Misreadings

Many of us sense that we are living through unsettled and increasingly dark times. It is not only our own nation but much of the world that seems buffeted by the return of strongman politics and renewed great-power rivalry. Political leaders animated by grandiose visions of national destiny promise stability through domination while the global order fractures into competing spheres of influence.

Whenever such moments arise, religion often becomes entangled in political ambitions. Biblical language is invoked to legitimize territorial claims and nationalist visions. Faith itself is recruited to serve projects of power.

We see this dynamic in different places and forms—whether in the revived rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in American politics, in the religious nationalism of Russia’s Ruski Mir, or in modern, politically expansionist interpretations of Zionism.

At such moments, confusion about Scripture does not necessarily arise because the Bible is unclear. Confusion arises because we forget that the Bible itself is a complex historical record—one that bears witness to communities over the long span of history as they wrestle with land, justice, identity, belonging and exile.

More troubling still, confusion sometimes emerges from deliberate misreadings of what the biblical promises actually say.

In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Mike Huckerbee the current Administration’s choice as ambassador to Israel, and a Christian Zionist zealot, mixed a dangerous cocktail of biblical promise with contemporary political discourse to make the bold claim that God’s promise to Abraham grants the modern state of Israel a permanent divine entitlement to the land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.

This interpretation distorts the biblical narrative by collapsing two distinct covenants into one. God’s promise to Moses and the Israelites is misread through the lens of  God’s promise to Abraham, for the purpose of justifying contemporary Zionist expansionism. Here we must tread carefully. For the Bible is telling a far more complex story.

For two Sundays now, the Old Testament and Gospel readings have echoed a recurring theme of divine promise spoken within the unfolding, turbulent story of human history.

Last week, we heard the account of God’s encounter with Abram, a childless man, who would become Abraham, the father of many nations. This week, the echo returns centuries later in the encounter between God and Moses at a decisive moment in Israel’s exodus journey from slavery. Out of the wilderness of that journey would emerge another defining event—the covenant sealed at Mount Sinai.

Two encounters. Two promises. Two covenants taking shape within the long narrative of God’s relationship with humanity.

John’s Gospel mirrors this pattern. Last Sunday we listened to the story of Nicodemus, a prominent Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, who approaches Jesus cautiously and under cover of night, anxious about the reputational cost of being seen asking questions. Today we overhear another encounter, this time between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.

At first glance, the encounter at Jacob’s Well appears to be a simple exchange. Yet the location itself carries centuries of tension. Jacob’s well stood in a place long contested between Jews and Samaritans—two peoples with intertwined origins and rival claims to the same ancestral story. Their dispute was not only about land but about the very place – Jerusalem, the holy city of the Jews, or Mount Gerizim, the sacred mountain of the Samaritans, as the location for the right worship of God.

As the French proverb reminds us, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—the more things change, the more they remain the same. As in Jesus’ time, the well lies within land contested by rival communities, and the geography has not lost its tension.

The covenant with Abraham is God’s promise that this childless wandering Aramean to become the father of all nations and a blessing to all peoples. The covenant with Moses, centuries later, serves a different purpose. It forms a people committed to living justly within the designated land they will come to inhabit.

Neither covenant functions as a timeless political title deed. Indeed the Torah itself resists such an interpretation. In Leviticus God reminds Israel:

“The land is mine; you are but aliens and tenants with me.” (Leviticus 25:23)

In other words, the land ultimately belongs to God. Israel’s presence within it was always conditional, dependent upon its practice of justice, faithfulness, and care for the vulnerable. The prophets repeat this warning relentlessly: when injustice grows, dispossession and exile follow.

In biblical theology, land is never an absolute possession. It is a vocation before it becomes a habitation—a sign of gift rather than entitlement.

Genesis and Exodus therefore present two foundational covenants: two promises, two lineages, and two ways of understanding belonging to God. Much misunderstanding—ancient and modern—arises when these covenants are collapsed into one.

The Gospel of John provides a remarkable lens through which to see this distinction more clearly. John places two conversations side by side: one with Nicodemus and another with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well.

Nicodemus represents the world shaped by the covenant through Moses. A Pharisee, a scholar, and a leader of Israel, he embodies the religious tradition formed by the Law. Yet when he encounters Jesus he hears something unsettling: he must be “born from above.” Belonging to God cannot rest solely upon ancestry, law, or religious status. It requires new life—a life begun again through water and Spirit.

In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus speaks words that reopen the horizon first glimpsed in Abraham’s promise. John captures this in Jesus’ phrase:

“For God so loved the world.”

Not one family. No longer one nation, but again the world.

Immediately after this conversation the scene shifts from Jerusalem to Samaria. There, at Jacob’s Well, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman. Both Jews and Samaritans traced their ancestry to Abraham. Both believed themselves heirs of God’s covenant. The tension between their communities lies just beneath the surface of their exchange.

This rather bold woman asks Jesus about the question that had divided their peoples for centuries. She says that:

“Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that Jerusalem is the place where people must worship.”

Which mountain is holy? Which land truly belongs to God? Which claim to covenant is correct? Jesus’ answer is startling in its simplicity:

“The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem … but in spirit and truth.”

In a single sentence Jesus relocates holiness. No longer confined to Mount Gerizim. No longer secured by Jerusalem’s temple. God’s presence is no longer anchored to geography.

It is encountered in living relationship. And the first person to recognize this is not a priest or scholar but a Samaritan woman—an outsider by every conventional measure of religious authority. She runs back to her village and invites her neighbors to come and see.

John’s point here is that Jesus’ messiahship is first recognized in foreign territory beyond Jewish boundaries. John shows Jesus echoing Abraham’s promise in a new key. For these foreigners, without any reluctance or hesitation, proclaim:

“We know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

Not the savior of one people or a single nation, but now the Savior who is to be a blessing to the whole world.

Seen together, the trajectory of Scripture becomes clear. Abraham reveals God’s promise to bless all nations. Moses shapes a people called to be an example of a society based on the practice of justice. Jesus reaffirms the trajectory of the promise to Abraham – a movement from one family, to beyond the possession of a single nation, to a blessing to all nations.

The movement of Scripture is toward widening the boundaries of belonging. A timely warning to those who might follow Mike Huckerby in his biblical misreading . Christians must tread carefully whenever biblical covenants are invoked to justify modern-day territorial claims.

The Bible itself resists such simplification. The promise to Abraham is a blessing to all nations. The covenant through Moses imposes on a specific community the obligation to live responsibly in harmony with one another and with the land, guided by principles of justice underneath the umbrella of God’s universal blessing.

At Jacob’s Well two ancient rivalries meet—rival claims of ancestry, rival claims of covenant, rival claims of sacred land. Yet Jesus does not resolve the dispute by choosing one mountain over another. Instead, he points beyond both of them to the future of God’s promise, which will not depend on who controls sacred ground but who receives the living water God offers to the whole world. Alas, however, the sad trajectory in most human affairs is plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Amen.

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The Incident of the Woman, the Serpent, and the Apple in the Garden revisited

I remember a dinner party many years ago at a colleague’s home. Along one wall of the dining room stood a large terrarium containing several very large snakes. For someone who grew up in a country without snakes, being surrounded by them while trying to enjoy dinner provoked a certain… primal discomfort.

Conversation continued. Glasses clinked. Dinner was served. But I confess—I never quite relaxed. Somewhere deep in the human nervous system lives an ancient instinct: snakes are not to be trusted.

All fairy stories need a villain, and for most of us the snake fills the role perfectly well. Perhaps that explains why the serpent has occupied such a powerful place in human imagination for thousands of years—most famously in the Genesis story of the garden.

Just as Adam and Eve settle into carefree existence, something unexpected happens. A conversation begins. A question is asked. A boundary is crossed. Innocence is lost. To paraphrase Rabbie Burns—with some theological license—the best-laid plans of God and humanity often go astray. Who says God is never surprised?

The story that unfolds in Genesis has always challenged the religious imagination. Adam and Eve eat from the only tree forbidden to them, and immediately the blame game begins:

“Not me, Lord—it was her.”
“Not me, Lord—it was the serpent.”

Human history begins exactly where ours so often continues—with deflection, fear, and fractured responsibility.

But the deeper theological question remains: was this moment a disastrous fall from grace, or paradoxically a necessary step toward something greater?

Christian thought has never answered this question with a single voice.

In much of the Latin West, the story became known primarily as the Fall—a catastrophe with devastating consequences for humanity. In the Greek Christian East, however, another phrase emerged: felix culpa, the “happy fault.” Not because sin itself is good, but because redemption becomes possible through it.

The Apostle Paul traces this paradox when he draws a line from Adam to Christ: through human failure, God opens a path toward deeper grace.

Augustine of Hippo leaned decisively toward the tragic interpretation. His theology shaped what became the Western doctrine of original sin—the belief that humanity inherited a profound moral wound passed from generation to generation, healed through baptism.

For Augustine, human desire itself became suspect after Eden. It is striking that Adam and Eve’s first awareness after eating the fruit is shame about their bodies. They hide their nakedness. Sexual shame, something Augustine knew personally, profoundly shaped his theological imagination.

His interpretation took root so deeply that Catholic and Protestant traditions—otherwise divided on many matters—found rare agreement here.

Anglican theology, true to its vocation as a via media, or middle way, adopted a different emphasis.

We do not deny sin. But neither do we define humanity by it.

We hold together two truths simultaneously: human beings are broken, and human beings are dignified. Sin influences us, but it does not erase the image of God within us. Grace is therefore not merely corrective; it is restorative.

Like Paul, Anglican spirituality leans more heavily toward grace than condemnation. Human beings are vulnerable to self-centeredness not because we are irredeemably corrupt, but because our freedom is shaped by fear, culture, trauma, desire, and illusion. Our will is real—but never entirely free without grace.

Matthew’s Gospel revisits the Genesis story in a new setting—not a garden, but a wilderness.

Eden’s gates have long been closed. Humanity now lives east of Eden, in uncertainty and struggle. After his baptism, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.

There the ancient serpent appears again, this time as Satan, offering metaphorical apples: power, control, certainty, invulnerability.

The ancient whisper returns: You can have it all. You can decide good and evil for yourself.

Unlike Adam and Eve—spiritually young and suddenly awakened—Jesus sees through the illusion. He knows who he is. More importantly, he knows whose he is.

Why prohibit the tree in the first place? Was God trying to keep humanity naïve or dependent?

Perhaps the prohibition was less restriction than parental guidance—loving protection until maturity could catch up with freedom.

Suddenly the garden story feels startlingly contemporary.

We are now handing powerful technologies—social media, algorithmic influence, endless comparison—to young people long before emotional maturity has formed. Children encounter limitless judgments and limitless choices without the wisdom needed to interpret them.

We are only beginning to see the consequences: anxiety, isolation, depression, despair.

Freedom without maturity is not liberation. It is danger.

The serpent’s whisper has gone digital

In the wilderness, Jesus confronts the illusion of unlimited choice and reveals something essential: freedom is not having every option available; freedom is knowing which options lead to life.

The wilderness is not merely geographical. It is spiritual and psychological—a landscape where our struggle to exercise wise freedom becomes visible.

This is where Lent begins.

After the clarity of the Transfiguration comes descent into the inner terrain we usually avoid. Here we discover something uncomfortable: sin is rarely dramatic rebellion. More often it is subtle confusion—a slow venom that dulls moral clarity.

The serpent becomes a powerful metaphor. Sin works like a toxin, numbing compassion and distorting perception.

If sin is the toxin, repentance is the antidote.

The Prayer Book invites us to keep a holy Lent through practices meant not to punish but to heal.

Self-examination reconnects us with emotions we prefer to avoid—anger, envy, resentment, fear, bitterness. Properly understood, self-examination is not self-criticism; it replaces the harsh inner voice of judgment with the gentler voice of grace.

Fasting introduces small discomforts that awaken awareness. We notice habits of consumption—food, screens, shopping, distraction, even the careless spending of time. Abundance easily breeds entitlement, yet awareness can transform abundance into gratitude, and gratitude into generosity.

Prayer, worship, and study retrain attention. They cultivate what the seventeenth-century Anglican divines called habitual recollection—an awareness of God’s presence permeating ordinary life.

Lenten disciplines are not punishments. They are detoxifications.

In the wilderness, Jesus shows us what humanity looks like when rooted in God: clear-sighted, grounded, and free—not because every choice is available, but because wisdom learns which choices lead toward life.

Lent gives us practice in noticing the difference.

The serpent, then, is not merely the villain of an ancient story. It is the voice of self-delusion—the temptation to remain in willful innocence, to avoid truth, to mistake unlimited choice for genuine freedom.

Lent does not invite us back to Eden’s innocence.

It invites us forward into mature freedom: a freedom shaped by grace, grounded in belonging, and healed by God’s patient, loving invitation.

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Transfiguration in a Disenchanted Age

Last Sunday after the Epiphany – 2026

We stand at a hinge in the liturgical year. Behind us lies the season of Epiphany with its moments of illumination. Ahead of us stretches the long road to Jerusalem and the austerity of Lent. At this pivotal point in the Jesus narrative, we are given two mountain stories: Moses on Sinai and Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Two peaks. Two luminous encounters. Two moments when heaven and earth appear to overlap.

Across the wide sweep of Scripture—from Moses to Jesus—we can trace not a change in God, but a deepening in human awareness of God. For Moses, God is encountered “up there” and “out there”—in thunder and cloud, in fire and trembling mountain. God commands wind and sea. The divine presence is external, overwhelming, transcendent.

By the first century, something has shifted. The prophets speak of a law written on the heart. The psalmists cry from the depths of inward experience. By the time Jesus appears, God is no longer encountered only on mountains but within conscience, compassion, and community.

The movement is from “up there,”
to “in here,”
to “between us.”

This is not a movement from transcendence to its absence, but from transcendence as distance to transcendence as depth.

Charles Taylor describes a similar shift in Western consciousness. In A Secular Age, he speaks of the transition from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one. In 1500, belief in God in the West was nearly unavoidable. The world felt charged with spiritual presence. Today, belief can feel implausible. Reality appears calculable, controllable, confined.

In an enchanted age, transcendence saturates reality. In a disenchanted age, reality is saturated with immanence. We have descended from expansive connectivity into increasing isolation.

And yet the hunger for transcendence persists. We binge stories of magical realism. We attend concerts like revivals.
We chase peak experiences. We curate spiritual moments. The longing has not disappeared. The human spirit still yearns for more than what can be measured.

On the mountain of Transfiguration, Peter sees Jesus radiant, his face shining, his clothes dazzling. Moses and Elijah appear. The veil between material and spiritual reality thins. Time itself seems to bend. In response, Peter cries out:

“Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us build three dwellings.”

He wants to contain the moment, to hold it in place, to domesticate transcendence within the structures of control.

But the cloud descends. The voice speaks. And just as suddenly, it is over.

As they descend, Jesus orders silence: “Tell no one about the vision until the Son of Man has been raised.”

Illumination and secrecy. Now—and not yet.

But why secrecy?

Because revelation without readiness can distort.
Because glory without the cross becomes fantasy.
Because peak experience is never the destination—it is only ever a preparation.

The mountain is not a residence. It is a revelation.

The Transfiguration is a moment when the spiritual penetrates the material, allowing Jesus and his disciples to see more clearly the path downward and onward.

We often imagine transcendence as altitude. But altitude is a primitive religious metaphor.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” no one assumed he had taken a hike. The mountain had become a metaphor for moral clarity, prophetic vision, the ability to see beyond present injustice toward promised possibility.

Transcendence is not about geography. It is about perception. And here lies the paradox for us in 2026: in a disenchanted age, transcendence is not found by escaping immanence. It is discovered within it. Not somewhere else. Right here.

The distinction between joy and happiness helps illuminate this.

Happiness is self-focused.
Joy is self-transcending.

Happiness asks, “How do I feel?”
Joy asks, “Who can I share this with?”

Joy and grief are closer than we imagine. At births and weddings, at funerals and memorials, we are carried beyond ourselves. In deep grief, we transcend the self just as surely as in deep joy. We are bound to others in shared vulnerability. Both joy and grief rupture the illusion that we are alone on center stage. Both are moments of transcendence that reconfigure our experience at the very heart of immanence.

In recent days, the people of Minneapolis have experienced something that, in its own way, bears the shape of transfiguration. Moments of crisis have catalyzed protest. Protest has coalesced into collective resistance to power. In those moments, something happens “between us.”

Strangers stand together.
Voices rise in chorus.
Fear and courage intertwine.
Grief and determination occupy the same streets.

No one would call such days “happy.” Yet they are transcendent. In the face of injustice, people move beyond private preoccupation. They step off the lonely center stage of individualism and into a web of shared vulnerability and resolve. Community, no longer theoretical, becomes embodied.

Ordinary streets become sites of moral clarity. Immanence becomes the arena of transcendence.

Not dazzling light on a mountaintop,
but illumination in the midst of pain.
Not escape from history,
but deeper engagement within it.

This, too, is transfiguration!

The disciples glimpse glory. But they must descend the mountain back into ordinary existence. They have glimpsed who Jesus is. But they must walk with him toward who he must become.

The Transfiguration is a hinge moment. Behind it lie teaching and healing in Galilee. Ahead lies the costly solidarity of Jerusalem.

Behind us is the light of Epiphany. Ahead lies the demanding honesty of Lent that will strip away illusion, confront us with suffering, and challenge our need for distraction.

But today we are given a glimpse—so that when darkness comes, we remember that Transcendence is real, not as escape, but as empowerment to live in the present moment – to face its challenges and to embrace its opportunities.

The thread that binds Moses, Jesus, Charles Taylor, Martin Luther King Jr., Minneapolis, joy and grief together is this:

Transcendence is not about leaving the world.
It is about seeing the world differently.

It is not about climbing higher.
It is about loving deeper.

It is not found in isolated bliss.
It is found in relational courage.

God is not only “up there.”
Not only “in here.”
But “between us.”

In the space where we risk connection. Where grief becomes solidarity. Where solidarity transforms hope, Jesus does not remain on the mountain. He touches the frightened disciples and says, “Get up. Do not be afraid.” Then he sets his face toward Jerusalem—toward suffering, service, and a love that does not retreat.

“Listen to him,” the voice from the cloud commands.

And what does he teach?

Blessed are the poor.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Love your enemies.
Lose your life to find it.

This is transcendence within immanence. Glory revealed in vulnerability.

In a disenchanted age, we are tempted either to chase spectacle or to surrender to cynicism. The gospel offers a third way.

Attend to the relational space.
Stand together in grief.
Serve in love.
Resist injustice.
Practice courage.

Transcendence has not vanished. It has simply moved.

Not up there.
Not someday.
But here.
Now.
Between us.

The mountain shows what is possible.
The descent shows who we are becoming.

As we enter Lent in 2026—with political fractures, digital distraction, ecological anxiety, and spiritual weariness—the invitation is not to escape upward. It is to descend with purpose to discover that even in a disenchanted age, the world still burns with unconsumed fire—if we have eyes to see and ears to listen.

And so we listen.
We rise.
We walk down the mountain—together!

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Let Your Light Shine

In my summation delivered at the end of my report to last week’s Annual Meeting, I warned that all our extensive ministries must always be more than good works by good people doing what good people do. We need a larger context in which to situate our activity. This is the collaboration with God in the unfolding of the divine dream of the world’s healing. So that which has been made low will be raised up, that which has grown old will be renewed, and that which is wrong about our world, the perpetuation of injustice and oppression, will be put to rights.

Which leads me to the question quietly pulsing beneath both Isaiah 58 and Matthew 5. It is not a question about belief, sincerity, or religious effort. It is a far more unsettling question: What does faith look like when it becomes visible?

Both Isaiah and Jesus are wary of private devotion. They are suspicious of religious practices that leave the world unchanged. And both insist—each in their own way—that when faith does not show up in how we live with others, something essential has gone missing.

Isaiah offers the diagnosis with unsettling clarity. The people are doing everything right—or so they believe. They fast. They humble themselves. They seek God daily and delight to draw near. Their religious lives are active, intentional, and disciplined.

And yet God interrupts them with a piercing question: Why do you fast, but do not see? Why do you humble yourselves, but do not notice?

What is striking is what God does not say. God does not accuse them of bad faith. God does not dismiss their prayers as insincere. The problem is not that their devotion is false; it is that it has been carefully contained. Their religious practices have been sealed off from the rest of their lives.

Even on their fast days, they pursue their own interests. They pray while preserving systems that exploit others. They bow their heads in humility while keeping their hands closed. Repentance is performed, but never allowed to reorganize how they live, relate, or share power.

Isaiah’s critique endures because it names a temptation that never quite disappears—the temptation to mistake religious performance for faithfulness.

God’s response is blunt: This is not the fast I choose.

The fast God desires loosens the bonds of injustice. It breaks the yoke of oppression. It feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, and honors the fragile web of human responsibility that binds us to one another. True devotion, Isaiah insists, is not measured by how much we withdraw from the world, but by how deeply we enter into its suffering with courage and generosity.

Only then—only then—does the promise appear: Then your light shall break forth like the dawn. Then healing shall spring up quickly. Then I will hear when you cry.

Light, in Isaiah, is the consequence when justice lies at the heart of religious practice.

It is at precisely this point that Jesus speaks.

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

Jesus does not tell his listeners to become light. He assumes they already are. Light is not something the disciples manufacture; it is something entrusted to them. The danger Jesus names is not weakness, but concealment—light rendered harmless by being hidden or contained.

Salt only matters when it dissolves or is used to season. We have the expression to cast light on something. Jesus is asking us to cast light on the practice of our faith.

When Jesus says, Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven, he is not inviting religious self-display. He is decrying religious invisibility. He stands firmly in Isaiah’s tradition: “good works” must be more than random acts of kindness. They must be justice-shaped, mercy-grounded, community-forming practices that make God’s character visible in the world.

Light shines not because we talk about God. Light shines through the way we choose to live our lives.

This is why Jesus immediately turns to the commandments. He is not abolishing them, nor replacing obedience with stricter rule-keeping, but a deeper commitment to faith as action. Being right with God happens when worship, ethics, prayer, money, power, and relationships stop being sealed off in compartments and begin to inform one another in our daily lives.

In this sense, Jesus echoes Isaiah in warning against devotion without justice. Jesus warns against faith that insists on remaining hidden. Both insist that a faithful life must be recognizable—not because it draws attention to itself, but because it changes the texture of the world around it.

These texts press on us because they name our own habits so precisely. We are adept at faith that stays interior, at spirituality that comforts without challenging, at worship that lifts our hearts while leaving our habits untouched. Scripture refuses to let us linger there.

The question is not whether we believe the right things. The question is whether our belief is reorganizing our lives in ways others can see. Does our fasting loosen anyone’s burden? Does our worship make room for others to come to the table? Does our faithfulness cast light on the shadows?

Isaiah promises that when justice takes root, light breaks forth. Jesus trusts that when lives are aligned with God’s purposes, light cannot help but shine. The world does not need more self-preoccupied religion. It needs faithful witness.

And the promise that holds these readings together is simple and demanding: when faith stops being something we perform and becomes something we practice—when devotion reshapes how we live with others—then light illuminates a world where what has been made low is being raised up, that which has grown old is being renewed, and where wrongs – the perpetuation of injustice and oppression, are being put to rights.

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The Cost of Authenticity

Providence is experiencing a deep winter storm of snow and ice, and the resulting parking ban has simply confirmed the wisdom of cancelling church services. This sermon is by way of a reflection on the gospel for Epiphany 3 from Matthew chapter 4 on one of the key characteristics of discipleship – the cost of authenticity. The tone of the audio is more fireside chat than proclamation.

Sometimes discipleship is not hearing a new call
so much as realizing that a familiar and faithful way of life
is being gently loosened from our grasp.

Most of us live with the quiet assumption that if God is going to call us,
it will be obvious. Clear. Undeniable.

We imagine a clarion call.

And so, when we sense even the faintest possibility
that something might be shifting, we mutter—often without realizing it—
not yet.

Most of the time our antennae are finely tuned
to filter that possibility out. Familiarity comforts us.
Routine reassures us. They insulate us from disturbances
that might decenter us.

We are often listening for a call, but we are listening for it
to arrive on our terms.

And of course, it rarely does.

When a familiar and faithful life begins to leave us less satisfied,
when we sense—sometimes reluctantly— that something needs to change,
what often happens first is not clarity, but loosening.

Our accustomed ways of thinking about ourselves,
our settled sense of who we are,
begin—almost imperceptibly—
to slip from our grip.

Even when the light ahead feels real,
we often become alarmed
as the ground beneath us begins to shift.

We say to God:
If the light ahead is real,
then surely you can explain it to us.

We ask for a blueprint.
Presented for our pre-approval.

But even as the way forward remains unclear,
the ground beneath us continues to move—
heedless of our need for certainty.

Discipleship often asks us
to step away from what has been faithful,
fruitful, and trustworthy, before we can yet see
what will take its place.

Not all calls offer clarity at the outset.

For many of us,
facing a call only dimly perceived
fills us with anxiety.
With restlessness.
With agitation.

And that restlessness—
that refusal to let us remain where we are—
has a long spiritual pedigree.

St Augustine gave it words centuries ago:
“O Lord, our hearts are restless
until they find their rest in thee.”

That restlessness is not the enemy of faith.
It is often the sign that faith is being invited
to grow into a new form.

When we turn to Matthew’s Gospel,
this is not always easy to see.

I have often struggled with Matthew’s lofty, elevated portrayal of Jesus.
Matthew’s Jesus can feel remote—hovering above the human fray,
secure in his identity, untroubled by uncertainty.

Matthew gives us a Jesus shaped deliberately in the image of Moses:
authoritative, commanding, decisive.

And because of that, we can read Matthew’s account
of the call of the first disciples as a story from a different world—
a time when people were apparently capable of instant, unquestioning obedience
in a way that seems unavailable to us now.

But sometimes a familiar text changes because we have changed.

Sometimes scripture becomes newly audible
not because the words are different,
but because our lives are.

When Jesus hears that John the Baptist has been arrested,
Matthew tells us, he withdraws to Galilee,
leaving Nazareth, and making his home in Capernaum,
by the Sea of Galilee.

Matthew offers no commentary.
No emotional description.
No interior reflection.

And yet, for the first time, that single sentence stops me short.

Jesus leaves Nazareth.

He leaves his family networks.
He leaves the rhythms of village life.
He leaves behind the identity of the carpenter’s son—
a life that had made sense up until now.

And suddenly, I see this moment for what it is:
a threshold.

A quiet one.
But a costly one.

Before Jesus calls anyone else to leave their nets,
he himself leaves what has been home.

Matthew may not tell us how Jesus felt,
but he shows us the price that must be paid
before discipleship can even begin.

I find myself imagining the scene.

The packing of a few possessions.
The unspoken grief of departure.
The vulnerability of beginning again
in an unfamiliar place.

Capernaum was not a retreat.
It was a border town.
An ethnic and cultural crossroads.
An economic hub marked by opportunity
and deep precarity.

Matthew underscores this by reaching back to Isaiah:
“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali…
Galilee of the Gentiles… the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light.”

Yes, this is mission geography.
But it is also inner geography.

Capernaum is the kind of place you go
when you are no longer who you were,
but are not yet who you will be.

Jesus’ move is not only strategic.
It is formative.

It is there—in that unsettled, liminal space—
that his authority takes shape.

And then, walking by the sea, Jesus sees two brothers fishing
and says simply: “Follow me.”

Matthew tells us they follow him immediately.

No deliberation.
No negotiation.
No farewell speeches.

For generations, this has sounded almost magical.

But perhaps it is not magic at all.

These fishermen already lived with risk.
They already knew instability.
They already sensed the limits
of their current lives.

They were poised.

And the power of Jesus’ invitation lies not only in his words,
but in the life he is already living.

Jesus does not appear as a settled authority figure
asking others to risk what he himself will not.

He appears as someone who has already crossed a line.

Discipleship recognizes authenticity instinctively.

Simon and Andrew follow him not because he is powerful,
but because he is already living the question they have not yet dared to ask.

In our Episcopal Church culture, discipleship is a word we use often
and understand poorly.

We tend to imagine discipleship as familiarity without transformation.
As membership.
As volunteerism.
As being good people doing what good people do.

But Matthew will not let us rest there.

The call to discipleship involves decentering.
Disruption.
Relocation—if not always geographic,
then interior.

It asks us to risk uncertainty in order to discover
a deeper, truer form of life.

And so we come back
to where we began.

Sometimes discipleship is not hearing a new call
so much as realizing that a familiar and faithful way of life—
the habitual way we think about ourselves
and experience the world— is being gently loosened from our grasp.

Discipleship is not adding Jesus to an otherwise stable life.

It is allowing our encounter with Jesus to unsettle us just enough
that the possibility of a new kind of life might begin to take shape within us.

The dawning of the light is a principal theme of Epiphany. Discipleship is how the light breaks through.

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A Challenging Invitation

There is much that is confusing in John’s Gospel. In his opening chapter, John the Evangelist focuses on John, elsewhere known as the Baptist, as a witness to the messiah. But there’s also another John lurking in the background – John the Beloved Disciple of Jesus, whom Tradition has associated with John the Evangelist. Despite the Tradition, it’s clear that John the Evangelist is not John the Beloved Disciple. The Evangelist is writing in the 120’s, a period beyond the normal lifespan of the Beloved Disciple. So, John the Evangelist is someone who stands in the tradition of the Beloved Disciple, who, as a young man, probably knew him personally.

John’s gospel opens on the majestic panorama painted in the Prologue before plunging us into the opening moments in Jesus’ earthly ministry. The evangelist known as John fills this opening chapter and the whole of his gospel with word allusions and metaphors indicating the mysterious connections between Jesus and the fulfilment of Old Testament expectations of the Messiah.

We can tie ourselves in knots trying to decipher what these allusions and metaphors meant to the Evangelist John and his community. But so much of John remains mysterious.

For instance, John uses the metaphor of the Lamb of God. Taken in the context and period in which he is writing, this is a peculiar metaphor for Jesus. The practice of Temple animal sacrifice is, by this time, but a distant memory. Yet John’s metaphors are arresting, and in chapter one we have two on display – Lamb of God and God the Son – titles for Jesus that deeply resonated as they eventually entered the mainstream of orthodox Christology, i.e., the branch of theology that relates to the identity and nature of Jesus. Seeing as believing is the major theme in John’s gospel. First-hand seeing is not necessary, believing through hearsay, i.e., the words of another, is enough.

Chapter one is a story set over three days. On day one, the Jewish elders come to interrogate John (the Baptist), during which he identifies Jesus as the messiah because of what he has seen and can bear witness to. Day two, John’s out and about with two of his disciples – one of whom is Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. When Jesus walks by, and John points him out as the Lamb of God, curiosity gets the better of Andrew and his unnamed companion, who follow Jesus, asking him where he is staying. Jesus replies come and see. 

Andrew then recruits his brother, Simon. In the section following this passage on the next day, day three, Jesus journeys to Galilee, where he encounters Philip, who then recruits his friend, Nathaniel (Bartholomew), and tells him he has seen the messiah.

John is showing his readers how discipleship happens and how it works. One person’s curiosity discovers Jesus. This discovery is then shared with a friend and they both begin to follow Jesus.

Jesus and his new disciples are now in position on day three for the first of John’s great signs – the wedding at Cana of Galilee, opening chapter two. John is not telling his readers about the call of the first disciples as much as he is showing them how discipleship works. First – we notice, then – we become curious, leading us to ask – then we have the opportunity to respond or not, to Jesus’ invitation to come and see. We then tell our friends what we’ve found and invite them to join us.

John’s Gospel is a gospel for our own age precisely because John the Evangelist addresses a mixed community in tension, a ragbag of different constituencies.

  1. There are the former disciples of John the Baptist, hence the Evangelist’s emphasis on the initial role of John (the Baptist) in the first chapter.
  2. There is a strong contingent of Samaritans, as evidenced by the story in chapter four, where the Samaritan woman he encounters at the well is the first to recognize Jesus’ true identity.
  3. There are gentile spiritual seekers. Later, in 12:21, we read that some Greeks come and ask Philip: please sir, we want to see Jesus.
  4. There are Jews who have openly split with the synagogue.
  5. There are Jews who still faithfully attend the synagogue but also secretly hang out with John’s ragbag Christian community on Sundays.

John’s task is to speak to the inner tensions in a community composed of factions, each with its own slightly different history and take on Jesus, all seeking to hold together amid the backdrop of unremitting hostility from the Jewish authorities, as represented by the emergence of rabbinic Judaism. This unremitting hostility from the newly emerging rabbinic movement is why John appears to us to project hostility back to those he continually refers to as the Jews.

John’s ragbag community manages to hold together during his lifetime. But after his death, another John, John of Patmos, writer of the epistles of John, bears witness to the internal tensions and eventual breakup of the Johannine Community in the middle decades of the 2nd century. Members of the Johannine community, known to us as the Gnostics, easily challenged the cohesion of a community with no recognized leader.  

The Johannie community had a flat hierarchy. It seems to have no recognized leaders apart from the guidance of the Evangelist, who lived on in his gospel. For instance, John never mentions the teaching authority of the apostles as the community leaders so evident elsewhere in the New Testament. Everyone is simply a disciple. All disciples are equal, sitting under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. There are no sacraments, no doctrine, only the willingness to be led by the Holy Spirit on the way of love.

Jesus’ invitation is to come and see. But see what? Come and see a community characterized by the love its members have for one another. Now there’s a rare and seemingly unworkable thing!

A community known as the Beloved Community was a radical experiment based on Jesus’ Golden Rule in chapter 13:35, love one another, for by this the world will know them as his disciples. A radical and noble experiment in community, yet one predictably destined to fail.

Can we hear an echo of John’s beloved community in our Anglican, tolerant, and inclusive understanding of Christian community? Surely this is a difficult yet precious witness. Something unique to offer amidst the civic strife of 2026 in a nation torn asunder by so many bitterly held divisions.

The former Presiding Bishop, The Most Rev. Michael Curry, exhorted us with  John’s message to invite a renewal that flows from reframing ourselves as the contemporary Jesus Movement, a modern-day Johannine community embarked on the Way of Love involving seven practices that require us to turn, pause, listen, and make a choice to follow or not to follow Jesus.

  1. Learn – through reflecting on Scripture each day, esp. on Jesus life and teachings.
  2. Pray – dwell intentionally with God daily.
  3. Worship – gather in community weekly to thank, praise and dwell with God.
  4. Bless- share our faith unselfishly – one might suggest unselfconsciously- in order to give and serve.
  5. Go- cross boundaries, listen deeply and live like Jesus.
  6. Rest -receive the gift of God’s grace, peace, and restoration.

The Way of Love is a contemporary Johannine project that flows naturally from our Anglican love for John’s Gospel. For like John’s Beloved Community, we have some experience of holding together internal tensions within a framework that cherishes right relationship over right belief. Communities that stress the right belief are vulnerable to becoming oppressive. Communities where right relationship is stressed require no agreement, only tolerant acceptance of one another’s differences negotiated by love.

Our only obligation is to come and see! The question is, are we open and willing to see what the Spirit of Jesus longs to show us?

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A Story Big Enough To Belong To

Our lives unfold inside stories.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, our experience of living in time and space is structured by the stories we tell—about ourselves, about one another, about the world, and about God. It is through story that the world takes on shape and meaning, that chaos becomes intelligible, that suffering is given context, and hope a horizon.

So the most important question we can ask about the stories we tell is not whether they are true or false, but whether they are big enough.

Are they thick stories—or thin ones?

Thin stories are easy to tell. They reduce complexity. They trade nuance for certainty. They divide the world neatly into winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, saved and lost. They are efficient. They are emotionally gripping. And for a while, they feel powerful.

But sooner or later, the threadbare nature of thin stories becomes increasingly difficult to hide. When reality refuses to fit their narrow frame, thin stories resort to fear, coercion, and eventually, violence to hold themselves together. Thin stories always need enemies.

Thick stories, by contrast, are harder to tell and slower to hear. They are woven from many strands—memory and hope, failure and grace, belonging and struggle. They leave room for contradiction and growth. They make space for human flourishing because they are large enough to hold real lives.

It is the thickness of our stories—their depth, complexity, and generosity—that determines whether we thrive.

And today, we stand inside one of the thickest stories the Christian faith knows: the baptism of Jesus. And in 2026, we inhabit this rich story surrounded by the fraying of the thinnest of national thin stories.

All four Gospels tell a story about Jesus’ origins—but they do so in strikingly different ways.

Matthew and Luke begin with birth stories. Mark begins abruptly, with no mention of an infancy at all, Jesus emerges from the long silence of childhood and adolescence and steps onto the public stage as a grown man, ready to begin the work God has given him. John reaches back even further, telling a cosmic story of pre-existence: the Word who was with God and was God from the beginning has taken flesh and blood.

Each Gospel tells the same truth—but not in the same way. Each shapes a recognizable yet distinctive identity through story. This is the variety offered by a thick story – the truth -approached from a number of different angles.

And that matters, because identity is always a moving target. We discover and rediscover who we are through the stories that are told about us—and as these stories become our own, edited and reedited to become the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Some identities are rooted primarily in birth. For a few—royalty, dynasties, elites—birth alone bestows belonging and meaning. But for most of us, identity is shaped less by birth than by adoption.

We become ourselves through a series of adoptions: into families, friendships, communities, vocations, causes, and commitments. Each adoption draws us more deeply into the persons we are becoming.

That is why baptism matters.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke recount Jesus’ baptism differently—and their differences reveal something essential. In Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives, the divine nature is conceived in human gestation. Matthew’s account is typically shorn of the human warmth of Luke, an event reserved only for the select few, whereas in Luke, Jesus’ baptism is witnessed by the crowds – a solidly communal experience. But it’s in Mark’s account that Jesus’ baptism becomes intensely personal. In Matthew and Luke, the heavens majestically part, but in Mark, they are violently torn open. In all three accounts, the Spirit descends, and the divine voice proclaims, but in Mark alone it is a voice heard only by Jesus. It’s personal, it’s particular, it’s the voice of divine adoption – still a secret only to be shared between Jesus and God.

These are not contradictions. They are complementary truths held together within a thick story. Within the complexity of this thick story, a key question remains unanswered. Is baptism a personal or a communal event? Is baptism the certificate of individual salvation —or is it the recognition of entry into the life of a community that is already saved?

The Christian tradition has never settled this question neatly, because it refuses thin answers to complex questions. What baptism does is tell us where and to whom we belong.

Jesus’ baptism echoes the first story of creation, when the Spirit of God swept over the waters and breathed life into the world. At the Jordan River, that same breath rests upon Jesus. God claims him. Names him. Delights in him.

And why the adoption strand in Mark’s account is crucial is that it shows that what God does for Jesus, God does for us.

As Jesus is baptized into a relationship of adoption, so are we.

In baptism, God adopts us—not because we have earned it, not because we understand it, but because God delights in us. Before we believe, before we choose, before we behave correctly, we are named and claimed.

Belonging precedes believing!

This is where the Christian story confronts the thin stories of our time.

Our nation is struggling—violently at times—to tell a story about who belongs. Immigration, race, power, identity, and fear have all been reduced to brittle slogans and hardened boundaries. Thin stories dominate because they promise certainty in an anxious world.

But many of us no longer recognize ourselves in these stories. We sense—often without knowing how to articulate it—that they are too small, too cruel, too narrow to hold the truth of our lives together.

What we are witnessing is not merely political conflict. It is a struggle over belonging.

Which story will tell us who we are and where we belong?

The Christian story is very thick, yet this does not mean the Church is immune to thin interpretations.

Different Christian communities tell very different stories about baptism, salvation, and belonging. Some see baptism as a personal declaration of faith—a transaction securing one’s place in heaven. Others see it as entry into a tightly bounded institution where salvation is carefully guarded.

The Anglican tradition tells yet a different story—an awkward, sometimes frustrating, but profoundly generous one.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, once said, “The Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members.”

That sentence unsettles us because it resists thin boundaries. In the Episcopal Church, belonging often precedes believing. People find themselves woven into the life of the community—sometimes long before they know what they believe.

Our boundaries are intentionally fuzzy. Worship is open to all. The invitation to Communion is offered to the baptized—yet no one is turned away at the rail. To some, this seems inconsistent. But it reflects a thick story: the Church as a sign of God’s salvation already at work in the world.

Unlike other traditions, ours does not confine grace. We are content only to witness to it.

Baptism, then, is not a private spiritual insurance policy. It is entry into a community that lives for the sake of the world.

That is why the Episcopal Church places such weight on the Baptismal Covenant. Baptism is not something that happened once. It is something we relive every day.

We promise to persevere in the life of community.
To resist evil and return when we fall and to proclaim—not create but proclaim—the good news that God has already acted.
We promise to love and serve our neighbors. And to strive for justice, peace, and to fight to defend the dignity of every human being.

These promises are not abstract ideals. They are the practices of belonging.

They form us into people who can live inside thick stories—stories that do not require enemies, that do not depend on fear, that make room for difference and growth.

At Jesus’ baptism, God does not give him a task list. God gives him a name.

“You are my Son. With you I am well pleased.”

Before Jesus teaches. Before he heals. Before he suffers. Before he dies. He comes to belong.

Belonging comes first.

And that is the story we are called to live and tell—not only in church, but in a world desperate for stories big enough to hold the hope. And remember Advent’s key message about hope. That for which we hope is already present to us simply by virtue of our hoping. We are already those for whom we have been waiting. So let us stop waiting and proceed with the tasks at hand.

Amen.

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It’s the Beginning that Matters

How you begin a story matters. For example, in a time long ago, in a galaxy far, far away– but such a beginning takes us into the wrong story. Let me try again. Now, what is it? Ah – here it is – to boldly go where no one has gone before – still the wrong story. What about – once upon a time there was – no, no, no, this won’t do either.

Let’s try again.

In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through the Word all things came into being …
What has come into being was life… and this life was the light of the world.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Now that feels right.

We are fortunate that the New Testament provides more than one doorway into the mysterious story of the Incarnation, the term we use for the event in which God wishes to become recognizable in the world as a human being acting through human agency.

On Christmas Eve, we come to hear the good news of our Savior’s birth. In some churches, it will be enough to bathe worshippers in a warm bath of a manger scene nostalgia, of shepherds, angels, and, eventually, wise men. In others, however, something edgier will be offered – capable of speaking the good news of our Savior’s birth into the pain and chaos of the world in these times.

Yet, John begins: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Using the phrase “In the beginning,” John echoes the opening verses of Genesis, which, like a cinerama, opens onto a wide screen filled with a deep darkness, with the only sound – the ghostly haunting sound of the divine wind sweeping across the face of the dark.

Then, suddenly, a pinpoint of light appears.

A flicker at the heart of the darkness of the deep.
A pinpoint of light expanding at phenomenal speed -piercing the darkness—bringing order out of chaos, life out of light.

In the phrase: In the beginning… John takes us back to before Bethlehem, before shepherds, angels, and mangers; before wise men, before an infanticidal king; before flight into refugee exile.
John takes us back to the moment of the Big Bang, when all that exists emerged from within the self-contained life force we know as the Creator or the Prime Mover.

Genesis pictures the emergence of a single point of light breaking open the deep darkness. John has a word for that light. He calls it the Logos, which literally means “that which speaks forth God.”

In English, we translate logos as the Word. The Word is the communicative life of God.
The Word is God speaking into the void—speaking order, organizing structure, creating meaning. The Word is the light of divine life, shining out from the heart of the darkness.

And here John makes his crucial point: he identifies Jesus as the very Word of God, speaking forth into the darkness of the primeval void as light shining in the darkness. Of this light, John tells us the darkness is powerless to overcome.

Listen again to his opening lines:

In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through the Word all things came into being …
What has come into being was life… and this life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

At Creation, the Word spoke forth the light of life into a formless universe. In the Incarnation, that same Word spoke forth the divine self into a human life.
The Word became flesh and now dwells among us, full of grace and truth.

Let’s pause.
Let this settle in you.

On this Christmas Eve, we come seeking comfort and solace—a brief respite from the world’s tribulations. We find comfort in familiar memories of Christmas past. 

In 1849, the Reverend Edmund Sears, a New England Unitarian minister, wrote the poem It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

What’s striking is that Sears doesn’t situate Christ’s birth in its ancient context of the stable scene.
He situates the birth of Jesus in the turmoil of his own day, turmoil weighing on his heart.

He pictures a moment of solemn stillness amid the world’s cacophony, as humanity strains to hear the angels’ song of peace, always at risk of being drowned out by the noise of human strife.

Speaking of the angels’ voice, Sears delivers his prophetic line:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
And man, at war with man, hears not the love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

How contemporary that sounds to us.

We celebrate Christmas this year amidst rancor and bitterness here at home. All around us, the fabric of the Republic – its laws, its Constitution, its government frays under the assault of authoritarian forces.

And abroad against the backdrop of heart-rending violence in Ukraine, in the Holy Land, we behold that Bethlehem itself—once a symbol of holy joy—stands darkened in protest and grief amidst the unspeakable settler violence being unleashed against Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank. Bethlehem is darkened in mourning for the destruction of Gaza and the dreadful plight of its people.

Sami Awad of Nonviolence International put it succinctly:

What Bethlehem offers today is not reassurance, but clarity. People here are celebrating not because the “war in Gaza” is over or we are ignoring our reality but because it is what we have left in our resilience. 

To meet the challenges and seize the opportunities in our world, we must first find the right story – with the right beginning. We must situate the birth of our Savior in the context of our present lives, as the story of the light of life penetrating the deepest reaches of the darkness that enshrouds us. So that, like the people of Bethlehem, our celebration, rather than ignoring reality, flows from the source of our resilience.

The French saying captures the irony: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they remain the same, or as ordinary Frenchmen and women today say, no matter who you vote for, the government still gets in.

So many of us feel pulled toward despair by the course of world events. And into that despair, John’s Prologue speaks the word we most need to hear.

Here is the most startling truth of Christmas that in the human life of Jesus, the divine Word, the divine light, takes flesh and blood to dwell among us, full of grace and truth.

And here is the challenge:
John tells us not whether this light is real, but whether we choose to recognize it or not.

Forget belief for a moment and focus on the exercise of choice. Do we choose to allow the light of life to shape our lives? Coming back to belief, it’s not whether this happened as described, but whether we give this story the power to remake us.

And this is what requires courage.
Courage to believe in the face of everything that whispers despair.

Many of us feel as though we’ve fallen into the primordial deep—
where the darkness is thick and the sound of hope feels faint.
In such moments, how easily we forget the central truth:

Darkness is not the enemy of the light. Darkness is the fuel the light consumes to shine even brighter.

This is the defiance of Christian hope.
No matter how dark things become…
no matter how relentless the headlines…
darkness cannot extinguish the light.
 For:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it.

Renewed by that hope, we have work to do.
The work of aligning ourselves with God’s ongoing restoration of creation.
The work of preparing the world to receive Christ’s eventual return in glory – the Advent metaphor for the completion of God’s dream in the full restoration of creation.

How do we begin?

We begin with cherishing the light that burns within each of us.
By sharing that light.
By pooling our individual lights until they become a radiance strong enough to push back the encroaching shadows around us.

Given the state of the world, perhaps “merry” isn’t the word that fits this Christmas.
But resilient, hope-filled might be.
Hope-filled, because the light still shines.
Hope-filled, because the Word has taken flesh.
Hope-filled, because the darkness will never overcome us.

Amen.

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Dreaming Joseph

Image: The dream of St Joseph. Bernardino (Bernardino de Scapis) Luini (c.1480-1532)

This year, we return to Matthew as the gospel of choice in the three-year Lectionary cycle. Thus, Advent IV’s gospel opens with Matthew’s account of the events leading to the birth of Jesus. Matthew structures his birth narrative around themes specific to him. I want to offer a very personal take on Matthew’s understanding of the significance of Jesus’ birth.

For most of us, our sense of the nativity narrative emerges from an often unconscious compilation of Luke and Matthew, giving us the typical manger scene depicted in countless churches and nativity plays. In doing so, we miss the significance of each Evangelist’s distinctive portrayal of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.

Luke’s focus is on Mary. His birth narrative is Mary’s story, depicting a birth in farmyard conditions surrounded by sheep and cattle and witnessed by ordinary shepherds – representative of those on the margins of society – and of course, let’s not forget the angels.

Matthew’s version of events gives us Joseph’s story – the story of Jesus’ birth told from Joseph’s perspective. Matthew does not mention the setting. Here, there are no shepherds, no cattle or sheep. This is a birth witnessed not by ordinary people but by foreign emissaries – the Magi – representatives of the wider world’s homage to the infant king of the Jews. Matthew also has an angel, but Matthew’s angel appears not to Mary, as in Luke’s account, but to a dreaming Joseph.

The first point to notice in the Matthew chronicle is the importance of establishing Jesus’ identity within the long genealogy that extends back through Jewish mythological time to Abraham. Matthew spends 17 verses of his 25-verse first chapter to do this. So we notice from the outset how intensely a Jewish story this is.

The second point to note is that Matthew’s story is highly political, situating the birth of Jesus within the turbulent political context of 1st-century Palestine. Here we have all the ingredients for a tense political drama – a brutal ruler in Herod the Great, the puppet of Roman occupation, whose murderous intent drives the Holy Family into exile as political asylum seekers. The Holy Family escapes, but every other-year-old male child born in the region of Bethlehem is slaughtered as Herod, alerted by the indiscretion of the Magi, endeavors to neutralize Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of a rival king.

Matthew’s is a rich narrative, one that sets the birth of Jesus within a political context entirely familiar to us today in a world where literally millions of fathers and mothers with young children are daily forced to undertake the perils and dangers as refugees escaping in fear for their lives. And, Matthew’s birth narrative provides a contemporary flavor of the political and humanitarian themes embedded in his account. Matthew sets Jesus’ birth within the context of political oppression and of a ruler’s desire to seek out and punish anyone who poses a threat.

Matthew’s birth narrative also hints at the societal complexities of Joseph and Mary’s predicament. Matthew will go on to describe the holy family’s displacement and flight from political violence, but he must first skillfully navigate 1st-century Jewish societal reactions to surprise pregnancies out of wedlock.

Matthew’s approach to the Jesus story is told from within the Jewish patriarchal worldview of the men in charge. I have an intense personal unease with this feature of his approach. As a gay man, I learned early to fear the power of the patriarchy and to be deeply suspicious of the presentation of scripture through the exclusive lens of the men-in-change, in whose worldview there was no place for someone like me.

Richard Swanson is – at least to my way of thinking – a delightfully provocative biblical commentator who never misses an opportunity to take the patriarchal voice – that is, the traditional interpretation of scripture from the restrictive perspective of the men-in-charge – down a peg or two. Swanson coined the delicious phrase Holy Baritones to describe scripture’s patriarchal voice. My not infrequent uneasiness with Matthew’s voice is that, at times, he seems to me to epitomize the role of section leader in the Holy Baritone chorus.

It’s only in verse 18 that Matthew turns to the birth of Jesus. Having, as I’ve already noted, spent the first 17 verses of his 25-verse first chapter establishing Jesus’ identity at the heart of Jewish patriarchal transmission. Matthew writes:

When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child.

In a society with a strict prohibition against sex before marriage, which by the way is a central convention in all patriarchal societies, including our own until relatively recently, Matthew chooses to introduce the birth of Jesus by telling us that Mary was found to be with child.

Was found to be is a grammatical structure known as the divine passive. It’s a way of telling us that so and so happened while obscuring causality. For the Hebrew writers, it was a way of indicating that something had occurred by the hand of God without invoking the name that could not be spoken. Matthew makes clear that Mary’s pregnancy is the result of God’s hidden hand. Still, unlike Luke’s portrayal of a direct encounter between Mary and the Archangel Gabriel, in which God addresses Mary directly and respects her primary decision-making agency, the thrust of Matthew’s narrative suggests that, once Mary’s pregnancy is discovered, she no longer has any agency, with all decision-making reserved to Joseph.

Matthew presents Joseph in a predicament. His reputation, through no fault of his own, is endangered by this turn of events. A kindly middle-aged widower with a teenage betrothed, he is resolved to end the engagement quietly. What a mensch! But here’s my problem with Matthew’s Joseph-focused version of events. In a religious society with draconian laws against sex before marriage, Joseph’s risk is one of public disgrace. Still, Mary risks honor killing by being stoned to death – in the first instance by her father – and if he could not bring himself to do the deed, then by another male relative – an uncle, or brother, or male cousin conveniently waiting in the wings. The reality of honor killing is a nasty detail that the Holy Baritone voice skips over in silence.

So how is Joseph to be extricated from his predicament of being betrothed to a girl who has now been found with child. Matthew rescues Joseph through the tried and trusted literary device of an angel appearing to him in a dream, telling him not to be afraid. Afraid of what we might ask? – if not a reputational disgrace. The angel instructs Joseph to proceed with the marriage because it is God who has caused Mary’s pregnancy. On waking, Joseph dares to do as the angel had commanded him. After all, what’s social opprobrium when compared with divine displeasure?

We might expect Matthew to end his chapter here. Joseph the mensch rescues his betrothed by marrying her. But as a cheerleader for the Holy Baritone voice, Matthew is not done yet. He rather tellingly – to my mind at least – mentions that while Joseph married Mary, he declined to consummate the marriage until after the child was born.

Why does Matthew feel the need to tell us this? Well, one of the pervading themes of the Holy Baritone voice is a preoccupation with genital penetration and sexual purity. As today’s conservative obsession with the restriction of women’s reproductive, queer, and transgender rights continues to demonstrate, this preoccupation continues a story older than time.

Let’s listen again to Matthew’s voice:

When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son, and named him Jesus.

Although Joseph did as he was commanded, we will never know how he actually felt; however, we have a hint of how Matthew thought he might.

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Hope is in the Waiting

On Advent Sunday, I explored the conundrum of time usually pictured as moving in a straight line, flowing only in one direction – from past to future. Drawing from a few lines of T.S.Eliot in his poem Little Gidding, I contended that our usual way of thinking about time, rather than describing reality, is simply a construction around which to organize our lives. What Eliot hints at is a notion of timelessness interrupting the linear flow of predictability: timelessness in which time bends back on itself—where memory and imagination meet, where, under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present, and God’s future leans toward us with urgency.

Today on the 3rd Sunday in Advent I want to explore another conundrum – that of hope and hoping, with reference once again to a few lines of T.S. Eliot in his poem East Coker:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope – for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Eliot is pointing us toward a distinction we rarely pause to notice between the action of hoping … and the object of our hope. That distinction lies at the heart of Advent, where, between the act of hoping and the object of our hope, we encounter the experience of waiting.

When hope disappoints us, is it because, as Eliot warns, we’ve placed our hope in the wrong thing?

So the question quietly pulsing beneath the themes in Advent is this:
How do we know whether our hope is rightly placed?

Act One and Act Two

Jesus’ fellow Jews in the first century lived with a deep, transgenerational expectation of the coming one—the messiah. A small group came to believe that this long-awaited hope had finally arrived in Jesus and that the messianic age had dawned.

But there was a problem. An enormous problem. How do you proclaim a messiah … who is dead? A dead messiah was not part of anyone’s expectations, prompting the first Christians to understand the dawning of the messianic age as a two-act process.

Act One: In Jesus—through death and resurrection—God had begun the messianic age. Act Two: What had begun would be completed when the Lord returned. Only then would God bring the long hope of Israel—and the hope of all creation—to its promised fulfillment. But it’s difficult to find ourselves living in the tension between the beginning of Act one and the still distant fulfilment of Act two. And so somewhere along the way, we Christians, especially in the Western mainline, quietly jettisoned a real expectation of a second act in the fulfillment of the messianic age.

We still say the words:

He will come again to judge the living and the dead. And Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

But is this still our actual expectation? Not so much.

We no longer live with any urgency around Christ’s return. Advent has become almost entirely about Act One—the Incarnation. A sweet baby. A quiet Bethlehem. A familiar story.

So when we jettison Act Two—what do we put in its place? We replace the early Christian hope of God renewing heaven and earth with a far more comfortable expectation: that when we die, we will be transported into eternal bliss. Instead of Christ coming to us, we will go to him.
Heaven is the end. Mission accomplished.

But note the subtle shift: Hope has moved from the renewal of creation to the escape from creation. A small shift with enormous consequences.

Competing Expectations—Then and Now

When John the Baptist began preaching his fiery message of repentance, many flocked to him because they thought he might be the coming one. Every Jew lived with urgent expectation. Yet, as with all expectations, there was a wide divergence about what the messiah was actually supposed to do.

Some clung to Isaiah’s great vision of cosmic renewal, which we listened to in the first reading from Isaiah 35. This is a vision of the desert blooming, the blind seeing, the lame leaping, the whole creation singing. A kind of divine re-terraforming of the earth.

Others, humiliated under Roman occupation, longed for a more political messiah.  A military leader. A racial champion. One who would restore the fortunes of Israel and make Israel great again.

Two expectations. Two hopes. Both fervent. Both biblical. Both alive in the hearts of first-century Jews.

And into this tangle of hope comes the moment in Matthew’s Gospel—with John the Baptist, now in prison, becoming afraid, unsure, increasingly doubting.

He sends messengers to ask Jesus:
Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect another?

We can imagine the roots of his doubt. John was a firebrand. He expected a messiah with a bit more muscle. A bit more judgment. A lot more nationalistic fervor.

And Jesus—wily as ever—refuses a direct answer.
He doesn’t debate. He doesn’t reassure. He doesn’t explain away the paradox. He simply says:

Go tell John what you see and hear. The blind see. The lame walk. The lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear. The poor receive good news.

In other words: remind John of Isaiah’s messianic expectation. The object of John’s hope is misplaced – his hope is hoping for the wrong thing.

Jesus aligns himself not with tribal ambition but with prophetic transformation. Not with national restoration but with justice, mercy, and renewal.

That same clash of expectations is alive today—very much alive—in the American church. Among large swaths of white evangelical Christianity, the hope is for a more muscular Jesus. A more tribal – a racially pure Jesus. A more nationalistic Jesus. A Jesus who will restore the fortunes of a particular nation, through political power at home and military strength abroad.

It is, as in the first century, hope for the wrong thing. And Jesus refuses to endorse it.

The Advent Question for Us

We who call ourselves mainstream Christians face the same choice John faced. The same choice the early Church faced. And the stakes today feel just as high.

Do we continue to ignore the New Testament’s two-act expectation, living with our eyes fixed solely on the reward of heavenly bliss? A single-act Christianity of personal salvation? A spirituality that floats above the world rather than being incarnated within it? Or do we recover Act Two—the expectation that Christ will return to this world, bringing justice to this society, healing to this creation?

Because the expectations we choose shape the lives we live.

If we believe the earth is simply the disposable staging ground before we depart for heaven, then why bother with justice? Why bother with creation? Why bother with anything beyond my personal ticket to ride the heaven-bound express?

But if we believe that God intends to redeem this material reality, then we understand our present responsibilities very differently – to become collaborators with God, agitators for peace with justice, stewards of the earth, and repairers of the breach. People who embody this hope – now—in real time.

So How Do We Know Whether Our Hope Is Right?

Let me return to the question that has been quietly humming underneath everything:

How do we know whether our hope is for the right or wrong thing?

Is our hope placed in some future escape from this world into heavenly bliss—while the world around us burns, and injustice deepens, and creation groans under the weight of greed and neglect?

Or is our hope placed in the renewal of all things— the healing of creation, the raising of what has fallen, the setting right of what has gone wrong?

Is our hope aligned with John’s early instinct for a tribal, forceful messiah? Or with Jesus’ prophetic vision of the messiah as the herald for the inbreaking of God’s justice, healing, and ecological restoration?

Enormous consequences flow from the hope we choose. Because hope is realized in the waiting, and in the spaciousness of waiting, future expectation folds back into present-time action.

Into the spaciousness of waiting time bends to flow back on itself — here memory and imagination meet, here under the influence of the future, the past unsettles the present, and God’s future leans toward us with urgency as we discover that the power of that for which we wait is already – I repeat, already effective within us.

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