn’t control in this way. He doesn’t decide from the balcony of heaven whether to intervene or not.

What the cross shows us is that God’s word and creative action are the final word and the end to which all things will be brought. The cross was the height of human sin and wickedness. It was our unbridled sin on full display as we collectively murdered an innocent man (God) to a tree. And yet, God was creatively at work so that the word of our sinfulness was not the final word. Our actions were not determinative in the end. His actions overcame ours. His word stands forever, and He brings our plans to nothing.

What is critical for us to realize is that in the moment, no one thought this was true. No one recognized what God was doing. What we now call Good Friday was not good on that specific day. Christ’s most powerful work, the very reason He came, was hidden from our senses as He accomplished it. Such is the nature of God’s work in the world. It was only upon later reflection that we gained eyes to see what was always true, what was really happening on that day.

This is our hope for our Yezidi brothers and sisters. Although we don’t yet see or understand how God is at work in their lives, we believe that what God has done in Christ is and will be true of their lives as well. God is not done with them.

This is precisely the ground that allows us to stand with the wounded, mourning, and grieving among us. It’s what gives us the courage not to look away. We need to see the horrors of what was done to Yezidis, the sorrow they still live in, and the hope of Christ’s final act and word over them. We need to see all of these at the same time, holding them together. And we need to do it because they need us to. They need to know that they are seen.

So today, will you please join us in a day of fasting and prayer for our Yezidi neighbors? Today is the darkest day of the year for them, and we can, from near and far, join them in the darkness so they know they are seen and cared for.

A Prayer for Yezidis:

O Lord, you who went down into the depths of darkness

who took on all our pain, suffering, and grief

and joined yourself to it forever;

Today, be with every Yezidi mother, father, son, and daughter.

Be with them in their despair, near in to them in the grief, and present to them in their confusion.

We pray for the rescue of every young woman still missing

and for justice to come upon their captors.

Remember them today O Lord;

comfort them, heal them, and give them justice

from all who have oppressed them.

And may You have the final word over each of their lives.

Amen.

In the opening statement of today’s epistle, the apostle Paul gives a flurry of commands to the church. He calls us to remember how we received Christ, by faith through baptism, and continue in that manner of life. That life is “in him”, it is His life in us and our life in Him together in the Father by the Spirit. We don’t live alone or separate from our God and Father, but have been brought to Him in and through Christ so that now our life, which is still ours, has been swallowed up in His.

The apostle continues by instructing us how to live the life we have received, namely by “continuing…just as you were taught.”

Christianity is a received faith. As such, we have all learned much, if not most, of what we know and believe from others. And that isn’t a bad thing at all. We are meant to grow up together, to learn from each other, and to listen to the fathers and mothers of the faith. We all hold theological views and positions on certain topics, ideas, and dogmas, all of which were taught to us. Our beliefs about God and the world are deeply indebted to those who have convinced us the world is one way or another.

As a received faith, we have also received actions, tasks, and embodied rituals that lead us. We aren’t, as one theologian says, simply “brains on a stick” but embodied lovers. And as such, we have received both things to think and things to do. Those actions, those embodied rituals, are what Paul is encouraging the church to continue in as much as he expects them to keep their theology in order. This is the “life” that we are to continue in.

Central to the life of Christ in which we now live is prayer, which brings us to our Gospel text. Luke tells us that Jesus was praying. We should stop to ponder that wonder, that the Son of the Father, God of God, light from light, the only begotten, lives His life in communion with His Father via prayer.

Prayer is not just the means of communication given to us mere mortals to communicate with the divine. No, Jesus prayed because that is how the Father and Son relate, how they speak, how they experience one another. The Son eternally prays to his Father, who eternally hears and pours forth His love and power via the Spirit on the Son. For us to pray then is to be brought into the very life of God. It’s the heart of the divine, the core of what it means for the Father and Son to be Father and Son. In Galatians, Paul tells us that the Father has given us the Spirit of His Son so that now we too can “cry out, ‘Abba Father’”; that is we can pray like, with, and in Christ.

Our life, Paul tells us, is “in” Christ, and thus we are brought into the heart of divine life by grace. What Christ participates in by nature we are brought into via grace so that prayer becomes a doorway into our future, when, at the end of the ages, all things are made new and we become just as Christ is. Prayer and the Eucharist are foretastes of that reality, windows into what is and what will be.

After Jesus is done praying, his disciples ask Him to teach them how to pray.

Prayer is learned. It’s taught and practiced. God hears and values every prayer, even the clumsy bumblings of the uninitiated, or the naive musings of a child, or the theologically imperfect requests of the sincere; He loves and listens to them all. But a life of prayer is taught and learned. It’s practiced. It’s rudimentary and regimented. It’s confined and particular.

What does the Lord say in response? He gives them, and us, a prayer to pray. Say this. When you pray, do it this way. Say it this way. Prayer is learned in the act of praying. But more specifically, it’s learned in praying the prayers given to us by the Lord, psalmists, prophets, and apostles.

Say this. Those words are instructions to us. But they are more than that, as we’ve already noted. This is how the Son prays to the Father, and those who pray this prayer find themselves to be “in Him”.

Continue as you were taught. The Lord, as our great teacher, doesn’t simply tell us abstract theological ideas about prayer, but He gives us something to do. He gives us words to say.

His prayer begins with the two most crucial words, “Our Father”. The Father is ours together as the Church, but also ours with Christ because the One we are praying to is the Father of Jesus, and we now find our lives hidden in His. We pray with Him. He prays in us. Our voices become the voice of the Son on earth petitioning the Father.

And this Father, because He is the Father of Jesus, our Father, is not like a friend who refuses us for a while until we bug Him for a long enough time. If we only knock long enough. If we only ask enough times. If we only prove our faith via persistence, then he will answer. Many of us were taught this.

No.

He is not an inconvenienced friend or an annoyed Father who caves to our requests simply because we won’t stop asking. He answers precisely because He is our Father, and a good one. How many of us, when our children ask us for bread, give them a stone only to finally give nourishing food if they ask enough times? Nonsense. It is precisely because He is our Father and we are in Christ, living the life given to us, that we can know that our Father hears us with delight and will give us all we need and more. He gives us His Spirit, the Spirit of His Son.

And so we pray with boldness and faith, with confidence and peace, with assurance and trust. We pray because we know who are are talking to. We know whose child we are.

And that life has been given to us, made available, through the received faith we are here to practice today.

Amen.

Jesus, the master teacher that He is, never wastes an opportunity to correct, instruct, and teach us. As we prayed today in Psalm 25:4, “Make me understand your ways, O Lord. Teach me your paths.” When this lawyer comes to Jesus, he comes with the most hideous intentions. He came not to learn, but with a disingenuous heart and a crooked set of motives. He came in the pretense of genuine desire, but underneath that veil was a dark heart full of selfish ambition and self-aggrandizement.

And yet our Lord walks straight through the minefield of entrapment and still opens up a way of grace for the lawyer. As the psalmist prays just a few verses later, “he teaches sinners the right way to live”. It isn’t just the righteous and blameless that are students of the divine, but those who are stuck in sin and themselves ensnared by it. This lawyer attempting to entrap Jesus was, in reality, himself trapped by the sin of pride and selfishness. And although he didn’t have eyes to see it, for as the psalmist says, it is the humble who see God’s way, Jesus still answers him.

In answering this lawyer Jesus unleashes both judgment and mercy upon him. In the moment, because of the hardness of his heart, it is a word of judgment against him. But God’s judgments are ultimately acts of creation, not destruction, so that the word of judgement becomes the very word of grace that creates in the man the possibility to see what is true about himself and the God he claims to believe in. When his eyes are opened, those same words, this same parable, are transfigured into words of revelation and loving instruction.

This is what the prophets mean when they say things like, “darkness is as light to you.” Because He is the one who created the light and dark, He is master over them both, filling them both with His creative power. In this way, even those in darkness, or in the depths of the sea, are not lost to God, only to themselves. And God’s words of judgement against them are not proclamations of destruction to their bitter end but themselves acts of creation for those who hear them.

Consider Saint Paul in Romans 12, who similarly instructs us. He tells the church to feed their enemies if they see them hungry and give them water if they are thirsty. In so doing, the act of mercy simultaneously acts as a kind of judgement, “heaping burning coals on their head”, against them. And yet, earlier in that same letter, we are told that it is the kindness of God that opens men’s eyes to repent. So the coals of fiery judgement carry within them the creative power of the Spirit by which we are made new through the grace of repentance. Those coals of fire, after they do their work on us, are themselves transfigured into the burning fire of the Spirit, which alights our hearts with love for God as we realize we have been forgiven much.

This is precisely what happened to the two on the road to Emmaus. “Why are you slow of heart to believe all that the prophets said?” These were the words of condemnation against the two disciples who walked with Jesus and yet were unaware of it, having their eyes blinded. And yet, even though they didn’t recognize it in the moment, but only understood it after, the Spirit was setting their hearts ablaze with love for Christ through the words of the prophets. Once their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread the same words which were against them became the words of life by which they lived for the rest of their days.

God’s judgment and mercy always come together, working for the sake of the other, for the sake of all. Every time we open the Scriptures, we find ourselves underneath the same question Jesus asked this lawyer, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” This lawyer, not having his eyes yet opened by the revelation of the crucified Christ, still read the Scriptures with a veil and shroud of darkness lying over them. In this way, the words of life given by God to Moses and the prophets became words of judgment against him. He did not understand that the Scriptures he claimed to know spoke about the One standing in front of him.

Whenever we read the Scriptures, we stand in front of God’s double-edged sword. One sword because it is one word. Two edges because for some it brings blessing and others judgment. This is how judgment begins in the house of God, because we are the ones standing weekly before His word, putting ourselves in the way of the sword of God.

As I’ve said already, but it is worth repeating, these are not two opposing words because God’s mercy and judgment are not opposed to each other. As my bishop likes to say, “God’s judgment is just His mercy taking the long way home.” Thus, we should fear not because God, just as Lewis rightly describes Aslan, may not be safe, but He is good. That goodness is ultimately the gospel for us. That goodness is what this story and all the Scriptures are inviting us into. What we can rest assured of today is that no matter who we are today in the story, God’s word is active and powerful, making us into His image even when we aren’t aware.

How is this possible? How can it be that God’s judgment and mercy are indeed of one essence? To this we turn to the painting Christ the Good Samaritan by Anatoli Vanchev (see above). What strikes us immediately is that Christ has filled the story with Himself. But more than that, Christ has taken on every character in the story. He is both the victim and the healer. This is also true of our own lives and of the whole world. God in Christ has filled the cosmos with His life. He is both the God of the living and the one who holds the keys of death so that all who die encounter Christ. He is on the top of Mount Sinai and bottom of David’s proverbial sea. He is on the dry ground walking us through salvation, and is drowned in the depths of the water with Pharaoh and His chariots through baptism. He is the image of the snake of our wretchedness and sin, and the healer of all who look upon Him. He is the Lord of the cosmos and the servant of all. He is the giver and the gift. He is the master of the feast and the meal itself.

Lastly, it is this view of God’s economy, His action in the world, that gives us the boldness that Hebrews talks about. We can come boldly to the throne of God and the table of the Lord today, precisely because we confess that God is always and only working things together for our good, including His judgment. If we, in our ignorance or sin, find ourselves in the place of this lawyer, we can still know that God’s word of judgment and condemnation is a creative word of power meant to bring about the life of God and the fruit of the Spirit. When that happens, we then realize that what we understood as God’s harsh judgment was nothing more than the power of His relentless love breaking through the hardness of our heart from inside and out.

Luke records three distinct times in which Jesus sends out his followers to do the work of the ministry. The first time is directly following last weeks reading, when Jesus healed the demoniac. We are told He calls the twelve together, gives them power for miracles, and then sends them out to preach. The final one, which we will come to in a moment directly follows our reading for today. These two scenes act as brackets within which the middle “sending” happens (today’s reading). A careful reading shows a common thread that holds this section together: namely, Elijah.

So let’s run through the story briefly as it sets up the stage for our reading today directs us to something important for us to consider.

After Jesus sends out the 72 (Luke 9:1-6) news of their exploits finds its way into the ear of Herod. He was “perplexed” because no one knew exactly who this Jesus was. Some said he was John raised again (himself a picture of Elijah), some said Elijah had appeared, and others said one of the other prophets from Israel’s history. Herod “wanted to learn about Jesus”. Herod, as wicked of a man as he was, shows a posture of heart and mind we should all take. He was curious, intrigued, and willing to investigate the uniqueness of this man. These are all things we should strive for as well.

A short time later Jesus is alone with His disciples and He inquires of them about what people are saying. They give the same answer as Herod, some say John, others Elijah, and still others another prophet. As readers this repetition should alert us. Luke is trying to highlight something to us, trying to hint at a key point he is trying to make: the identity of Jesus. Who is this One we are beholding? He confounds the powerful, confuses the crowds, and even has His own disciples guessing.

Peter answers the question, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. In Matthew’s telling Peter is commended for receiving such a revelation but here in Luke the narrative moves straight into Jesus predicting His own suffering, death, and resurrection. Jesus then invites His disciples to follow Him. We read this now as a metaphoric call to self-denial but His disciples surely did not. He just told them He was going to die and then told them to come and do the same.

After encounter with Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration we come to today’s reading and the next reference to Elijah. You’ll remember Elijah is the one who called down fire from heaven on the altar and then killed the prophets of Baal. James and John, who had just been arguing about greatness, recall that story and ask Jesus if they should also call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan villagers who have refused to make room for Jesus to stay there on His journey to Jerusalem.

On the surface that seems like a fair reading of the text. When you read 1 Kings 18 it sounds like a resounding victory. Fire comes from heaven, the false prophets are killed, and the people commit themselves to God. Why shouldn’t James and John want to emulate that? I can imagine them thinking, “Let’s put on a show of power and announce to the nation who you are.” They could with one swift act answer Herod and the nation, this is the One greater than Elijah, greater than the prophets, greater than Moses even.

But all we must do is keep reading the story in 1 Kings and we find out all does not go well. The wicked Ahab and Jezebel stay in power, idolatry remains, the people continue in their ways, and Elijah is forced into exile and hiding. All of a sudden the story of victory, of God’s display of power, isn’t so clear. He travels all the way to Horeb (Sinai) where he encounters God just like Moses. Unlike Moses however, Elijah covers his face before God and is ultimately sent away to anoint his replacement, Elisha, which brings us to our Old Testament reading.

Now our stories crash into one another in the most unmistakable way. Both our Gospel text and our Old Testament text are stories about disciples being invited to follow. Elijah comes back from Horeb, finds Elisha, throws his cloak over him as he is farming, and Elisha chases the prophet down in order to follow him. He just has one request, “let me go and say goodbye to my family first”.

Jesus likewise invites numerous people to follow Him (to Jerusalem and the cross as He told His disciples) and each of them also makes a request. The final request made is the exact one Elisha made and yet Jesus, unlike Elijah, denies the request. Why? What has Elisha discovered that the disciples of Jesus have not yet so that they are being kept from following? None of the people invited in the final verses of Luke 9 are recored as having come to follow Christ.

And so what does Jesus do? He starts the cycle back over again by sending them out again for the third and final time. Again the disciples return and Jesus rejoices with them. Luke transitions the story immediately into a story of Jesus telling a parable. You’ll remember that someone comes to Jesus and asks how he can have God’s life? “Love God and your neighbor just as the Torah teaches”, the man is told. The man responds, “Who is my neighbor?”

To answer this question Jesus tells a parable. Which parable? The parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is our neighbor? Wrong question. Jesus’ story doesn’t reveal who our neighbor is but how we become a neighbor to our enemies and to the world. The Samaritan here isn’t just a stand in for a generic enemy, these are the people James and John wanted to kill like Elijah just a few verses ago. Why did Jesus rebuke them? What is the lesson He has been getting at this entire time by reliving the story of Elijah? Who is this One?

This is the God who treats his enemies like friends, who becomes our neighbor to serve us and save us. He is the God who would rather die for His enemies than kill them (sorry Elijah). And this is what none of the disciples understood yet Elisha got right away and why he was allowed to follow. Elisha went back home and kindled a fire to throw a party for his friends and family. Elisha made a table for them, because the fire of God is not about burning up our enemies, winning in life, forcing our way to achieve a desired end, or getting what you want, even if it’s in the name of God. God sends fire on the earth to throw a party for his enemies who He treats like neighbors, like family, like friends.

Elijah’s fire serves his own self-interests but are dressed up in the name of God. But God isn’t in that fire. It may look victorious at times, even like the power of God come from heaven, but ultimately God’s fire never consumes others as if they are disposable. It never degrades, uses, or demeans. God's fire is like the burning bush, all-consuming yet we are not consumed.

Elisha’s fire on the hand looks small and ordinary, it doesn’t come from the sky but from the graced labor of his own hand. And although that fire is smaller and less spectacular to the eye it is deeper in the heart because Elisha’s fire sets the table and brings people together. It fills up others with the joy of God. Elisha’s fire isn’t about himself but about the joy of those God has placed in his life. Elisha’s flame burns as self-sacrificial love, giving of itself for the joy of others.

The disciples do eventually learn this lesson, that the way of Jesus is not the fire of Elijah but the flame of Elisha. Luke tells that story in Acts. Acts opens with those same followers of Jesus in a high place, like Elijah was on the mountain, and wind, a shaking, and fire come upon them just like it did Elijah. They have now become the altar consumed with fire, the holy burning mountain of God, and Elisha’s burning yoke and oxen. And where does this burning fire send them? Back to Samaria, to those same villages, to those same families. This time when they call down fire it isn’t to kill them but for them to receive the fire of the Spirit. God had been a neighbor to them now they were free to be a neighbor the Samaritans.

Who is this One? He is our neighbor. He is the One who comes to us when we least expect. He is the one who heals us even though we don’t deserve it. He is the one who pays the price for our rest and recovery, going the distance with us, even though we could never pay Him back. That is the fire of God. That is the work of Spirit in us. It is only the neighbor God who can open our eyes to see the world around us as friends and not enemies, as guests at His table and not outsiders who need to be kept away, and as brothers we take responsibility for rather than strangers we simply pass by.

Elisha’s flame is a shadow of the Spirit’s fire alive in us.

May we follow Him in this way by becoming neighbors for sake of the world, burning with the fire of God, so that all can come to His table and eat.

Today is Trinity Sunday. This holiday officially started about 700 years ago as the final feast day in the first half of the Church’s calendar. It closes the book on the whole story beginning at Advent and finishing at Pentecost. The roughly 6 month liturgical and Scriptural journey we have just completed is at the heart of our faith. We remember the story yearly in our gathering, reading, prayer, and worship because without these events our faith would be either absurd or nonexistent. Our communal observation of these days isn’t just a mere remembering of something that happened a long time ago. As the worshipping community of the baptized and by the Spirit we come to enter that story, and it enters us, so that our observation becomes participation.

We, as it were, walk through Narnia’s door every year and enter the world of the story of God, the story of our salvation. We enter the darkness of Advent and come out the other side in the light of the fire of Pentecost. The wisdom of the Christian Calendar is how it engages every facet of our being in the story of God, reminding us that our entire being has indeed been wrapped up into this grand narrative. We light candles and extinguish them, we keep silence and we sing, we fast and we feast, we mourn and we celebrate, we confess and receive pardon.

After Pentecost we enter “Ordinary Time”. The name “Ordinary Time” is not meant to communicate meaninglessness. Just the opposite is true. Ordinary time is the time we live out the story we’ve just remembered. Just like the apostles were sent out into the world after Pentecost so we are sent out into the world, into our ordinary lives, by the power of the Spirit. The flame of the Spirit now rests on us. Moses saw a bush a flame with fire, the 120 in the upper room saw tongues of fire on their heads, they had become burning bushes, and we, like them, are now filled with the fire of the Spirit sent out to light up the world.

Ordinary time isn’t void of significance or meaning but a yearly reminder that every moment is now holy. Every day a holy encounter alive by the Spirit of God. As one poet reminds us, “Every tree is now a flame of fire”. Ordinary time, rightly received, is where we discover that God’s life descended into ours so that ours has now ascended into His.

Trinity Sunday is the hinge between those two halves of the calendar. Trinity Sunday closes the chapter on the Advent-Pentecost season and sends us out into Ordinary Time. Traditionally today is used for preachers to teach about the doctrine of the Trinity. God’s identity as Father, Son, and Spirit, one God who is three persons of one essence, will, and being is at the core of our theological confession. We are baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit as we are brought into the family of God. We pray every day in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit as we live out our lives under the grace of God. And we gather weekly and confess our faith together, that we believe in One God and Father, His only Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; each are worshiped and glorified.

Why is the day important? And why has it been placed here, between Pentecost and Ordinary Time at the hinge of our holy calendar?

One thing we are meant to remember today is that it is precisely this God, the Triune God, who is holding everything together as creator, acting as the savior of the world, and now alive in us, His church, for the sake of all. What we have just celebrated in the previous months is the story of this Triune God. And it is this same One, Father, Son and Spirit, that is filling our ordinary times, our ordinary lives, with the fullness of Himself.

In our Romans text Paul explicitly mentions each member of the Trinity. It is God the Father whom we have been brought into relationship with by the work of His Son Jesus. And now, Paul tells us, we can have hope in every moment of our lives because that same Father has poured out the Spirit of His Son in the fullness of His love for us. All of this, he concludes, has been “given to us”. This God, Father, Son and Spirit, is Himself the giver and the gift. He doesn’t simply give us blessings from His hand He gives us the gift of the fullness of His life.

Jesus, in our Gospel text for the day, does the same thing. The Father has given Him all things which He now shares with us by the life of the Spirit. “All things that the Father has are Mine” Jesus declares. The scandal of the gospel, and why we have Trinity Sunday, is that He has now shared all those things with us.

All of this can be summarized by a single word: Love. God so loved the world He sent forth His Son into the world. This is who we know the love of God. Before we loved God He first loved us. Just as the Father loves the Son the Son now loves us. God is love.

Love is the ground upon which everything is built, the reality upon which all of this raises and falls. God must be Triune because God is love. We must come into exists by the will of the love as it seeks to express itself. And this love will in the end get what it so desires because love never fails. It as for love, from love, and to love that we were created and redeemed. That same love which makes up the fabric of time and space itself is now would holds us together as a people, as the Church baptized into the love of Jesus by the power of Spirit.

In Advent we believe love will act.

In Christmas we believe love has come.

In Lent we believe love goes all the way.

On Good Friday we believe this is what love looks like.

On Holy Saturday we believe love is always working.

On Easter we believe love conquers all.

On Pentecost we believe love is for all.

And now, as we go into ordinary time, we go believing that the love of the Triune God holds us every day.

We should clarify two different ideas or views the ascension of Christ is not and then we can look with more clarity at what it is in a matching set of counter-ideas.

First, the ascension is not the end of Jesus’ story or ministry but the promised fulfillment of it. Second, the ascension is not about Jesus going away for an undisclosed period of time but about His nearness as He fills everything everywhere with Himself and becomes “all in all”.

First, the ascension is not the end of Jesus’ story but the promised fulfillment of it. Luke 24 is, as you here all know, my absolute favorite story in the Gospels. It is a fascinating scene in which the resurrected Messiah confronts multiple groups of disciples. In the main two scenes Jesus expounds to the group how everything He did, and is still doing in their midst, was foretold by the Law and Prophets. This includes what is about to happen in the midst when He is taken up into the clouds.

What is this a fulfillment of? Ground zero for this scene is surely Daniel 7. Daniel has one of the paradigmatic visions/dreams in the entire Old Testament in which he sees beasts coming up from the earth to kill and conquer. These beasts represent the kingdoms of this world, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. But they are architypical symbols for how empires and political powers of greed, violence, and domination always operate.

The beasts of Daniel’s vision are set against a figure only described as “One like the Son of Man”. As the beasts war and rage doing their best to take what they want from whom they want at everyone else’s expense, there is One, a Son of Man, who comes on the clouds up to God and to Him the kingdoms of the world are given.

This is a profoundly and overtly political vision. Who has the right, the power, the authority, to rule the world? When we think the ascension of Jesus is the end, or the pause, to His story we unknowingly open up ourselves to allow the beasts of the age to continue to operate. If Christ’s work is done, at least for now, than who else is running the world but politicians, bankers, and war-machines? If Christ’s ascension is just the vanishing act to pause His story while the Spirit operates than we relegate the authority given to Christ and the church to the powers that be while Jesus becomes the ruler-elect. He has won and will one day take over but that day isn’t today.

But this isn’t what the ascension is! The ascension of Jesus is His reception of all power and authority. It isn’t the end of His story but the prophetic fulfillment of it. Jesus is Lord! Not of my life, or my heart, or my family, but of the whole world. What the beasts try to take by force has been given as a gift by the Father to His Son. “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.”

Secondly, and we’ve already mentioned it in passing, notice the contrast between beasts and humanity. The powers of this age will always act beastly. What does that mean? They will take for their own at the expense of others. They will justify their desired end by any means. They act in ways that degrade others by doing all kinds of violence to them. In war you’ll often hear soldiers describe their enemies as “animals” or “savages” or “beasts”. This is the work of the beastly spirit of Satan turning Cain against Abel all over again.

Jesus is the the Son of Man in that His kingdom fills up the image of God in each of His subjects. He serves, gives, forgives, loves, and welcomes all. The kingdom of Christ is a human one as much as it is a divine one because in the end to be fully human is to be at one with the Divine.

Second, the ascension is not about Jesus going away somewhere else for a while until He comes back. It is about His nearness to us all. Said another way, the ascension is not a story about where Jesus goes but about where He is. Growing up I always imagined this scene as Jesus riding a cloud like elevator up into heaven where there was an empty chair waiting for Him and that once He arrived He got off the cloud and sat down.

The ascended Christ not only rules over all things, like we saw in Daniel, but He is now in all things, at work for the good of all things. Jesus didn’t go “away” in His ascension but He filled all things through it. The ascension of Jesus is often framed as His absence. But the exact opposite is true. The ascension is not about where Jesus goes, away to heaven, but now where He is, present to us in all things.

This is exactly what Paul tells us in the last few lines of Ephesians 1 when he says that now Christ “fills all in all”. Ben Myers puts it like this, “So the ascension is not meant to make us wonder where Jesus has gone. Instead it out to elicit the psalmist’s question, ‘Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?’”.

Christ’s ascension is good news precisely because He is now nearer to us that we could ever imagine. Look closely at that final line from Paul again. It isn’t simply that Christ is “all in all” but Christ and the church, “which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all”.

Christ’s ascension is not a change in or to God in any way, but an act upon us and the world. In the same way Christ carried humanity down into death, raised us up in resurrection, He has also carried us up into the heavens with Him in His ascension. So that Christ has, as Paul says earlier in Ephesians, “seated us with Christ in heavenly places”.

Jesus’ ascension doesn’t take Him away from us but brings us all up into Himself, in the Father, by the Spirit. His ascension is the way we are brought into the life of God via the power of the Holy Spirit. And that life means that Christ is nearer to us now than ever before.

One of great gifts my childhood church gave me was the value and practice of prayer. We prayed more than we did just about anything else. Schedules were always shifting but at our peak we had over 10 prayer meetings a week. We had 6 am prayer, lunch hour prayer, all night prayer, women’s prayer, and a prayer conference. Prayer was the lifeblood of the church and for that I’m eternally grateful.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed my prayer life has changed and taken on a few distinct characteristics that would make me somewhat unrecognizable to my former self. My journey in prayer has largely corresponded to my journey into a more sacramental spiritual life.

First, my prayers have become less and less extemporaneous and more structured. This shift happened pretty drastically due to our painful exit from a previous ministry. Long story short we were suddenly pushed out the door due to “theological differences”. In the wake of that I found for the first time in my life prayer to be difficult. Not because I didn’t have anything to say but because I didn’t have anything good to say. My heart was broken and filled with anger, resentment, and even rage at times. The imprecatory psalms never looked so good.

Thankfully, and I mean that with all sincerity, I had recently attended one of Brian Zahnd’s prayer schools in which he teaches people to pray the morning liturgy. I had gone for a personal retreat a few weeks before I found out we were being shoved out the door of our current ministry. And so during that season I stopped praying extemporaneously altogether and just prayed the morning liturgy he gave the attendees of the prayer school. It took me about 40-45 mins to pray depending on the readings.

For a few months that little liturgy was all I prayed. When I finished it I just started again. With my whole life swirling around me I found that I needed the sure and true words of others to steady my heart. I needed the psalms, the prayers of the saints, the Our Father, and steady diet scripture reading. What was remarkable was I knew in the moment, as this was all happening to me, that these written, ordered, received words were saving me. Not that they were saving my faith, but they were saving my heart from despair. Allowing these words to fill my mouth kept me from checking out as a kind of coping mechanism and from becoming bitter.

That 3 months season was all I needed to be convinced that praying the liturgy, the wisdom of the church, psalms, and scripture, were a better way to pray. I don’t say that to sound pretentious or condescending but I do say it with some level of conviction. And now, 6 years later, I’ve found that even when I’m left to pray my own thoughts and use my own words, I lean into the words given to me by the church and saints.

Second, and surely related to the first, my prayers have become shorter, more concise, and theologically dense. While it was never stated overtly, and thus this may just be my own interpretation, the prayer culture that raised me seemed to favor long, drawn out, “flowing” prayers and “pray-ers”. The microphone was typically given to the one who could hold a stream of prayer for minutes on end.

Now, long pauses of silence and breathing are normal, short phrases are repeated numerous, sometimes dozens, of times. Even intercession is simultaneously meditative, an act of listening as much as an act of speech. Profundity is no longer the aim, but faithfulness to the revelation of God in Christ.

This shift has at least in part changed the melody and tone of my prayers. Prayer, good prayer, used to have a strong streak of desperation, “crying out” was the way we used to talk about it. Losing my voice due to long hours of strenuous prayer was something fairly common in my college years. But little children are the ones that lift their voice to get what they want. As a child grows up and matures their tone changes. Children begin to speak with their parents more like peers and friends learning to love each other.

Prayers like “Lord have mercy” or “Father, shine your light” have become wells that I drink from over and over. While these are simple prayers they are not simplistic. To throw ourselves into the mercy of God is like swimming in the ocean at the beach, even the grandeur that lays before us couldn’t begin to prepare us for the entire world that lays under the surface. Whatever we grasp of God’s mercy, His faithfulness, kindness, and love for the world are merely small ripples on the surface of the ocean of God which contains a kind of life which we could never begin to grasp from what we see.

Lastly, revival is much farther down my list of desires as it used to be. The number of hours I’ve spent praying for revival, whatever it is we mean by that, is probably to many to number. It was the aim of my spiritual life for over a decade. If we could just have revival my college campus would be changed, my city with be saved, and America would turn by to God.

But I’m not fairly convinced that kind of language is misguided at best and idolatrous at worst. Does God do those kind of broad sweep things? Of course. But its far to simplistic to see such moments in history as programmatic or even unequivocally positive. We need only to read the Gospels to know this to be true. At every turn Jesus tells his disciples the kingdom of heaven is like a hidden treasure, a small amount of leaven, or a mustard seed. The kingdom of God looks like a man dying on a tree speaking mercy over his enemies. In fact many of the “revival” moments in the Gospels are portrayals of unfaithfulness and judgement rather than God’s blessing (ex. John 5-6).

Do those moments of revival happen in Acts? Yes of course they do. But those moments come and go. And Paul doesn’t seem go from place to place looking to hold revival meetings. He goes to encourage the brethren, give to the poor, establish bishops, and teach. The moment of Acts 2 quickly gives way to regular meeting, teaching, eucharist, and generosity.

I also believe that the underlying paradigm of revivalism is often that God is far away and we need Him to come and move. Ironically, those who talk most about the presence of God seem to think He is most distant. Heaven needs to come. God needs to move. The Spirit needs to fall. All of these assume that nothing is happening at the moment. But what Good Friday tells us is that God is always creatively at work, even on the darkest days. God is nearer than we hoped. Heaven has come in Christ. The Spirit poured out on all flesh so that nothing and no one is outside of the sovereign hand of God’s creative activity.

We may not see it now, let alone understand it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. No one called Good Friday good standing there outside the city gates of Jerusalem that Spring day 2000 years ago. No one said, “this was the day God acted” or “this is revival”. And yet that is precisely what it was.

Everyday is like that day. Whether you are suffering, watching in horror, committing the crime, or ignorant to it all together, God’s actions in the world are none-the-less the same and salvific. In the end we will all know this to be true.

The psalm for this Sunday is perhaps the most well-known of all the psalms. It very well may be the most well-known song/poem in human history. The image of God as a shepherd is in large part thanks to this psalm. Christian art, poetry, songs, and stories are filled with this image.

David, the author of Psalm 23, is in many ways the prototypical shepherd in the Old Testament. His story is told through the lens of his upbringing as a shepherd. You’ll remember he was the forgotten son of Jesse when the prophet showed up in town to anoint the next king of Israel. Shepherds were, and still are, at the bottom of the social totem pole. They are the pasture dwellers, the lonely wanderers who are friends with the animals and the earth.

David stands as the greatest in a long line of shepherds in the Scriptures. Starting with Abel, and running through Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses. David’s kingship was meant to reflect his shepherding. He was to remain humble, live in service for those given to him, and fight to protect the community. A shepherd then is a kingly title, a kind of deliverer, a prophet who hears God’s word, and a priest who mediates the life of the flock to God.

David becomes king after serving in the fields of his father.

Moses becomes the deliverer after serving in the fields of Jethro.

Amos is a prophet after tending flocks in the fields of Tekoa.

The unnamed shepherds of Bethlehem become priests who connect heaven and earth as they serve in the winter fields of Bethlehem.

John 10 is of course Jesus’ famous interaction with the Jewish leaders at the Feast of Dedication in which He identifies Himself as the Good Shepherd. As it was winter the crowds were likely crowded into the porticos around the Temple. About this note that it was winter Saint Augustine comments: “‘It was winter,’ and they were chill; because they were slow to approach that divine fire. For to approach is to believe: he who believes, approaches; who denies, retires. The soul is not moved by the feet, but by the affections.”

As such, the leaders come to Christ and implore Him to make it plain if He is indeed the Christ or whether they should look for another.

In response, Jesus rebukes them for their unbelief and contrasts them (the Jews) with His true followers who are His sheep. His sheep hear Him, obey Him, and follow Him. And He knows them, gives them eternal life, and keeps them safe in the Father’s hand.

On Thursday I was watching coverage of the conclave and the election of Pope Leo XIV. The channel I was watching referenced the Pope as the Church’s shepherd numerous times. And so this morning I want to reflect a bit on Christ as the Shepherd of Shepherds.

Christ’s role as shepherd is one that He shares with those called into full-time ministry to serve the Church. I remember asking my bishop at my ordination consecration service what all of the articles of clothing that he wore meant, including his shepherd staff.

Christ is the shepherd who shares His sheep. And in that sense, priests do not own the sheep they are simply keepers of the Lord’s flock. As Jesus told Peter, “feed My lambs” and “shepherd My sheep”. God’s Church is indeed “His flock” as we are all His sheep. And so the priest is called to enact that role, to be a kind of sacrament revealing to us the Father’s work as the Good Shepherd in our life. But the flock is never ours to own or put our hand on. The Church is His flock, not any man’s.

The priest mystically becomes the voice of the shepherd that we come to know and follow. Paul tells us that a bishop/elder watches over our souls as a shepherd watches over his flock. And like David fought off the lions and bears a priest battles the schemes of the evil one for the life of God in the congregants through prayer, fasting, and preaching. This is one of the reasons Christianity outside of the Church isn’t possible. A person attempting to follow Christ outside of the gathering of the baptized is like a wandering sheep without a shepherd. A lone sheep is an odd sight and a sign of trouble.

Priests then take up all these shepherding duties that are fulfilled in Christ.

The priest is not a king, only God is, but is called to serve and lead God’s people through life.

The priest does not deliver, Christ is our redeemer, but is called to declare and enact that deliverance to God’s people through prayer, preaching, and sacramental administration.

The priest is not a prophet, Christ is the Word of God to us, but does declare to us everything concerning this One who is the Word m.

The priest is not our High Priest, that alone is Christ who is the mediator between God and man, but does offer us the bread and wine at the Table of the Lord.

This brings me to my final reflection on the role of the priest as a shepherd sharing in the work of the Good Shepherd.

Three years ago our wealthy neighbor died of coronavirus. As is customary all of the neighbors were tasked with helping the family put on the 40-day celebration of his life. Given his influence in the country, the first feast day saw thousands of people descend upon our small village neighborhood. I tried to do my neighborly duty and asked how I could help. Being that we were still outsiders at this point as we had only been living here a year at that point I was given the task of unloading sheep in the back of the house.

As I came around back I saw that it was myself and a small group of pre-teen boys charged with this glorious job. I was there for a good hour as truck and truck pulled up with a sheep tied down in the back. We unloaded each one, one at a time, and herded them into the gardens of all the neighbors. By the time we were done there were well over a hundred sheep spread out across a few houses as there were too many to have them all in one place.

I thought about that day this week. While shepherds here are indeed towards the bottom of the socio-economic structure of society, on that day they played the most vital role.

These shepherds were not the owners of those sheep, they were the caretakers of other’s festivities. When the time for celebration comes: a wedding, a dedication, a funeral, or a holiday it is the shepherd who provides what is needed for the community to come together. Without the shepherd, we have no banquet, no wedding feast, no holiday meal, and no memorial. Without the shepherd, we have no table and subsequently no community.

Of all the roles of the priest this is maybe the most vital. The priest does not own the sheep of God’s flock, nor does he use them for his own personal gain. Their job is to keep the flock for the community and bring everyone to the table to eat, to celebrate, to feast, and become one community in the Spirit of God.

And this is exactly what David tells us in Psalm 23, it is our God as shepherd who prepares a table for us. That is the great role of the priest, to be the shepherd who prepares the table. And we as sheep are brought to that table both to give and receive. As sheep in God’s flock we give ourselves to God in thanksgiving. As His children we partake of Christ who is the slain lamb of God given for us.

And so we now come to the table of the Lord to both offer ourselves to God and to receive of His offering to God for us.

1. Jesus, Friend of the Poor

2. The First and Foremost

3. The Whole Gospel

Jesus was reminding them that he is the first of the poor, the poorest of the poor, because he represents all of them. It was also for the sake of the poor, the lonely, the marginalized and the victims of discrimination, that the Son of God accepted the woman’s gesture.

We’ve come to the final post in this short series (at least I think so as I’m writing this). In this post, I want to focus on the final phrase in the quotation from Pope Francis that we have been using as a starting point. In context, Pope Francis is commenting on Mary’s anointing of Jesus to prepare Him for His burial. You’ll remember that what she does is met with hostility from the disciples and Judas in particular. Jesus defends Mary’s actions saying she has done a good thing which will be remembered wherever the gospel is told.

The story itself is rich with layers of meaning and profundity. How did Mary know when everyone else was blind to the moment? How did she come to this idea? Did she even realize the extent of what she was doing?

Mary, Francis says, was standing in for all the poor, weak, lonely, and marginalized. She broke her most valuable thing and thus became poor at that moment. She anoints Jesus’ feet as a slave would their master and thus becomes weak. She stands alone in the crowd, lonely among Jesus’ closest followers. In that lonely place Mary is marginalized, scorned, and reprimanded by the group as a fool.

Mary then, as well as Jesus, takes on the place of the poor, lonely, sick, and marginalized. She comes in the lowest way, taking on the form of a slave, to offer her most precious gift.

Jesus’ response is even more astounding in light of Mary’s actions, for He accepts them. This scene rings of regal notes. Here is a king, the king, about to come into His glory and His kingdom and one of His royal subjects is showering Him with gifts, perfume, and anointing oil. And yet we know by this point in John’s Gospel that the kingdom of God is going to come via sacrificial death, His throne is not of seat of gold but a cross of splintered wood, and that His victory over the powers of evil will be won through His self-giving act of forgiveness and not through violence and conquest.

Mary’s anointing is both regal and mournful, kingly and sacrificial, fitting and foolish. She gives to a king but a king who will die a condemned criminal. She offers her best to the Messiah but one who will conquer by being conquered for the sake of the conquerors conquering Him.

Christ, the conquered conqueror, deems her sacrifice worthy not because it is fitting but because it is foolish. She anoints for death. She gives it to say goodbye. And precisely because she participates in the foolishness of the cross her gift is the most fitting of all. The death of her future, as this was likely her dowry, is right because it is a participation in the death of Christ who raises the dead, even her dead future.

Part of the good news is that we serve a God who doesn’t just give but receives. He receives all that we give Him. But His reception is not because He is greater, although He is, but because He is humble. Mary’s lonely, marginalized, gift is given to and received by the One who is the loneliest, most marginalized, and scorned. In the end, her participation in His life and offering of gifts was the Spirit’s response in her coming back to God in Christ. Said another way, her gift was divine reciprocity for what had already been given to her in Christ. She gave what was first given to her. She anointed with the perfume the first poured forth from Jesus.

This is one way in which Christ is all in all. He is gift, giver, and reciever. He is the first and the last, the alpha and omega, the beginning and end, and the One in whom all things, including our gifts to Him, have their being and exist.

1. Jesus, Friend of the Poor

2. The First and Foremost

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Jesus was reminding them that he is the first of the poor, the poorest of the poor, because he represents all of them. It was also for the sake of the poor, the lonely, the marginalized and the victims of discrimination, that the Son of God accepted the woman’s gesture.

A quick refresher after the long break (ironically enough I was traveling in Rome). The above quotation comes from a homily given by Pope Francis on the Fifth World Day of the Poor in 2021. After first reading the homily back in December I have not been able to get it out of my mind with this passage in particular continually coming back to my mind time and time again.

When I first read this passage I immediately was struck by the all-encompassing nature of it. In the first two installments in this little series I showed how Christ is the friend of the poor, bearing their burden, shame, and ultimately bringing them to Himself. In the second installment, I focused on Franics’ insight that Christ is just a friend of the poor but is poor. To say it provocatively, in Christ we discover that God is weak and poor. What the writers of Scripture continually insist on however is that God’s weakness and poverty are not what we assume nor do they “work” in ways that line up with our conventional notions of such ideals.

With that in mind, we can now say something else, something even more radical for many of us modern American non-denominational types: God has always been this way.

Somehow growing up I was taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that God, the Father of Jesus, in the Old Testament was radically different than Jesus. All the stereotypes were what I came to believe. God was holy, just, righteous, and could not bear to look at sin and was under an obligation to punish sinners eternally for their crimes against Him. How could an all-holy God be in the presence of sin or sinners? The question seemed to have an obvious answer.

Jesus’ life and death became the divine mechanism by which this problem was solved. God, who could not bear to look at us woeful sinners, now sees Jesus in our place. He has taken our place in two ways: First Jesus took our place on the cross, underneath the wrath of His Father. Second Jesus now takes our place before God so that His righteousness is ours.

Jesus then was always set against His Father. His Father wanted, or needed, one thing, namely justice, and Jesus was willing to take our place so that God could get what He required while Jesus, who was portrayed as merciful, got what He wanted (kinda because the vast majority of people still reject Him and suffer eternally in hell, but that’s another post for another day).

How can a holy God look upon sinful humanity and all their wickedness? This idea, at least in my upbringing, was rooted in the famous statement of Habakkuk, “Your eyes are too pure to see evil, and you are not able to look at wrongdoing.” There it is. Case closed. But……

we have to

keep

reading.

“Your eyes are too pure to see evil, and you are not able to look at wrongdoing. Why do you look at the treacherous?” - Habakkuk 1:13

Literally, the next line makes it clear that the prophet’s initial statement is not one of fact but one of belief. He believes God is too holy to look at sin. He thinks God could never turn His face towards the wicked. After confessing his belief Habakkuk faces the facts that seem to be right in front of him, that God does indeed look upon the sinful.

You could summarize the prophet’s complaint like this: “God if you are so holy as to look upon evil, why do you?”

This complaint is the same one that offended Jonah. Why did Jonah run away? The narrative doesn’t immediately tell us, but at the very end of the story Jonah finally confesses.

And he prayed to Yahweh and said, “O Yahweh, was this not what I said while I was in my homeland? Therefore I originally fled to Tarshish, because I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and having great steadfast love, and one who relents concerning calamity. - Jonah 4:2

We cannot say this with enough boldness, Christ is not what God the Father employs to get around what He needs in order to get what He wants. Jesus Christ is the final word concerning all that God is and wants. Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about us, or even worse, to hide us from the eyes of God so that He could no longer see us. Those ideas should be what gets cast into the Lake of Fire and the pits of hell rather than sinners.

What Francis puts forward is something much more beautiful, and something much more ancient.

God sees you. He always has. And He doesn’t just see you in spite of your sin but through it. He sees through the cloak of shame and evil to see what is true about you. He sees the wicked Ninevites who bask in their sinful ways and He sees Jonah who is blinded to his own sinful heart.

The good news is not only that God sees you but He has joined each and every one of us. Melito of Sardis, in his famous sermon, On Pascha, tells the story of the gospel this way:

Thus if you wish to see the mystery of the Lord,

look at Abel who is likewise slain,

at Isaac who is likewise tied up,

at Joseph who is likewise traded,

at Moses who is likewise exposed,

at David who is likewise hunted down,

at the prophets who likewise suffer for the sake of Christ.

And look at the sheep, slaughtered in the land of Egypt,

which saved Israel through its blood whilst Egypt was struck down.

Melito, like Pope Francis, does not stop there, however. Rather, they take their readers/listeners by the hand and dive in the mystical and mysterious depths of the life of God in Christ Jesus. Melito continues:

This is the Pascha of our salvation:

this is the one who in many people endured many things.

This is the one who was murdered in Abel,

tied up in Isaac,

exiled in Jacob,

sold in Joseph,

exposed in Moses,

slaughtered in the lamb,

hunted down in David,

dishonored in the prophets.

According to Melito Jesus Christ of Nazareth was simply murdered like Able, but in Abel. He wasn’t simply tied up like Isaac but in Isaac. So that when we read the stories of Abel, Isaac, Jacob, and the rest we are not reading similar stories to Jesus’ but we are reading Jesus’ story.

This is what Francis means when he says that Jesus “represents” them all. He doesn’t simply stand in their place or take on their form, He joins His life to theirs so that what happens to them happens to Him. And therefore, and this is the true essence of the gospel, what happens to Christ is precisely what God intends to happen to us.

In fact, everything that happens to Christ is nothing but what God predestined to happen to us all. We are, as Paul says, predestined in Christ. And nothing happens to Christ except that which God desires to happen differently for us for His and our sake: namely death and resurrection.

What’s more, this kind of assumption, what Irenaeus calls recapitulation, is not something God suffers in the sense that it is an impingement upon Him. He is the God who is condescending, serving, humble, meek, and deferential by nature. The incarnation and cross are not things that happen to God but the actions of God happening to us. Nothing acts upon God in that sense but all of God’s actions act upon the world and everything He has made.

This is the good news of our salvation. This is how the prophets and psalmists can confess that no one is outside the reach of God’s saving arm because Christ is closer to us all than we are to ourselves. In Him we live and move and have our being.

Lent is a time of fasting, of letting go, of self-emptying for the sake of being filled again with the life of the Spirit. Our gospel text today speaks of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness and this posture of letting go. I want to examine each temptation and what each of them teaches us about God’s kingdom this lenten season.

The first temptation of Christ is that He turns stones into bread. In his homily on this passage, Origen wants to know which stone the devil pointed to. Later in his gospel, Saint Luke records Jesus’ teaching on prayer in which He again uses the images of stones and bread. There (Luke 11) Jesus asks, “If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone?” Of course not. When we ask our Father according to His will He will always give us the Holy Spirit.

So what was Jesus being tempted with here? One way I believe we can read the story is to see that Jesus was tempted to settle for cheap solutions. Stones in the Judaean wilderness were as plentiful as those outside my house here in Iraq. They lay everywhere. Bread on the other hand must be made. It takes effort by more than one person to make bread. Loaves of bread aren’t just lying around. Jesus, like us, was being tempted with the path of the least resistance. Will Jesus remain faithful to His Father or will He take the cheap alternative that costs less and requires very little?

That is the question facing us during Lent and why we fast. Following our Lord’s example we voluntarily forsake the cheap alternatives of this life to eat the bread of the Spirit. And our confidence is that our Father delights to give us this bread. God’s kingdom is always a narrow path but it leads to life. Yes, there are stones all around, cheap imitations of true joy and peace, but we forsake the pleasures of this life to eat of the heavenly manna that is Christ.

In His second temptation Christ was shown all the kingdoms of the world. That is, He was shown all the people under the sway of sin and death. The very people Christ came to save. The very kingdoms God had promised His Son in Psalm 2, Psalm 110, and Daniel 7. The devil’s temptation to Christ was the same given to Adam and Abraham. They too were given promises to rule and reign but they both took those promises into their own hands, Adam by taking the fruit and Abraham by taking Hagar, and tried to bring them about in their own wisdom.

This is the temptation we all regularly face. Will we trust the promises of God, the ways of God, in this world or will we try to make our lives by our own wisdom and will? In Psalm 73 the psalmist laments at the prosperity of the wicked and the seemingly pointlessness of living a righteous life. That is, he says, until he walked into the sanctuary of God and his eyes were opened. At times it can feel like living for Christ is a loss or an empty promise. We too need our eyes to be opened anew this lenten season to see what is true.

Will we try to grab control of our own lives, to make sense of them, to wield our strength to make the future we so desperately desire? We must let go of that temptation and trust that God’s way, even though it leads to calvary, is not a loss but a gain because he is the God who raises the dead.

Lastly, Christ is tempted to protect Himself. But how is He tempted? This time the devil tempts Him with Scripture. This is the most devious and sinister of the temptations. Here the devil takes God’s word and bends it to become a satanic weapon of self-preservation and protection. There is a way to read the Scriptures that leads us to believe that God wants nothing for us but health, prosperity, and wellness. The most egregious form of this is the prosperity gospel but it works in all of us in much subtler ways. We can see this even in the text by the note that Satan “led” Christ to the pinnacle of the Temple. This is in direct conflict with the open verse of Luke 4 which tells us that Christ was “led” by the Spirit.

The devil here is “leading” Christ using the Scriptures, that is he is playing the role of the Spirit trying to convince Christ that this way of reading and understanding is faithful. We must resist any temptation we ever have to bend the Scriptures in a way that leads to us standing over them rather than them standing over us. The Scriptures are there to bend us, to remake our hearts, desires, and loves and we should be wary of anyone who tells us that they are a tool to “work” for us. The Scriptures are not something to work for us but on us and in us. To make the Scriptures into a tool of self-preservation and gain is to be led by the satanic not the Spirit.

May the Lord be with us all this lenten season. Amen.

A Theology of the Least of These in Conversation with Pope Francis

1. “Jesus, Friend of the Poor”

Ok, let’s get started.

Jesus was reminding them that he is the first of the poor, the poorest of the poor, because he represents all of them. It was also for the sake of the poor, the lonely, the marginalized and the victims of discrimination, that the Son of God accepted the woman’s gesture.

The above quotation is taken from the third paragraph in Pope Francis’ message from World Day of the Poor, 2021. It is, as far as I can tell, at least three things. First, it is a kind of doctrinal statement about God’s holiness and being. From these simple two sentences, we can derive profound and faithful answers to the eternal question, who is God and what is He like? Second, it is the wholeness of the gospel message compressed, or maybe better said, concentrated, into two sentences. Thirdly, it can be read as a commentary on the opening line of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (which he later quotes), “Blessed are the poor, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

These three readings held together form a singular whole with each comprising a singular fiber weaving in and out from the others so as to become a unit. I’ll take each one in turn and then try to show, Lord willing, how they all are singing the same song forming a perfect melody.

Holy. It is one of the weightiest words in all of Scripture. It is the word the fills the skies, echoes through the mountains, and rings in the chambers of heaven. Uttered by angel and creature alike it is the single-word refrain of all when they see God. Holy, holy, holy cry the seraphim and cheribum. “Everyone”, the psalmist tells us, “in the temple cries ‘Holy!’”. Everyone and everything that eventually has its eyes filled with the light of God’s glory falls back to this single confession; a single word in which all that can be said about God is said.

God is holy because He is unlike any other. “Who in heaven or on earth is like you?” the psalmist wonders aloud. While every Christian affirms the holiness of God I am not sure that we all agree on what we mean by it. Admittedly, there is too much to be said than can be said here regarding God’s holiness, but Isaiah gives us some ground in which we can plant our flag.

Remember the famous passage from Isaiah 55:8, “my thoughts are not your thoughts nor my ways your ways”. This well-known prophetic line is often used by preachers to hint at a surprising future coming to us from God. He is about to do something new, something we have not seen, something we could not anticipate, and so we should be on guard for what is about to come our way. God, the preacher contends, is not like us and so we should expect the unexpected, something better than what we could imagine with our own minds.

There is a strand of truth in such a sentiment, although I do think it is misused more often than not. God is surprising. This is exactly what we mean, at least in part, by the word holy. He is holy, unlike anyone else, and therefore we are often surprised by God. The prophet tells us this just a few verses earlier in 55:5. He is the “Holy One of Israel” and thus we should not be surprised that we are about to be surprised by what He will do.

But what is He about to do? What is the surprise? What does His holiness look like when it comes to us? He tells us in the verse immediately preceeding the famous “my thoughts” passage. The prophet tells us,

“Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the Lord, And He will have mercy on him; And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon.” - Isa. 55:7

God is holy, unlike us or any other god, because He is the One who calls His enemies to come home so He can freely forgive them. He calls (Is. 55:1) all who have left, all the wicked, all the lost, all the vagabonds, all the bound, all the weak, and all the hateful to come home and sit at His table and eat freely from His graciousness. God is holy because He liberally pardons all without limit. The surest word of God turns out to be His most surprising because of the lavishness of it. “Father forgive them” is the word of God ringing throughout the world and it will, Isaiah contends, not return to Him void. And that, the prophet tells us in the final verses of the chapter, is what remakes the world. The word of boundless forgiveness and enemey-love, which he earlier tells us is the same as His word of justice (see Isa. 30:18), is the generating word of God from which new creation comes. It is, as Paul reminds us, the kindess of God that makes men new.

And yet, while all this is true, the surprise is even more shocking.

(Enter Pope Francis stage left.)

God doesn’t simply call the thirsty, hungry, broken, sinful, wicked, estranged to come and drink from fountains of life, as if He were some kind of cosmic vendor on the street corner calling out into the crowd. No, God in Christ enters into the world as -

the vulnerable by becoming a babe

the poor unable to offer the proper sacrifice

the refugee by fleeing to Eygpt

the sinner by becoming sin

the suffering by being flogged

the dead by dying

Our jaw on the floor in shocking awe we still must say more to get at what Francis points out. He isn’t just a babe, but the first babe. Not merely a poor person, but the first and foremost of all the poor. He isn’t a refugee, but the One who eternally left His Father’s home. He isn’t a sinner among many but has become sin itself. He didn’t suffer alongside those who suffer but He clothed Himself in all the suffering of the suffering like a garment so as to cover Himself completely with it. And He isn’t simply another a dead man , but the slain lamb from the foundations of the earth.

His wounds become our healing. His open side, which the Romans opened with a spear, became the very fountain of life which Isaiah spoke. The water which poured out of His broken open body on Good Friday the new river coming from Eden. Christ became all for all.

He did this, Francis tells us, for our sake. Jesus takes every life up into His life thereby giving us His life and Spirit. And we, like the woman, offer that very gift back to Him. So He becomes the giver, the gift, and the recipient. He is the One who gives, the One given, and the reciever of that very gift given back to Him from our hands.

This is exactly what is happening every time we partake in Eucharist. At the Table of the Lord we answer the call of Isaiah 55:1 as the prophetic words of the prophet become incarnate in our very lives. At the table Christ is the giver, it is His table prepared for us. He is the gift, as we eat and drink of His body and blood. And He is the reciever as we take those very elements and offer them back to God in prayer, worship, and thanksgiving.

Lastly, Francis tells us that Jesus was “reminding” his disciples of this truth. What Christ is saying and doing to that woman is not something unknown or new to God. This is what God has always done and what He has always been like. It’s not new but still surprising.

And so may we also be reminded today of the audacious, scandalous, liberality of God’s mercy, justice, and grace; joining the heavenly chorus by crying: holy!

The poor, always and everywhere, evangelize us, because they enable us to discover in new ways the true face of the Father. “They have much to teach us. Besides participating in the sensus fidei, they know the suffering Christ through their own sufferings. It is necessary that we all let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to recognize the salvific power of their lives and to place them at the centre of the Church’s journey. We are called to discover Christ in them, to lend them our voice in their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to understand them and to welcome the mysterious wisdom that God wants to communicate to us through them. Our commitment does not consist exclusively of activities or programmes of promotion and assistance; what the Holy Spirit mobilizes is not an unruly activism, but above all an attentiveness that considers the other in a certain sense as one with ourselves. This loving attentiveness is the beginning of a true concern for their person which inspires me effectively to seek their good” (Evangelii Gaudium, 198-199). - Pope Francis12

The above quote comes from a message given by Pope Francis, (who himself is quoting a larger body of teaching, which is itself quoting other Popes and Saint Thomas Aquinas) on the World Day of the Poor, in 2021. I used this quote last week while teaching in a school in Hawaii about God’s heart for the poor, suffering, and oppressed. What our Lord called “the least of these”. The whole message is worth your 15 minutes to go and read.

I first came across this message back in late November or early December and the line I have not been able to get out of my head is the opening one, “the poor, always and everywhere, evangelize us”. We would do well to let that single phrase settle down into our souls and overturn the tables within us. The ideas and implications presented here by Pope Francis, in just a few short words, cut to the very heart of what many of us have been taught about our job to reach the world for Christ and how we should go about it.

The poor, suffering, widows, orphans, and destitute are there for us to evangelize not for us to be evangelized. We go to them. We bring what they need, whether it be food, clothing, or, ultimately, the gospel. I was told, as many of you probably were, that you should “feed a stomach so you can feed a soul”. Or, “the quickest way to someone’s heart is through their stomach”. Both are disgusting and gross distortions of the Christian faith and teaching. Such clichè sayings are nothing but manipulative tactics aimed at taking advantage of the suffering of others to score religious points and raise money. Many of us were raised on Hobby Lobby Christianity that distills everything down to single-line phrases we can hang in the hallways of our homes on our way to the bathroom.

Strong words, I know but after 4 years of working for an NGO among the suffering and poor, I am more bullish now than ever that we cannot treat people like fish to be caught while using our generosity as bait on the hook. Nothing could be more dehumanizing than to talk about someone, and then subsequently treat them, like a fish to be caught all so we can brag to our friends about how we hauled in the biggest catch.

Francis offers us another way; to see our brothers and sisters, of every socio-economic strata, as the face of Christ to us. Christ’s unity with the poor and suffering of the world leaps off every page of the Gospels. Christ is one with the Father and Spirit. He is one with His body, the Church. He is also one with the suffering. Thus when we come to those oppressed by this world we come to the foot of the cross and the face of Christ. And precisely because that is true we must, as Francis tells us, must come as receivers first and givers second. Those moments, conversations, and interactions are alive with the grace of God, full of the Spirit’s flame.

When we treat our good deeds like bait on a hook and our help as a kind of “pay for play” scheme we not only dehumanize our brothers and sisters we cut ourselves off from the face of God, silencing his voice to us, rendering our ears unable to hear the good news.

The poor evangelize us precisely in the fact that they expose our prideful independent spirit that thinks it has no need for God. The poor are God’s word to us. His word of humility, contentment, meekness, and grace. Their oppression declares to us His oppression, their suffering speaks of His suffering, their pain gives voice to His pain, and their hope in spite of everything announces to us the eschatological hope of the world. It is His word to us because He has wrapped Himself in the sufferings of the world. It is gospel because His suffering changes ours, transfigures it, into something entirely different. His wounds heal and His stripes make us whole. His death is our life and His sorrow is our joy.

This isn’t some sadistic worldview to glorify misery and pain. The good news, and hope for all, is that God in Christ has taken all that sorrow and injustice upon Himself, becoming one with it, and made it His own. But His presence in our suffering doensn’t just comfort us because now we know we aren’t alone. No, something much more mystical and astounding has happened. His presence and life takes up all the pain and suffering of the world and transfigures it. Christ allows these things, suffering, sin, and death to “happen” to Him. But nothing happens to God in that way because all things have their being in God. Rather God “happens” to them. When the brokeness of the world comes into contact with God in Christ it is He that happens to it so that it is altered and changed.

And so we must allow the poor to evangelize us because that is where God is; where His power lies. The happening that is God’s life is located there, in the lives marred with death and destruction as He takes those things upon Himself, making everything sad come untrue.

The poor then are not a project for our churches to take up. They are not the object of our pity. They are the witness of God to us and against us. They are His judgement and mercy present in our lives. Thankfully, mercy in the end always triumphs over judgement.

There is a wonderful multi-volume set of prayer books entitled “Every Moment Holy”. My wife bought the first one a few years back and we love to find moments throughout the week to use them in our times of family prayer. Preparing to give this year's reflection I thumbed through the book and in the first volume there is a “Liturgy for Feasting with Friends”. A perfectly titled prayer for Friends-giving.

The opening line of the prayer caught me completely off guard in the best possible way like your song coming on the radio or the first bite of a surprisingly delicious dish. It reads:

“To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for reacting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war.”

Pie is the farthest thing from serious and cranberry sauce doesn’t exactly scream “Let’s get ready for battle!” This is Friends-giving after all not Braveheart. And yet this foolishness, this kind of absurdity to think of feasting as warfare and giving thanks as a battle cry, is precisely true.

You’ll remember that the first miracle Jesus performs in the Gospel of John is turning water into wine at a wedding feast. Numerous things are fascinating about this scene to me. First, Jesus was the kind of guy who his friends wanted to invite to their wedding banquet. They wanted him around to celebrate because they thought his presence would bring more joy, laughter, and fun to the party.

Second, Jesus did exactly what they thought. After the water was turned into wine it was given to the master of the feast who upon tasting it exclaimed that his was the best wine yet. Jesus served the best wine to the already-drunk banquet guests just to fill their joy even more. His generous joy became the life of the party, whether the guests were aware of it or not. He was content to simply let the guests enjoy the heavenly vintage.

Lastly, this generous joy and the miracle that proceeded from it was, as John described it, the beginning of Christ manifesting his glory. The glory of Christ looks, at least from one angle, like a well-thrown party where everyone in every state of mind is filled to the brim with the best food and wine they could imagine. Christ’s glory looks like keeping the party going, like expanding the dance floor, and like losing your voice while belting out karaoke songs from your teenage years.

And that glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, shakes heaven and earth. What did Isaiah see and hear? Songs of praise being sung so loudly by angels that the doorposts of heaven we shaking. And what does prophesy concerning the coming kingdom of God? That it will be a feast with the choicest of meats and wines. What do the elders of Israel and Moses do upon the mountain when they see God in His splendor? They eat and drink with Him.

In God’s kingdom, feasting is not simply the result of victory but the very means of it. Consider what David confesses at the heart of his prayer in Psalm 23; that even in the darkest valley and in the presence of our fiercest enemies God is there setting a banqueting table for us and filling our cup to overflowing. Or remember what God had Israel do while the angel of death passed over that fateful night in Egypt? They were to eat their slaughtered lamb together and celebrate their deliverance from bondage. The lamb whose blood was painted on their doorpost became their celebratory meal. The meal WAS the act of God in their midst overthrowing Egypt and liberating them from slavery.

All of these Old Testament stories of course lead us to Christ who is Himself the fullness of all of these stories. He, as the true Passover lamb, on the night that He was crucified gave us the eucharistic meal. That meal of “giving thanks” is not just a symbol of our victory nor is it a mere celebration of the past victory of Christ. No, it is the victorious act of God breaking into our world here and now. It is the weapon of our warfare. The Eucharist is God’s saving power coming to us.

Saint Paul also tells us that this meal speaks to our future when we will eat with God in the fullness of His kingdom. At the heart of God’s in-breaking kingdom and the center of His dominion is a table open to all. That is true in the past, it is true now, and it will be true into the age to come.

The second line of the liturgy hits this exact note:

“In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final world.”

Our feasting together in the name of the Lord, both at the Table of the Lord and our kitchen table this holiday season, are in actuality creative words and acts of prophecy that declare to the powers of darkness that Christ has the final word. In the end, as Robert Jensen famously said, all will be music.

And so as you gather around your Thanksgiving table this year with family and friends do so as an act of war. Let your gathering be a word of victory, of Christ’s victory then, His victory now, and His ultimate victory yet to come. May the generous joy of God in Christ fill your time together and may your cup be overflowing knowing that in God’s kingdom the best wine is always saved for last.

I grew up in a very low-church context which meant the creeds were something in the air but I don’t ever remember actually saying them. It wasn’t until I was studying theology in seminary that I understood the importance and gravity of the creeds. One specific moment in this class brought the weight of the creeds to bear upon my heart and mind in a fresh way.

During one of the lectures, Archbishop Rowan Williams was quoted regarding our confession that God is “almighty”. He stated, “It (God’s almightiness) is His unlimited power to be there…” Not only is this a profoundly true statement about God, but it is for me, also true about the creed itself. The creed is God’s gift to the Church and is always “there” wherever you are; holding your faith in moments of weakness, bringing clarity in times of doubt, and giving confession in those seasons of life that rip the words right from our mouths. I’ve been through one of those seasons and what I found myself doing every day was praying the BCP and confessing the creed.

The creed was precisely how God was almighty to me. It was His gift of language when I was at a loss for words. For months I confessed the Apostles Creed without thinking about it too deeply, but looking back now I see that it acted as an anchor for my heart in turbulent seas.

The act of confessing becomes, as Rowan Williams wrote, like the gentle swell of God’s love always presently working as it surrounds us and washes over us. That tide has a rhythm to it so that those who are aware can know the time and season. Confessing the creeds also acts as that sweeping tide that washes in the presence of God for us every morning. As we declare our allegiance to the God who is and has been revealed in Jesus Christ of Nazareth His nearness, His almighty power “to be there” comes rushing in like the morning tide.

I’ve also come to realize, mostly through the actual practice of daily creedal confession, that it is the physical act of speaking the words out loud that brings all of this to life. These are not magical words to inspire belief when read or mentally assented to. These are words to be said, out loud, and repeated daily. As I’ve done that, even just for a few months now, I’ve found that every morning my ears are brought into contact with the creative power of God as I hear my own voice confess the story of Jesus.

I am not simply confessing a set of theological propositions but a story that has, whether I feel like it at the moment or not, changed my life and the world. This simple act is like throwing my body into the invigorating cool morning waters so that my heart’s forgetfulness and my head’s stubbornness don’t win the day. Instead, I’m bringing myself into the presence of the God who is always “there” and allowing Him to speak His creative words to me.