Fasting: Starve the Emptiness

Mark 2: 18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people[a]came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ 19 Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.

The weather had been unstable.  One day brilliant and warm, the next day stormy with a wintery edge to the wind. An autumn day in Judea, long long ago. Your friends and even strangers call you a God-fearer.  Not born a Jew, but you know Torah better than a few descendants of Moses.  You learned the household practices and public rituals. And then you heard him.  This Jesus of Nazareth.  The things he says and the things he does, he makes Torah come alive, fills it with flesh and blood, and love.  Some people say he used to study with the Essenes, and yet others with the Pharisees.  An old woman who walks with you says he is somehow kin to John, the one who is baptizing down at the river. 

Somehow, you don’t really care about that.  He is like no one you have ever met, and entirely just like everything you want to be.  The day of Atonement, a fasting festival is coming, and it makes you wonder.  So you speak up, and ask out loud in a clear voice: Why don’t we seem to fast? 

Starve the emptiness and feed the hunger.  How do you starve emptiness? Is it reasonable or possible to deprive nothingness? Not the emptiness of a solitary room, but the blankness of bored lives, the way you can feel lost in the middle of a crowd, how we might feel very shallow in the presence of plenty. 

“Why do John’s disciples and the Pharisees’ disciples fast, but yours don’t?” It is a very reasonable question.  Everyone you have ever known, every religious system they have ever heard of, the Essenes, the Zoroastrians, they all fast.  From something.  In a material world that can shift from grains of sand to stores of grain in a season, fasting reminds us of survival, of abundance and fragility.  Food is survival memory.

Fasting in religious practices across time and place is commonly tied to penance, protest, mourning and discernment.  When experienced with holiness it has been known for millennia to well, work.  The followers of John the Baptist fasted, the Pharisees fasted.  Yet, Jesus, who did fast, is not asking them to fast.  There is this first somber hint of Jesus’ coming death, which is a reminder that this Gospel is not a live tweet, but a faith story of memory mixed with the needs of a Markan community, who will be people who religiously fast in the name of Jesus.  Fasting is a core practice of Judaism to this very day, and the early communities we know in the New Testament are still deeply embedded in Jewish community life, that it is no surprise that some fresh evolution of fasting will soon become a part of Christian practice.

Yet, like so often, Jesus turns it upside-down.  Right now, in this text, while Jesus is teaching and healing,  right now is the time not to fast, but to Feast.  While he is with us, he will reach into that other side of the survival memory.  We will break bread together.  He invites us to starve the emptiness and feed the hunger.  Again and again, and in the days after his resurrection, he invites us to feast.  A feast of new life and fresh understanding.  A feast of clarity about the brokenness of the world around us, and how this man, his life and his teachings, are the way to salvation.  Recalling the words of the book of the scrolls of Isaiah,    he invites us to a new fast. One that feeds the hunger.  Real hunger for real calories for real people, and the kinds of hunger that folks with full cabinets feel.  Live in him and he will starve the emptiness.  How does Jesus starve the emptiness? By feeding the hunger.  The hunger for forgiveness and compassion.  The desire for real solutions to real problems that can loosen yokes and shelter the refugee.  Whatever you give to the Lenten season, my advice is this. 

Whatever fast or project you choose, and you should choose something, how can it starve the emptiness and feed the hunger?  Fasting is a practice across religions for one simple reason.  It works.  For all the human error and brokenness of the strangeness of religious systems of the questionable pursuit of embracing the Holy, over time what remains is what ‘works’.  Fasting works because it invites us to redraw our parameters.

Poet-philosopher David Whyte suggests why in his essay, ‘Withdrawl’.

“We make ourselves available

            for the simple purification

            of seeing ourselves and our world

            more elementally and therefore more clearly again.

We withdraw not to disappear,

            but to find another ground from which to see;

            a solid ground from which to step,

            and from which to speak again,

            in a different way, a clear, rested,

            embodied voice,

                        our life as a suddenly emphatic statement

                        and one from which we do not wish to withdraw.”

Jesus’ answer as to why he wasn’t fasting with his followers, is that what he invited us into is a kind of fast that is actually a feast.  Neither chocolate nor cheese, nor sackcloth and ashes, but an invitation to a different way, that is a clear, refreshed and holy statement.  Starve emptiness, feed hunger.  This is the fast, the fast that is a feast, that Jesus chooses. 

(There is no doubt the refrain from this homily came from this song.)

Holden Ecumenical Evening Prayer

February 18, 2016

Pioneer Methodist Church

Walla Walla, Washington

Boxes and Butterflies

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky.  Boxes on our calendars, boxes in our attics. We even put critters in boxes: ant farms, fish tanks, and butterfly houses.  These booths for living critters allow us to keep them in one place, to hold a precious un-holdable,  to glimpse the wonder of life itself. 

I think this gospel lesson is sort of funny. I know, I know, it is a big deal. However you might admit it is kind of weird. ,Then it also has the comedic relief of the sleepy disciples coming up with one more bad idea.  However, the part that is really amusing, is in the way that I can see myself reflected in the story.  Oooooh, precious.  Look it is Moses, the premium prophet is standing here, let’s put him in a booth!  And look, Elijah, second only to Moses, is this an all-star game?  We cannot let him fly away again, so yes,  so let’s put him in a box too!  And Jesus, the anointed, the Christ, look at him…so he looks different.   Can we make a little box for him too?  Perhaps with a light blocking curtain?  Little boxes on a hillside, it is easy to see this become a strange attraction, a mini Stonehenge, a living hall of fame.  Let’s take the radical call of God for us   to liberate all people, and let’s tuck it away where we can find it again when we want to.  Prophetic demands for justice, managed.  Holy invitations to leave everything and follow, contained.  One of the most amazing things we have ever seen and do not quite understand; well, we understand things in boxes.

Most of us are familiar with the butterfly life cycle.  Caterpillar crawling around in the dirt on all those legs, eating and eating and eating leaves.  Then a cocoon for a while, and then voila..beautiful butterfly.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar made it all look quite cute and mundane.  Here is the thing.  That cocoon, it doesn’t form around the caterpillar skin.  Nope.  The caterpillar skin rips open with the cocoon material INSIDE!!!  If I were a caterpillar, and my little caterpillar brain could wrap its head around the changes that lay ahead, I would be beyond scared.  I might eat excessively to numb the fear.  I might try to google DIY ways to stay young forever.  I like my caterpillar legs and caterpillar stripes, and, well, no thank you.  I do not want to experience such painful changes.  I will stay here, and nibble on leaves until I get nibbled on myself!

Lent begins on Wednesday, and it is in some ways, a cocoon time.  A frightening journey into the worst of humanity, into the graves we dig for ourselves into our selfishness and meanness,  into the grubby messy reality of lives that are lost and broken and hurt begins on Wednesday, and it is in some ways, a cocoon time.  A frightening journey into the worst of humanity, into the graves we dig for ourselves into our selfishness and meanness,  into the grubby messy reality of lives that are lost and broken and hurt and angry.  

We are about to get broken open, not once, but twice.  Our veil of a caterpillar life will be torn in two, and then after a time,   that precious shell, that will break too.  There is no change without letting go, without naming our discomfort and sorrow, without scrubbing away our dragon skins.  Jesus will suffer, he will die by our terribleness, but that is not the end of the story.  The future that our caterpillar brains cannot imagine, is that wings of love, justice and freedom are already inside of us.  No matter how many ways we try to box God in, love, forgiveness and liberation can always break through.

The venerable Rowan Williams offers us this,

“So the Holy Spirit, who always brings Jesus alive in our midst, is very specially at work in the Eucharist, making it a means of spiritual transformation. Because of this we go from the table to the work of transfiguring the world in God’s power: to seeing the world in a new light, to seeing human beings with new eyes, and to working as best we can to bring God’s purpose nearer to fruition in the world.”  (Being Christian, Eerdmanns)

Perhaps the glow of Christ at the transfiguration is us. Perhaps on that day the disciples saw the world in a new light and they saw a world of disciples reflected in him.  We with our new eyes, living in a fresh light, the world of faithful people turned to Jesus. Following his call to be love, to do justice, to choose wings over boxes.  Perhaps in Jesus that day, they saw the eternal Alleluia,  the brilliance of love, the hope of the saints, and the tears of the martyrs.  Streaming through the past and the present and the future, reflecting back from him.  Or maybe, shining through this one person, this light, this friend, this Holy One who call’s you his beloved.  

Alleluia is our destiny, the resurrection of Easter will be our butterfly wings.  We are called into a brave participation in Jesus’s life, a willingness to risk ourselves beside him in this messy broken world.  To find that brilliant alleluia, we have to practice a stout vulnerability, the kind that leaves the old skin and little legs in the dust.  To live into Alleluia, we will have to be astounded by the breadth and depth of honesty we are capable of.  Ash Wednesday is directly ahead of us.  We are invited to face courageously the shedding of our old selves, to be still , yet not unchanging and not in a box.  Instead a cocoon of prayer, examination and reformation.  Yet..the thing our little caterpillar brains cannot conceive of…we are going to be butterflies!  We can emerge with wings!  Wings!  Can your caterpillar brain even imagine them?  What do your wings look like?  Christ invites us to rise, has made us to soar.  Alleluia.  Thanks Be to God for the grace of wings for which we can hardly ask or imagine.  

Alleluia. Alleluia, Alleluia. Amen.

Last After Epiphany, RCL C

February 7, 2016

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

Know Where You Are: Merry Christmas!

Old surplices and cotta’s make good angel costumes.  They can have burn holes and stains from years of use, they can have wax from candles dripping and or purple splotches from wine splashed. They can be yellowed with time or pink with mistaken washing, and yet they will still make excellent angel costumes.  Such common costuming of angels is honestly not Biblical,   but the light garment, tinsel halo and wings are hard to cast aside.  We can add biblical swords and even simulated fire, but we have to stay away from the kind of alien like costume that demands the first line the angels always sing, BE NOT AFRAID.

Holly was clever, inquisitive and outgoing.     That year she was so excited.  It was the first year she got to be an angel.  The wings and halos and fairy fluff of dreams.  Secondly, she was excited because she had managed to grab the most yellow old cottas.  Frankly I think this one was a laundry mistake.  It shone, it glowed lemon, much more than it shrank back in tones of aged parchment.  Holly rushed up to me and announced how she had secured the golden one, and it was the very best.

As we prepared for the pageant, I reminded every pageant critter that when they were ready in their costumes,they were to come and find me to receive their bell.  ‘Merry Christmas Holly!’ and I placed the bell over her head. I was giving out bells and finding shepherd headwear with frantic haste, like some of you may have experienced in the last few days.  This proud golden angel, asked me one question.  ‘Ms Jane, why do you give us bells?’  I was barely listening, busy and harried with preparations.  I offered a snarky and silly answer, ‘so I know where to find you.’  She nodded her head and she backed out of the pageant critter crowd. A few moments later she cleared her throat and said loudly,  ‘Alright everybody.’  At which point I lifted my head and listened to hear what she might declare. ‘Ms. Jane wants us to wear the bell so she knows where to find us!  So don’t lose your bell!’

If you dressed someone up in cardboard illustrations of a smart phone text message screen, you might come close to the definition of an angel. It is active living messaging.  Not just words on a screen or in the air,   but a shape and a light and a strange encounter with living communication.  We don’t really have an angelology in the Episcopal church. Important councils and creeds make no statements about angels.  If you turn to the small print Historical Documents section of the prayerbook you will not find the word anywhere.  Nor will you find it in the Catechism.  We sing of them, we name them in scripture, we dress children up as them,      but we have never seemed moved as a church to say anything definitive about them.  Which may be wise and suit you just fine.  Maybe strange goings on and incomprehensible things are         exactly the sort of thing you sincerely doubt, or would rather not think about.  Or maybe angels tickle that sense that there is more     than the objective observable universe, but have no words for it, so you just don’t try.  Or maybe you have never sensed anything mysterious and magical and spiritual, or maybe you simply hope that there really is more.

Augustine of Hippo instructs us that 'Angel' is the name of their duty and calling,    but it is not what they are. According to scripture their chores include praising God, watching God’s people,   and being instruments of judgement. However, primarily, they are mysterious heralds of God's desire.  A different order of being, and what they are according to Augustine, is more like shapes of God’s spirit. The angels are manifestations of God’s dreams, intention and energy.  So strange and other are they that it is difficult to say anything definitive at all.  Yet at two of the largest festivals of the church, there they are.  Standing at the Empty Tomb, and appearing to Mary, and to Joseph,and lowly shepherds near Bethlehem.

Angels are a powerful symbol for all the dimensions of God’s universe about which we have no real idea. The venerable Rowan Williams invites us to consider angels more seriously. He says ‘anything that puts our human destiny a bit more into perspective is not a waste of time.’ He continues, ‘the world we experience is complicated and in many ways seems dark and dangerous. These angels are a shorthand description of everything that is around the corner from our perception; everything that is beyond our understanding of the universe - including the universal song of praise that surrounds us always’. (Slightly paraphrased.  From Tokens of Faith)

You may have heard that sweet and trivial notion that every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings.  I wish that it were that easy. That we could multiply the messages of peace and goodwill, that we could increase the living words of justice, that we could make a festival of jubilee just by the ringing of bells.   We are surrounded by things we do not understand, but this dream of God isn’t so manipulate-able.  The actions of tyrants and the confusions of friends and family, these crush such fantasies. 

Yet, just around the corner from our limited senses, we are surrounded by choruses of Gods spirited communication, we are surrounded with living words that glow with God’s dream of peace. Peace from terrors and release from fears.  The truth that real peace comes     not from earthly things and governmental power nor spending sprees.  Peace comes through God in human heart and voice, comes through this boy, this child.  A living word, made flesh, not only a shape of word and spirit but truly made of everyday skin and bones and cries and muck.  Peace comes not by distance from every day and mysterious things, but through it.

We live in a universe that is vast and amazing and terrifying and we have only begun to comprehend it.  Where are we?  How does God know where we are?  Where we are is proclaimed in thought and word and deed, it is shown in the light of what our Christian practice is.  This is a song that is sung never alone, always surrounded by the communion of saints, always accompanied by the angel choruses that sing Comfort, Bravery and Peace.  We are called to sing with them, to glow with them, to be a living message of the gift realized in the life of Jesus the Christ.

Ms. Jane, why do you give us bells?  I give out bells so that you know where you are.  You are at the stable, you are one of the cast of millions, you are in second hand costumes and you are with a hopeful chorus singing the story of God’s people. Jesus is born, embodied holy Word of God throughout all ages.  Healing, justice, food for the hungry and shelter for the lost.  Where are we?  We are summoned to the cradle, and sent out again.  A message that stays with the messenger, is no message at all.

Do Not Be Afraid! The world is dark and dangerous, yet Do Not Become Your Fears!  Enter the mystery of the angelic throng, be astonished and be a living message of the Christmas wonder.  For I am bringing you Good News of great joy for all people!  To you is born this day in the city of David a savior, the Messiah, the Lord!  Merry Christmas!

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington

5.30pm Christmas Eve Liturgy

Christmas Lessons (form uno)

I did earnestly intend to record this, and it was good.  However the crucial step in recording, press record, didn't occur.  Blessings, see ya next time!

Weight of the World: Mary and Harry

The girl with the weight of the world in her hands, and the boy who lived.  Plenty of authors and preachers have outlined the parallels between Harry Potter and Jesus, which are fairly unavoidable.  Yet sometimes I think there is a lot more of Mary in Harry’s story, and certainly a whole lot of Moses.  He is just a boy, that Harry Potter.  With fractured glasses and pants many sizes too large.  He has no worldly power, no glory that might cause eyes might turn to him.  Hidden amongst us muggle-types, we with no knowledge of magical things, Harry has hints and inklings of his vocation.  Yet nothing in his life as he knows it has prepared him for the journey that he is called to.  The Chosen One, darling and amazing and burdened with a possibly heartbreaking fate.

Mary she is just a girl.  She is covered in shawls and scarves of legend and longing, covered in roses, in beads of prayers and in saccharine silliness to numb our discomfort.  What young person's life can possibly prepare him or her for the journey Gabriel announces?  She is just a girl.  A girl with the weight of the world in her hands.  Luke is telling us that in the birth of Jesus, we are part of a new Exodus.  The Magnificat, this song that Mary sings, it is a lyric that echoes the song of Hannah, the opening musical number in the Davidic epic.  And Hannah's song is rich with the tones and topics of the song of Miriam, a celebration of freedom, a thrilling voice ascending from the terrors that lurk behind them in Egypt,  and a pause before journeying into the unknown silent night that lays ahead.

I am having a harder and harder time believing that there isn’t a terrible magical spell running amok in the world.  In the novels, when something goes wrong in our world,  That we just cannot reasonably explain, it is actually due to the misdoings of the magical realm.  Now some data suggests that things here in our world are getting better.  I read the whole article yesterday.  The math seems accurate, the stories congruent.  Yet still, I scoff.  Because in the newsfeed I sense something beyond everyday wrong.  Every time another disaster scrolls across up my screen, every time the news seems gut wrenchingly terrible beyond reason, I wonder if there are giants on the loose, or if dark spells are being cast, and I wonder if the fictional world isnt’ such a fiction after all.

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,     

            remembering his mercy,
 just as he promised to our ancestors,
        to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.

The song that Mary sings is not about some future age.  The salvation that is dawning at Christmas is already active.  The title of Savior is evidence of a human need that is deep and broad and heartbreaking.  It names a fearful desperation  that is greater than what our own resources can bear.  In Jesus the work of God as savior is made flesh, in the birth of Christ God transforms my childish confusion, in the incarnation of God compassion dissolves my cruel imaginings.  And as we await Christmas day, Mary sings to me courageously, sings that the gift of God's peace has always been being born.

Mary was young.  Anthropologists tell us that in Biblical times for women, first marriage was in their early teens.  Maybe you have to be young at heart to dare this.  The tradition tends to gild the wholehearted young Mary in clean skin and blue scarves. But I never see her that way.  I see the girl who embraces vulnerability, who will face shame and possible peril for this gift she bares.  The Greek orthodox title for Mary is Theotokos.  God bearer.  Glorious but also weighted.  A precious son, a wiggly boy, a compassionate adult, a systematic victim,  and yes a resurrected Lord.  What will be the scale to weigh the gift she will bear?

If I were God and considering my incarnation, I might start by asking experienced mothers.  Which makes me wonder if other women were asked.  What if more mature women heard this invitation     and were frozen by disasterizing; stopped by seeing the tragedy that could lay ahead?  What if we have to possess the brave dreaminess so natural to our young friends to trust like this?  Does it take the faith of a young person to believe the half-giant who says you are a wizard?  What if we have to cast aside all mature defensiveness to sing Mary’s song? 

What kept her safe may have been that Mary seems to go unnoticed, just another veiled and shamed woman in occupied territory.  If she were of more notice to the powers that be, this scandalous occasion would have brought more scrutiny, and perhaps retribution.  She whose body is home for the great and holy Creator of the universe,  she is awe inspiring, but she demands questions. Would we say yes?      How do we care for desperate people in difficult circumstances?  What is happening in her, what is be happening in us is regime change.  Are we ready to sing a song of liberation and mercy for all people?

If we take up her song, we cannot just name the promises of God,, instead we have to dare greatly and enter into them. The good news that Christ is a gift for us, he wants us to sing her song, wants us to embrace his whole life in the center of our being.  He wants for us to discover the gift of vulnerability which shines bright enough to transform the evils we cannot comprehend. 

In a closet beneath the stairs is a boy, who has been counted for nothing.  A boy who is the stranger, the unusual neighbor, who is in every way an ‘other‘ who arrives at our door.  Like us he is confused and lonely, and what matters is not his will, but his bold trust, what matters is not our power, but God's.  

The girl with the weight of the world in her hands dared to trust in the holy unbelievable.   She bears for us the God made flesh, Christ our Lord, Savior, Redeemer, friend.  She also bears us to him, presents us to someone and something who has been with us all along, inviting us to sing this song, waiting to hear us answer yes.  In Jesus the work of God as savior is made flesh, in the birth of Christ God transforms my childish confusion, in the incarnation of God compassion dissolves my cruel imaginings.  And as we await Christmas day, Mary sings to us courageously, sings that the gift of God's peace is ready to be born in us.   

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington, USA

December 20, 2015

Advent 4C RCL

There is no doubt that Patty Griffin's song Mary, and the Indigo Girls song The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands are all over this sermon and spontaneously quoted. And it is also properly tagged with the 'probably has buffy at it's heart' category.  DFTBA!

Acceptance of Imperfection: Advent 1.1

Acceptance.  Things you can change, those you cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Scripture ties acceptance to gifts and therefore also to sacrifices.  Time, effort, emotion, resources all go into these acceptable gifts.  So to do time, effort, emotion and resources go into acceptance.  Whether it be self-acceptance, circumstance-acceptance, or neighbor-acceptance, none of these happen without intention.  

The heart of compassion is really acceptance. The better we are at accepting ourselves and others, the more compassionate we become. Well, it’s difficult to accept people when they are hurting us or taking advantage of us or walking all over us. 

This research has taught me that if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their behavior. -GoI, B2

Perhaps acceptance is rooted in examination.  Looking at our time, our talents, our resources with plenty of love, and an abundance of truthfulness.  Accepting that our time is both abundant and limited, that our talents lie with some things and not others, accepting that we live in a time and place of unbelievable resources, but that we may utilize them unwisely.  Unless we take the time to examine our feelings and naming our boundaries we cannot begin to be wise or healthy.  

For most of my ministry career I have had ample time to focus on Advent and make the preparations needed to encourage congregations to practice it.  This year was turned upside-down, and between congregational transition and new demands and duties, I had hardly the time.  Furthermore, it being on the heels of Thanksgiving travel, I was even less prepared than usual.  And the full realization of it didn’t land until Sunday morning.  Jesus is coming, better look busy! 

There were surprises in the bulletins and boxes left unfound.  It was a imperfect advent of Advent; but it was good and holy and blessed.  Learning to accept imperfect Sundays and other days isn’t something that will come easy.  I have to live myself into the imperfections, discover that love and hope and truth still flow no matter the things that seem like errors.  Advent continues, Christ will come. Furthermore, I find myself repenting of the years and years of judgy-ness of folks who didn’t seem to do much to plant lifelong formation in the practices of the church year.  Compassion and forgiveness and acceptance are deeply bound to one another.  Go Blue!

Journey through Both.And: Gifts of Imperfection for Advent Introduction

The Wholehearted journey is not the path of least resistance. It’s a path of consciousness and choice. And, to be honest, it’s a little counterculture. The willingness to tell our stories, feel the pain of others, and stay genuinely connected in this disconnected world is not something we can do halfheartedly. To practice courage, compassion, and connection is to look at life and the people around us, and say, “I’m all in.” 

Brene Brown, Gifts of Imperfection

Advent is both.and time.  Dismay and promise. Confusion and safety.  Scarcity and satisfaction.  Fear and forgiveness.  It is dark and it is light, there is abundance and there is desperation.  Any day, any time, and it is especially right now, it is the season of Advent.  St. John of the Cross called this liturgical time a luminous darkness.  It is a night sky, electric with the glow of the universe and yet enough darkness to cause us to struggle to walk without harm. There is an approach to the liturgical advent that focuses on the tripping, the falling, the brokenness.  There is another approach that is awe and wonder at the justice that God in Christ is leading us into.  It is not a one or another thing, it is both.and.  We are to prepare to make Christ room by looking honestly at the absence of righteousness, and by bending our hearts toward holy abundance.

If you are just beginning an Advent journey through ‘the Gifts of Imperfection’ you deserve a few warnings. 

• She will talk about uncomfortable things.  Like shame.  Real human shame that can lead to mountains of self-criticism and self-righteousness.  If you want to heal our personal and societal brokenness, then we must talk about shame and the numbing we use to ignore shame. 
• This book is based in university level research, yet this research is shared in stories, and the invitation to journey more deeply through your own.  Every Advent journey calls on us “to tell our stories, feel the pain of others, and stay genuinely connected in this disconnected world.” 
• Many of the personal stories in the book are focused on contemporary parenting and householding in a privileged setting.  Even when this is not our setting, we should find in her work and storytelling a more generous understanding of the social forces that are impacting all of us. 
• She will occasionally use the dialect known as ‘Texan’.  This might include a few choice words, and you are invited to recall that forgiveness is an important spiritual practice. 
• This is not an Advent, Christmas or Epiphany book, yet it is very much full of wide-eyed-compassion, it is very much full of holy gifts that you can use to better be Christ for the world, and it is awash in the whoa’s of Epiphany: enormous and intimate and impactful.  

Finally, it is a both.and book, it is both about our courage, connection and compassion on a personal level, and our courage, connection, and compassion in our congregations and wider community. Of all the gifts we discover this season, perhaps a new way of practicing love for our imperfect selves and neighbors is a holy gift of peace.

A Brave Story: Christ the King

There are times when I skip to the last chapter of the book.  Perhaps, I have been slogging my way through, or maybe I am frustrated by the story or bored with the book, or even appalled.  So I skip ahead, I read the final chapter, and then I decide: Do I want to know the journey between here and there?  My life with novels is complicated.  If I have just read one that made my heart soar, I want another book, I want another delight, immediately. Yet I know, I cannot use any review or search engine to find that perfect new fictional journey.  There have also been times when I have read a book all the way through,  and I despise the ending.  I feel slighted.  I find myself resistant to starting a new book.  I grow growly and snarly and perfectionist and I think about taking a break.  

Yet we need story, we are created for story.  New research shows that our brains light up when we hear a story.  All the places in our minds that we need to bind together for meaning making: stories do it.  Hearing a story is like a meaning making wish come true. 

Grace and peace to you from the one who is and was and is coming, and from Jesus Christ—the faithful witness, the firstborn from among the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.   Look, he is coming with the clouds!  

Revelation was 3-d before there was a word for 3-d.    It is abstract storytelling art,  word pictures inviting us into God’s story.  The letter to the churches that we know as Revelation, it is written to be read aloud, written to be heard and written to be experienced. Revelation is surround sound, and it is absolutely not Morse code.  The main character in Revelation is Jesus Christ, The main plot is that God has made us agents in the story of his reign.  You could imagine this royal story following a route on a map, yet we know from our earliest days the route isn’t flat or straight. You could imagine God’s story as a Ferris wheel, or like the Godly Play circle of the church year, going around and around,  never ending.

To understand this message of God's reign made flesh in the life of Jesus we must see the world eschatologically, see things from the final perspective.  Of all the stories Jesus tells us about who he is, brother, friend, teacher, shepherd, gate, vine, bread, lamb, in the end we are called to know him as Christ the King.  We are called to enter the last chapter,  which is also the first chapter.  We are invited to experience the hope and heartbreak, invited to the truth that this is God’s story, and that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Yet the thing about this end, is that it is not the kind of end that you can pin down.  Our conclusion is off of the page, off of the map, our last stop will be beyond 3-d, beyond now and then.    That last moment, every first moment, these are all in God’s heart, in Christ’s reign.

The gospel writers didn’t begin with creedal statements.  They began with stories, because we are wired for stories. They began with telling of Jesus’ reign by telling us of his life helping us to make meaning of what the destination is and our place in it.  Jesus’ quest is a story where love is everything.  Love is the setting and plot and the actors of God’s story.  The kingdom of God isn’t about a place or a time, it is emotions and actions    and relationships and responsibilities.  This reign of God, our plot line within it, this is impossible without love.  Impossible without forgiveness, impossible without refusing to be separated from those ‘outside’. 

It is Christ the King Sunday, the New Years eve of the church year.  A time to look back at the year gone by, and a chance to wonder about the way that lies ahead.  It is a quiet type of New Years eve and I cannot help but look back at this year’s journey. If it was a book, I would tell you I barely remember the first chapter.  More importantly, however, it is a multi-dimensional story of stories, of surprise, hurt and confusion and rising to challenges.  The tender stories of friends and strangers in the kitchen serving soup,  an unbelievable story of teens in the ocean on a sunny San Francisco summer day.  Everyday chapters that tell of Bible studies and Renovare and Godly Play wondering.  The brave epic of whipping up a cooling center in a heartbeat.  There is not one single story that will tell of how we have lived the quest      for the reign of Christ this year.  We are living the tale of Christ’s love, even when it is hard, and messy and you are ready to close the book.

This isn’t a fairytale, the violence across the world is unavoidable, the fear, hard-heartedness and shame runs loose in the streets here at home.  The not-yet of God’s reign is too loud and too close.  Advent is dawning, and Jesus is coming.  It is the time for daring hearts to rumble with a trying journey.  Time for eyes open, minds alert, time for people brave enough, in love enough with the story,  to follow our Lord and Savior into mystery of it all. 

There was one book I really wanted to give up on. It was a startling, and strange, and non-linear novel.  Because of its premise, I knew that reading the last chapter wouldn’t help.  I kept texting the good friend who recommended the book. ‘Really?  Should I keep reading?  This makes no sense.’        ‘Yes,’ she replied.  And the next time, yes she said, and again.  I was over halfway through the book before I began to get it, I was deep in the story before I found myself in the beauty and awe of the story.  I had to rumble with the novel,  I had to go through the disorientation and frustration.  I could not skip the middle of the story.  I had to read it with a friend.

Christ has already told us what the brave ending of this story is.  Now and then, there is only a love story. Love your friends, love your enemies, learn to love the rumble with the hardest parts.  The brave beginning, middle and ending is a love story.  Our text comes from the life of our beloved who is the soon to be newborn King.  

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, WA

Christ the King, Year B, RCL, Track 1