There is nothing else in the Gospels like today’s story from the ninth chapter of John.  Throughout the Gospels, Jesus heals people.  Reactions range from joy to skepticism.  Some people love Jesus for his healings; others despise him.  Once Jesus is called Beelzebub, the prince of demons, for his ability to cast out demons.[i]  But nowhere other than John 9 is there such an extensive effort to figure out from where Jesus’ power comes and how it is that Jesus heals.  It is fascinating.

The story begins by making clear that the blind man has been blind from birth.  He doesn’t have scales on his eyes—cataracts—as do some other blind people healed in scripture.  This man’s eyes have never functioned.  His blindness has been and is permanent.

The spiritual economy of Jesus’ day also leads the man’s community to assume that his blindness is either the result of his own sin or the sin of his parents.  Like the friends of Job in another context, they think that any physical malady must be a punishment, and they want Jesus to tell them who is at fault.

But Jesus breaks the rules of their game.  He discards the community’s reasoning off hand, he heals the man born blind.

After Jesus heals the man, his neighbors are incredulous.  How can a man born blind now see?  They take him to the experts in the Mosaic law, the Pharisees, for an explanation.  And that’s when the dispute arises.  From where does Jesus’ power to heal come?  It must not come from God, the Pharisees say, because Jesus heals on the sabbath.  Tempers flare.  The man’s family gets caught up in the melee.  The man himself is cast out of his community.  One would think the man would be crushed by this turn of events, but instead he giggles like a child.  The man says to those he has known all of his life—upon whom he now looks for the first time with eyes that see them, who now ostracize him because he has been healed, says to them—he says to them, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

I’ve always been deeply intrigued by this story.  It is by far the lengthiest healing story in the Gospels.  It involves so many twists and turns.  Like reading a good Agatha Christie mystery story, I always felt like I was missing something, like some tantalizing clue was right in front of me but, ironically, I could not see it.

Then I visited Jerusalem and spent some time at the Pool of Siloam.  It is a small, rectangular pool at the base of the hill below the Old City.  A trickle of water enters it.  Frankly, it’s not much to look at.  But I vaguely remembered having heard of it before, and I went to my bible, sure enough, there it is in the ninth chapter of John: “Jesus spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.’ Then the man went and washed and came back able to see…The neighbors kept asking him, ‘How were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’”

I had never noticed before that Jesus doesn’t actually heal the blind man, not directly.  Jesus puts a poultice on the man’s eyes, but the healing comes only after the man washes in the Pool of Siloam. 

That was a clue, but it didn’t shed light for me.  The Pool of Siloam didn’t seem to me to have any overt miraculous properties.  It appeared to be mundane.  I left the pool, forgot the story, and carried on.

A day or so later, I toured underground, subterranean cavern beneath the slope of the City of David.  As we walked the cavern, our guide reminded us why King David originally wanted Jerusalem for his capital.  Jerusalem sits that the western edge of the Wilderness, one of the dryest deserts in the world.  It is not self-evidently a good place to settle.  But underneath Jerusalem three thousand years ago there gushed and flowed the Gihon Spring, which provided and endless source of water to the people of Jerusalem.  Even when besieged, the city would not thirst.

Jerusalem was a walled, impregnable city, and the way David originally conquered it was by sneaking up the spring’s water course and emerging in the middle of the city, Trojan Horse-style.  Once Jerusalem became Judea’s capital, the Gihon Spring allowed the city to sustain over thousands of years, through countless attacks and sieges.  Even in times of peace, the Gihon Spring saw the people through vicious droughts.  For ancient Jerusalem, the Gihon Spring was, quite literally, the saving water of life.

As our guide told this story, we could hear rumbling in the distance.  We kept walking until we came upon a gushing torrent of water that flowed through the rock and cascaded down the slope.  With a smile, our guide explained that the same spring that slaked the thirst of King David still flows from the desert rock, endlessly providing water in a parched land.  And that same torrent eventually makes its way all the way to the plateau to feed…the Pool of Siloam.

My mind immediately returned to John 9 and the story of the man born blind.  I read John’s account of the healing as if for the first time.  Jesus doesn’t actually heal this man at all.  Hear again the scripture: 

“Jesus said to the man born blind, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.’  Then the man went and washed and came back able to see.”  Jesus prepares the man for healing, but the man is granted his sight when Jesus sends him to the rushing, gushing, torrential water that had preserved, saved, healed, and sustained the people of God since practically the dawn of history. 

Like Ms. Marple revealing the mystery, the story of the man born blind revealed itself in wonder.  I understand why the man giggled like a child, even when his community cast him out.  The man says, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.”

John 9 shows us the futility of religious arguments about who is right, who is wrong, who sins, and who has God’s favor.  As we fuss and fight, castigating those with whom we disagree and claiming sure knowledge we do not have, all the while the torrential power of God flows just beneath us, living water that can cleanse us, heal us, and slake our spiritual thirst. If you listen closely with spiritual ears, you can hear it rumbling, in the subterranean places, in the heart of the world, in the core of our souls, eternally and endlessly.  When we are parched, God is there.  When we are besieged, God is there.  When we are blinded, God is there, overflowing like a torrent, cascading out of bounds to find us through desert and rock.  Jesus points us to that source, that living water that sustains the world.  All we have to do is open our eyes to see. 

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[i] Matthew 12:24-27 and parallels

In late December, my entire family was in Norman, Oklahoma for our daughter Eliza’s graduation from the University of Oklahoma.  While there, all of us gathered Arkansans—Jill, my kids, the grandparents, aunts, uncles—decided to purchase Powerball tickets.  After all, the jackpot had grown to a massive $1.8 billion, the second largest in American lottery history.  On Christmas Eve, the winning Powerball numbers were drawn.  (4, 25, 31, 52, and 59 in case you’re interested.  The Powerball number was 19.)  None of the Thompsons or Bensons won, but to our surprise and to the collective surprise of everyone in Arkansas, the winning ticket was purchased by a woman at a Murphy USA in Cabot.  She took the cash payout, which totaled $834.9 million.  The winner chose to remain anonymous, which is understandable, but we know she is local.  You may have passed her in a grocery store aisle.  She might be sitting in these very pews! 

Who could have guessed that my family should have stuck closer to home to purchase our lottery tickets.  How close I came to being a billionaire!  I love you folks, but I think I might have taken early retirement.

After the historic lottery draw, people took to social media to remark on the winner.  Among the frequent comments were things like, “She is truly blessed.”

That’s a phrase with which we are familiar.  But what does it mean?  To be blessed is, biblically and in common parlance, to be bestowed with God’s favor.

In the American South, of course, we have a distinctive, usage of the term.  When we say, “Bless his heart,” we actually mean the exact opposite of God’s favor.  We mean, “Poor fellow, he is definitely lacking God’s favor along with being a few bricks shy of a load.  He sure could use a sprinkle of blessing.”  but even that vernacular makes the point.  When one is blessed, when God’s favor is bestowed, it is wondrous.

Sometimes blessing is momentous, as when someone survives an accident unscathed; when medical treatment is successful; when a family is blessed with a child by either birth or adoption; or when dedication and skill is affirmed through a promotion at work.  Sometimes blessing is mundane, as when one makes a tight airport connection despite bad weather, or when a sunbeam pierces the clouds at just the right moment in a dreary day.  Sometimes blessing is unbelievable, as when a woman walks out of a gas station with a $2 lottery ticket and a week later walks out of bank with $834.9 million.

Whenever blessing is discussed, the question arises, “But why are some people blessed and others are not?”  I promise you, on Christmas Eve I asked God, “Hey, Abba Father: Got a question for you.  Why am I not a billionaire?!?”  I don’t know the answer to that question.  The economy of blessing is as mysterious as anything in God’s world.  Even so, I suspect this is the wrong question altogether.  Rather than asking, “How does God choose who to bless?” perhaps we should ask, “Why does God bless anyone?”  After all, we are all the recipients of enormous blessings.  We live in the most prosperous country in the history of the world.  We enjoy antibiotics and vaccines for our infections, robotic surgery for our broken parts, fluoride in our toothpaste—heck, deodorant alone is a modern blessing for which we should be deeply grateful.  In addition to these general blessings, a brief five minute self-reflective meditation would reveal to any and each of us the very specific ways we are blessed in our lives.  We may not be Powerball winners, but we are abundantly blessed.  Why?  Why does God bless any one of us?  Have you ever stopped to wonder?

In the Old Testament today, Genesis introduces Abraham—called Abram at this early point in the story—who initiates the long relationship of God to the people of God.  We read, “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”

It is from this brief beginning that the blessing and chosenness of the people who become Israel and we as the Body of Christ stem.  From this starting point in Genesis 12, the Psalmist will proclaim, “O offspring of Abraham, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen ones!”[i]  It is from this origin that St. Peter will say of us, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.”[ii]

These are lofty and awesome verses, and both the people of the Old Covenant and we people of the New Covenant celebrate and give thanks for our blessing.  But in truth, throughout their respective histories both Jews and Christians have also abused God’s blessing in most grotesque ways.  We have interpreted God not as setting us apart for a special function or purpose, but setting us above as immune from error or critique.  The nation of Israel has acted and continues to act as though it is immune from sin, that the actions it chooses are good and right simply because it chooses them.  And Christendom has run roughshod over virtually every non-Christian people it encounters, from ancient days to our own, often forcing others to accept our beliefs and way of life at the tip of a sword.  I suspect that does not feel like much of a blessing to those on the receiving end.

Something is deeply wrong with this understanding of God’s blessing, this idea that God favors me in a way that disfavors someone else, that God’s way of the world is to create some people for grace and others for perdition.  Where have we misunderstood?

The answer stares us in the face at the very beginning, in one of the most willfully overlooked and ignored phrases in all of Holy Scripture.  Hear again the very first words God says to Father Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

If I know any theological truth, it is this: God only ever blesses us—blesses anyone—so that we can go forth and be a blessing.  From Abraham to the Christmas Eve Powerball winner, this holds true.  From the person cured of cancer to the one who wins elected office, this is true.  We are only ever blessed so that we can be a blessing.  God never sets us above; God always commissions us.  In that way, we can actually think of blessing as a blessed burden.  Like the flame of candle passed from wick to wick, we are to share our blessing, to extend it, to set it forth to course through the world. 

If we hoard or hide our blessing, jealously guarding it; or if we lord it over others, falsely believing that blessing means God prefers us; then our blessing actually becomes a curse.  Better that a millstone be hung around our necks, as Jesus will say.[iii]  God blesses us, each and all, because God has work for us to do.  Like Abraham, we are called out of our comfortable places to be a blessing.  Look what God ultimately did with Abraham.  Imagine what God might ultimately do with us!  To the people of Saint Mark’s on this very day, God says, “I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the people of this community will be blessed.”  That’s better than winning the Powerball.  Thanks be to God. 

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[i] Psalm 105:6

[ii] 1 Peter 2:9

[iii] Matthew 18:6

Good morning, class!  I hope you enjoyed last week’s snow days, sledding to your heart’s content and eating snow ice cream, as well as catching up on both sleep and homework.  Now that we are back together, let’s exercise our “little gray cells” (as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiret says) and engage in some word study today.  We will look at three very important words, what they mean, and where they came from. 

First, we are in the middle of the Epiphany season of the church year, and for several Sundays running we’ve read Gospel accounts of call stories, in which Jesus calls his disciples to leave behind whatever lives they’ve been living—their occupations, but also their worldviews, attitudes, biases, and presuppositions—and follow him.  The Gospels are all originally written in Greek, and the Greek verb used for “call” in these stories, as when Jesus calls Andrew, James, and John to follow him, is καλέω (kaleo).

Calling is a funny thing.  We find ourselves called to all sorts of things, rabbit holes down which we travel that cause us to drop everything.  Many things to which we are called are, perhaps obviously, not good for us.  I think of addictive doom scrolling on social media—sometimes accompanied by injudicious postings of our own—that can rob entire days from other, more productive pursuits.  I think of mid-life crises casting a siren song that upends entire lives.  I think of all the intoxicating lures that draw us in and consume us before we know it.  Some callings are better ignored than followed.

But that Greek verb—kaleo—is interesting.  As columnist David Brooks points out, it shares an etymology with the similar Greek word καλόν (kalon), which means beautiful, noble, and good.[i]  When we acknowledge the organic connection between these two terms, we are granted a failsafe criterion for judging which callings to follow in our lives.  We should always ask ourselves, before dropping everything and tromping down the road, “Is this good; is it noble; is it beautiful?”

The second word I’d like us to study today shifts from Greek to Latin.  The word shows up a bit further on in Matthew, in a passage we’ll read on a Sunday in June.  In that passage, Jesus says to the disciples, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”[ii]  This is the ultimate statement in a broader soliloquy where Jesus talks about family members turning against one another, about relationships breaking down, about animosity and recrimination prevailing.  I don’t know about your family, but with the state of the world today, I’ve had many folks share with me that this is no longer a theoretical state of affairs.  Relations are leaving the dinner table and walking away from one another.

But something unusual appears in the 9^th Century Book of Kells, arguably the most famous illuminated edition of the Gospels in existence.  The Book of Kells resides at Trinity College in Dublin.  It is a gorgeous and sacred work of art.  It also includes an odd element.  Where Jesus usually says, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword,” the ancient scribe wrote not the Latin word gladium, which means sword, but gaudium, which means joy.[iii]  That is a revolutionary change in meaning, and perhaps one inspired by the Holy Spirit. 

In the Book of Kells, Jesus says, then, “I come not to bring peace, but joy.”  In other words, following Jesus may not bring peace.  It may lead to hardship, and difficulty, and a different place in the world, but the goal of discipleship is always joy.  The undercurrent of joy is what ultimately characterizes our relationship with Jesus.

For our third word study, we turn to today’s Gospel reading, the Beatitudes, that list of virtues of which Jesus begins “Blessed are they…”  We usually read “Blessed are they…” with the idea, either conscious or subconscious, that the “blessing” refers to some reward in the next life.  “Bless-ed” becomes “blest,” and the Beatitudes are then categorized as the hope of heaven.  “Blest are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God” is interpreted like the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, as if to say, “In the great hereafter, the poor will receive heavenly riches.  In the end, it’s all going to be o.k. for them.”

I certainly believe and hope it will be, but that interpretation lends us the excuse to be complacent, to say of that long list of people, both good and bad, included in the Beatitudes, “We need not worry about them.  God will take care of it all eventually.”

Catholic author Sister Joan Chittister, however, points out that this is a gross misreading of the Beatitudes’ intent.  “Bless-ed,” an etymological study reveals, is best interpreted “blissful.”[iv]  And that casts a different light entirely on the Beatitudes.  The Beatitudes are all about, regardless of the circumstances we experience, where we find our bliss.

Matthew’s Beatitudes (which we read today) focus on our spirits, while Luke’s focus on our bodies, but this truth holds in either case: Our anxieties, our hungers, our tears, our struggles in this life are also those very depths in which we most often discover, to our utter and complete surprise, that we tap into the well-spring of God.  It is in those experiences that, even through our pain, we encounter bliss, that “peace which passes all understanding,” as St. Paul calls it.[v]  When all else is stripped from us, God is there, waiting in love.  There we find our bliss.

But neither does this bliss, this peace, this resting in the heart of God intend to lull us into complacency.  Immediately after sharing the Beatitudes, Jesus tells us what the encounter with God’s deep grace compels us to do: Do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who abuse you.  Give to those in need, and do so with gratitude for the blessings you bear.  Be kind, and be merciful.  Our own deep need, which leads to our own deep bliss, compels us to identify in solidarity with the grave concerns and needs of others. 

Kalon: We are called by God always to that which is good, noble and beautiful. 

Gaudium: Jesus comes to bring joy, and joy is sometimes even discovered when peace is not at hand.

Blessed: We find our bliss when we set the desires and purposes of God first and pursue them before our own desires and purposes.

This is not merely a posture we are to assume on Sunday mornings.  It is a way of being in the world.  It changes how we see ourselves and how we see others.  The Christian spiritual writer Henri Nouwen says that this shift in our understanding is “the movement in which we become less and less fearful and defensive and more and more open to other people and their worlds.”[vi]

Sometimes word study is not merely academic.  Sometimes it makes all the difference to the way we live our lives.  As we move through the coming days and weeks, we should examine, “What calling do we follow?  Is it good?  Is it noble and beautiful?”  We should ask, “Are we seeking the deep joy that is found when we follow the God of love, come what may?” We should remember that bliss is to be found when we are stripped of all but God, and when we then love sacrificially. 

May it be so with us, and thanks be to God.  Amen.

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[i] Brooks, David. The Second Mountain, 96.

[ii] Matthew 10:34.

[iii] Bradley, Ian. Following the Celtic Way, 124.

[iv] Sister Joan shared this interpretation at a Faith and Reason Conference at Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, TX, in October 2016.

[v] Philippians 4:7.

[vi] Nouwen, Henri J.M. Ministry and Spirituality (Continuum: New York), 246.

“Let’s play a cooperative game.”  These were the words of my good friend, the Reverend Mary Vano, at our annual seminarian friends retreat a couple of years ago.  Five of us gathered, as we do each year, for several days of intense study and accountability and evenings of enjoying one another’s company.  It was after dinner and time to unwind, and we were trying to decide what to do.  “Let’s play a cooperative game,” Mary suggested.  To me, she might as well have been speaking New Testament Greek.  The words she used were familiar, but the way she strung them together made little sense.  “A cooperative game?” I asked.

You see, in my family of origin there is no such thing.  Games, by their very nature, are not cooperative.  Games are about bending others to your will, gaining advantage, vanquishing your foes, winning.

Beginning with my grandfather, Pop, a game of Scrabble quickly instilled the importance of using multisyllabic words.  Otherwise Pop would bring down the hurt with a triple word score and that included three Qs and a Z.  With my own father, a card game of Old Maid was an opportunity to teach kids the despair of defeat.  As we grew older, board games like Clue were bloodsport.  Scattegories and Taboo caused family rifts that might take years to heal.  To this day, Jill refuses to play Balderdash with the Thompsons.  Too many scars.

Even now, each time my family gathers, three generations sit around my parents’ dining room table for a fun game of Scum, a card game where the loser of each round has to move to the foot of the table and wear a dunce cap, an object of defeat and ridicule.  Good times.

I’m being unnecessarily hard on myself and my family, because, in truth, our entire society is predicated on such an approach to games.  In a capitalist society, there are always winners and losers.  In fact, one necessitates the other.  Economics acknowledges this explicitly and without apology.  An entire branch of economics is called Game Theory, defined as, “A mathematical framework for analyzing strategic interactions…where each player’s outcome depends on their choices and the choices of others, helping predict behaviors in competitive situations like pricing, negotiations, and market competition by modeling scenarios as “games” with players, strategies, and payoffs.”[i]

More than Christianity, our economics is our true religion, and the desire to gain advantage—to win—carries over into all aspects of our lives.  Indeed, in my somewhat studied opinion, the root of much of the social tension and ill throughout our society today, from immigration to race to ideology, is the deeply-rooted and unexamined belief that if someone else succeeds, we must be bound to decline.  We love to win.  We hate to lose.  Life is the big game, and we all play for keeps.

When we think about it, this also pertains in our relationship with God.  Despite any highbrow theology or heartfelt spiritual connection, at the end of the day we often revert to treating our relationship with God as transactional, a game we hope to win.  We try to bargain when we need God to do something for us.  We try to negotiate when God asks us to do something we don’t want to do.  Even with God, we strive to figure out where the advantage might be and capitalize on it.

We’re in good company at least.  From Moses to Peter, the titans of Holy Scripture make this same mistake.[ii]  Even they approach God’s calling upon their lives as something to be managed and won.  They want to minimize God’s impact on them and maximize God’s favor.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

But last Sunday and this Sunday, we get a very different scenario, one that breaks the mold.  For two weeks in a row, we read about Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist at the River Jordan.  Last week we read Matthew’s version of this story, and this morning we read John’s Gospel.  Last Sunday, Michael McCain preached a brilliant homily about the redeeming power of water, including the water of baptism, so today I want us to look at the story differently, from the standpoint of the interaction between Jesus and John.

The baptism of Jesus by John is one of the few stories that shows up in all four Gospels, and each Gospel relates the story in slightly different but consequential ways, as if the Evangelists are trying to reckon with a strange event in which the roles are upside down.  Jesus is the Son of God, but John is the Baptist.  Jesus shows up to be baptized, and John is in place to do the deed, but why would Jesus need to be baptized by John?  To be so would seem to place John in a position of authority over Jesus.  In a sense, John wins and Jesus submits.  That doesn’t seem right to the Evangelists or to us.  It turns out, it didn’t seem right to John the Baptist, either. 

In today’s version, as soon as Jesus appears on the riverbank, John the Baptist declares, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”[iii]  Last week’s version had John explicitly add, “I need to be baptized by you, Jesus, and you come to me?” [iv] 

Things seem to be crescendoing like it’s another game.  John doesn’t want to do this thing God asks him to do.  John wants to jockey and manage the outcome.  But suddenly, something shifts.  In Matthew’s version Jesus (who I believe is likely as confused by what God is asking at this point as John is) pauses and replies, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then, we are told, John the Baptist cooperates with Jesus to do the thing God has called them to do.

Today, the Gospel of John’s account extends the action to show us how the baptism of Jesus serves as a catalyst for proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God.  It turns out it wasn’t for Jesus’ own benefit or John’s that Jesus was baptized, but for the benefit of the world.  The stakes were much greater than one or the other of them prevailing or being right.

In other words, the interaction between John and Jesus was a not a competition, not a game.  It was a step in God’s salvation history, and as such only God set the terms.  The goal of the “players,” if we insist on calling them that, was not to win, but to cooperate.  (I hate it when Mary Vano is right.)  It was o.k. for both of them—John and Jesus—to be confused, and wonder, and ask questions.  But rather than trying to figure out an angle or avoid God’s call, the interaction was all about figuring out how faithfully to do the thing God called them to do.

This is the Epiphany season.  This is the time in the church year when we are called especially to pay attention to where God may be revealed, and what God may be saying, and how God may be calling each of us to follow.  This is not a transaction, not something to push and pull with God, not a game to win.  If, in our lives, instead of responding to God, “O.k. God, I’ll do X if you’ll do Y” or “God, how about I do Z instead of what you’re asking me to do?” what if we approached God’s call in a spirit of cooperation?  What if we trusted God enough to lean into God’s plan for us, even when it confuses us as it did John the Baptist?  We can and should ask our discerning questions just as John the Baptist did.  To the extent that we can understand what God is doing, we should strive to understand.  (God made us rational and inquisitive creatures, not automatons.)  But then, we, like John, should seek to place our wills in concert with God’s will, to cooperate with God.  In that way, we will discover that we are freed from the obsession with winning the game and instead will be able to declare, “This is the Son of God!  Come and see!”

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[i] The definition of Game Theory by Google AI.

[ii] Cf. Exodus 4:10, Matthew 16:22, Matthew 17:4.

[iii] John 1:29.

[iv] Matthew 3:14.

Though this is the eleventh day of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany is day after tomorrow, the Gospel reading this morning begins as the Magi are leaving Bethlehem.  Immediately thereafter, an angel warns Joseph that King Herod is looking for Jesus to do him harm and counsels Joseph to flee with his family.  Joseph does so, and if you read the Gospel on your lectionary page you’ll see that after an interval in Egypt, King Herod dies and the Holy Family are able to return home unharmed.  A reading that begins with mild apprehension is anodyne in the end.  We can move on directly to the next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus is grown and begins his ministry.

Even if you are a regular Sunday churchgoer, this is all the story of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt that you’ll ever get.  But it’s not the whole story.  If you look again at your lectionary page, at the heading of the Gospel reading, you’ll see that we read Matthew 2:13-15 and 19-23.  We left out three verses.  No big deal, right? 

We never read those three verses on a Sunday.  We only read them once per year, on December 28, but even then, if December 28 falls on a Sunday (as it did one week ago), then we punt Matthew 2:16-18 and read a different Gospel.  I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it does seem as if the lectionary powers-that-be want us forget these three short verses of scripture.  Why might that be?  What could they say that might offend us, shock us, or affect the way we view the entire salvation story?

Here are those missing verses: “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.  Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’”

Let that settle in our minds and our psyches: hoping to scoop up Jesus in his deadly net, King Herod sends his thugs into the village of Bethlehem, rips baby and toddler boys from their mothers’ and fathers’ arms, and kills them.  Can you imagine?

Some question the historical veracity of this account, because outside of Matthew there is no other written or archaeological evidence of it.  But here’s the thing: Bethlehem was a tiny village in a backwater province ruled by a strongman.  Today no less than two thousand years ago, atrocities in such places go unrecorded with frequency that would shock us, if we paid any attention.  And what we do know of King Herod’s recorded character renders the slaughter of those children—called the Holy Innocents in our tradition on the rare occasion that we pause to remember them—entirely plausible. 

Herod was a ruler tolerated, if not loved, by the establishment, because he was larger than life and actively stoked the economy.  But he was also a terrible human being.  We know from reliable accounts[i] that Herod murdered three of his own sons, his wife, and his mother-in-law.  King Herod also ordered that, upon his death, Jewish elders were to be rounded up and killed, so that when the masses grieved for the elders, it would present the illusion to the outside world that they were mourning for Herod himself.  A guy like Herod would not hesitate to send his lackeys into Bethlehem to kill a generation of boys. 

He did it, friends, of that I have little doubt.  The slaughter of the Holy Innocents is a part of the historical story just as it is part of the salvation story.  We can’t elide over it and pretend Jesus and the Holy Family merely went to Egypt to lie low while nothing else happened.  Those little boys were killed by the man in power.  Their families’ lives were scarred forever.  For the residents of Bethlehem, the world shattered.  We can’t ignore it.  We have to reckon with it.

I mentioned a moment ago that the slaughter of the Holy Innocents occurs in both history and the salvation story.  This matters because too often we seek to separate the two.  We attempt to spiritualize the Gospels as if they have only to do with our own individual inner relationship with God.  We want to read passages of scripture in relation only to our own sin and salvation (and then only if these questions don’t impinge too much upon our daily lives).

But that approach misses the mark[ii].  As we celebrate during this Christmas season, the crux and pivot of God’s plan for salvation is the Incarnation, which shares the same root as the word “carnal,” having to do with flesh and blood.  Which is to say, whatever God is doing in our souls God is also doing in the real, tangible, gritty, social, everyday world.  The historical Jesus actually, literally embraced the diseased, sex workers, the hopeless, and the elite who harbored inner feelings of unease that they did not follow Jesus’ lead.  There can be no spiritualization of the Gospel, friends.  In addition to the posture of our souls, the Gospel of Jesus is always about the real world, and how we live in it, and the choices we make.

So what do we do with Matthew 2:16-18?  What do we do with a story of Jesus barely escaping the murderous hands of Herod and those dozens of little boys Herod callously and brutally kills?  What would it look like to draw Herod’s act forward and translate it for our own day?

UNICEF provides detailed statistics about violence towards children.[iii]  Each year, on average, 130,000 children and adolescents die violently across the globe.  Some years that total is much higher, and sometimes violence is perpetrated by those in power.  As one of innumerable examples, occuring just scant miles from Bethlehem (and admittedly close to my own heart), in November many of us gathered in this space to hear the heart-wrenching stories of Dr. Ahmad Yousef, a Little Rock physician who has spent time in Gaza, where more than 50,000 children—not terrorists, not soldiers, not able-bodied adults, but kids just like the ones who stream with laughter to our own children’s chapel each Sunday morning—have been killed by air strikes, illness, and malnutrition in the past twenty-six months.[iv]  That’s children equal to the combined total population of Benton and Bryant. 

Nor are we immune from violence against children in this country.  The National Children’s Alliance reports that approximately 2,000 children die from abuse or neglect in the United States each year.[v]   And, according to Education Week, in the past eight years, 147 have been killed and 419 injured in 238 school shootings in the United States.[vi]

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.

You know, and I hope you trust, that I strive never to be a partisan preacher.  It would be a mistake to read into any of the real-world examples I cite a political slant that I do not intend.  The point is from the time of Herod until our own day, we live in a world that kills children.  And we live in a world in which, too often, those in power sanction, actively or passively, the death of children. 

As Christian people, we cannot skip either those verses in scripture or those stories on the news that speak this truth and live our lives as though they don’t exist.  And then, we must—each of us—ask ourselves what our role will be in such a world.  Herod, due to his paranoia and will-to-power, sends thugs to kill children.  Many who benefit from Herod’s status quo undoubtedly choose to pretend that the slaughter never happened.  The parents of the dead kids keen and grieve.  Are those the only options? 

In Joseph—who is not, remember, Jesus’ biological father—we find one who takes action to protect and, indeed, save the child Jesus.  And in the adult Jesus who will emerge from these events, we find someone who learns from Joseph’s example and acts throughout his ministry to intervene and protect the vulnerable in real, physical, and concrete ways.[vii]

We, who claim to be disciples of Jesus, can do no less.  In wherever our contexts; in whatever ways we have influence; however our hearts are moved; we must intervene and act.  We must hear Rachel’s weeping.  We must preserve children’s lives and laughter.  We must obstruct Herod wherever he is found, so that all children can grow into the full stature of Christ. 

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[i] Namely, those of the contemporary Jewish historian and general Josephus.

[ii] Which is, by the way, the literal definition of sin.

[iii] https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/fast-facts-violence-against-children-widespread-affecting-millions-globally#:~:text=Violence%20takes%20the%20lives%20of,killed%20by%20violence%20were%20boys.

[iv] https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unimaginable-horrors-more-50000-children-reportedly-killed-or-injured-gaza-strip

[v] https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/national-statistics-on-child-abuse/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20an%20estimated%201%2C990,compared%20to%20girls%20at%202.25.

[vi] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-over-time-incidents-injuries-and-deaths

[vii] See John 8:1-11, for example.

What are you waiting for?          

Have you ever asked yourself that question?  What are you waiting for?  The areas and aspects of life to which the question could pertain are limitless:

You are stuck in your profession.  Going to work each day feels like repeatedly banging your head against a concrete wall.  You have long wanted to pursue something else as your livelihood.  But each day you sigh, and pack your lunch, and head back to the same place to do the same thing.  What are you waiting for?

You have always wanted to play a musical instrument, or learn a second language, or write poetry.  It’s been a lifelong dream you feel certain will give you a sense of accomplishment and meaning.  But the days, months, and years pass, and you never pick up the guitar or the pen, and you never subscribe to Duo Lingo.  What are you waiting for?

You yearn for a relationship of intimacy and understanding in your life.  You want someone with whom to share your joys and fears, someone to rely on and who can rely on you.  You believe you are capable of being both vulnerable and strong with another person.  And yet you do not make that phone call, or offer that invitation, or (these days) swipe right.  What are you waiting for?

In each of these scenarios, the waiting is for something that has not yet been.  It is the mystifying, and sometimes paralyzing, longing for a future that we desire but which seems inexplicably and bafflingly out of reach.  It is the exact opposite of nostalgia, when we pine for what once was.  The German language has two associated words for such waiting, sensucht which refers to a longing for some thing, person, or ideal you’ve never known, and fernweh, which refers to a longing for a place you’ve never been.  I love these two words—sensucht and fernweh—because together they capture that wistful and forward-looking emotion that seems to occupy so much of our lives.  We stare toward the horizon, wishing in our lives for so many things that aren’t: People, skills, ideals, and an altogether different world…and we wait.

We are in the right season to ask this question.  This is Advent, and it is a season of waiting.  Advent begs the question of what we are waiting for with importance that is equal parts personal and cosmic.  Each year, Advent insists that Christians ask, “What Lord are we waiting for?  What kingdom of God are we waiting for?”

I am presently reading a book[i] that examines these important questions in the context of the current American Christian milieu, and the conclusions are not promising.  So many Christians today—including, ironically, those who claim to be the most “Bible-based”—are waiting for a Jesus who looks very little like the one promised in Holy Scripture, and for a world that is completely foreign to the Bible’s hope.  In their sensucht, Jesus is a mean-spirited, violent-prone cynic.  In their fernweh, the kingdom is one in which only a few are included and most are left out, where those on the outside are considered ineligible for grace and unworthy of care.

But here’s the thing: Christians don’t get to decide who or what we are waiting for.  We don’t get to create our hoped-for vision out of thin air, or according to our cultural and ideological inclinations, or, worst of all, by lifting a Bible verse out of context here and there to cobble together a self-justifying picture.  The scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments are clear about who and what we are waiting for, and nowhere so clear as in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.

Isaiah writes in an era when nothing is trending the right way.  Personal relationships, local society, and the broader world are all spiraling downward.  The glories of Israel’s past are long gone.  Rather than blooming with abundance, God’s promises of grace and blessing seem as dead as an old and rotting tree stump.  If people are waiting for anything, the horizon of their hope is low and dim. 

But it is then that the Prophet speaks, and his sensucht, his fernweh, is bold.  Isaiah says:

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the awe[ii] of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the awe of the Lord…

[Then] the wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the
ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

The promise of God is not dead, it turns out, and from that rotting stump will emerge a new, green shoot.  The sensucht of God’s people—the one they are waiting for—will be filled with God’s spirit and wisdom and will embody joy and delight.  That One will usher in a world—the fernweh of God’s people—that is so wondrous, so desirable, that it brings tears to the eye: A world where there are no predators or prey, where violence and hurt are no one’s motivation, where those so unlike one another are all embraced as creatures and children of God, where all commune as siblings rather than exclude as competitors and enemies.

From the days of 8^th century B.C. until our own day, God’s vision is unchanged.  This is what we are waiting for.  This is our Advent expectation.  Anyone—Christian preacher, secular leader, or individual believer—who construes God’s intention for the world in any other way is twisting Holy Scripture and maligning God’s goodness and grace. 

This would all be merely argumentative, except for the character of the waiting to which God calls us, as Christian people. Our waiting is not—cannot be—like the waiting in other areas of our lives with which I began this homily.  In spiritual terms, we must give up our soulless pursuits and write poetry, reach out to others in love.  Once we know what we are waiting for, we are called to ready our hearts and the world around us for the coming of this Lord.  This means we are to be the vanguard of—we are to embody now—that which will be fulfilled when the Lord comes.  And not only during the hour on Sunday when we are in the church building.  We are to reflect Jesus–the One we are waiting for–in our own lives, taking delight and joy in God, decentering our own egos and allowing God’s Spirit to fill the space in our souls.  We are, in our own orbits, to labor for the world we are waiting for, in which there are no predatory human snakes, wolves or lions, where all of God’s children are embraced and cared for.         

In other words, those German words, sensucht and fernweh, which mean a passive longing for a future yet to come, we replace with a different word, a Greek word—prolepsis—which means “to live in the present as though the future has already arrived.”  Our waiting is to be active, so that we show ourselves and the world around us exactly what we are waiting for, so that, when the Lord arrives, Jesus looks upon us and says, “You have made the most of your waiting.  You have delighted in your God.  You have sought the kingdom.  Well done, good and faithful servants.

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[i] The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim Alberta.

[ii] “Awe” is an appropriate synonym for “fear” here, and, given our contemporary equation of “fear” with “terror,” it better evokes the original meaning.

Zacchaeus was a wee, little man, and a wee, little man was he.  He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see.

Anyone who grew up attending Sunday school knows today’s Gospel story from Luke.  Jesus is traveling through Jericho at the edge of the Judean wilderness.  Jesus’ reputation as a teacher, healer, and exorcist has preceded him, and as he enters the town a crowd gathers around him.  Word reaches Zacchaeus, the town tax collector, that Jesus is coming, and Zacchaeus wants to see him.  But Zacchaeus is a short fellow, and in order to see the impressive, awe-inspiring Jesus over the crowd, Zacchaeus must climb a sycamore tree.

Those are the details of the story as specifically described by Luke the Evangelist, correct?  Not so fast, says biblical scholar Isaac Soon.[i]  Professor Soon points out that the crucial Greek masculine pronoun in the Zacchaeus story is imprecise.  The NRSV, which mirrors the Greek accurately, says “Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way.”

Luke’s text is unclear whether the “he” referring to the one who is short in stature points to Zacchaeus or to Jesus.  In our minds, without pause, we always translate Luke to be saying, “Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because Zacchaeus was short in stature.”

But Professor Soon points out, with an undoubted twinkle in his eye, that the passage can equally be translated this way (listen carefully): “Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd Zacchaeus could not, because Jesus was short in stature, so Zacchaeus ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus.”

Maybe Zacchaeus is six feet tall, and maybe—just maybe—the reason Zacchaeus can’t see Jesus through the crowd is that Jesus is four foot eleven.  What does that do to the way we imagine the story?  What does that do to the way we imagine Jesus?  Do our minds, and perhaps our pride and sense of self, rebel against such a notion?

The possibility that Luke is describing Jesus short in stature is even more intriguing when we realize that the Gospels contain no other physical description of Jesus at all.[ii]  So, where do our preconceptions of Jesus’ appearance come from?  In preparation for this sermon, I did a bit of digging on the prevailing renderings of Jesus in various Christian churches and traditions. 

A common image is Jesus with a slim, angular face.  Jesus has auburn hair and a gauzy glow about him.  He looks contemplatively and angelically up to heaven, as if his attention is always on the will of his Father.  You’ve likely seen this very print on innumerable church walls.

Another common image shows a robust, hale, and even muscular Jesus, again with auburn hair, looking like a Nordic Hercules ready to wrestle a lion for the faithful.

And so on.  In these and similar images, Jesus is always attractive in some way or another.  Jesus portrays the epitome of one or more of our contemporary ideals.  Jesus looks like we want to look.  He looks like us on spiritual (and in some case physical) steroids.  In other words, the way we depict Jesus says a lot more about us than him.

The physician and biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer famously said that often our depiction of Jesus is akin to looking down a dark well.  We think we see Jesus, but what we really see is our own reflection.[iii]  We call to Jesus, but instead of Jesus’ voice, we hear our own echo.  This is problematic, to say the least, because when we cast Jesus in our image, his teaching and his call cease to challenge us.  Instead, such a Jesus serves to reinforce the ways we already look at the world, to satisfy our social, political, and religious inclinations rather than turn them on their heads.  Such a Jesus doesn’t say, as Jesus does throughout the Gospels, “Drop everything you know and follow me.”  Rather, such a Jesus merely says, “You’re doing fine.  No need to change a thing.  Keep on keepin on!”

But what if Jesus looked nothing like our usual renderings?  What if Jesus was physically underwhelming?  Professor Soon, who poses this notion, points out that Luke the Evangelist was familiar with Greek stories and the Greek world.  That includes the stories of the great Greek philosopher Socrates, another character who, like Jesus, challenged everyone he met.  Socrates is described in various places as having a snub nose, protruding eyes, a paunch, and to top it all off, a bad temper.[iv]  Socrates was not much to look at, apparently, and he could be abrasive and infuriating.  Socrates always pushed and prodded those around him to examine their assumptions about life, value, and the Good.  Crowds flocked to Socrates despite the fact that he was, in every conventional way, unattractive.  And, it’s worth noting, the conventional world ultimately condemned Socrates to death for his critiques.

Socrates and Jesus had a lot in common.  Professor Soon believes that Luke may have had Socrates in mind when he recollected Jesus.  Jesus also had a temper.  Jesus also frustrated and infuriated as many people as he captivated.  Many people, rather than open themselves to Jesus’ challenges upon their assumptions and their lives, chose to walk away from him.  They spread rumors about him.[v]  They ridiculed him.  Ultimately, they killed him.

I agree with Professor Soon’s interpretation of the Zacchaeus story.  I think it may have been Jesus who was short of stature rather than Zacchaeus.  Because anytime we imagine Jesus as the embodiment of our conventions, we close ourselves off to Jesus’ challenge.  We see not the Son of God who overturns our world, but our own idealized reflection, justifying our ways of being and our outlook on the world. 

So give yourself permission to imagine Jesus with a pug nose, bulging eyes, and a paunch.  Imagine that, when Jesus speaks, his words do not comfort you like a mug of cocoa on a cold day, but rather get under your skin, frustrate you, force you to see the world around you in a radically different way.  Then, imagine that you choose to follow Jesus anyway, not because he affirms you as you are, but because his words are so compelling, so true that even though they require you to change everything, you cannot help but embrace them. This is the effect Jesus has on Zacchaeus.  Jesus overturns Zacchaeus’ world.  After gazing at Jesus from the sycamore tree, Zacchaeus climbs down and invites Jesus into his home.  Zacchaeus commits his whole life to living differently, and he puts his money where his mouth is, committing half of all he has to help the vulnerable and the lost.  Zacchaeus will never be the same again, not because Jesus embodies all of his expectations, but exactly because Jesus does not.  Jesus upends everything, and Zacchaeus follows.  What about you? 

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[i] https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/new-testament/jesus-the-short-king/

[ii] The singular exception is in John 20, when the Evangelist describes the wounds on the resurrected Jesus’ body.

[iii] https://wwwtest.csun.edu/~rcummings/gridly.html

[iv] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202304/how-ugly-was-socrates

[v] See Luke 7:34.

Some will know that Jill and I recently moved to Hillcrest, and we’ve been getting our new-to-us house in order.  Last week, an electrician came by to fix a faulty socket.  He was a young man and quite talkative.  As he worked, the electrician glanced around at the books on my bookshelf and at our décor, including a small portrait of me in my Sunday vestments.  He suddenly paused both his work and his chatter and asked, “Are you a pastor?”  With a reluctant sigh, I responded, “Why yes, I’m an Episcopal priest.” 

Thus, what should have been a twenty-minute service call turned into an hour-long witness by the young electrician about his faith.  He was forthright, he was sincere, he was yearning…and I disagreed theologically with virtually everything that came out of his mouth.  But I nodded, made thoughtful noises (Hmm…), and didn’t say a meaningful word in reply.

Do you have any recurring dreams?  According to the website Choosing Therapy, there is a host of dreams that people commonly experience again and again.[i]  Most such dreams are not happy ones.  Among those that top the list are dreams of which you are likely aware, such as dreams of falling or being chased.  Others were new to me, such as the common recurring dream of one’s teeth falling out.  Then there’s an entire category of well-known recurring dreams that include the dream of standing naked in front of a crowd of people.  The motif of this and similar dreams is finding oneself unprepared and exposed. 

My own recurring dream is actually a variation on that theme, though blessedly in my dream I am fully clothed.  My version is that I step into the pulpit, and my sermon manuscript is missing.  It’s gone, and as I look out at the congregation, I have nothing to say.  Another variation is that I stand at the altar, and the pages in the altar book are all mixed up.  When it’s time to speak the sacred words of the Eucharistic Prayer, I say the wrong thing at the wrong time.  I have those dreams quite often, and I always wake up anxious and unnerved.

Today’s epistle reading comes from the Second Letter to Timothy.  This letter is traditionally considered to be the last of St. Paul’s writings, a farewell of sorts, in which Paul gives his final advice and encouragement to Timothy and all those followers of Jesus yet to come.[ii]  In the letter, Paul warns of a world in which the teachings and meaning of Jesus will be manipulated toward personal and worldly ends, when, instead of following Jesus faithfully, people will “suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth.”  When that happens, Paul says in the letter’s crescendo today, “I solemnly urge you: proclaim the Gospel; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.”

The young electrician who came to my house last week did not knowingly or intentionally misconstrue the Gospel of Jesus, but he misconstrued it nonetheless.  He expressed a Gospel message of “divine gotcha,” in which God is waiting at every moment to jump out and condemn.  He believed the primary goal in life is to get one’s ticket punched to heaven when we die, rather than living a life of gratitude for God’s grace already given.  And the look behind the electrician’s eyes was not that of someone who felt himself unconditionally loved by God, but rather of one who is skittish and wary of a stern and capricious Creator. 

Not only did I disagree with the electrician; I also worried for him that he was leaning into an interpretation of God and Jesus that is more about a particular strand of contemporary American culture than anything I read in the Gospels.  But I didn’t say a word.  I listened to him talk; I offered him a brief prayer when he finished; and I let him gather up his tools and leave.      

After the young man left my house, I realized I had exactly the same feeling as when I awaken from my recurring dream.  I didn’t find the words to say to him, words that might have given him relief and offered light.  And I’m a preacher, for Pete’s sake.

This is the Episcopalian’s lament.  So many become Episcopalian because we sense that the Gospel we seek to understand and follow here is true to the person, the message, and the grace of Jesus.  Many of us have gravitated to the Episcopal Church for just this reason.  At some point, through word or action, some Episcopalian spoke to our souls in a way that liberated us from either distorted Christian exclusion and fear on the one hand or secular emptiness on the other, and we were awakened anew to the sheer abundance of God’s grace and the wide circumference of God’s love.  So why are we Episcopalians often so timid to name that Gospel and speak that Word?

Consider it this way: Many Christian churches regularly pull a verse or two from scripture and weave a message around those isolated verses that may have no bearing at all on the context of either the history or the biblical book in which they appear.  To often, those messages fall prey to the exact danger St. Paul cautions in Second Timothy, suiting the preacher’s own social, cultural, or political desires rather than faithfully following where the Gospel leads.

But in the Episcopal Church—our church—each and every week we read large swaths from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Epistles, and the Gospels, and over the course of months we work through entire books of the bible, paying close attention to how the pieces fit with the whole.  Additionally, our parish offers well-attended bible studies that dive deeply into Holy Scripture, so that we get not biblical sound bites, but the sweep of salvation history, in which God is always pushing God’s people to grasp more fully the radical extent of God’s embrace.  And yet, we Episcopalians are too often timid about sharing our faith.

It’s time we find our voice.  The world can no longer afford our hesitation or our silence.  Dividing lines, the demonization of others, the acceptance of violence as a way to settle differences, a willingness to disregard those on the margins, leaving the most vulnerable forgotten, and uncared for…Each of these things is increasingly common in our world, and, unbelievably, all of these things are at times pursued and defended in the name of Jesus.  But that is not the Jesus I read about in Holy Scripture.  That is not the God whose Gospel we follow and who nourishes our souls.  More than ever, the world needs our voice.

The Rt. Reverend Andy Doyle, Bishop of Texas, has published two books entitled Unabashed Faith and Unabashedly Episcopalian.  I love those titles, and I love that adjective.  Unabashedly—without reserve, with the confidence borne of the grace of Jesus that lightens our souls and enlightens our lives—we must find the words to share the Gospel as we know it with the world. 

The singer songwriter Jason Isbell has a tune entitled, “It gets easier, but it never gets easy.”  That’s true of many things in life, and it is surely true of sharing the Gospel.  We will never be as prepared as we’d like.  We will not always have the manuscript close at hand or the altar book turned to the right page.  Sometimes we may find ourselves in awkward situations that feel like a bad dream, perhaps trapped in a house with a stranger who talks about Jesus with a twinge of fear in his voice.  Speaking of our faith, talking about the grace we encounter, naming Jesus, will not always be easy, but as we do it, it gets easier. We are Episcopalian followers of Jesus.  We are unabashedly faithful.  “Do the work of an evangelist,” St. Paul says, “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.”  The grace of God is too good, the embrace of God is too wide, not to share it.  God knows the world needs it. 

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[i] https://www.choosingtherapy.com/recurring-dreams/

[ii] Most mainstream biblical scholars believe 2^nd Timothy was written by a later disciple of Paul rather than Paul himself.