'relationalrealities' is the recognition human beings are designed to be in relationships. Relationality is the meaning of being made in the image of God who is by divine nature, relational – Lover, Beloved, and Love-sharer..
Love hurts, and our hearts have an all too familiar affinity with suffering. Yet, if we dwell on our suffering, we are in danger of being little more than mere spectators of Jesus’ suffering on his way to the Cross.
It’s so easy to stand and watch from a safe distance, comforted by an image of Jesus as the noble hero valiantly traveling the route God has set for him, seemingly heedless of the costs because, after all, he knows ahead of time how things will end.
But we must go deeper than this if we are to move from spectators to participants in Jesus’ Passion. You see, if we are to be participants, then Jesus must be more like us than not. We are not noble heroes passing through the drama of our lives unscathed with complete foreknowledge. And so, if he is to be more like us, then neither is Jesus.
He treads his path, a path he chooses to accept – and like us, he knows little more than what is revealed as he takes each step, putting one foot in front of the other, one breath at a time. Jesus is no noble victim sacrificing his life for the sins of the world. If we just stop there, no matter how thankful we might feel, we fail to see that the way of the Cross is God’s invitation to become transformed not by suffering, but by the power of love. For Jesus’ chooses the way of love.
Some say love it is a river that drowns the tender reed, some say love it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed, some say love it is a hunger an endless aching need. I say love, it is a flower, and you its only seed. ….
The Rose Verse 2
The Way of the Cross requires us nothing short of a transformation in our whole (moral, emotional, and spiritual) way of being. In Jesus, God’s hands get dirty as Jesus takes the initiative and leads us through example. Our acceptance, our entry into the way of love, involves risking as Jesus risked. Risk is the raw material for transformation for
It’s the heart afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance It’s the dream afraid of waking, that never takes the chance It’s the one who won’t be taking, who cannot seem to give And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live …
Entering into the way of love leads us to challenge the status quo – taking risks and stepping out in faith rather than holding back in fear. As a community, it means uncovering and challenging the cosmic forces of dehumanization woven into the very DNA of our culture and its collective memory. In our confrontation with the forces of power and privilege that stand in opposition to the expectations of the Kingdom of God, we may often fail, but we cannot be defeated. Failure is a temporary setback, not an ultimate defeat of God’s purposes for us in the unfolding repair of the world.
Entering upon the way of love – above all else means accepting an invitation to become transformed into a new way of being, one step at a time – a transformation from timid and grateful children into collaborators with God in the vision of putting the world to rights.
From mere spectators to active participants with Jesus on the way to the cross is a movement through belonging into believing, a risking that moves us from fear into loving and trusting being loved.
This is not a hero’s path. Jesus shows us that it is a very human path. On Good Friday, God shows us the way of love, motivated not by an abhorrence of sin but by what is for God—the impossibility for God of not loving enough.
When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows Lies the seed, that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose.
All we have are the stories we construct to explain the world both to ourselves and to one another. The creation of narrative is the essential building block for discovering meaning and developing purpose. Any cursory Google or web search will reveal the considerable neuroscientific evidence in support of this assertion. For example – neuroscience researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a narrative after exposure to fiction (Green & Brock, 2000; Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997; Strange & Leung, 1999; Wheeler, Green, & Brock, 1999).
The current profusion of online disinformation and conspiracy theories proves that there is always more than one way to tell a story, and the way you tell it influences beliefs and behaviors. Our awareness of competing stories increases the accuracy of our experience—to use a current slogan—there are facts, and then there are alternative facts. It’s vital to be able to distinguish between restrictive and toxic stories that restrict our capacity for creative responses and expansive stories that encourage creativity in our encounters with the world around us. We develop accuracy of perception, clarity of meaning, and purpose as we select between competing narrative storylines because it’s vital to know which storyline we are participating in.
The power of a storyline rests on its capacity to attract our attention and command our allegiance. We may construct a storyline to make sense of the world as we experience it, but once we do so, that storyline has the power to own us. The question of the current moment is, among competing storylines available to us, which storyline will we choose to believe? From among a bewildering choice of possibilities, which stories will command our allegiance?
With the spread of online information, the question of which stories we allow to shape our perceptions of reality is the question of the moment. We might be surprised to learn that this is not only a modern problem.
Palm Sunday offers a snapshot of competing storylines from Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before the Passover and his crucifixion. On Palm Sunday, we witness a clash of competing storylines that are particular to Jesus’ 1st-century setting yet are also universal – timeless.
There is the storyline of sacred violence as the storyline of empire – that is – the unrestrained exercise of power to dominate and subjugate. From Rome to Rule Britannia, from the European legacy of colonial violence to the revival of Putin’s dream of the Russian imperium – not to forget to mention here the legacy and current ugly resurgence of American manifest destiny – the storyline of empire repeats endlessly across time.
Then there is the storyline of populist nationalism with its blood-socked dreams of liberation. On Palm Sunday the waving of palms was a significant echo from Jewish-nationalist collective memory. For some 160 years before, the triumphant Judas Maccabeus, the last leader of a successful Jewish revolt against foreign domination, led his victorious partisans into the Temple – which the Hellenist tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes had defiled by placing his statue in the Holy of Holies. Using palm branches, the Maccabean partisans cleansed and rededicated the sanctuary after its defilement. On entering the sanctuary, they discovered miraculously the last light of the Menorah still burning – an event Jews, today, celebrate in the festival of Hanukkah.
On Palm Sunday, this more recent Jewish storyline of national liberation found a powerful amplification in Israel’s more ancient founding story of liberation—commemorated in the festival of the Passover.
Inhabiting the amplified storyline of national liberation, the crowds ecstatically welcome Jesus into the city. They have yet to discover that they have chosen the wrong storyline. But they will do so – and rather quickly, with the result that they will pivot from exuberance to disillusionment and anger over the course of days. Jesus may be the Messiah, but his messiahship is part of a third storyline—that of the dream of God’s salvation, not of Jewish national liberation.
Casting our mind’s eye over the competing storylines converging on Palm Sunday, we observe that at the same time as Jesus was entering the city from the east, a second triumphal entry procession wound its way into the city from the west. The Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate, at the head of a militia made up mostly of Samaritan mercenaries, had also come up to Jerusalem for the Passover.
As Prefect, Pilate was a vicious yet relatively low-level regional administrator who reported directly to Vitellius, governor of the Province of Syria. Each year at the Passover, Pilate came up to Jerusalem – forsaking the sea breezes of Caesarea Maritima— Herod the Great’s former capital and now the administrative center of the Roman occupation of Judea.
Pilate loathed and feared Jerusalem’s ancient rabbit warrens seething with civil and religious discontent. He most feared the pilgrim throngs crowding into the city for the Passover, swelling the city’s normal population of between 20-30,000 to over 150,000. The stability of Roman imperial rule required Pilate to come up to the city with a show of preemptive force to forestall any potential for insurrection.
Passover was Israel’s founding story of liberation from slavery. Pilate’s arrival was indeed a wise move, for the crowds hailing Jesus’ arrival were in insurrection mood. Being caught, as they would soon discover, in the wrong Messiah storyline—would have dire consequences for Jesus.
In the week leading to the celebration of Passover, we see with hindsight the lethal intersection of these three competing storylines – of imperial domination and political violence intersecting with populist resistance and longing for national liberation – both confronted by the next installment in the epic storyline of God’s love and vision for the world-through-Israel. This clash of storylines results in a chain of events that takes an unexpected turn – rapidly spiraling out of everyone’s control.
Emotionally and spiritually bloodied by our passage through the snapshots of Holy Week violence, we will eventually arrive at a different story – a new story – a bigger and better story – the unlikely story of Easter. Yet, on Palm Sunday, we’ve some way to travel before arriving there.
Holy Week is when we accompany Jesus on his journey to the cross. For some of us, this can be an intensely personal experience as our own experiences of loss and suffering – our passion – surface in identification with Jesus. For most of us, however, the nature of our Holy Week experience is less personal and more communal.
As liturgical Christians, we journey with Jesus as a community – each liturgical step along the way. Each snapshot is a prism refracting our own individual suffering and our identification with the overwhelming suffering of the wider world – an experience amplified by events in 2025.
Liturgy transports us together through sacred time. In sacred time, there is no past and no future, only the eternal now. Here, our individuality dissolves as we become participants in the events that engulf Jesus, erasing separation across time and then becoming now. As I’ve mentioned, we are no strangers to the storylines of sacred violence and national populist yearning for a messiah.
Choosing the right story to explain the world to ourselves is crucial. Choosing the wrong story leads only to disillusionment and rage.
Like the crowds praising Jesus as he entered the Holy City, we enthusiastically hail our next political savior until that is, – he or she no longer is.
We long to do the courageous thing – until that is, the moment when we don’t.
In sacred time, we become participants with Jesus—as if we were part of his band of disciples during this eventful last week. With them, we will share in the breaking of Jesus’ Passover bread and drink from his Passover cup. With them, we will accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane, where we, too, will fight sleep to keep watch with him through the night and early hours of Friday morning. With them, we will follow Jesus on the way of his suffering to the cross. For like them – we will long do the courageous thing – until the moment when we we won’t.
History does not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
The parable of the Prodigal Son occurs only in Luke. Among all Jesus’ parables in Luke this one captures the singular tone of Luke’s humanistic presentation of Jesus.
In 2013, in a sermon on this text titled A Punch to the Gut, I drew out the parallels between Luke’s parable of the prodigal and Hogarth’s 18th century series of drawings in A Rake’s Progress – chronicling a young man’s unravelling from fashionable young buck- about-London-town – newly come into his inheritance – to that of a broken man – destitute and driven mad with syphilis he’s incarcerated in the famous Bedlam hospital where along with the other inmates he becomes an object of curiosity for the fashionable of the day who loved to gape at the inmates as if they were animals in a zoo.
A fun fact is that the first hospice for the mad was dedicated in 1267 as the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem at London’s Moorgate. During the reign of Henry VIII, the priory was dissolved and reestablished by royal charter as the Bethlem Royal Hospital – where I served as chaplain for 18 years. In the 17th century, the name Bedlam – a popular derivation of Bethlem became a synonym for chaos and madness and which today remains in common use.
In 2013 I focused on the destuctive narcissism of the young man as psychologically illustrative of the process Luke describes in his parable of the prodigal son. Then I wrote of the younger son seeing other people and situations as simply an extension of his own wants and desires. He cares little for his father, or brother, nor for the women he consorts with. They are simply the momentary extensions of his own wishes- needs, and to him have no life independent of what and who he needs them to fulfill his desires. At the lowest ebb of his life, is it the emergence of sorrow and repentance that reminds him of his father’s love, or is it his narcissistic expectation that his father will once again meet his needs regardless of his actions? Such a myopic psychological analysis seems a rather indulgent luxury when viewed from preaching demands in these more turbulant times.
Today I’m more conscious of the parable’s multilayered complexity. It’s a story as much about the elder son as the younger – as much about the father as either of the sons. Taking Luke’s parable as the parable of a loving father – provides a different starting point for my reflection on the text today.
Who among us does not know the experience of a wayward child? If that is too strong an expression at least many of us will know the pain and concern felt when our children begin to chart courses in life very different from the ones we had anticipated for them – making decisions we would have wished they made differently.
Luke sketches out the scene as Jesus leaves the synagogue where he’s been engaged in a long discussion with the Pharisees following the Shabbat service. As he comes out into the street, he’s mobbed by a crowd who had been loitering with intent to waylay the teacher outside the synagogue doors. In describing them as tax collectors and sinners, Luke is drawing our attention to the fact that these are the ritually unclean, those who would not have been allowed through the synagogue’s doors. Unable to listen to Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees inside, they are eager to hear him nevertheless. The Pharisees, following Jesus out into the street begin to grumble behind him about the shameful way Jesus is mixing with the ritually unclean. Clearly aware of their grumbling he begins to tell everyone this parable: There was a man who had two sons —. .
We can’t know with any certainty what ending the crowd outside the synagogue – both the virtuous pharisees and the ritually unclean expected from this parable. But we do know how subsequent interpretations have sought to reduce it to a rather simplistic morality tale about the wages of sin with strong patriarchal themes of judgment about sex with prostitutes, disobedience to fathers, and the wages of sin contrasted with the importance of duty. The younger son, in following his hedonistic desires, comes -predictably – to a sticky end. When hard times overwhelm him, he is forced to humiliate himself by going back home with his tail between his legs to beg his father’s forgiveness. You can hear the tut tutting down 2000 years of interpretation – be this a lesson for all you rebellious sons.
Both moralistic and psychological interpretations of the text focus on the motivation of the younger son, ignoring both the responses of his elder brother and his father. What about the elder son’s reactions to his brother’s return? What about the father’s inexplicable pining for his profligate son’s return? Both challenge the traditional worldview of this parable as a morality tale.
This parable offends against the traditions that emphasize the virtues of obedience and duty to strict fatherly rule and the honoring of the firstborn over the younger. It challenges the virtues of blind filial duty. It skirts over being dutiful and hard working on the family estate seems to have bred in the elder son only a deep sense grievance – an envious resentment of his brother and a disparaging contempt for his father. In confronting his father, he refers to his brother not as my brother but as this son of yours – aptly articulating his anger towards both.
The traditional reading of this story is likewise conflicted on how to picture the father – whose indulgent generosity flies in the face of conventional inheritance custom. His willingness to take back his son – failing to hold him to account for his profligate ways smacks of more than a little moral weakness if not an indulgence dangerous to hierarchical moral order.
Reading this story through the filter of patriarchal relations has been one of the two main ways this parable is favoured by tradition. The other has been to read it through the filter of antisemitism. The father is God. The elder son represents the Jews. and the younger son, the Christians. We can all see where this reading is headed.
But if Jesus were standing in this pulpit, orienting himself to our 21st century mindset he might ask so who do you identify with in this story? This is not simply a question for us as individuals – it has wider social-relation implications. As middle-class folk, dutiful, obedient, hardworking, and schooled in the virtues of delayed gratification, I imagine few of us identify with the headstrong younger son and his deeply narcissistic and self-destructive choices.
Reading the story through the lens of the prodigal son simply confirms our moral judgment of him as selfish and irresponsible – or a psychological interpretation of him as emotionally and psychologically immature. Both comfortably distance us from him and his choices. Reading the story through the lens of the elder son is likely to evoke more sympathy in us. We easily identify with his feelings and reactions – for who among us has not had an experience of being passed over in preference to another. However, it’s when we read this parable through the lens of the father – in other words, hearing the parable through the filter of his feelings and responses that we discover our disapproval of his indulgent, seemingly uncritical and nonjudgmental welcoming of his son’s return. He not only fails to call his son to account but throws caution and financial prudence to the winds – giving completely the wrong signal by appearing to reward bad behavior with a lavish party.
We can’t know how his 1st-century hearers, thronging the road outside the synagogue, expected this story to end. Yet for us today, the parable certainly carries a sting in its tail. We can be clear that Jesus is primarily painting a picture of God as a noncritical and non-judgmental father. God is recklessly generous, failing to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy as recipients of his love. God is a vigilant father whose is by his nature compelled to keep a watchful vigil in the hope of his wayward children’s return. Jesus paints a picture of God as a shockingly indulgent father who treats our return as the occasion for a wild celebration of new life – for his son who was as good as dead and has now come back to life – lost and now found..
The question remains, however, how does this picture of God leave us feeling? We may be happy to imagine ourselves as the recipients of such reckless generosity. But as a model for us to emulate towards anyone who has the power to hurt and disappoint us – we might feel some ambivalence.
Like all of Jesus’ parables, it operates at two levels. In the setting of its telling – the street outside the synagogue – the Pharisees can be depicted as the sincerely religious – men of real integrity and longing to know and love God more. Yet, their ability to be sincere in their spiritual quest is a product of their privileged social and economic status. In debate with Jesus, they are intrigued but remain cautious for being the privileged; they feel that they have much to lose. They want to know what the right path is before they commit to following it. Contrastingly, it’s those whose occupation or lack of one excludes them from among the company of the righteous – who have nothing to lose and who seem open to, and excited by, the invitation implicit in this parable.
We don’t know if the elder son did eventually swallow his hurt pride and join the feast – the parable leaves us with this possibility, for the father’s invitation is open-ended.
Although the parable does not have a clear concluding moral message, it nevertheless has a rub that chafes. The rub is – grace is never free. Oh, it’s offered freely by God and there is no pre-qualification required to receive its invitation. The offer is free, but the acceptance is costly. Identifying with the elder son – what would it cost us to relinquish our resentment and go into the feast? If we can identify with the younger son – what would it cost us to return home, humiliated?
The younger son knows that the grace of the father’s undying love is costly. Both the Pharisees and the tax collectors know that grace is costly. For the Pharisee, it’s costly to give up a presumption of righteousness. For the socially marginalized and religiously excluded, grace comes at the cost of lives of humiliation.
Like the father in this parable, who among us does not know the cost of unconditional, nonjudgmental love? Who among us has not suffered the pain of watching our children chart different life trajectories that either lead to painful and unsuccessful outcomes or hurt us in their rejection of our values and assumptions? We know that, like God’s grace, our love is not free; it exacts its own cost.
Becoming open to the new – now there’s a counter-cultural proposition if ever there was one. Landscapes change, challenging us to take our values, principles, and beliefs with us as we find our bearings in a new and unfamiliar landscape.
The story of the call of Moses, as we receive it in Exodus 3, is the work of the Deuteronomist scribes of the Babylonian captivity following Jerusalem’s fall and the Temple’s sacking in 586 BC. The seven decades of the Babylonian captivity confronted the Jewish exiles with the challenge of rebuilding a sense of national and religious identity in a dramatically changed landscape. Soul searching for the meaning of events that had befallen them required them to confront the painful question- had God abandoned them in their captivity? In search of an answer, the scribes returned to their stories of national and religious origin. The fruit of this exploration emerged as the book of Exodus. Returning to the stories of national origin, the Jews of the captivity found meaning in present-time events and imagined a new future in restoring national identity.
As we find in Exodus 3, the story of the call of Moses is a reassembling from the fragments of oral folk memory. Many Bible stories – particularly origin stories follow this method. Remembering has less to do with reviving an old tale than with forging a new one.
As we receive the story of the call of Moses, we note the relationship between the time in which the story is set, around 1500 BC, and the circumstances at the later period of composition between 586 and 539 BC. As I’ve just noted, projecting present-time themes back into the past is a tried-and-true method biblical writers used when it was not always safe to be transparent. It’s not only biblical writers who employ this method. Shakespeare’s history plays covering the period from 1399 – 1485 purport to chronicle the rulers and events between these years. Yet, what we see portrayed in his history plays is a picture of Elizabethan and Jacobean society’s politics, entertainment, and social situations, safely projected into the medieval period. In this way, Shakespeare commented on current events without risking losing his head – literally. The purpose of remembering has less to do with reviving an old story than with forging a new one.
The call of Moses is a multilayered story about the struggle to hold onto cultural identity during a period of national catastrophe. There is an overarching narrative linking later issues of exile with an earlier period of captivity. However, within the narrative, events become powerfully instructional. Within the story, we discover the importance of curiosity, the importance of paying attention to peripheral vision, the oscillation between forgetting and remembering, the location of divine encounter as in the place where God meets us, and the struggle to find the courage to respond to God’s call.
Curiosity and the importance of peripheral vision. The story opens with Moses shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep for fresh pasture. Walking along a familiar track, he should have focused on what lay directly ahead of him. However, he becomes distracted when his curiosity is aroused by something he sees flickering in his peripheral vision – glimpsed, as we might say, out of the corner of his eye.
Isn’t this often the way of things. It’s not what appears to be most evident that we need to pay attention to but what we glimpse – caught out of the corner of our eye. Don’t we love those detective stories in which a witness being questioned about the details of the crime remembers something crucial in solving the case? At first, they claim not to have seen anything important. Yet, through painstaking detective prompting – bit by bit, their memory is unlocked, revealing something recorded by their peripheral vision.
Moses detours from his beaten path to better view this fantastic sight of a bush burning without being consumed. As he approaches the burning bush, he hears a voice calling from the heart of the flames: Moses, remove your shoes, for you are about to enter holy ground. He does so and encounters that which will change the trajectory of his life – propelling him onto a new path toward his still-to-emerge life’s purpose.
Forgetting and remembering. Reading between the lines, we are surprised that Moses does not know the god who addressed him. In declaring that he is the God of his fathers, God jogs the collective memory fragments of Moses’ Hebrew identity. Remember, Moses was raised as an Egyptian. The reason he wanders around leading someone else’s sheep is because of the conflict between his Egyptian and Hebrew identities that eventually forces him into exile. Forgetting and remembering – the relationship of the past to the future – become the pivotal themes in the conversation between Moses and God.
God does not waste time after the introductions are over in declaring the purpose he has in mind for Moses. God is asking Moses to return to Egypt to remind the people that the god whom they have forgotten – has not forgotten them. For the hearers of the story in Babylon, this was a reminder that even as they were in danger of forgetting God, God would not forget them.
The place of encounter. Moses is leading his father-in-law’s flock through a landscape described as a place beyond the wilderness. The incurious among us might miss the significance of this description by simply picturing Moses walking through an arid desert landscape – in other words, a wilderness. But he’s not walking through a wilderness- he’s walking into a landscape beyond the wilderness – a description that implies entering a changed landscape – one beyond previous experience – devoid of recognizable signposts.
Moses is tasked with reintroducing God to the Hebrews and, in so doing, conveying a message of hope to them. As with all significant life-changing challenges – Moses is frightened and seeks to avoid the responsibility by playing down his fitness for the task. Even if I take your message to them, why should they believe me? I imagine many of us are similarly daunted by the task of reintroducing the God of the biblical record, the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to a culture held firmly in the grasp of a modern-day Pharaoh.
God’s new name. Up to this point in the story, God has identified as the God of memory – the God of your fathers.In answer to Moses’ understandable hesitancy, God instructs him to give the Hebrews his new name, symbolized by the Hebrew acronym YHWH – translated as I am who I am. God instructs Moses to tell the Hebrews that I am has sent me to you.
The Hebrew letters YHWH shimmer with ambiguity. The ambiguity of meaning is an outstanding characteristic of Hebrew, wholly lost in English translation. The Hebrew I am who I am, suggests a shimmering oscillation between I am who I have been, and I am who I will be. A God identified with memory becomes a God of future possibility.
The God of their fathers resurfaces into Hebrew consciousness – not as a God of distant memory but henceforth as Yahweh, a God of future hope and promise – a God whom they may have forgotten -but who has not forgotten them and who is inviting them into a changed landscape – into a place beyond the wilderness – a place of new beginning replacing the mourning for the past.
Today, rather like the Hebrews in Egypt and the Jews in Babylon, we find ourselves in a culture in which God, as revealed in the biblical record, has likewise become forgotten. Most Americans no longer share a common religious knowledge, allowing us to access a shared memory of God. The younger the generation, the worse it becomes. Outright rejection accompanies a general ignorance regarding the biblical stories through which God introduced God-self to former generations.
You might object that there is a vocal minority that loudly proclaims divinely mediated knowledge of God. However, this god is not recognizable as the God of Moses. The god of popular American Christian Nationalism is a god who no longer hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed, the voice of the stranger and the dispossessed, the plight of the victims of a cruel hatred for the LGBTQ+ community. This god is vociferously celebrated for his deafness, along with his whiteness and his maleness.
Today, we painfully awaken to the experience of finding ourselves in a changed landscape. Will we reach a place beyond the wilderness where new connections forge new possibilities to be grasped?
Receiving this story in 2025, we can’t avoid the question: are we willing to take our values, principles, and beliefs into a changed landscape – into an encounter with a God of future possibility? Or will we continue to mourn the loss of previous certainties – pretending that we don’t notice things have changed? In a changed landscape – a place beyond the wilderness God reintroduces God-self to us. No longer a God of fading or even of forgotten memory – but a God of vibrant present-time hope and future possibility – calling us to slough off the dead shell of yesterday and begin to live the life to which we are called. But this requires fortitude to resist being coopted into pharaoh’s camp. It will require finding the courage to confront a culture that seeks to make one man God so that all men become slaves. My goodness, if we do, then who might we become?
Looking at the gospel reading from Luke chapter 9, you will see that we are given two options. The first is to read only verses 28-36. Here, we hear the story of Jesus taking Peter and John on a mountain climb. On reaching the summit, Jesus becomes transfigured – his face shining with intense illumination and his clothes glowing with a dazzling whiteness. We note the echo of Moses’ experience on the mountaintop of Sinai reported in the OT lesson from Exodus 34.
Between verses 28- 36, we learn that the disciples gaze amazed yet fearfully at Jesus, speaking with Moses and Elijah – discussing Jesus’ journey to his death in Jerusalem.
The last Sunday after Epiphany is not the celebration of the feast of the Transfiguration – which takes place on August 6th. Today, we simply hear the story of Jesus and the disciples’ transfiguration experience as the transition story that marks the movement from Epiphany into Lent.
Epiphany means showing – a peeling away the layers of appearance to reveal the underlying true nature of things. Epiphany season begins on January 6th with the event known as The Epiphany – recalling the visit of the Magi to the infant Christ Child – signaling the non-Jewish world’s recognition of Jesus as the promised one foretold by Israel’s prophets. A second epiphany with a small e occurs a week later when we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus – during which the voice from heaven reveals Jesus as God’s openly acknowledged son. After his baptism, the clouds part as the heavens open to herald God’s proclamation of Jesus’ divine sonship. During Jesus’ transfiguration experience, once again, we hear the voice of God repeating the earlier proclamation of Jesus’ sonship – but in contrast to the clouds parting and the heavens opening, this time the voice sounds from within the density of a dark cloud descending to envelop the mountain summit.
The story of the Transfiguration functions as a final epiphany with a small e – in this case, a piercing of the layers of appearance exposing the underlying hidden truth of Jesus’ identity as a preparation for his fateful journey to Jerusalem. The story also functions as a literary device, marking the halfway point in the gospel narratives between Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and his journey to Jerusalem – his death and resurrection. We can picture the Galilee ministry progressing towards an epiphany on the mountaintop. Likewise, we can picture the trip to Jerusalem beginning with the descent from the mountain – setting out on the hard road through Lent to the destination of the cross before the final epiphany of his resurrection.
The story of the Transfiguration operates symbolically similarly to when Dr Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed I have been to the mountain top, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. No one ever thought he was claiming to have climbed a mountain to describe the view on the other side. They understood his use of the mountaintop as a symbol with deep theological and biblical resonance. Likewise, for the synoptic gospel writers – Mark, Matthew, and Luke – the story of the Transfiguration is loaded with theological and biblical resonance, linking the beginning of the Jesus story with its ultimate ending – from birth through death to resurrection.
So far, so good. But suppose we continue to read beyond verses 36 to 43. In that case, we enter into a bracketed section of text – bracketed to indicate that in the mind of the Lectionary compilers, these verses are optional. The bracketing might suggest a desire to keep the gospel reading short. But it also strikes me that the bracketing of verses 37-43 not only leaves the story incomplete but also might indicate how much more comfortable we are with experiences of transcendence than those of immanence.
Mountaintop experience symbolizes much hankered after peak experience – the spiritual high – the blissful experience. In contrast, the journey down shows Jesus reentering the noise and chaos – the tension, the messiness of the world. The arguing and recrimination in the scene that greets him at the bottom of the mountain is emblematic of our life experience when we come down from the highs of peak experience. Transitory bliss is soon dissipated amidst the more familiar feelings of anger, frustration, exasperation, and disappointment. Jesus does not hold back in expressing all these feelings in the face of human propensities and pretensions as he cries You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?
Today’s gospel marks our transition from Epiphany to Lent. Figuratively, we descend from Epiphany’s heights to accompany Jesus on the rugged and stony road through Lent that will lead us to Jerusalem and beyond. This year, we hear the readings for the last Sunday before Lent sounding within the unique context of the present time in which we can’t ignore the fact that today, we revisit the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain in the context of profound shock at the speed with which the world as we have come to know it seems to be coming apart at the seams.
We are sick at heart –aching with concern for the thousands of legal refugees now stranded across the globe at ports of debarkation for the US – clutching their State Department permissions to enter the US now seemingly not worth the paper they were written on. Our concern encompasses the legal refugees newly arrived in the US whose resettlement programs have now been defunded. Our hearts are full of fear for the families of undocumented immigrants – families where parents and children at the beginning of each day wonder if they will still be together at day’s end.
We seethe with rage at the callous indifference shown to thousands of faithful civil servants whose employment has been summarily terminated by the click of the send button.
We blanch with shame as America insidiously affirms Russian aggression before the General Assembly of the United Nations. We watch in fascinated horror as foreign leaders are welcomed, unaware that the Oval Office has now been transformed into the set of The Apprentice. Bravo to President Zelensky, who, unlike the ritual humiliation of Jordan’s King Abdullah two weeks ago, refused to play the game and pretend he didn’t recognize that the subtle art of diplomacy is now replaced by the crude art of the deal.
Our faith in sound government is further corroded by a deepening cynicism as we witness once more a cowered Congress embarking on swinging budget cuts – not to put a dent in the national debt but to give wiggle room for a trillion dollars in tax giveaways to the 1%.
But lest I be accused of laying blame at others’ doors, as the blame game goes around and around, there is enough blame to crown all our heads with shame. Dietrich Bonhoeffer –our go-to prophet for our age – speaking to his fellow pastor-resisters during Christmas 1942 pulls us up short, reminding us of our failings. To paraphrase him: we stand in grave danger lest we become even more the silent witnesses of evil deeds. We stand in peril of further perfecting our defense skills, relying on our learning in the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. If we fail to protest in the face of a deluge of unbearable events, we will become more worn down – become – as if it were possible – even more cynical – so that Bonhoeffer’s question – Are we still of any use, becomes the question for our age.
Kristopher Norris, Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington DC, in the Baptist Global News wrote: With family separations at the border, automatic detentions, dangerous dehumanizing rhetoric from our highest office and authoritarian misappropriations of scripture from our highest attorney, many churches and Christian leaders have remained silent witnesses. Three-fourths of white evangelicals continue to support these policies. Other churches and Christian leaders have responded with appropriate outrage. We’ve said this is not who we are — as Americans or as Christians. But Bonhoeffer’s words should compel us to take a deeper look at ourselves, at our history, and acknowledge that this is not true…. this is who we are as Americans ….. this is who we are as Christians ….. for this – citing the legacy of white Christian Nationalism is our collective history.
On Ash Wednesday, we will hear the Church’s invitation to the observance of a holy Lent.Among the traditional disciplines – the practices of discipleship – repentance is named as the chief way to make a right beginning. It is not only the best way to make a proper beginning, but it will remain the only way we will stay self-reflective and course for Jerusalem.
Repentance is the mark of our mortal nature, and repentance must become our byword as we accompany Jesus through the arid landscape of Lent, navigating the stony path to Jerusalem. In this life, it’s not what happens on the mountaintop that shapes us but how we conduct ourselves on the downward journey into the inevitable confrontation with the challenges of life in the world ruled by the demons of our age.
It’s Friday morning, a sunny but still bitterly cold morning. From my desk, I look out on the panorama of the houses and streets that, from North Main Street, climb College Hill to its apex crowned by the impressive verdigris dome of the Christian Science Church. I always think this an odd choice of architecture for a Christian Science church, yet like a great classical cathedral its dome dominates the horizon.
On this particular Friday morning, I am struggling to clear my head of the fog of the head cold – currently doing the rounds – that has laid me low since the previous Sunday. I’m daydreaming—casting around for inspiration to take me into a spiritual riff on the lectionary texts for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany. This Friday morning feeling is familiar – the tension between despair at the task lying before me and a curiosity that stimulates my imagination sooner or later will provide the hook for my fresh engagement with the texts for the day.
Genesis 45 and Luke 6 address the tension between the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you and the law of retaliation do unto others as they have done unto you. A distinction lies in the inclusion or absence of four words that, insignificant in themselves, have the power to determine the course towards the promise of liberation from or the endless repetition of cycles of victimization and retaliation in individual and wider social relations.
From general observation, we can often see themes connecting the OT and the Gospel texts, which alert us to the particularity of God’s timely invitation. Between OT story and Gospel teaching, we find old themes reemphasized and given new impetus.
The experience of victimization – whether real or imagined – fosters the illusion that retaliation will provide satisfaction for past injury. This is the theme that the story of Joseph and his brothers and the teaching of Jesus in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is timely – speaking into the dilemmas of our current time.
Joseph becomes an exemplar of the power of love – interpreted as the desire for reconciliation – to triumph over the impulse for retaliation. Joseph has every reason to hate his brothers for what they did to him. His brothers have every reason to fear his desire for revenge. Yet, having moved beyond his experience of being the victim allows Joseph to choose reconciliation over retaliation – thus breaking out of the repetitive cycle of victimization and retaliation.
Yet the story of Joseph and his brothers is nevertheless an ironic tale. At the heart of this story lies the irony that it is harder to be forgiven than punished for wrongdoing. The brothers are astonished and relieved having escaped Joseph’s retaliation. But this is not enough to free them from their expectation of retaliation – if not now, then later. Although they are seemingly forgiven, they are still left with the memory of having only narrowly avoided murdering their brother by selling him into slavery and deceiving their father with the lie of Joseph’s death in the claws and teeth of a lion. Until the end of the story, they remain in the grip of their expectation that revenge is the only response open to the victim. Proof that being the recipient of mercy -is, as Proverbs 25 says- akin to having hot coals poured over the head.
Jesus asks us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. He encourages us to turn the other cheek and to be self-sacrificial in our generosity – even at the risk of personal cost. He asks these things of us not because it’s the nice Christian thing to do – not to score some secret oneupmanship victory. Jesus is not exhorting us to the practice of a pious masochism that sentimentalizes turn the other cheek as the ultimate expression of passivity. He is showing us that this is the only way to step out of the cycle of victimization and retaliatory violence.
James Breech, in The Silence of Jesus, writes:
Jesus says, ‘…do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’ And watch what happens. This is a recipe for destroying the little bundle of lies about myself and my society that came into existence the moment my tribe and I found somebody to hate. Following this injunction is not just a nice thing to do. It’s a matter of destroying the whole system of mystification which has been the womb in which [we’ve] lived and moved and had [our] social existence.
Love your enemies is the recipe fordestroying the whole system of mystification – by which is meant the hatred of the other that forms the womb in which, to quote St Augustine, we live and move and have our being – that is, the culture of victimhood and retribution that permeates our social existence.
These days, many of us witnessing a severe attack on the Constitutional balance of power and the seemingly unstoppable descent into transactional authoritarianism with alarm and distress are asking the question, what does resistance look like? The unpalatable answer – unpalatable because it feels so unsatisfactory and so ineffectual- is Christian resistance. It means resistance shaped by Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies as the only way of breaking the cycle of victimization and retaliation – by which hatred of the other forms the womb in which we live and move and have our being.
Jesus calls us to follow him – to live lives well lived as the response to living under the weight of a coercive regime. Jesus calls us to embrace the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people – as opposed to fantasizing grand schemes of formal political action. He calls us to the resistance of the heart – the refusal to be coopted by feelings of powerlessness into responses of passivity and compliance. Likewise, he calls us to turn away from the path of countering violence with violence. In addition to legitimate steps of political and legal protest, Jesus calls us to love our enemies as a reminder that –there are no small acts of resistance; any act by anyone has the potential of reverberating – of being absorbed and replicated, leading to meaningful change (Delia Popescu writing about Vaclav Havel the great Czech dissident and later President of a post-Communist Czechoslovakia).
Translated into our current political context, Jesus calls us to love our enemies as the primary form of effective resistance, requiring us to undergo a transformation of the human heart. This alone breaks the cycle of victimization and retaliation – the cycle of repetitive violence that has captured our social consciousness. In effect, when we cease seeing ourselves as victims, we not only take back our power but also break the grip that the desire for retaliation holds in our hearts.
At the deepest level, Jesus is asking us to give up being afraid – to give up seeing ourselves as helpless victims and, in the words of the late John O’Donohue, to have the courage today to live the life that we would love and to waste our hearts on fear no more (John O’Donohue, Morning Offering).
In an age when calls to make Christendom great again are growing deafening we need the courage to risk new kinds of thinking—about ourselves, our roots, our communities, and our obligations; about God’s relationship with us and our relationships with each other. This is a kind of risky thinking – so writes Mac Loftin in his review of a new translation of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots in the recent edition of TheChristian Century. In 1942, General de Gaulle tasked Weil to write a report on how France could be rebuilt after liberation from German occupation. Weil jettisons the idea of universal human rights in favor of universal human obligations – because recognizing another’s rights does not necessarily change how we treat them.
Taking my English Cocker Spaniel, Mable Rose out at the crack of dawn – living on Exchange St downtown I sometimes witness the trickle of seemingly unhoused persons trudging from the direction of Kennedy Plaza towards the railway station. I’m saddened by the sight of obvious misery. I think – someone should do something!—before going back inside the warmth and security of my building. Weil’s treatise shifts the perspective from an infringement of the universal human rights of the unhoused to my obligation toward them. Every time I lament their plight before moving on, I fail an absolute and unshirkable obligation.
The Beatitudes – are one of Jesus’ most loved, yet also one of the most misunderstood and argued-over of his teachings. The Beatitudes are in Matthew part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But in Luke, they are delivered as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. This difference in location has a greater significance than a mere question of topography. Playing on Simone Weil’s distinction between rights and obligations is it possible to frame the difference between Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of this story as one akin to the difference between a statement of potential rights and a demonstration of present-time obligations?
In Matt. 5:1 we find Jesus retreating from the huge crowds who had flocked to hear him. Climbing a hillside he leads his disciples to a quiet place, where he begins to teach them. In seclusion on the mountaintop Jesus begins Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Jesus is weaving a beautiful vision of rights and ultimate rewards.
In Luke 6:17: we find Jesus – not retreating up a mountain but coming down from one to stand in the middle of a plain. He stands in the middle of a huge crowd who have come from all over Judea and Jerusalem, even from the seaside towns of Tyre and Sidon seeking to be cured of their ailments. It must have been pandemonium -everyone trying to touch Jesus – healing energy surging from him with every bodily contact. Amid the throng pressing in on him Jesus proclaims Blessed are you who are poor now, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Instead of a vision of rights and ultimate rewards, Jesus is asking for present-time action within a set of mutual obligations.
Matthew’s Jesus uses the third person form of address to communicate an impersonal objective generality—blessed are they—whereas Luke’s Jesus communicates with the directness of the second person form. He’s not speaking in general; he is talking specifically to you and me.
In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, we see Jesus emerging as the new improved Moses, delivering his new model Torah from the mountaintop only to those who constitute the new and improved community of Israel. Whereas Luke’s depiction of this scene in the Sermon on the Plain, shows Jesus emerging as a cosmopolitan healer with a message proclaimed not in the serenity of the mountaintop to a chosen few but to anyone who cares to listen amidst the chaos and din of the world.
Matthew pictures Jesus talking to the in-crowd, his band of trusty disciples – the selected ones who are privy to the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. Luke’s picture is of Jesus talking to anyone who will listen- an approach that assumes that none of us can be included in the kingdom while any one of us remains outside. The message of the kingdom is far from being a secret – it’s laid bare before the public gaze. Luke’s Jesus, having broken out of the straitjacket of Jewish expectation comes down from the lofty isolation of the mountaintop to mix it up with all in sundry. Luke’s Jesus is shockingly intimate with the desperate and seething throng of humanity serging around him. Luke’s Jesus is more than promising a right to be healed – he is acting upon his obligation to heal them. For Luke, the Beatitudes’ are more than rights to an inheritance in heaven. They are obligations to be fulfilled through present-time action.
Not for the first time do we have to straddle the tensions between Matthew’s and Luke’s presentation of Jesus. We must balance Matthew’s emphasis on an inheritance of future fulfillment of kingdom promises through perseverance and courageous faithfulness in the face of present-time suffering with Luke’s emphasis on the kingdom – not as a future inheritance but as a lived reality in the here and now.
Present-time reality is messy. There are forces and conspiracies of power that oppose the values and frustrate the expectations of the Kingdom. Therefore, living the Kingdom in the here and now involves not only promises of future blessings but also naming and calling out the sources of opposition – cursings alongside blessings. Luke’s Jesus shouts out a stinging rebuke to those who through the self-protective interests of wealth and power oppose the implementation of the Kingdom’s values and expectations in the here and now. Jesus is an uncomfortable preacher who blesses those the world curses and curses those the world blesses.
Sunday’s Coming Premium is TheChristian Century’s paid-subscription email newsletter—which week-by-week draws from the Century’s archives articles related to the week’s lectionary texts. I’ve already noted Mac Loftin’s review of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots appearing in this past week’s edition.
In this past week’s Sunday’s Coming Premium newsletter, the editor cites the writer Christopher Morse who in Not Every Spirit demonstrates how the early Christians were persecuted not for what they believed (Jesus Christ is Lord) but for what they refused to believe (Caesar is Lord). Ralph Wood is also cited for pointing out that in the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church in Germany, every credimus, “We believe . . .,” is followed by a damnatis, “We reject . .” When it came time for the rest of the German church to say “Nein!” it had lost the theological means to know there was even something about the world worth rejecting, as well as lost the courage to say “No!” Taken out of historical context, this is a powerful message that should resonate within contemporary American Christianity – lest we too lose the theological means to know there is something about the world that needs rejecting and grasp the courage to echo Jesus’ judgment – woe to you who count yourself powerful in this world and brazenly set yourself against the implementation of the values and expectations of the Kingdom’s coming!
Luke’s is a theological message that carries a powerful political punch – confronting every aspect of a status quo where environmental, economic, and social injustice continues to be denied and where the self-satisfied pride of the rich and the powerful is celebrated; where living the Kingdom’s expectation for greater social and racial inclusion as a present imperative for the Christian life is dismissed as mere wokeness. The Beatitudes – whether seen as universal human rights or present-time obligations- demand a response which if heard, should make us decidedly squirmy.
Then I said, "How long O Lord?" And he said: " Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land utterly desolate; vast will be the emptiness in the midst of the land."
Normally, my alarm is set for 5 am – which at this time of the year seems an indecently early time to awaken – greeted by the cold and dark of a winter’s morning. Even if my 5 am alarm does not go off, Mable Rose, my 2-year-old English Cocker Spaniel has her own mysterious time clock which she signals to me by moving from the foot of the bed where she’s slept peacefully through the night to sitting as close to my face as she can get with tail wagging. The intensity of her quiet staring penetrates my attempt to fake sleep by keeping my eyes closed. She knows. I know she knows. What’s even more uncanny is that she knows that I know she knows I’m faking it.
Yet, in these past few weeks, it seems that a 5 am alarm is no longer necessary. For some weeks now, my equivalent to Mable Rose’s internal alarm clock seems stuck at 3 am when suddenly wide awake I begin another cycle of rumination on the all-consuming state of the nation and the world. Even conscious efforts and evasive actions to filter out the deluge of noise masquerading as news – fail to keep troubling thoughts and painful feelings at bay. A sense of profound unease so pervades our cultural spaces that by osmosis it seeps into neurocircuits and body cells alike.
In the modern world of the all-consuming 24/7 news cycle, the prophetic words from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock sound.
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven.
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit ........
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Today, Eliot’s soaring eagle becomes a reference to the 24-hour surveillance culture, and the hunter with his dogs a reference to the draconian actions of immigration and customs agents – hunting down frightened immigrants.
The worry awakening me at 3 am – which then cycles endlessly until at day’s end sleep once again offers a brief few hours of respite – is deeply personal. New worries challenge the illusion of overlap between assumed shared societal values and my Christian-shaped conscience. Yet, my worry is also born of empathy for those to whom I am both a priest and pastor. This is the worry I see etched on the faces of some who fear the withdrawal of funding will affect their own livelihood. I see it on the faces of aging parents consumed with worry for their adult children who have chosen careers in government agencies from USAID to the forestry service, not to mention the intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies.
Government is so much more complex than running a tech company or social media platform. So much of it remains invisible to the naked eye until – that is – services taken for granted cease to function. Increasingly this reality will come as an unexpected surprise to those who have little idea of the extent to which their lives are impacted by the immanent disappearance of government services, structures, and protections.
On Friday I attended a Dorcas International – one of Rhode Island’s three refugee resettlement agencies – webinar update on the chaos affecting RI refugee resettlement agencies struggling to make sense of how to keep operating following the immediate cancelation by executive fiat of across-the-board funding for the legal resettlement of refugee programs. As a Dorcas long-term community partner, for St Martin’s this dire situation is of particular concern to us.
My reference to Eliot is so much more than the predilection for the poetic mind. It’s an attempt to find words strong enough to frame a description of current reality. Eliot’s words frame the current dilemma consuming us. He notes that:
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Eliot asks:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
He concludes:
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
In the OT lesson on the fifth Sunday after Epiphany we hear of the call of the prophet Isaiah – the first of three to be known by this name. We are ushered into his powerful mystical encounter with the radiant glory of the divine presence in the form of a robe filling the whole temple and shaking the very foundations. The divine presence is surrounded by the six-winged seraphim – not pudgy cheeky cherubs – but fierce and frightening angelic beings deafening this man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips with their repetitive chorus of Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of heaven and earth.
It is significant that Isaiah accurately dates his mystical encounter with the divine presence in the year that King Uzziah died. Uzziah, also known as Azariah, reigned in Judah from approximately 792 to 740 BCE. Ascending the throne at a young age, around 16, following the death of his father, King Amaziah his reign is noted for both his military successes and his ambitious building projects, contributing to a period of prosperity for Judah.
However, his reign was not without challenges when eventually his pride led him to overstep his boundaries. He attempted to burn incense in the Temple, a duty reserved exclusively for the priests. When confronted by the high priest and other priests, he became enraged. Struck with leprosy as a consequence of his actions, Uzziah was forced to live in isolation, with his son Jotham managing the kingdom’s affairs for the remainder of his life.
It’s curious that the call of Isaiah comes at a pivotal moment in Judah’s political history. Uzziah is remembered for both his accomplishments and his tragic downfall, and he serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers for any ruler who allows pride to overstep legitimate authority. Let those who have ears to hear- listen!
Isaiah is given a mandate to speak God’s truth to power, and God’s rebuke to a people’s collective folly. But God it seems has no illusions about the likelihood of Isaiah’s success in speaking to a people who in listening do not comprehend, who in looking do not understand – whose minds are clouded, whose ears are stopped, and whose eyes are shut, who fail to recognize the urgency of the moment facing them.
Isaiah asks how long O Lord? In an allusion to future exile, the Lord tells him that things must run their course until cities lie waste without inhabitants, houses without people, and the land utterly desolate – vast will be the emptiness in the midst of the land. Yet like the stump of a burned tree, the seeds of new growth will survive.
Jesse Zink – in Faithful, Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World – the text chosen for our Lent 2025 Tuesday evening book study, draws out a crucial yet misunderstood distinction between defeat and failure, which we do well to remember in these days. In these days, as the bearers in our time and place of God’s timeless message to the world – the forces that rule our society by the laws of self-interest will always conspire to defeat the message of truth. But as the Lord counsels Isaiah it’s not defeat he should fear but failure.
Eliot reminds us:
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
There is a price to be paid for singing “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty” in the face of an oppressive force that thinks otherwise. Amidst challenges, anxieties, failures, disappointments, discouragement, and loss, our awareness of the sovereignty of God’s transformative expectations for the coming of the kingdom empowers us to face defeat at the hands of the conspiracy of power ranged against us. However, defeat is not the same as failure. We speak out and risk defeat yet even in the face of defeat we remain undaunted for the fire-ravaged stump of the tree still contains the seeds of future fruitfulness. No, it’s failure we should fear. Failure lies simply in the refusal of God’s call for us to speak truth to power and folly to the foolish!
The 8th chapter of the book of Nehemiah throws a historical spotlight on post-exilic life among the returning Jews in Jerusalem. Remember that in 586, Nebuchadnezzar had sacked Jerusalem taking into captivity the upper echelons of Judahite society. In 538 following the edict of Cyrus the Great, the first wave of returnees led by Zerubbabel arrived among the ruins of Jerusalem to begin the restoration process. A second wave followed in 458 led by the priest Ezra escorting the return of the sacred vessels for the new Temple construction. A third wave led by Nehemiah arrived in 445. Nehemiah had been a cupbearer to King Artaxerxes I, who is now entrusted with the civil administration of the restoration project.
The returning exilic community faced serious opposition. A group described as the people of the land represented the original Judahite indigenous peasantry who had been left behind after the Babylonian deportation of the upper echelons of Judahite society in 587. They clearly resented the returning exiles. Together with Judah’s Canaanite neighbors – the old traditional adversaries – they fiercely resisted the restoration project – frequently sending messages and envoys to lobby the Persian court against the exiles and further returns.
Therefore, the restoration project proceeded in fits and starts, as much hampered by the internal struggles within the returnee community between rich and poor, powerful and powerless – just to add into the mix with the constant guerilla attacks mounted by both indigenous and surrounding peoples.
In Nehemiah 6, we read of the completion of the wall around Jerusalem—an exhausting but significant achievement. With a modicum of physical security achieved, in chapter 8, attention now turns to the spiritual renewal of the people who gather before the Watergate to hear the Torah—the book of the law—proclaimed before them.
We read that all the people, both men and women gathered in the open square before the Watergate outside the newly constructed wall to hear the priest and scribe Ezra read from the law of Moses. Imagine the scene – from dawn until midday, standing on a raised platform before the Watergate, surrounded by the Levites and Scribes, Ezra read from the book of the law. We don’t know quite what this included but it is likely portions from the Deuteronomic corpus of Genesis, Leviticus, and Numbers.
With the completion of the physical city walls, it was time to build a different kind of wall – a spiritual wall within which the community reaffirmed its distinctive identity shaped by their covenant obligations not only to God but to one another. We read that the gathering included men, women, and all who could understand – reflecting a collective commitment to heal communal divisions under the guidance of God’s word.
We note that for many gathered to listen to Ezra, much of what he read was unfamiliar for it seems that among the assembly knowledge of the covenant heritage had been largely, lost. Added to this was a language problem – for Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the lingua franca of the people. Hence the importance of the Levites flanking Ezra who acted as interpreters so that the people could understand the message being proclaimed. Like good preachers the Levites and Scribes rendered the message accessible and its application practical.
Standing under the judgment of God is for any community a bittersweet experience and we are told that hearing the words of the law evoked both weeping and rejoicing – repentance paving the way to reencountering the generosity of God’s promises.
In our St Martin’s community, the last Sunday in January is by divine decree designated Annual Meeting Sunday. And so, on this Annual Meeting Sunday when we move from celebrating the achievements of the past year we also are looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities of the coming one. 2025 from its outset promises to be the first year in a political cycle reflective of a nation deeply at odds with itself and with the wider world beyond. A political cycle that will have to grapple with the irreconcilable tension between the further privileging of the rich and powerful and the demands of a restless and angry electorate hungry for an improvement in their lives. Ahead lies a period in which many events will test our Christian allegiance to Kingdom values.
The span of centuries marking the passage through linear time separating us from the event recorded in Nehemiah’s 8th chapter evaporates like mist before the lens of Kairos time – where there’s no separation between past, present, and future. Therefore, we too stand -imaginatively speaking- alongside the exiles before Ezra’s reading from the law. Like the men and women gathered before the Watergate – the question remains – how do we understand the message of the law? How will we interpret and apply our understanding?
In the importance of hearing and receiving God’s Word, we acknowledge the centrality of Scripture in shaping the life of our community faithful to the vision of a just society – a deeply rooted vision of covenantal community guided by God’s desire for a society built on justice as the communal expression of love – upon compassion as the outward working of mercy – a community faithful to the good news of Jesus Christ that the Kingdom of God is already among us.
Justice and righteousness are fundamental to social order. Justice ensures fairness and accountability, while righteousness emphasizes compassionate mercy and ethical behavior in recognition that everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity as children of God. Justice is blind to the artificial distinctions maintaining unequal systems favoring discrimination against and neglect of those whose difference renders them among the most vulnerable in society.
Justice has an economic face. The effective exercise of justice is a bulwark against monopolistic practices leading to the economic exploitation of the poor by the rich and the steady impoverishment of everyone in between. Today we most clearly experience this as institutions privilege shareholder returns over the duty to benefit those they were created to serve. We are living in a world where further tax cuts for the wealthiest are presented as a benefit for all and where the powerful take all the profits while demanding that we – the rest -shoulder the risks – compensating their losses from the public purse.
Justice has an environmental face. The primary command in creation is to exercise responsibility for the care of creation and to confront environmental depredation by the powerful and profits hungry from whom we hear that the environmental crisis is too costly to address. Yet, creation’s message could not be plainer – the reality is upon us – that it is infinitely more costly not to.
Standing alongside the crowds gathered before the Watergate we also hear the commandment to treat the stranger with dignity and with mercy for we were all once strangers in a new land. The tragic paradox was that while Ezra was proclaiming the care for the stranger as a divine decree – he was already working on measures to reinforce the ethnocentricity of Jewish society- prohibiting intermarriage and forcing Jewish men to expel their non-Jewish wives and biracial children. We are no strangers in our own time to the construction of physical walls as the first step in the completion of ethnic cleansings.
The just society envisioned in the Torah and central to Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom is a community where divine expectations shape individual and communal relationships – where individual rights are balanced with communal responsibilities.
This vision is not merely theoretical – it’s practical, designed to ensure a harmonious and flourishing society. Many today feel the demands of justice are impractical, too costly to implement and give away too much power to those less deserving than we are. It’s sobering to realize that every ill we experience in the operation of our society today, every corruption we lament, is an expression of our rebellion and rejection of the template of God’s vision of a just society. The question we should ask is not whether we can afford the demands of a just society – but whether can we afford to ignore them!
We have long prattled on about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. If we didn’t realize it before – we now must confront the seeming unpalatable truth – the moral universe bends only through our commitment to realizing justice, practicing mercy, and our courageous walking in step with our God.
As we celebrate the past year and prepare for the new one ahead, we will do well to remember that the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because the Lord has anointed us to bring good news to the poor. The Lord sends us to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to fight oppression, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Welcome to the coming year in which God’s invitation is to let the scriptures be fulfilled in our hearing.
A contributor to Sermons.com shares a humorous story about three pastors lamenting their shared problem: bats in the belfry. The first pastor tried scaring them away by shooting at them, but all he succeeded in doing was making holes in the roof. The second pastor captured the bats, transported them 50 miles away, and released them, only to find they returned to the church before he did. The third pastor stunned his colleagues by announcing he no longer had a bat problem. When asked how he achieved this, he replied, “I baptized them—and I’ve never seen them again.”
This amusing anecdote illustrates the saying, “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” It raises a serious question: What is the meaning and purpose of baptism?
William Temple, a revered Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-20th century, once observed, “The Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members.” This sentiment sheds light on the Anglican tradition’s unconventional view of boundaries. Becoming a member of the Episcopal Church often feels effortless—attending regularly can subtly integrate you into the community before you even notice.
This approach is unusual among contemporary American churches. The Episcopal Church’s open boundaries express Temple’s assertion. However, this openness creates challenges in distinguishing the Church from the world. Worship is open to all, but only the baptized are invited to communion—though no one is turned away.
To Christians from other traditions, this may seem inconsistent. Yet, it reflects a theology that regards baptism as entry into a saving community, nourished by Holy Communion. It also acknowledges that the altar rail is not the place to turn away those who approach with faith and good conscience.
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ baptism is profoundly personal—his adoption as God’s Son is a secret known only to him and John the Baptist. By contrast, Luke’s account portrays Jesus’ baptism as a communal event:
“Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…”
Mark presents Jesus stepping onto the world stage, becoming the Son of God through adoption at baptism. Luke, however, emphasizes that Jesus has always been the Son of God, with his baptism confirming this preexisting truth.
These differences reflect an ongoing theological debate: Are we saved through baptism, or is baptism a recognition of salvation already granted?
Evangelicals often view baptism as a personal act of faith—a believer’s conscious decision and a ticket to heaven. Anglicans, however, generally see baptism as a celebration of God’s grace, marking entry into a community where salvation is encountered and witnessed.
Returning to Temple’s statement, “The Church is the only society that exists for those who are not its members,” we recognize the Church often falls short, behaving as though it exists solely for its own benefit.
Protestants view the Church as a temporary gathering, existing only when believers come together. In contrast, Anglicans and Catholics see the Church as the mystical body of Christ, existing beyond any specific gathering. Accordingly, Protestants see baptism as entry into an individual relationship with Christ, while Anglicans and Catholics view it as entry into the communal life of the Church—a saving experience.
For Roman Catholics, salvation is bound within the Church, necessitating rigorous boundaries. Anglicans, however, see the Church as leaven in the loaf of the world. The Episcopal Church exists not to confine God’s salvation but to witness to its presence already at work.
Why does this matter? For me, it challenges the Calvinist preoccupation with personal salvation. I reject the idea that my salvation depends on choosing Jesus while my neighbor faces damnation. God loves us both without distinction. The real question is: How do we live out this truth?
Baptism is not a one-time event but a daily commitment to live out God’s purpose in the world. In the Episcopal Church, this commitment is articulated in the Baptismal Covenant, which includes five promises:
1. Faithfulness in community: Participate in the life of the Church, practicing faith daily.
2. Resistance to evil: Fight evil and return to the path of repentance when you fall short.
3. Proclamation of the Gospel: Share the good news that God has already saved the world in Christ.
4. Service to others: Love and serve your neighbor as yourself.
5. Justice and dignity: Strive for justice, peace, and the dignity of every human being.
As Episcopalians, we embrace fuzzy boundaries intentionally. Guided by Temple’s vision, we affirm that belonging precedes believing.
Through baptism, we join a community that witnesses to God’s salvation as a gift for all. Christians live in tension—balancing engagement with the world’s values and dedication to a life of service and witness shaped by the Baptismal Covenant.
Relationalrealities 