grace (with a side of ducks) - rev. bri desotell -

“And having loved his own who were in the world,

Jesus loved them to the end.” – John 13:1

  they say

that even the rich and famous are stuck at home

and the fashion designers have set aside their sequins and satins and silk

and instead they sew gowns and hats and masks for the heroes

who show up each day to fight the enemy we cannot see

  and I sit

at my own little sewing machine

my crooked seams as far from couture as you can get

 I sit

stitching masks

which I know aren’t enough

but they’re all I’ve got to give

 I sit and I sew

and I pray

 I pray for those who will wear these masks

I pray for the community outside my walls

I pray for healing and safety and strength

and I pray that one day

one day

these masks will be torn apart

every stitch ripped out

and these grim reminders of our frailty

will be reassembled into baby blankets

and teddy bears

and wedding quilts

and baptismal gowns

 each one a patchwork of pain redeemed

and perseverance

a ragged reminder of darker times

and the promise of resurrection that kept us holding on

 and maybe, God willing

one day I’ll cradle my grandbabies

swaddled in blankets

made from the fragmented pieces of masks once soaked with tears

now perfumed with the aroma of life made new

 and one day the museums will advertise piles of elastic

and ribbons and ties ripped from those masks

now set aside

but which still stand as a reminder of the way we pulled together

a silent witness to all those stitches which hold us together

and bind us together

and how great we were

when we all came together

by staying apart

 I sit and stitch

alone

and realize

we are not our own

and we have never been alone

 and maybe I won’t see that day

but by God, someone will

 so I sew and I sing

I stitch and I pray:

 Bind us together, Lord

Bind us together

With cords that cannot be broken

Bind us together, Lord

Bind us together

Bind us together with love

  --------------------------------------------------

(this poem is for my kids

who think my crooked seams are perfect

and whom I hope are learning more than sewing skills

when they look at me)

- Bri Desotell 3/25/2020

Last week, we started our series on the Gospel of Dr. Seuss with the story of one of Seuss’ most familiar characters – the Cat in the Hat – who taught us about grace and reminded us how important it is to know when to ask for help.

 This week, we go back to an even earlier Seuss, one which is perhaps more unfamiliar to most of us: the story of Bartholomew and the Oobleck.

 I don’t remember hearing this story when I was growing up – and when you remember that I grew up as the child of two elementary school teachers, that’s pretty surprising; I didn’t think there were any Dr. Seuss books I didn’t know. But Bartholomew and the Oobleck somehow flew under the radar: perhaps because the story doesn’t rhyme, or perhaps because level-headed Bartholomew isn’t quite as flashy of a hero as the persistently optimistic Sam-I-Am or the fun and funny Cat in the Hat.

 So for your sake and for mine, let’s revisit the story of the Oobleck.

 The story starts in the Kingdom of Didd, in The-Year-the-King-Got-Angry-with-the-Sky. And in an unlikely twist, the hero of the story is not the king but the page boy, Bartholomew. Then again, if you remember that this is a children’s book, it’s not so surprising that a child is the hero. Or if you’ve ever read the bible, if you remember the stories of David, the overlooked youngest son, or if you remember young Samuel’s call story, or the young person whose lunch fed thousands, or the king who was born in a stable, the Messiah who called us to have the clear-eyed faith of a child – then it’s not so surprising that a child sees more clearly than the proud and pompous king.

 But anyway, back in the story, we learn that the King is a person who gets angry often. In this particular year, the King gets angry with the sky: he growls at the rain, he growls at the sun, he growls at the fog and he growls at the snow. And maybe you know people like this king, who spend their lives growling at things they cannot change – and who are so busy growling that they miss the beauty right in front of them. Maybe you’ve been a person like that; I know sometimes I have been: so caught up in the false feelings of power that anger gives me, that I miss what’s right in front of my face.

 So here we have this King, angry with the sky, wishing for something NEW to come down. And because he is the King, he is determined to have exactly what he wants. The King decides to call for his royal magicians, to force them to make something new come down from the sky.

 Bartholomew, the page boy, tries to get the king to slow down, to think his plan through, but the King won’t listen. And Bartholomew, bowing, says, “Your Majesty, I still think you may be very sorry.”

 The king’s magicians are summoned, shuffling up from their secret hideaway, chanting their secret magical words, and the king commands them: “I wish to have you make something fall from my skies that no other kingdom has ever had before.”

 And the magicians speak one word: “Oobleck.”

 “Oobleck?” says the King. “What will it look like?”

 “Won’t look like rain. Won’t look like snow.

Won’t look like fog. That’s all we know.

We just can’t tell you any more.

We’ve never made oobleck before.”

 And as the magicians shuffle away to summon the Oobleck, Bartholomew begs the King to call them back. “I won’t stop them,” says the King, “not for a ton of diamonds! Why, I’ll be the mightiest man who ever lived! Just think of it! Tomorrow I’m going to have Oobleck!”

 All night, while the king struggled to sleep, Bartholomew kept a sleepless and anxious watch, afraid of what the morning might bring. At first, when dawn breaks, it seems like the silly magicians have failed, but just as Bartholomew breathes a sigh of relief, he notices a wispy little green cloud. As the cloud comes closer, lower, he notices tiny little greenish specks.

 Bartholomew can’t say why, but those green blobs frighten him. He wakes the king, who looks out the window in delight, even as the little specks grow bigger and bigger in size. The King calls a holiday: “I want every [one] in my kingdom to go out and dance in my glorious oobleck!” And he sends a protesting Bartholomew to ring the holiday bell… but the bell won’t ring; it’s full of sticky green oobleck.

 And that’s only the beginning. Bartholomew sees a bird in her next, stuck in gooey, gummy, glue-y goop, and he realizes: if the green stuff sticks up robins, it’ll stick up people, too!

 He runs to wake the royal trumpeter to sound the alarm – but a glob of oobleck flies right into the horn, and not a sound will come out. The trumpeter reaches inside to clean it – but he ends up with his hand stuck tight.

 Bartholomew runs for the captain of the guards, who ignores Bartholomew’s frantic warnings, and – in an effort to prove his bravery – eats some of that beautiful green oobleck… and his mouth is glued shut. Bartholomew runs to get more help – but it’s too late. The oobleck is falling in globs as big as footballs; it’s too late to warn the people, who are already stuck in their fields and in the streets. The oobleck piles, still falling, until it breaks through the windows, pouring into the palace, and everyone ends up stuck, panicked, terrified, right where they are. No one can move – no one but Bartholomew, who carefully continues to avoid the green goo.

 He runs back to the throne room, looking for the King – and there he finds him, “proud and mighty ruler of the Kingdom of Didd, trembling, shaking, helpless as a baby.”

 Bartholomew finds the king, stuck to his own throne, his crowd stuck on his head; oobleck dripping from his eyebrows and oozing into his ears.

 “Fetch my magicians!” he yells, but Bartholomew says, “It’s too late.”

 “Then I must think of some magic words,” groans the king… until Bartholomew says, “Don’t waste your time saying foolish magic words. YOU ought to be saying some plain simple words!”

 “What do you mean, boy?” asks the king.

 “I mean,” said Bartholomew, “that this is all your fault. Now, the least you can do is say the simple words, ‘I’m sorry.’”

 The king is flabbergasted; no one has ever spoken to him like this before. “Kings never say ‘I’m sorry!’ And I am the mightiest king in all the world.’”

 “Bartholomew looked the King square in the eye. ‘You may be a mighty king,’ he said. ‘But you’re sitting in oobleck up to your chin. And so is everyone else in your land. And if you won’t even say you’re sorry, you’re no sort of a king at all!’”

 Friends, Dr. Seuss wrote this book in 1949. He was inspired, he said, from a conversation he overheard while stationed in Belgium during World War II: during a rainstorm, a fellow soldier complained, “Rain; always rain. Why can’t we have something different for a change?”[1]

 Knowing Dr. Seuss’ great imagination, that conversation caused him to dream up just what else might fall from the sky – and what might make that soldier more careful what he wished for.

 But knowing Dr. Seuss, and knowing the world of the 1940s, it’s not hard to see a deeper caution in the story of Oobleck and the King. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. Just because we don’t intend devastation, doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for the destruction that follows our choices. And pride, the desire to outshine our neighbors, our love of power and love of self – those are dangerous, devious motivations indeed. And if we are not careful, we just might end up being the reason that devastation rains from the skies.

 It was an important message in the aftermath of the war, but it’s also an important message for us today: when we find ourselves stuck, mired in broken systems, watching devastation unfold around us, while those with the power to make changes stubbornly refuse to take any responsibility, to apologize, to change or to grow.

 Friends, the systems we live in are broken. We are stuck. I don’t think that any of us, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum, can deny that we find ourselves divided on nearly every important issue, longing for a better system but unable to imagine one, feeling hopelessly gridlocked, just as stuck as if we were sitting in Oobleck up to our ears.

 We’re stuck. We’re stuck with one person of wealth and privilege spending billions of dollars trying to prove they’d be a better leader than some other person of privilege and wealth… while for most of us, nothing changes at all; we’re stuck, lobbying accusations and insults at each other, while a virus preys on our prejudices.

 We’re stuck in a society where women and minorities are still locked out of the rooms where decisions happen.

We’re stuck paying thousands and thousands each year for health insurance and even more thousands in copays and deductibles and medical expenses because we’re afraid of the cost of health care for everyone.

 We’re sinking into the racism our forefathers mixed into the very foundation of our nation; we’re stuck in a cycle of inherited wealth for a few and generational poverty and despair for everyone else.

 We’re stuck in a nation where we are so afraid of being taken advantage of that we’re willing to let children go hungry and veterans sleep under bridges while retirees freeze in their homes.

 We’re stuck in the church, too. We’re stuck in a church that tries to cling desperately to the golden past and spends our time and energy preserving what we have rather than joining Jesus out in the world looking for the lost – and we’re stuck in a denomination that has spent decades and billions of dollars fighting over whether all really does mean all.

 We’re stuck. We’re stuck; we’re overwhelmed, bogged down, mired in the hopelessness and helplessness of it all.

 And this week, Dr. Seuss teaches us a very important lesson about what to do when we’re stuck. For one thing, when we’re stuck, sometimes the best thing we can do is listen to the children: to the voices of the young people, who haven’t been so hardened or become so comfortable that they’ve stopped dreaming of the way the world is meant to be. Bartholomew warned the king not to let his own pride guide him, much like the child in another story who was brave enough to admit that the emperor had no clothes. When we’re stuck, look to the next generation: their voices, their passion, just might help get us moving again.

 But just looking for something new isn’t enough: before we can move in a new direction, we need to figure out how to get unstuck from the messes we’ve already made. I think often of the words of Greta Thunberg, the teenage activist who went on strike – and inspired a generation to rise up and demand action on climate change. When she was invited to speak at the Senate, Greta said, “Don’t invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it…”[2] Listening isn’t enough – not if we don’t figure out how to get unstuck and do something.

 Last week, the Cat in the Hat taught us how important it is to ask for help. But this week, we learn it’s just as important – and often far more difficult – to say, “I’m sorry.”

 It’s so hard to say, “It’s my fault.” It’s hard to say, “I contributed to making the mess we’re in today.” It’s hard to say, “I’m sorry.” We don’t want to admit our mistakes. We don’t want to confess we were wrong. We don’t want to have to change our minds or change our ways. We don’t want to learn, to be challenged, or to grow.

 Even when, like the King of Didd, we can’t ignore the evidence of our mistakes, we’d rather sit, proudly stuck in our own messes, than apologize.

 But Bartholomew forces the King to recognize that, just as his unbending pride got him into this mess, his unbending pride is what’s keeping not only the king but the whole kingdom stuck. Because the king’s sin doesn’t just affect him; his refusal to acknowledge or apologize means no one can move on.

 And maybe that’s the lesson we need to hear, as we search for a way to get unstuck: maybe it’s time to stop pointing fingers and assigning blame – because until we are ready to acknowledge that we’ve all helped make the messes, until we are willing to admit the ways we’ve all be wrong, we won’t ever be able to get unstuck and start moving towards a new way of living, towards making things better, for everyone, together.

 This season of Lent is traditionally a season of repentance: a time to take a good look at our lives, to confess where we’ve gone wrong, to do what we can to make it right, and to commit ourselves to turn and go in a new direction. This is a season to say “I’m sorry” – to God, and to the people we’ve hurt, to all those who’ve gotten stuck in the messes we’ve made – this is a season to say “I’m sorry” – and acknowledge the ways we’ve benefited from systems we may not have built, the times when we’ve been willing to be silent and look away rather than confront the hard truth – this is a season to say “I’m sorry,” recognizing that there is magic and power in this words; when we apologize with humility and honesty, when we say we’re sorry and we really mean it – we open the door for healing to begin.

 As soon as the King of Didd finally confessed; when he sobbed out, “It is all my fault. And I am sorry…” all the oobleck began melting away. Our messes are rarely so easily cleaned up; it can take quite some time and effort for us to get unstuck, but until we are sorry, until we find those words, we cannot even begin.

 Beloved in Christ, I am sorry. I am sorry for the ways the church has missed the boat. I am sorry for the ways the church has abused its power, for the times when church leaders have let their fear be bigger than their faith. I am sorry, on behalf of every pastor who has hurt you, who abandoned you, who kicked you out, who beat you down, and who told you your pain and grief were your own fault. And I am sorry, on behalf of every pastor who let you off easy, who told you only half the gospel, who never challenged you to examine the log in your own eye, who promised you heaven without showing you the kingdom of God here on earth.

 I am sorry for the times when I should have said something – but I didn’t. I am sorry for the times when I should have listened – but instead, I said everything wrong.

 I’m sorry. For myself, for this church, for the global church: I confess that we have failed. There are many things we’ve done right – but there are also many times when we have fallen short. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, and we have not heard the cries of the needy. We have served other lords than the Christ who comforted the hurting and unsettled the comfortable – and I am sorry. And I pray that, as we confront our sin, as we confess and repent, we may begin to find a way to move into the future God dreams for us to see.

 I am sorry. But I’m not the only one who’s “stuck” today. So I ask you: what are you sorry for? What messes have you made? What is it that’s got you stuck? What do you need to confess before God? And what do you need to confess before others? Whose forgiveness do you need to seek out? Who is it that you need to forgive – so that, even if they’re not sorry, you at least can come unstuck? What broken relationships are you being invited, in this season, to try to set right? And what are the systems we are being called to take responsibility for – to apologize for the things we’ve allowed to go on for far too long, and to find that, as we take responsibility for what’s wrong, we discover we also have the power to help make it right.

 Beloved ones, may we be strong enough to say we’re sorry. May we be humble enough to ask for help. And in our confession, in our forgiveness, in our faith, may we find again and again the power of grace.

  O God, we are sorry. We have failed. We have let our pride lead us astray. We have chosen to sit stubbornly in our mistakes rather than admit where we’ve gone wrong. We have let ourselves get stuck – and we’ve let others sit, stuck, in our messes, too. O Lord, have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Hear us, as we cry out to you: hear us, as we name our sins, as we face our own responsibility for the messes around us. And Lord, by your mercy, by your grace, as we face the choices we’ve made that have helped get us stuck, may we also discover that we have the power to begin to clean up the messes, to transform puddles of oobleck into rivers of justice and oceans of grace. In the name of Christ, who hears us, who forgives us, who calls us to new life, we pray; amen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_and_the_Oobleck

My kids are artists. They are made in the image of a creative God, a God who delights in drawing rainbows across gray skies, who loves to paint the clouds orange, purple, and gold, a God who knelt in the mud to form beings out of dust.

 My kids are artists. Like the God who made them, they look at the world and search for ways to transform it, to make something new, to bring color and manifest joy.

 And I appreciate their creativity; I love how my children have learned to embrace their visions, to dream their dreams, to care enough about the world they live in to work to make it more beautiful. I love when their creative spirit leads them to new solutions to their own problems; I love when their creative spirit helps them made new friends, helps them try new things; I love when their creative spirit produces amazing artwork to frame and hang on our family walls.

 I appreciate their creativity a little less, however, when they are so inspired that they try to skip the middleman and create their artwork directly on our family’s walls. Or floors. Or furniture. Or skin. Or clothes.

 And by now, our kids know the expectations. They know that crayons and markers are only for paper – they know, because they’ve been taught, reminded, caught, punished, taught and reminded over and over again. They’ve had to clean up their own messes; they’ve learned just how hard it is to erase pencil marks off dressers and scrub markers from bedroom walls.

 But sometimes, sometimes, the call of inspiration is too much to resist; sometimes, even though they know better, sometimes our little people just can’t help themselves.

 Not too long ago, our five-year-old felt the creative spirit calling her, and she was moved to design a new art installation on our bathroom wall. She worked with a variety of media: pencils and crayons and markers and watercolors and lip gloss, brought together in pursuit of one glorious and colorful vision.

 My daughter really is a great artist. But she also is a smart little girl, and even as she admired her handiwork, she knew that mom and dad would probably have very different feelings about what she’d done.

 So she turned her pencil around, and started trying to erase the evidence from the bathroom wall. Unfortunately, that pencil eraser just made smudges and smears and made everything look worse.

 But B didn’t panic. Fortunately, she was already in the bathroom, and there was a sink right next to her. So she started the water, and she dipped her paintbrush into the water, and she started trying to paint her masterpiece away.

 The wet paintbrush did some wondrous things to blend the colors, but the art remained. So B turned next to the bar of soap. Again, she used her paintbrush, dabbing it first in the soap, then attempting to use the soap to swirl the colors away.

 Again, she discovered a new artistic technique. But again, the artwork stubbornly remained.

 And now she was starting to get a bit desperate. She reached for the bottle of hand sanitizer, pumped out a handful, and tried smearing it directly on the wall. Hand sanitizer is pretty strong, but mostly, it just transferred more of the colors to B’s hands, while leaving incriminating little handprints behind.

 She reached for the towel, tried to wipe her hands clean, and tried to wipe the whole mess – the paint, the crayons, the markers, the gooey lip gloss, the water, the soap, the sanitizer – she tried to wipe it away. And she ended up with a colorful towel, and a smudged and blotchy wall, and a panic in her little heart.

 She did the only thing left to do: she scrubbed her hands, balled up the towel in the corner, turned off the lights, closed the door, and walked away.

 Maybe you can relate: maybe it’s been a few years since you created artwork on the walls, but maybe – like B, or like the Cat in the Hat – maybe you’ve made a mess which you only later discover you just can’t figure out how to clean up. Maybe it’s the words spoken in anger, which you just can’t take back – maybe it’s the email you wish you never sent; maybe it’s the money spent on an impulse which you later regret; or maybe it’s years of neglecting your physical health, only to reap the consequences… or years of letting your fears and insecurities keep you from doing what you really want to do, or trying something new. But no matter what you do, you can’t undo what you’ve done… and no matter how hard you try to fix it, to clean up the mess, you just keep seeming to make it worse.

 Eventually, though, it catches up to us. Eventually, reality sets in. Perhaps it surprises you not at all to know that my daughter’s bathroom masterpiece was discovered… it was discovered by her older sister, her wholly unsympathetic older sister, who delighted in tattling, who took great joy in a superior attitude, who scolded and admonished her little sister… until mom and dad reminded her how, at the same age, big sister expressed her creative side with a bottle of red nail polish… all over the bookshelf, and the books, and the box fan, and the carpet, and the walls… We reminded her how her own creative spirit once inspired her to doodle with a permanent marker on the face of a flatscreen television… We reminded her how all of us have made messes, and we all make mistakes.

 And suddenly, big sister didn’t have nearly so much to say.

 Not one of us is perfect. We are made in the image of the creative God – but we fall short; we make mistakes along the way. All of us have, at times, whether intentionally or not, all of us have made messes of God’s good creation; all of us have disappointed God, and hurt others, and hurt ourselves; all of us have sinned.

 And much like my five-year-old artist, much like the Cat in the Big Hat, we find that – try as we may, we just can’t fix it by ourselves. Everything we try just moves the mess around. It’s like a bad attitude: and maybe you manage not to yell at your boss, but instead you yell at the car that cuts you off on the way home; maybe you control your temper with the grandkids, only to let it loose at the server at the restaurant; maybe you keep your cool with your neighbor, only to scream when the kids won’t eat their veggies; or maybe you watch the news, and it makes you feel overwhelmed and anxious, and because no one on the TV listens to you anyway, you end up yelling at your spouse or your best friend instead. Everything we try just moves the stress around. Even if we get the mess out of our own house, we just set it loose in the world – and we can’t ignore it; no matter what we do, we can’t make it go away.

 After trying and failing to clean the mess himself, the Cat in the Hat finally asks for help; one friend after another, Cats A, B and C and down through the alphabet all do their best – but nothing works, until finally we meet tiny Cat Z.

 And the Cat in the Hat says,

 “Z is too small to see. So don’t try. You cannot.

But Z is the cat Who will clean up that spot!...

“He has something called VOOM.

Voom is so hard to get,

You never saw anything Like it, I bet.

Why, Voom cleans up anything Clean as can be!”…

Then the Voom… It went VOOM!

And, o boy! What a VOOM!

Now, don’t ask me what Voom is. I never will know. But, boy!

Let me tell you. It DOES clean up snow!...

[And the Cat said,] “If you ever Have spots, now and then,

I will be very happy To come here again.”

 Finally, the whole mess disappears: through the power of this mysterious Voom, which cannot even be seen – but which is the only thing with the power to make everything clean.

 “Voom is hard to get,” the book says, and “Don’t ask me what Voom is; I never will know.”

 But friends, I know what it is. And the good news is, it’s not “so hard to get” – all you have to do is ask.

 Because Voom is the one thing that works, even when our own power fails; Voom is the one thing that can clean us when we can’t clean ourselves; Voom is the one thing that erases our failures and our sins, and allows us to start with a brand new clean slate. Voom is the love of God; friends, “Voom” is the Cat in the Hat’s word for grace.

 You can’t control it. You can’t see it. But grace changes everything.

 That’s what we see in our scripture for today: grace. In Genesis, a mess is made in the garden; a mess that the first people try to clean up, to hide with some fig leaves – but they can’t hide what they’ve done.

 But then God shows up, and offers grace: even in the midst of judgment, they are given real clothing, to protect them in this harsh new world. And later in Isaiah, the prophet speaks to a people suffering in exile, a people who are suffering for their faithlessness, wallowing in the messes they’ve made, and through Isaiah, God promises: though your sins be like scarlet, I will cover them, clean them, fresh as newly-fallen snow.

We are entering the season of Lent: a season which invites us to take a good and honest look at our lives, to face up to the messes we’ve made, the mistakes we’ve tried to sweep under the rug, the flaws and failures we’ve hidden behind a smiling face – Lent invites us to acknowledge our sin. We all have fallen short. We all have made messes, all over the place.

 But here is the good news: that’s not where the story has to end. The Cat in the Hat is finally wise enough and courageous enough to ask for help – and we can ask for help, too. And if we do, when we cry out to God, we are given the gift of grace: God’s power to heal us, to cleanse us, and to enable us to begin again.

 I hope that my daughters never become so afraid of punishment or failure that they stop creating masterpieces. And I also hope that they are learning that our love is always stronger than our frustration, and no matter what mess they’ve made, if they ask us, we will help them make it right.

 And friends, I hope that you know that God’s love for you is so much greater, so much deeper, so much more powerful and patient than our love could ever be. May you have the courage to keep seeking joy; may you have the hope to follow the divine and creative spark within you; and when you mess it all up, may you be strong enough to ask for help… and know that you will always be met with God’s amazing grace.

 God, we thank you for hearing us when we ask for help. We thank you that we are not alone in our messes. We thank you for the gift of grace; for giving us voom – that invisible, undeserved, powerful grace. Give us the courage to ask for help; give us the joy that comes from doing the best we can; and by your grace, when we fall, help us start all over again. In Jesus’ name we pray; amen.

I have always enjoyed travelling: whether it’s exploring a new hiking trail, finding a new playground for the kids around town, taking a road trip, going to a class or training, or getting on an airplane, there is something exciting about discovering a place you’ve never been before. Part of the magic is, I think, that traveling takes us out of our routines. Our normal rhythms, our normal daily worries and stresses, get put on pause for a little while. Even something a mundane as laundry and clutter takes a back seat when you’re living out of a suitcase or when you’re on the road. Instead, you’re able to focus on new experiences.

 I have always enjoyed travelling… or really, to be honest, I’ve always enjoyed arriving. I love to explore new places, but I’m not as keen on the process of getting there: frantic packing and repacking, long hours in a car, eating whatever food you can scrounge up from a gas station or overpriced fast food stand, hurrying up, waiting, hurrying again, worrying, checking and rechecking that you remembered your ID and your cash and your confirmation numbers…

 I enjoy arriving, exploring new places, but I sure do wish that there was a faster way to get there. Maybe that’s why, as a kid, I kept waiting for the day when the teleporter technology finally became a reality. Maybe that’s why my own daughters keep looking for secret doors into Hogwarts hidden behind portraits or inside unassuming brick walls. That’s why my husband keeps looking for a blue police box that’s bigger on the inside. And maybe that’s why all of us keep searching in every cupboard and closet for a shortcut into that wonderful world of Narnia.

 You remember Narnia, don’t you? The magical kingdom C.S. Lewis imagined, into which four children stumbled through a secret passageway in an unassuming wardrobe. In Narnia, the children discovered wondrous creatures, had magical adventures, learned hard lessons about faith and friendship and hard work and hope and – perhaps most amazingly of all – when they returned home, it was as if no time had passed at all.

 Imagine that: being able, anytime you want, anytime you need, to sneak away to a world full of fauns and talking lions, or maybe a warm and sunny beach, or an amusement park or a quiet mountaintop – to escape to a place where you can catch your breath, escape your to-do lists, allow your soul to be restored, and then – when you come back home, there’s no pile of mail waiting, no overdue bills, no thousand messages in your email inbox, no overgrown lawn, the milk in the fridge hasn’t even gone sour.

 I keep looking for that secret portal: for a fast escape, and an instantaneous return. I have opened many wardrobes, pounded on the back walls of every closet, but I haven’t found it yet. Our family has knocked on every fairy door we could find – we’ve even made our own – but no doors have opened for us. \I’ve even looked for a secret passageway here in the church where, in our big box of church keys, there hangs not one but two keys intriguingly named “the Troll Doors.” I don’t know where or what that is, though to be sure, I’m not sure I want those doors to open anytime soon.

 I still haven’t found the cupboard that leads to my private retreat. But there is one door in our home that opens into an unpredictable world of mystery and surprises. It’s a small door – only about yea high – a little door in the corner of the land of Kitch-En, behind which you’ll find the fickle and capricious Kingdom of Pots-and-Pans.

 Maybe you have a little door like that in your house: a door which, when you open it, you never know quite what you’ll find. Perhaps it will be a delightful and orderly little corner of the universe, everything you need conveniently organized by type and style and size, pots piled like so many nesting dolls, and with every pot, a lid to be found. Or perhaps, more often, more likely, just nudging the door open sets loose a cascading crashing cacophony of metal, pans and lids and colanders and bowls spilling all across the floor. Or perhaps nothing pours out, because the contents have been so haphazardly and consistently wedged into that space that nothing moves at all. Like a game of tetris, like a game of jenga, you search desperately for the one loose piece, the keystone that will release the rest.

 I hate that cupboard. Don’t get me wrong; it’s full of wonderful and necessary things, tools which we use to feed our family on a daily basis. But too too often, instead of putting our pots and pans carefully and neatly away, we take the fast and easy route: we take them out of the dishwater, open the cupboard door, throw the pieces inside, and then slam the door as fast as we can and hope for the best.

 The thing is, that fast and easy path today is anything but fast and easy when tomorrow comes, when the piles have poured down into the black hole of the no-man’s land of dead space back in the corner – because that cupboard connects with the corner space by the stove, where there’s no door, no light, and where – to be honest – there really just might be a gate to Narnia but we just reach far enough that we’ll ever know. Every day finds one of us or the other on our knees, crying frustrated tears, screaming unkind and angry words, up to our waists into that cupboard, with piles of pots and pans and colanders and mixing bowls strewn around us, searching desperately for the right lid or the big frying pan or that one sauce pot in the size we know we need.

 Which brings us to the season of Lent. Traditionally, this is a season associated with the practice of “fasting” – which means giving up some of our ordinary routines, letting go of something we’ve taken for granted, in order to shake up our lives and renew our gratitude and connection with God’s people: whether by spending one day a week eating nothing, or letting go of a specific kind of food, going meatless, or cutting caffeine, or letting go of processed sugar or eating out or unnecessary spending – giving something up, so that it forces us to think about what we really have, and what we really need, and what it is that matters most.

 But as I’ve prepared for this season, I’ve been thinking about the other meaning of the word “fast” – as in: we live in a fast-food, quick-fix kind of world… but too often, just like our mess of pots and pans, the fast and easy solution today only leads us to an even bigger mess in the days to come. Instead, we need to plan for our journeys, to appreciate the time it takes to get there, and to make the better choices today so that we have what we need tomorrow.

 And maybe the two meanings aren’t so very different: because in the season of Lent, part of the reason we fast is to force us to slow down, to think, to consider what we’re doing and where that road is leading us. When Jesus spent his time fasting in the wilderness, that time surely went slowly: but over those forty days of hunger pangs and prayer, he put his house in order, so that – when temptation came, he was prepared. And too often, the trouble we face isn’t an avalanche of kitchen tools – but it’s the way that our lives seem to come crashing down around us when trouble comes. When we reach for our faith, but we can’t find it – when we search for hope, but no matter how far we dig, we can’t figure out where it’s gone – or when we come to the end of our lives, and we look around at everything we spent our time and our energy on, all that we traded the days of our lives to build, and it’s nothing but a house of cards crashing down, nothing but vanity, just dust in the wind.

 This season invites us to fast by going more slowly. This season invites us to take some time to put our houses in order – literally, perhaps, by tackling those corners and piles of clutter that cause us anxiety; by digging through our piles of stuff, by cleaning up the messes, by weeding out the things we don’t need any more, and releasing them back into the universe, and finding ways to make things easier for us in the days to come. But this is also a time to put our inner houses into order – to open the doors we’ve worked so hard to keep closed. This is a season to come face to face with all those feelings, those memories, those parts of ourselves which we’ve tried to shut away – maybe because it was the only way we knew to survive at the time, but now, the time has come to open the door and face the mess that hides inside. It’s time to come face to face with our grief; to name what we’ve lost, and what it meant to us, and what it still means for who we are today. It’s time to come face to face with our guilt; to recognize the ways we’ve failed, the people we’ve hurt, the needs we’ve ignored, the things we’ve tried to run away from. It’s time to come face to face with our fear; to name the worry that keeps us up at night, to recognize the anxiety that lurks beneath the surface every day, and to take the power we have to face what we can, and to accept what we can’t, and to discover that sometimes the monsters that keep us up are nothing but bunnies made of dust.

 It’s time to let go of what we don’t need any more – and it’s time to think of what we do. Just like nesting our mixing bowls and colanders makes it easier for us to be fed tomorrow, what would it look like for you to put your spiritual life in order? To practice now what you’ll need when those hard times come – to wrestle with the hard questions now, while you’ve got space to breathe; to consider what it is that matters most, and just how far you’re willing to go for God; to revisit the story of hope and justice in the scriptures, to spend time in the presence of the God who loves you, to start writing down something you’re grateful each day, and to start intentionally weaving prayer into your life? How can you use this season to put your house in order, to learn to love God better, and to love your neighbor better, and to love yourself, too?

 The reality we face tonight is that there are no shortcuts – but at the same time, we are reminded that, for all of us, time is short. Let’s not waste it digging angrily through the messes we’ve made, or wishing away the journey of our lives, or pushing frantically against the closet doors where we’ve hidden our shadows away. But let’s commit ourselves, during this season of Lent, to slowing down, to doing the hard work, to making our spiritual homes places that we really want to live, for the rest of our lives – however long that may be – and places where we will be able to find peace, in our hearts and in our souls, when the time comes to go on to our eternal homes.

 May God give us courage to open the difficult doors.

May God give us power to face what we find there.

May God give us patience for the road that lies ahead.

And always, always, may the only thing that overflows and crashes down around you in waves be the peace that passes all understanding, the unfailing peace that comes from God alone.

I’ve really enjoyed this Faith at the Movies series. We’ve had fun the last few weeks – talking about Disney princesses and Jedi battles – though even in those fantastical universes, we’ve recognized the battle of good against evil, and the risk faced and the power held by ordinary people to confront their privilege and face injustice. But today, those themes come into the real world, and real lives are at stake.

 And I start by saying that, as I prepared for this Sunday, the thought that kept coming back to me over and over again is:  I should not be preaching this sermon. That’s not to say that I shouldn’t be preaching this sermon, but what I mean to say is, I should not be preaching this sermon – not because this conversation is not important, but because I’m me: I’m not a person of color; I’m a white cis straight woman… and while the world doesn’t always appreciate the voices of women, especially in ministry, the reality is that, as a cis straight white woman, I am very aware that people like me have far too often been treated as a precious commodity, to be defended and protected at all costs. In the name of people like me, injustices and violence have been heaped upon my trans sisters and people of color – especially men of color – even though, rarely, has anybody tried to trust or protect people like me against cis straight white men, who are actually historically our biggest threat.

 But I stand here knowing that the accusations of white women, the suffering and fear of white women, has been used over and over throughout history to justify prejudice and discrimination and imprisonments and railroading and lynching –and for that truth, and for all the ways I myself have over the years intentionally or not participated in a system that privileges me and devalues others’ lives and experiences – I stand here humbled, ashamed, full of sorrow and regret.

 I have wrestled this week with my place in this story – the story of a black man sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman, a murder he didn’t commit; a black man whose continued imprisonment is justified in the name of letting white women sleep well at night. But I’ve also recognized that this same black man was freed not just because of the efforts of his lawyer but the tireless and risky work of another white woman – a woman who saw what was happening, and knew it was wrong, and refused to be silent or just go away.

 Maybe I’m not the best person to preach this sermon. But I also know that, as a woman, I am grateful when my white male colleagues stand and name from their pulpits the experiences of their female and minority colleagues – so here I stand, naming my own participation in broken and sinful systems, but choosing to use the platform and the voice I’ve been given as best I can.

 So let’s talk about Just Mercy. Let’s not just talk about the movie, but the true story, the real life which inspired it: the life of Walter McMillian.[1] Walter was born in 1941, and he grew up poor, picking cotton in Alabama. As an adult, Walter made good – he purchased logging and mill equipment and began his own business. He married, raising nine children with his wife of twenty-five years – but he made waves in the community when he had an affair with a white woman – and when one of his sons married a white woman.

 Walter’s connections to white women – the ways he was seen to step “out of line” – made him an easy mark for suspicion, when another white woman, an eighteen-year-old dry-cleaning clerk, was shot and killed.

 At the time of the murder, Walter McMillian was at a church fish fry, with dozens of witnesses – including a police officer. Nevertheless, a few months later, Walter was arrested – by a newly-elected, openly racist sheriff who was feeling pressure to solve the crime.

 Walter McMillan was immediately sent to death row, where he waited for more than a year for his trial to begin. Did you hear that? He was sent to death row before his trial even began. The trial was moved to an overwhelmingly white county, where an overwhelmingly white jury, after a trial which lasted less than two days, found Walter guilty. The jury ignored the multiple witnesses who testified that Walter was at a church event. The jury ignored the lack of physical evidence or motive. The jury recommended a life sentence, but the judge – whose name was, this is the honest truth, Judge Robert E. Lee Key, Jr. – the judge overruled the jury – not to protest the miscarriage of justice, but instead to sentence Walter to death.

 This was in 1988. This is recent history, friends. This was the eighties: when we thought we were finally past the chaos of the civil rights movement, when good white people said we don’t see color and everybody can just be friends. This happened in my lifetime, and in many of yours.

 A couple of months after Walter was sentenced to death, and well into his second year on death row, a young attorney named Bryan Stevenson visited Walter in prison. The two men bonded over their common life experiences, especially their faith, and Stevenson was moved to help Walter fight for freedom. Over the next three years, the Alabama Court turned down four appeals in Walter’s case. But then the key witness – really, the only witness – against Walter McMillian recanted: he confessed that he was put under pressure by law enforcement to lie, to place Walter at the scene of the crime, or else to face death row himself.

 In the movie, this is the moment when you finally start to believe that the good guys could win – this is the moment when Walter himself, who’s refused so far to get his hopes up, when Walter starts to believe he might get his life back. Walter and his lawyer petition for a new trial, showing the evidence that was faked, the evidence that was ignored, all the evidence that Walter is an innocent man.

 But then the petition is denied. Walter McMillian goes back to death row – heartbroken, devastated, after that hope, which he’d resisted for so long, fails him again.

 But Stevenson doesn’t give up. Walter doesn’t give up. They keep telling the story: inviting the media to bear witness, inviting the public to hear what’s happened, getting the momentum to shift to the point where those in power can’t ignore it anymore. And after six years on death row, after six years of brutality and despair, after six years of protesting his innocence, Walter finally got a new trial. He was exonerated; his name was cleared; and Walter got to go home.

 It’s a happy ending – but it isn’t. Because Walter McMillian carried the trauma of his years on death row for the rest of his life. And Walter McMillian’s community, his children, never forgot that their lives could be ended just because someone thought they “looked guilty.” And Walter McMillian is not alone. Although the prosecutors claimed that Walter’s eventual release proved that the system worked, the reality is that – as his lawyer Bryan Stevenson said – “it was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man… and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence.”

 This is a powerful movie. It’s all the more powerful because it’s grounded in truth. But it also begs the question: how could this happen? And what’s terrifying is the realization that this story still plays out – innocent people are underrepresented, railroaded, convicted, even executed – all around us still today.

 The systems that are supposed to protect us are broken. Systems are made by people, and people are messed up and broken, unwilling to acknowledge our prejudices, unwilling to face our mistakes, far more concerned with keeping up appearances and offering the illusion of justice than we are concerned with seeking actual justice based on the truth.

 One of the protests offered again and again by those who refused to reopen Walter’s case is that “my neighbors deserve to sleep well at night” – as if having someone locked up, even if it’s the wrong someone, as if having the illusion of security is what really matters.

 But the question is asked, “Whose neighbors?” Whose neighbors deserve to sleep well? Whose neighbors matter? Do you think that the people in Walter McMillan’s neighborhood slept well at night? Men and women and children who’d been with their neighbor, their father, their friend, who knew he was innocent, and still had seen him condemned to death for a murder he couldn’t possibly have committed?

 What about us? Do we prioritize our own sleep over the sleep of innocent men on death row? The sleep of mothers, living in terror that their sons will one day be gunned down just for being black? What about the sleep of children separated from their parents at the border? The sleep of women who’ve been victimized but know if they come forward, their lives will just be destroyed all over again?

 Who gets to sleep well at night? On the night before his own death, Jesus scolded his disciples for the inability to stay awake, to pray and keep watch with him – are we, too, guilty of sleeping while others weep?

 It’s easy to talk about loving our neighbors – but as Just Mercy asks us: where is our neighborhood? Who are our neighbors? Jesus never gives us the luxury of limiting “loving our neighbors” to the people who look like, think like, believe like, or act like us.

 And you know, for a religion that laments the sacrifice of an innocent man, for a religion that proclaims that one death is enough, and no one else has to die for their sins – or anybody else’s, for a religion that celebrates grace in the name of Christ, we sure have hurt and killed and ignored the suffering of a whole lot of people in his name.

 When black men are shot in parks and traffic stops, we find ways to say it’s their own fault. When women are attacked, we immediately ask: what was she drinking? Why was she dressed that way? When violence breaks out, we breathe a sigh: it’s not in my neighborhood. When the water runs dirty for years on end, we shrug our shoulders – because our tap water is safe. Or at least we hope so. When mosques and temples are defaced and bombed, we look away; it doesn’t threaten me. And when the so-called justice system is in fact a travesty that privileges rich white people while overwhelmingly punishing people of color and threatening immigrants and refugees and terrifying victims out of telling the truth lest they be punished and victimized all over again –

 When rich white men play with fidget spinners rather than hearing evidence, because they’ve already made up their minds, and because the lies are more profitable than the truth –  

 Then we are a very long way from the days the prophets dreamed of: when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, where the young have vision and the old dream dreams, and there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, black nor white, slave nor free, but we are all one in the peace and the grace of Christ.

 Walter McMillian was almost executed for a crime he was innocent of; the system that was supposed to protect him let him down. But he’s not the only one. In fact, based on continuing work to secure new trials for those on death row, for every nine people who are executed in our country, at least one person is proven innocent. One out of ten. That’s unacceptable. That’s heart-breaking.

 But even for those who are guilty – as Just Mercy reminds us, no matter what you’ve done, you are more than your worst act. Isn’t that exactly the gospel that we proclaim here every week? We celebrate the promise of grace for the foulest sinner, grace that saves wretches like me. In God’s eyes, there is no such thing as a lost cause; even the worst criminal can, by God’s grace, be forgiven, redeemed, become someone new. Just look at the heroes of our faith: Moses was a murderer. David was a sex offender and a murderer. Paul breathed hatred and murder against the early Christians. But God used every one of them – even the criminal who died by Jesus’ side, who had no time to turn his life around, no time to redeem himself or atone for his mistakes – even he was promised a place at the feast of God in glory.

 We don’t get to kill people because they scare us. We don’t get to kill people because we don’t like the way they look. We don’t get to condemn people to death because they live on the wrong side of an imaginary line, or because they were born poor, because their skin is a different color, because they don’t fit in, because they follow a different faith. We don’t even get to condemn the worst criminal out there to death – because Jesus had something to say about throwing the first stone, and because – let’s face it – we are really good at getting things wrong. More than that, friends, we are people of life. We are people of grace.

 It’s not popular. It’s not easy. In Walter McMillian’s story, Walter’s family and friends were pressured and threatened; Walter’s lawyer and his colleagues faced death threats; the key witness had to overcome his own terror and trauma to risk telling the truth; the prosecutor had to face the guilt and embarrassment and responsibility of getting things so wrong.

 Speaking the truth is risky. Forgiveness is dangerous. Loving the wrong kind of people, eating with sinners – that’s exactly the sort of thing that got Jesus crucified.

 And he said, “Take up your cross, and follow me.”

 We are not promised that the road will be easy; it certainly won’t be comfortable or convenient. But we are promised that Christ will be with us, even in the shadow of death, even to the end of the age; we are promised that the truth will set us free. And we are promised that God’s grace will always be sufficient for our needs.

 So let’s keep speaking truth. Keep facing difficult truths: like the reality that racism is built into the foundation of our nation, and some lives have always mattered more than others, and the death of a few innocent black people or desperate brown people has always been considered a reasonable sacrifice so long as white people can sleep well at night.

 That’s the cold hard truth. Some of us have had the luxury of ignoring it for too long: but we can’t pretend any more.

 Do you remember, back when our nation was debating whether or not we should welcome refugees – something we’re still debating, but much more quietly, while our government distracts us and keeps turning desperate people away… do you remember, someone used the analogy which compared refugees to candies? And they said, “Would you eat a bowl of candy, if you knew that one or two might be poisoned?” – with the implication that we shouldn’t possibly invite refugees and immigrants into our country, when a few of them might turn out to be criminals. Not like we don’t have enough homegrown terrorists already, but that’s another story…

 When I remember from that conversation was when someone came up with the perfect response: He said, “Are the other candies human lives? Like, is there a good chance, a really good chance, that I would be saving someone from a war zone and probably save their life if I ate a candy? Then I would GORGE myself on candies. I would eat every single one I could find… And when I found the poisoned candy and died, I would make sure to leave behind a legacy of children and of friends who also ate candy after candy until there were no candies to be eaten. And for every person who found the poison candy… we would weep for their loss, for their sacrifice, and for the fact that they did not let themselves succumb to fear but made the world a better place… Because [the] REAL question [hidden behind an inaccurate, insensitive, dehumanizing candy metaphor] is, is my life more important than thousands upon thousands of men, women, and terrified children… and what kind of monster would think the answer to that question is yes?”[2]

 I know we were talking about the death penalty, but it’s all connected: because whenever we allow ourselves to be guided by prejudice and by fear – we’ve lost our way. When did we start believing that one life doesn’t matter, unless it is our own? I’d much rather err on the side of grace and compassion than hear about one more child dying in an American concentration camp, or one more teenager taking their life because they’re afraid to be who they really are, or one more innocent person executed by our government in our name.

 The problems are daunting. The systems are broken. And one person can’t fix it all. But each one of us can refuse to give up and to give in. We can choose to repent, to acknowledge our own prejudice and complicity, to name our own fear. We can search out truth, and call out lies – even when they come from the mouths of people we love. We can commit to a much broader definition of our neighborhood, and try to love and work for the good of all God’s children who live there – and when we fail, when we get discouraged, we can give thanks for God’s grace which is more than enough to cover our sins, and we can help each other find the hope and the courage to get up and start again.

 I want to end today with the words of Bryan Stevenson – the real Bryan Stevenson, the man who fought for so long to get Walter McMillian free, who dedicated his career to freeing other innocent people from wrongful convictions:

 Bryan Stevenson says, “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as [we] victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and – perhaps – we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”[3]

 Thanks be to God, for justice, for mercy, and for unmerited grace.

   O God, we have all fallen short of your glory. We have all sinned. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not heard the cries of the needy. We have looked away from injustice. We have thought too often only of ourselves. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Forgive us for privileging power over people. Forgive us for choosing comfort rather than change. Forgive us for choosing crucifixion, when you’re a God of resurrections. Transform us. Teach us to love others as you love them. Teach us to love others as we love ourselves. Teach us to seek truth, to do justly, to love mercy, and above all, to walk with humility and love. In the name of Christ, who redeems us, who forgives us, who calls us to new life, we pray; amen.

Note: The photo above includes a portion of the United Methodist Church baptismal vows; along with rejecting evil, repenting of our sins, and putting our whole trust in the grace of Jesus Christ, candidates are asked: “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” Methodism (and the early church, and Jesus himself) has always linked the personal and social gospel; we are called to live out our faith in the world.

[1] The story is drawn not just from my movie notes, but from this article, which helped me fill in the gaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_McMillian

[2] https://www.joe.ie/news/broadcaster-eli-bosnick-with-a-far-more-humane-skittles-analogy-561050

Movie Summary (spoilers – but if you don’t know the basics of Little Women 150 years after the story was published, I think it’s a bit late for spoiler warnings!): Little Women is based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel of the same name, and tells the story of four sisters coming of age in the 1860s. Their father is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War, so their wise and patient mother heads the household. The four sisters each have unique personalities: from oldest to youngest, they are Meg, who’s beautiful and traditional; Jo, who rejects tradition, longing to be independent and a writer; Beth, the peacemaker of the family; and Amy, the youngest, who loves art and longs to be rich. The family starts a friendship with their rich neighbor and his grandson, Theodore Laurence, whom they call “Laurie.” Meg falls in love with and marries Laurie’s tutor; Jo refuses Laurie’s marriage proposal and instead goes to New York City in search of adventure. Amy travels to Europe with the girls’ wealthy maiden aunt, while Beth’s health fails back at home. Before her death, Beth begs Jo to keep writing stories for her. Jo realizes she longs to love and be loved, and second guesses her refusal to marry Laurie – only to discover that Laurie has married her youngest sister, Amy. Jo ends up falling in love with a professor she met in New York City, who encouraged Jo to push herself beyond writing fantastical stories and instead capture the beauty of real life.

  As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.  But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” (Luke 10:38-40)

   I always hated Amy March.

 Maybe it’s because I was the youngest in my family, too, so I saw a little too much of myself in Amy, the youngest sister, desperate to stand out, longing for attention and a chance to outperform her older siblings.

 But I always detested Amy March. The four sisters are each unique: there’s Meg, the oldest, smart and sensible; there’s Jo, fearless and bold – often to the point of foolishness; there’s Beth, the shy sister who sits quietly in the background and asks why everyone can’t just get along – and then there’s little Amy, whiny selfish Amy, fiercely and relentlessly ambitious Amy.

 The March family is far from wealthy; though they do get glimpses of neighbors who are much worse off, they also live in the shadow of their rich neighbor’s estate, and more often than not, the family goes without. And so Amy is bound and determined that she won’t be poor forever; she is going to be a rich woman, no matter who she has to marry to get there.

 Amy is vain, perhaps because she knows her beauty is her one greatest asset in capturing a rich husband; she yearns to be popular in school, and she hates being left behind. So when her older sisters leave her behind to go out for an evening of fun, Amy yells, “You’ll be sorry!” – and then with anger and intention, she takes her older sister Jo’s masterpiece, her handwritten manuscript, the novel into which she’s poured her heart and soul over many sleepless nights – Amy takes Jo’s one precious labor of creative love, and she burns each page away.

 The sisters get in an actual rolling-on-the-floor, fists-flying and hair-pulling fight that night. And when Mike and I watched that scene – both sisters sobbing with anger, both sisters certain she was the one who’d been done wrong – when we watched those sisters yelling and rolling and fighting, I looked at my husband and said, “Isn’t it nice to know that sisters are the same in every generation? Some things just never change!”

 No matter what age we live in, we fight most passionately – and hurt most deeply – the people whom we love most dearly. Maybe it’s a simple matter of proximity. Maybe it’s because we reserve our civility for those people we can keep at an arm’s length. Or maybe it’s because deep down we believe that love will persevere – they say that’s why children will behave beautifully for teachers and neighbors and strangers, but as soon as their parent shows up, everything goes off the rails… the experts say it’s because our children know they’re safe with us; they can let their guard down, and let their sadness or anger or exhaustion show, and they know we’ll still love them, no matter what.

 Maybe. But – when we’re honest – there are plenty of days when we make it hard to love each other. And that’s what happened for the March sisters the night Amy threw Jo’s masterpiece in the fire. Even when she repents and apologizes, weeping, the damage is done, and Jo proclaims, “She doesn’t deserve my forgiveness. I hate her. I’ll never forgive her. Never.”

 It’s only later – only after Amy chases after her older sister, begging for forgiveness, her cries falling on deaf ears until the splash, until Amy falls through the ice and nearly drowns in a frozen lake – it’s only later that Jo relents, rushing to her sister, pulling her to dry land, wrapping her in Jo’s own warm dry clothes, and forgiving her at last. Jo realizes, in that moment, just how quickly things can change; she realizes that even more important than irreplaceable manuscripts are irreplaceable people. Jo realizes what matters most – and, as she later says to a grown-up Amy, “Life’s too short to stay mad at your sister.”

 And I know that Jo is right – I spend my whole life talking about grace after all. But I’m not sure I’d be so quick to forgive. I never really liked Amy to begin with, and this whole scene especially reveals just how selfish and ungrateful she can be. And I know, in my rational mind, that people are always more important than things. But still, the heart struggles to forgive sometimes.

 I never could stand Amy. Then again – and this may be close to blasphemy – but I never really liked any of the March sisters. I loved their story; I loved to visit their chaotic little household, but the sisters themselves had a way of getting on my nerves. There’s Meg, who gives in to peer pressure when the rich girls adopt her as their pet… and who rather enjoys playing the part, until she gives into pressure from the neighbor-boy to put her airs away. And Meg is always just a little bit too earnest, too good; she gives up her own dreams for the sake of love.

 Then there’s Beth, who never really has many dreams or much of a voice, just meekly letting the story pass her by – Beth, the one whose own sisters even think she’s just a bit too good to be true.

 And even Jo, the plucky heroine who bucks tradition, clinging to her independence, determined to keep her voice and make her own way – even Jo ends up compromising, giving up her freedom to marry in the end. Jo made me furious growing up: she is so determined not to marry that she breaks the heart of the neighbor-boy, turning down his proposal, even though he would have been such a perfect match… but then all of the sudden she changes her mind and marries anyway, marrying somebody else whom we, the audience, hardly get to know or have any chance to approve. Sure, I could make an argument that the whole arc of Jo’s story, the essence of her character, is that she doesn’t give in to other people’s opinions of what her life should be – she won’t be pressured into compromising her choices just to meet someone else’s expectations, so perhaps it only makes sense that she doesn’t care whether I approve of her decisions, either.

 Maybe. But my goodness, it was always just so annoying to watch this fiercely independent woman throw her whole personality away.

 So that’s the family: four irritatingly flawed sisters, and their mother – Marmee, who’s more than just a little bit too good, Marmee who bravely heads the family while father is away, Marmee who believes in educating her daughters to be independent women, who teaches them not just ambition but compassion for their neighbors, Marmee who is infinitely patient with her wild girls and somehow always knows the very right and perfect thing to say.

 It’s altogether a bit too much – which is, I think, why I appreciated this newest telling of the March family story. This film humanizes the March family and, in many ways, redeems them. Instead of saccharine perfection, wise words and quick forgiveness, we see more of the conflict and chaos. We catch glimpses of the struggle that patient Marmee faces when she confesses that she is angry every single day. We see that Meg, who achieves the perfect domestic little life, who pledged that she’d rather marry a poor man for love than anyone else – Meg marries her poor man for love, but still is the young woman who loves fine things, and struggles at times to be content. Beth the wallflower becomes a bit bolder, more of an actor in her own story, and in many ways the thread that holds the others together, even after her death. And we see a Jo who doesn’t forget herself for a man, but who instead clarifies her own priorities – and chooses to live, in her own ambiguous way, happily ever after.

 But most of all, we get to meet a kindler, gentler Amy. We see Amy not as a spoiled brat but Amy who’s lonely and longing to be loved. We meet an Amy who has grown up in the shadow of hardship and war, of poverty and death, and who is desperately afraid she will die unimportant, unnoticed, that she will die without ever really getting a chance to live. And we meet an Amy whose marriage, in the end, is not so much a greedy manipulation but is an extension of her love for her family, and her grief, and her longing to be loved for herself, and the pressure she’s always felt to be the one who finds a way to provide for all the rest .

 In this modern Little Women, each of the women are doing their best to make their way in the world – each choosing a different path, and each stumbling along the way to figuring out what love and happiness means. We find that none of the sisters is the caricature we’ve reduced her to; we find that none is so flawed nor so perfect as they’ve seemed – this new incarnation of the March family is not quite so pure, and for that reason, it’s so much more real.

 Because that’s what Incarnation means: it means in-the-flesh, in the real world of flesh and blood and sweat and tears. And that’s where the Incarnate Word, who put on flesh and lives among us, that’s where God meets us – not in some patient, perfect, harmonious universe, but in this one where we really live.

 It’s a bit peculiar, watching a movie knowing you’re going to preach on it in a few days. I’m always trying to take notes, jotting down the best lines and the things that really make you think – but this time, I found that my favorite scenes were the ones I couldn’t capture in my notes, because they were the moments when the whole brood of sisters are talking over each other – in joy, or excitement, murmuring words of comfort or exclamations of praise – and in those amazingly chaotic moments, there is just so much warmth and so much love.

 And when the March family ultimately loses one of their members, when quiet Beth really and truly fades right away, that’s when the sisters realize just how not-invisible Beth really was – how much her very presence meant – and more than that, they realize just how precious all those ordinary little moments of their ordinarily little lives always have been.

 Meg always longed for her own household, and Amy wanted riches, and Jo yearned for grand adventures – but when they lose Beth, they realize that what matters most, the grandest and richest adventures, came in quietly, in ordinary moments: in family newspapers and attic dramas, in family breakfasts and hair disasters, in missing gloves and burnt dresses and secret mailboxes and singing around the piano by candlelight… they learn to find the beauty and value in all that ordinary stuff.

 I imagine that’s why Jesus sought the company of sisters like Martha and Mary, whom we visited again today, on what was undoubtedly not one of their finest days. But Jesus the wandering rabbi was a man without a home, looking for a place to let down his guard and rest – and in his presence, even sisterly squabbles take on the air of something holy. Have you ever considered how remarkable it is that we know this story at all? That the story of two sisters fighting over housework was considered so important that it actually becomes part of the gospel – the story of salvation, the story of heaven come to earth, the story which was preserved and passed down through the generations? It’s not just crowds and miracles and sermons and speeches, but we find that the chaos of our daily lives is holy, too. Even when we’re not at our best, even when we get on each other’s nerves, love is there, and God is, too.

 Little Women is of course a story about a family of remarkable women, but there is an honorary brother in this family, the rich and lonely boy next door. And when that boy first encounters the chaotic bustle of noise and affection inside the March household, his face reflects his longing – a longing to belong to a crazy and boisterous and loving family like theirs. The arguments and embraces are holy, because they are bound together with a thread of love – and having everything means nothing if you have no one to share it with.

 Jo spends the whole novel trying to write great stories; she writes about kings and princesses, about murderers and star-crossed lovers and great and mighty battlefields. Jo writes stories about scandal and passion and gore – but what she realizes in the end is that the best story, the greatest and most important story, is her own.

 Beth begs her sister to keep writing, even after Beth herself is gone. And in the writing, Jo finds that the stories are holy – in the writing, she finds that her sister lives on. Love doesn’t end with death: we know it, we proclaim it, and Jo learns it – not by facing down a dragon on a battlefield, but by discovering the love that has been with her all her life through.

 That’s the beauty and the genius of Louisa May Alcott’s book – she who identified with Jo, who searched for a great story and found her story very close to home. Alcott’s characters reveal to us that every day is a holy day, and ordinary moments can be the holiest of all.

 And this is a message which is very personal for our family. Many of you know that we lost our son to leukemia when he was just one year old. Shortly after our son passed away, we sat with a friend of ours sharing photos and watching videos and telling stories through our tears, and our friend asked us, “Is there one memory, one moment, that you really treasure most of all?”

 And we said, “Honestly? It’s the stupid ordinary everyday family stuff: the stuff that we used to take for granted.” It’s the afternoon when our kids drummed together on the bottom of a garbage can, or the nights we actually all sat around the same dinner table, or we shared snuggles and had a tickle-fight at bedtime – it’s the seemingly ordinary moments that matter most. Carl’s big sister trying to “read” him a book. Going for a walk around the neighborhood. Playing with my parents’ dog. Crying in the carseat. Laughing as he spins around and around in an office chair. Holding him while he naps. Stupid, ordinary, everyday family stuff.

That’s what matters. That’s why the March family story endures: not just because each sister, in her own way, learns that the most important thing in life is love – but because, for all their grand dreams and ambitions, they discover the real adventure and the best story is our own. One of the sisters muses, “Do you really think anyone would care about our little domestic struggles and triumphs?” The answer throughout the years has, of course, been yes – because we are reminded that the real stuff of our daily lives matters, too.

 Friends, what is your story? Who shares it? Where has God been revealed in your life? What do you want to remember forever - not just the best days, but the ordinary ones? What legacy are we going to leave behind?

 Our little lives matter. This day, this day right now, is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. And may we find that this day is a holy day – flaws and squabbles and all.

Warning: there are spoilers here for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Continue at your own risk!

When we started this Faith at the Movies series, I promised that every Sunday in worship we would offer a summary of the movie’s plot for anyone who didn’t have a chance to see it. And I know we didn’t do that yet this morning, but the reason is – when I sat down and tried to figure out how to summarize what happened in The Rise of Skywalker, the main plot points came out sounding like just about every other Star Wars movie: There’s this unseen Force which connects everything in the universe, and which some people are more sensitive to and able to tap into in order to do seemingly impossible things. The main character, a nobody from nowhere, learns that they are descended from evil. The Empire – no matter what it’s called – the Empire is evil; those who hold all the power also control the army, the media, the money, the justice system, and they will abuse those powers in order to stay on top. Everybody in the movie has to wrestle with the fact that they have both good and evil inside of them, and must choose which will define them. There’s an unlikely redemption arc, an epic big-scale battle paralleling the battle happening inside the main character… and against all odds, good wins.

 It’s the plot of every good Star Wars story arc – and I mean every good one, because the prequels got so bogged down in trade wars and political maneuvering and blood levels and prophecies and tariffs and suspicion that they lost the thread… the bigger story, about how love includes grief, and we must choose whether that grief will lead us to anger and hatred and fear, or whether we will continue to choose love anyway – that story gets drowned out entirely. It’s a shame; there could have been a great story there, but we don’t get to see it. Instead we find out that trade wars and politics make for pretty lousy movies – even if, truth be told, we’d all be much farther ahead if we learned how politics and economic disparity and abuses of power and prejudice and fear can lead us, as a whole society, down the path to the dark side. Temptation doesn’t always come with a mask and a cloak and a terrifying theme song; the most dangerous temptations are the ones that prey not just on our fears but on our hopes and dreams and best intentions. The devil tempted Jesus in the desert with the kind of power Jesus could use to feed every hungry person, and to end religious debates and persecutions, and to establish the kingdom of God on earth – all good things – but to get there, Jesus would have to betray and compromise the very essence of who he was. And this is the dilemma presented again and again in Star Wars: will we compromise, will we make deals with the devil – or will we choose the harder path, the narrower path; will we choose what is right, even if it means fighting a losing battle, even if it means losing our own lives along the way?

 Friends, I grew up with Star Wars. My brother was born the year the original Star Wars film came out, and when the next movie came along three years later, I did, too. We always knew that Vader was Luke’s father, and Leia was Luke’s sister, and Han shot first, because even heroes aren’t perfect, and that’s okay. We grew up stealing the empty wrapping paper tubes every Christmastime so we could reenact our own epic lightsaber battles, and we learned that those cardboard tubes last longer if you wrap them with duct tape first. We grew up with “Luke, I am your father” and “I’ll never join you!” and believing that a few courageous rebels could overthrow an entire empire of violence and evil. Just like we grew up wearing bathrobes every Christmastime and finding our place in the nativity scene, we also kept finding our place in this epic story where good battles evil and good always wins.

 When this new trilogy was released, fans like me – who grew up loving these stories and worlds – we were ambivalent. But these movies are smart; they return to the heart of the story, while introducing a new generation of heroes: an orphan girl, a redeemed storm trooper, and a criminal-turned-rebel make up the heart of this story.

 And one of the great mysteries of the new trilogy has been: who is Rey? Who is this girl, this orphan from a desert planet, who discovers the Force and joins the resistance? Luke Skywalker started the same way, and he ended up being the son of Darth Vader, the biggest evil of them all. So speculations ran wild: who is Rey? And there were a million theories: perhaps she was a lost Skywalker, perhaps she was a granddaughter of Obi-Won Kenobi, perhaps she and Kylo Ren were siblings separated at birth, perhaps she was a Palpatine, hidden from the shame of her family’s name, perhaps she was another descendant of Shmi, the mother of Darth Vader way back in the prequels – who is Rey? Who could she be?

 It’s a question which dominated a great many chatrooms and discussion boards, and a question which haunted Rey herself. But when the second film was released, Rey was taunted with the truth: that her parents were nobodies. Nobody special, nobody important; Rey doesn’t have a famous family, and she doesn’t have a powerful name.

 It’s a heartbreaking moment – for all the fans who wanted a different story, but especially for this young woman who’s longed her whole life for a family and a history and a place to belong. But it’s such a powerful moment, too, because we find out that anybody can be the hero of the story. You don’t have to come from a famous family; you don’t have to be a long-lost princess or the daughter of a hero in order to be a hero yourself. Anyone can take up the mantle. Anyone can be a leader. Anyone can be the one who finds the courage to battle against the evil empire and change the universe.

 But, sigh. The most recent movie completely undermines that message: and we find out that Rey is in fact – spoiler alert – the granddaughter of the evil emperor Palpatine. She does have a famous name, but it’s not the name she wanted; it’s not a hero’s name. She’s Rey Palpatine, descended from evil, the granddaughter of death, and she’s being tempted to take up his throne.

 Rey has to come to terms with this new knowledge; she has to make peace with where she’s come from, and decide who she is going be.

 Rey’s story is paralleled by the story of Ben Solo, better known as Kylo Ren, the villain of these films. Ben is the son of Princess - I mean, General Leia, and her husband Han Solo. He’s the son of heroes twice over; he’s the heir to the Skywalker name, and he trains under the great Luke Skywalker himself – but it’s Ben who chooses the dark side, Ben who is seduced by power, Ben who succumbs to the emperor’s temptations and commits unspeakable evils. Ben rejects his parents, violently; he changes his name to Kylo Ren, puts on a mask and a cloak and literally takes up the mantle of his grandfather Darth Vader.

 And throughout the movies, Kylo Ren also wrestles to come to terms with himself. He seems to regret and grieve what he’s done, but he laments, “It’s too late for me to go home; I’ve done too many terrible things. I can’t choose good now; my choice is made, and I’m beyond redemption, beyond forgiveness.”

 So these two, Rey and Kylo Ren, these are the key figures of the new saga: both trying to come to terms with their pasts, both faced with an opportunity to choose their future. Will they continue to act out the battles of their ancestors – will they make decisions out of their own pain and fear – or will they make a new path? And of course, as a preacher of grace, I can’t help but notice that new beginnings don’t come easily – it’s not a simple task to escape our family stories or our own bad choices – but we can choose a new start all the same. We don’t have to be defined by our parents or our ancestors or our own mistakes. We all have choices we get to make.

 Early in the movie, there’s a little scene where Rey and her friends encounter a huge snarling serpent beast. Their first instinct is to fight, to shoot and destroy this terrifying creature – but then Rey notices that the beast is wounded. She puts aside her weapon, comes close, and heals him – and she discovers that this scary monster is in fact just in pain, and his anger comes from that pain, his violence comes from that pain. What Rey learns, when she puts her weapon down, is that healing and mercy and compassion can in fact be much more powerful than violence could ever be.

 The story repeats itself later in the film when Rey and Kylo Ren battle one another. Rey tells Kylo, “I can see through the cracks in your mask; you’re haunted by what you’ve done” – she can see his grief and guilt, and she acknowledges his pain. When they fight, Rey fatally wounds Kylo – but then she chooses to heal him.

 In the theater, when that moment came, when we realized Rey was going to heal Kylo Ren, there were audible gasps – my own husband even said, “No, don’t heal him!” My husband the pastor, my husband who believes in loving your enemies and blessing those who persecute you and turning the other cheek – my own husband wanted Rey to let her enemy die.

 But she doesn’t. Because she’s learning that anger and fear and a thirst for revenge are in all of us, but they don’t have to control us. Rey is learning that mercy and compassion and forgiveness are the most powerful tools of all.

 Rey shows mercy – and because she does, not only is Kylo changed, but Rey doesn’t have to face the Emperor alone. Alone, she would have fallen; alone, she would have given in or died… but because she’s not alone, because she spared an enemy and cared for him, together, they succeed where one alone never could.

 And this perhaps is one of the other great themes of this movie – oh, I wish I could preach more than one sermon on it! – because early on, one character tells another, “The [Empire] wins by convincing us that we are alone.” Isn’t that the truth? It’s why so many people don’t vote, because we think one vote alone won’t matter; it’s why we don’t do the little things in our power, because little things can’t possibly make a difference; it’s why we give in to despair, why we give up, because we feel like we’re trying to go this thing alone. I am reminded of the prophet Elijah, who faces his own evil empire and ends up running away and moping in the mountains, because he thinks he’s the only faithful person left in the whole world. But God reminds Elijah that he’s not alone – and he finds strength in an apprentice and in a whole movement of faithful people. It’s why Jesus sends his disciples out two by two; it’s why he created a church, a community; it’s why the Teacher in Ecclesiastes says woe to the one who falls and is alone, but blessed are those who can share their strength; because a chord of three strands is not easily broken.

 When we feel alone, it’s hard to keep standing. But we are not alone. And together, we are stronger; together we can stand. Star Wars tells us, “Evil wins by convincing us that we are alone. But we’re not alone. And there are more of us.”

 When one of the members of this new generation wonders how the old heroes – Luke and Leia, Han and Chewie and Lando – how they defeated an empire with nothing, Lando just says, “We had each other.” And in her darkest hour, Rey hears the voices of those who’ve gone before, telling her: You are not alone. You never have been alone. We are with you.

 When the battle seems to be lost, help appears – help appears in the voices of those who’ve gone before, and help appears in a multitude of ordinary people who claim their power, who stand together and refuse to let evil win.

 Rey and Kylo are the heroes, but this isn’t just their story. This story, this battle, belongs to the nameless faceless workers, pilots and smugglers and mutinied storm troopers, who choose to reject the empire and take their power into their own hands. We don’t have to be heroes alone; our real power is when we stand together.

 As they say in the movie, “Thousands of generations live in you now, but this is your battle, this is your moment… The things our fathers and mothers fought and died for will not die with us.” We are not alone, and never have been. We are the product of thousands of generations of prayer and longing; we are the hopes and dreams of our ancestors – and they live in us, and the choices we make will shape the universe for those who are yet to come.

 We are not alone. But this is our moment, this is our time – our time to choose who we will be, to choose who we will serve, to choose whether our fear or our anger or our hatred or our mercy and compassion and love will win.

 In the end, Rey chooses who she will be: she chooses her family, and she chooses her identity. She chooses grace. She chooses compassion. She chooses a new name: she chooses to be a Skywalker.

 May we choose mercy. May we believe in forgiveness. May we choose to be known and named by the best parts of ourselves. And may we know that we are never alone.

During the month of January, our worship services are based around current movies! We started this week with Frozen II. There are spoilers here, so consider yourself warned!

 A brief summary of the movie was shared for anyone who hasn’t seen it:

 In the first Frozen movie, we met Anna and Elsa, two royal sisters in the kingdom of Arendelle. Elsa has magic powers to control ice and snow; she has to learn to let her sister share her secret, and Elsa learns to embrace and control her powers.

 In the second movie, everyone seems happy and content – but Elsa is hearing a voice no one else can hear. When magical powers force the people of Arendelle to abandon their kingdom, the sisters set out to find out the truth about the past and right some unknown wrong. They follow the mysterious voice into an enchanted forest, where they encounter enemies who turn out to be friends, and discover the truth about the past. Their grandfather, when king, had offered a “gift of peace” – a dam – to the neighboring people; however, the dam was a trap, and their grandfather’s fear started the violence which now forced the sisters from their home. In order to right the wrong and make peace, the dam must be destroyed, even if it means destroying the kingdom of Arendelle in the process.

 And, without spoiling everything for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet – and it’s well worth seeing – there is a happy ending!

  When our oldest daughter was five years old, she was obsessed with the movie Frozen. She watched it over and over again, until she could recite every single line and sing every song along with every single character. She sang “Let It Go” for a talent show; she received an Elsa dress for her birthday, and she wore that dress to her birthday party – and for Halloween – and just about every single day after school. When she wasn’t in the gown, she was wearing any of a dozen shirts and outfits featuring Elsa’s face. Even though I tried, repeatedly, to tell her that Anna – Elsa’s sister – is actually the hero of the story, not to mention the character with orange hair much like my daughter’s own hair, no one could compete with Elsa’s sparkling blue dress and soaring theme song. In fact, our daughter loved Elsa so much that she was angry with her dad and me, asking us repeatedly, “Why didn’t you name me Elsa?”

 Our youngest daughter is now five, and she sleeps in Elsa pajamas. Earlier this year, she chose to use her own money to purchase yet another new Elsa doll – which she carries with her everywhere and sleeps with every night. She has an Elsa swimsuit; for Christmas, all she asked for was – and I quote – “all the Elsa stuff.” In the last year she has worn and worn out four different Elsa dresses, and she still changes in an Elsa dress after school whenever we give her the chance. But I knew that we had really come full circle when, not too long ago, our five-year-old asked, “Why didn’t you name me Elsa?”

 So when I tell you that the new Frozen movie has been eagerly anticipated in our household, I hope that you understand exactly what that means. Finally, finally, finally, we got to see the movie. And it did not disappoint.

 There’s a lot in this movie: there are of course lots of silly jokes – like the unmelt-able sentient snowman obsessed with his own mortality; there is a pure 80s power love ballad; there are singing reindeer and adorable creatures and catchy songs. And there are even more gorgeous dresses with which my girls are now obsessed.

 But this movie also has an incredible amount of depth. My husband – who’s also a pastor, and also preaching about faith that the movies (and who doesn’t look nearly as good in a princess dress as I do) – my husband Mike and I have been having fun wrestling with all the different themes and possible directions this Sunday might take.

 There’s the snowman’s theory that water has memory – a theory which actually carries the plot in some significant ways – and which you will hear about in a baptism sermon someday.

 There’s this journey that the sisters go on; in the first movie, they learned how to be sisters, how to come together and love one another, but in this story, they learn that loving doesn’t just mean holding on tight, but it’s possible to love one another while still learning to let go and each stand on her own.

 There’s the subplot where Anna’s boyfriend Kristoff is trying to propose to Anna, but keeps bumbling and messing things up – and the realization that even when we love each other dearly, sometimes, we still say and do things exactly wrong.

 There’s the reality that so many terrifying enemies turn out in fact to be allies and friends, while the real enemy, the real evil, is found much closer to home – and one of the greatest lines of the movie, when Elsa realizes, “Fear is what can’t be trusted.”

 There’s Elsa’s realization that the person she’s been searching for, the one who can give her answers about the meaning and purpose of her life – is herself.

 There’s the power of loving your enemy, which has its own magic and starts us on the road to making things right.

 And of course, there’s a whole lot of consideration to inherited systems of injustice, to generational privilege and prejudice, to the ways our fear and greed cause harm to others and to all creation, and how – eventually – the consequences of our actions will come home to roost.

 And that’s all good stuff. And I could preach a month or two worth of sermons just on this one “kids’ movie” alone.

 But I’m not going to. Instead, today, I want to focus on one specific character, one scene, and one song.

 And as fate would have it – because I ordered my costume before I’d even seen the movie – as fate would have it, today, I want to talk about Anna.

 In many ways, Anna is the secondary sister, the one who never really emerges from her sister’s shadow – even though, as I said, she emerges as the true hero. But Anna seems okay with her role; she loves her sister, and all she wants is for Elsa to be safe and successful.

 When Elsa hears a mysterious voice, even though she can’t hear it herself, Anna insists on going on the journey with her; she promises, “I won’t let anything happen to her.” Whenever Elsa tries to leave Anna behind, Anna runs into danger right after her sister – until finally, fearing for Anna’s safety, Elsa literally flings her away, sending her down the river in an icy canoe.

 And Anna ends up escaping the cold river, hiding from earth giants, trapped in a dark cave – literally, she ends up in the pit. While there, she learns the truth about the past; she glimpses the memory that Elsa left her behind to discover, the wrong that needs to be set right. And what she realizes is that – there’s this dam, this dam which was built as a supposed gift to the kingdom’s neighbors, but was in fact a trick, a trap, and it was Elsa and Anna’s own grandfather who struck first against his unarmed ally, and started the violence which led everyone to this place.

 Anna realizes that, to set the wrongs right, she needs to destroy that dam – even though it means that her home, her sister’s kingdom, will be flooded and destroyed. The people have already been driven out of their homes by the angry nature spirits, and now she knows why: it’s so they’ll be safe, when the wave of water comes.

 Anna knows now what she has to do. She explains to her companion, the loveable living snowman Olaf, and she begins to search for a way out of the cave.

 But then snowflakes start to appear.

 And Olaf realizes he’s flurrying – the magic that holds him together, Elsa’s magic that holds him together, is failing; the snowman is starting to fall apart.

 And Olaf says, “I think Elsa went too far... Anna, I’m sorry; you’re going to have to do this next part on your own.”

 Then, while Anna holds him, Olaf says, “Hey Anna? I just thought of one thing that’s permanent: Love.”

 Oh friends, there’s a sermon there: Olaf has been struggling with how everything keeps changing, throughout the whole story, trying to find something that doesn’t change – and in his final breaths, he says, “I finally get it: it’s love.”

 While Anna gives him one last warm hug, Olaf flurries away.

 And Anna is alone. Anna, who struggled so much with being alone in the beginning of her story. Anna, whose whole life has been in so many ways defined by others – by the prince she was willing to marry, even though they’d just met; by the sister, who struggled with her own secrets and powers; by her friendship with Olaf, by her relationship with Kristoff – Anna is alone.

 This moment finds Anna weeping in the pit – the pit, the lowest point, the place of hopelessness and despair, which we find throughout scripture – that’s where Anna is. Literally, she’s in a deep, dark, cold cave. She thinks her boyfriend abandoned her for a new friend and some reindeer – he didn’t, but that’s another story; she thinks he did; she thinks he left her behind. Her sister literally threw her down the river, and based on the disintegration of Elsa’s magic, Anna assumes her sister is lost – drowned, as their mother had warned them, in the river of memories; drowned, and not coming back. Olaf has turned to flurries in her arms. And she’s learned that the only way to finish the story, the only way to make all those sacrifices mean something, is by finding a way to destroy a dam and, in the process, destroy her own home.

 This is Anna’s Garden of Gethsemane. This is Anna’s “why have you forsaken me?” This is Anna’s “let the cup pass from me.” This is where Anna’s grief threatens to drag her under. This is her lowest point; this is the pit of her despair.  There in the cave, she curls up into herself, and she cries. And then she starts to sing. And I’m not going to sing for you – but I want to read for you the lyrics of Anna’s song:

 I’ve seen dark before, but not like this This is cold, this is empty, this is numb The life I knew is over, the lights are out Hello, darkness, I’m ready to succumb   I follow you around, I always have But you’ve gone to a place I cannot find This grief has a gravity, it pulls me down But a tiny voice whispers in my mind “You are lost, hope is gone But you must go on And do the next right thing”   Can there be a day beyond this night? I don’t know anymore what is true I can’t find my direction, I’m all alone The only star that guided me was you How to rise from the floor When it’s not you I’m rising for? Just do the next right thing   Take a step, step again It is all that I can do The next right thing   I won’t look too far ahead It’s too much for me to take But break it down to this next breath, this next step This next choice is one that I can make   So I’ll walk through this night Stumbling blindly toward the light And do the next right thing   And, with it done, what comes then? When it’s clear that everything will never be the same again Then I’ll make the choice to hear that voice And do the next right thing[1]  

 These are the words Anna sings, as she continues to cry, as she finds a way to climb out of the pit towards a sliver of light. This is the song, the drive, that compels Anna to wake the sleeping giants, almost being crushed herself in the process; this is the theme that gives Anna the strength to stand up to her own people, who try to stop her – the power that assures Anna that there is something more important than protecting the status quo. Sometimes, all you can do is the next right thing: even when it’s hard, even when you’ve lost everything, even when it means sacrificing what little you have left, even when it breaks your heart: take the next step, and do the next right thing.

 Anna becomes the hero again, because Anna is willing to sacrifice for the sake of love and for the sake of what’s right. And she learns that loving doesn’t just mean holding on, but loving sometimes means letting go.

 And Anna – the younger sister, the sister with no magic, drooling, snotty, awkward Anna – Anna finds the courage to do the next right thing.

 The story has a happy ending of course, because it’s a Disney movie. But Anna doesn’t know she’s in a Disney movie any more than David knew he was in the bible when he faced down Goliath, or Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, knew that they were in the gospels, or Paul and Silas knew they’d escape the dungeons when they decided to go ahead and sing.

 Anna doesn’t know. She herself admits: I can’t look that far ahead – it’s too much; it’s too hard to see, too overwhelming. But what I do know is the next right thing.

 These days, we have so many excuses not to do the next right thing – whether it’s standing up for the kids who’s being bullied, or speaking up when our friends make an inappropriate joke, or restructuring our health system so no one goes bankrupt because they get sick, or redistributing wealth so no one goes hungry in the richest nation on earth, or making education affordable, or taking climate change seriously – we have lots of excuses: if I speak up, I might be bullied, too; if we change things, it might hurt the economy, it might change the way I live my life, it might mean we have to make sacrifices and it will be uncomfortable and it will be hard.

 But it’s still right. And we are always called to do the next right thing.

 We stand at the beginning of a whole new year. We know that there are challenges to face this year, and they can seem so very overwhelming: looming war, a church-wide schism, a planet that is literally burning, the continued struggle to face down systemic violence and injustice, and speak up for our neighbors and for all creation, and we can’t help but realize just how far we still have to go – as Anna says, “It’s too much for me to take. But break it down to this next breath, this next step, this next choice is one that I can make.”

 We can’t do everything. But we can take the next step. One breath, one step, one choice at a time, friends, let’s choose to do the next right thing.

   God, we thank you: we thank you for your willingness to face the Garden of Gethsemane for our sake; we thank you for joining us in the shadow of death and pit of despair. We thank you for your voice, which whispers in our hearts, calling us forward, guiding us towards the next right thing. Give us the courage to get up; give us the strength to speak the truth even through our tears; help us to face the difficult stories of our own past; help us, always, to do the next right thing. In Jesus’ name we pray; amen.

As Christmas Eve approached, our family – like many of yours, I imagine – sat down together to watch the old animated version of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Our girls, who are five and ten, watched with big sad eyes while the Grinch loaded up his sleigh with all the Whos’ holiday goodies and hauled them all away – and then watched with wonder as the Whos awoke on Christmas morning, walked out of their empty houses, held hands, and started to sing.

 I asked our kids, “What would you do, if we woke up on Christmas morning and the tree was gone, and the lights were gone, and there weren’t any cookies or presents or treats left? What would you do?”

 “We’d be sad and cry,” said one. “I’d be super mad,” said the other.

 And I asked, “Would you feel like singing?”

 That was possibly the loudest, most emphatic “no!” I’ve ever heard.

 Well, at least they’re honest. Then again, I think most of us – if we awoke to find that our garlands and gifts were gone – most of us would be angry; we’d cry, we’d yell, and then we’d call the police.

 When I was younger, it was always very clear to me that the Grinch is the villain in this story. His irrational hatred of Christmas leads him to do unthinkable things: identity fraud, breaking and entering, and of course, theft and destruction of personal property. He’s cruel and heartless, a completely unsympathetic character…

 But then I got a bit older. And I’ve found that more days than not I, too, just can’t handle the noise-noise-noise-noise. Sometimes you just need some peace and quiet; sometimes, I just need to be alone. These days, I often see the Grinch as more of a kindred spirit, a prophet who speaks the truth many of us are thinking but just don’t have the courage to say out loud. The Grinch offers a cutting indictment of the commercialization of Christmas; he gives the Whos a chance to examine what their love of Christmas is really about; he reminds us that the holidays can’t really be jolly or holy if some of us are left on the outside looking in. And he acknowledges that families are messy and kids are loud and sometimes the holidays can just be far too overwhelming – and it’s as true for those of us who are surrounded by people as it is for those of us who are alone.

 Perhaps the Grinch is a prophet, one who speaks with an unpopular voice – not so different from the prophet Hosea, who enacts a difficult object lesson, or perhaps the Grinch is a prophet in the tradition of Jonah, who resented the people God sent to him to help, who tried to run away and, after spending three days in the belly of a great big fish and being puked up on dry land, after preaching reluctantly but so effectively that the people of Nineveh repent – Jonah responds not with celebration but by pouting outside the city walls. The Grinch is a prophet like Elijah, running into the wilderness, thinking he’s the only one who really gets what’s going on. He’s a prophet like John the Baptist, living on the fringes, criticizing the brood of vipers as he lives in a way they don’t understand. Even Jesus escaped from the cities, even Jesus retreated to the wilderness or the mountaintop, even Jesus needed to get away from the pressing crowds sometimes.

 So yeah, maybe I get the Grinch a whole lot more than I used to. The reality is that sometimes we all need silence and solitude. Sometimes we need to escape from it all. The difference, however, is that the Grinch never comes back.

 We actually don’t know whether the Grinch was born there on the outskirts of Whoville, always an outsider looking in, or whether – as the more recent live-action movie suggests – whether he was himself a Who who escaped because he was teased, pressured to conform, unable to ever quite fit in.

 But whatever led the Grinch to his isolated mountaintop, it seems that he isn’t content or happy there. He’s alone, but not alone enough; he can still hear the singing and the shouting from below. Maybe he wants to run away further, but feels trapped… or maybe what he really wants is to go down and join in. Perhaps he hates and resents the happiness and chaos below because, if it were up to him, he’d be a part of it… but he can’t or he won’t join in; he doesn’t know how to bridge the distance, and he feels he isn’t welcome there. So instead he sits angry, excluded, bitter and alone.

 We meet the Grinch up on his mountaintop, angrily passing judgment on the Whos down below, hating the community he’s not part of and condemning the celebrations he can’t understand. And his bitterness leads him to this terrible, horrible idea: his plan to not just judge and hate everyone else’s joy, but to find a way to steal that joy right out from under their feet. It’s a special kind of hardened heart that not only judges what we don’t understand but is determined to destroy it, to shut down any joy that’s not our own.

 There are plenty of Grinches in the world these days: people who, for one reason or another, angrily pass judgment on and try to put a stop to anything they don’t or can’t be part of. It’s as if someone else’s happiness makes us angry: it’s kids breaking the toys because, if I can’t have them, no one can; it’s adults complaining about people who like pumpkin spice too much or people who find joy in having a whole herd of cats at home, people who put their Christmas trees up too early or leave their Christmas lights up too late. We criticize people for loving the wrong kinds of music and cheering for the wrong sports teams; we judge people whose lives are different from our own. You’re doing happiness wrong, we tell them; you’re joyful for the wrong reasons… or you don’t have the right to be joyful at all. We judge each other, and then we try to take everyone’s joy away. We mock and belittle, we pass laws, we build walls, we try to convert others or, if we can’t, to lock them out and keep them away.

 It’s not enough for the Grinch to be sad and bitter; he wants everyone to be sad and bitter, too. It’s not enough for him to decide that the craziness of Christmas isn’t for him; he doesn’t want anyone to celebrate it at all.

 And this is what strikes me so much about the Grinch: he’s so alone. He has no family. No neighbors. No friends. He doesn’t have a circle to stand in, no one with whom to hold hands or lift up a happy song… so he can’t understand what kind of community and joy could possibly lead the Whos to do any of those things on Christmas morning. He doesn’t understand the music; he doesn’t share the laughter… so for the Grinch, it’s all just noise, noise, noise, noise.

 The Grinch thinks if he can steal the stuff of Christmas Day – if he could steal the horns and the toys and the bells and the treats – he can stop Christmas from coming at all. And he tries. He sneaks and he spies; he steals and he lies. And he waits: misery loves company, so he waits – he waits for the chorus of misery to begin.

 But the Whos don’t cry. Instead, they sing. The Whos down in Whoville stand, hand in hand, and they sing – like Paul and Silas singing in the prison cell, with no apparent reason to rejoice, they sing.

 And the Grinch is stunned. He’s perplexed. He’s confused. And famously, he muses: “Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from the store. Maybe Christmas – perhaps – means a little bit more.”

 Maybe. But what? Seuss doesn’t tell us; he lets us fill in the gaps for ourselves. We know what Christmas means though, right? We know that Christmas isn’t about the wrappings and the bows, but Christmas is about the love of God, the baby-king in a manger, come to teach us that God’s love is always with us, just as surely when we’re moping in the mountains as when we gather and join our hands to sing.

 We know what Christmas is about – but sometimes, we forget. We know what it’s about – but I still imagine that, if all those trappings disappeared, we’d find it awfully hard to sing.

 The Whos get it. Instead of looking at one another with suspicion, instead of filing claims and assigning blame, instead of angrily gathering in the center of the town to share their woes compare their losses – they join their hands. And they sing:

 “Christmas Day will always be, just as long as we have we.”

 They get it. I know; they don’t talk about Jesus or Bethlehem. But those Whos know that Christmas isn’t about the stuff. The stuff is fun. The food and parties and presents are fun. But at its heart, Christmas is about being together; it’s a celebration of the good news that we are not alone.

 Something happens to the Grinch that day: something that causes his heart to swell and to grow, something that pushes him out of his self-imposed exile and helps him realize he doesn’t have to be alone. Those Whos, just by being who they are, just by loving one another, allow that love to overflow to the sour Santa with his stolen sleigh. And so often, our best witness to God’s love is like that: we love each other, no matter the circumstances; and when others see our love, when they see our joy, it draws them in.

 The Grinch repents; literally, he turns around. And when he rides back into town perched on a wagon full of evidence against him – he isn’t arrested. He isn’t criticized or condemned; he isn’t hated, rejected, or driven right back out of town again. The Whos could have looked that morning with smug satisfaction, because the Grinch had just proven that he really is the terrible monster they always thought him to be.

 But they don’t. Instead, the Whos make room in their circle. This sorry outcast is welcomed in, and even given a seat of honor at the head of the table, at the feast that celebrates the day that reminds us that no one has to be alone.

 This is grace: this is grace, the welcome we don’t deserve. This is grace: forgiveness and a new beginning, a chance to really repent, to turn the page and start again. This is grace: it’s a seat at the table; it’s a hand to hold; it’s a new family – it’s the gift of being a part of an “us,” a “we,” and recognizing that – for better or for worse, no matter what we’ve done or who we’ve been – we are not alone.

 You know, when I think back over my life, I honestly don’t remember very many of the Christmas gifts I’ve received over the years. But this is what I do remember: I remember coming home early from college, and surprising my mom with a great big hug after too many weeks away. I remember how it feels for the whole family to sit around one table together. I remember laughing during a ridiculous card came, and decorating messy gingerbread houses, and walking through the snow in search of the perfect tree. I remember holding my niece, her warm little snuggles on my first Christmas as Aunt Bri. I remember sitting with my dad in the stillness of early morning, in just the glow of the Christmas tree lights; I remember the little smile on my mom’s face as she hummed Christmas carols in the kitchen. I remember the glow of faces by candlelight, and voices singing “Silent Night” in harmony. I don’t remember the gifts, but I remember those experiences, those celebrations of community, those moments when I was surrounded by love.

 Long after the presents are forgotten, long after our trees have been taken down and the cookies are eaten and the leftovers cleaned out of the fridge – Christmas is still with us. Christmas Day will always be, just as long as we have we. Christmas is within our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp.

 Let’s carry Christmas with us into the new year. Let’s look for those who are angry, bitter, and excluded – and invite them into the circle. Let’s move our own hearts away from judgment and cynicism, and offer forgiveness and compassion for others and for ourselves. May we believe that people really can change – and may all of us, always, find a place at the table.

There is a man in Ohio who creates artwork out of chewing gum; he shapes gum in tiny little sculptures… using nothing but his mouth.[1] There’s a couple in Tokyo who recently went viral for posting pictures of their cats, which isn’t too unusual, except that the cats are wearing hats – bunny ears and crowns, Viking helmets and wigs – all kinds of hats made from the hair those cats shed around the house.[2]

 And I’ve realized we all have weird things we do, things that make no sense, that others find strange or even a waste of time… but it brings us joy, so we do it, even if they don’t understand.

 Some of us dress up like Star Trek characters. Some of us study the Elvish language of the Lord of the Rings. Some of us love to bake cookies and cakes, even when everyone we know is on a diet. Some of us read the same books over and over again. Some people make works of art out of beach sand and sidewalk chalk, even knowing it’s all going to wash away. Some people train for marathons, or jump out of airplanes, or collect stamps or build ships in bottles.

 As for me, I knit stockings.

 On its surface, not that strange. It all started innocently enough: my grandmother always knit stockings for our whole family: generations of stockings, each one unique, each one knit with love. And we love those stockings. As a kid, opening our stockings on Christmas Day was almost more exciting than opening the presents under the tree. Under the tree you’d get the usual pajamas and socks and, if you’re really lucky, that one thing we’d hoped and wished for all year. But the stockings were a free-for-all of surprises: candies and hairbows, puzzles we didn’t know existed, books we didn’t know we wanted to read, games and puzzles and funny little toys that sometimes were more fun than the big ones under the tree.

 Stockings are an important part of our Christmas traditions. But when I was starting my own family, my grandma let me know that, because of the tremors in her hands, she couldn’t knit anymore. It was heartbreaking for her, but it was also nerve-wracking for me – because as the only other knitter in the family, the job of making stockings was handed down to me.

 And when I say that I knew how to knit, I mean that my grandma – the same grandma – had taught me how to knit a potholder when I was about twelve years old. I don’t think I even ever learned to purl, just to knit – straight knit – the end.

 But my grandma handed down her knitting needles and yarn, and I resolved to do the best I could.

 I started working on my daughter’s stocking, the first stocking I’d ever made. And because I wasn’t so smart, I didn’t start working on the stocking until after she was born – which was about two months before her first Christmas. I still remember frantically knitting whenever anyone came to visit and offered to hold the baby; I remember wearing my daughter strapped in a Baby Bjorn and dancing around the living room, trying to keep her happy, while I knitted behind her back.

 Somehow, I finished that stocking. And the even bigger wonder is that it actually looks like it belongs. It’s not perfect, but none of them are; they’re all made with love anyway.

 When my husband and I found out we were expecting again, I knew I needed to plan another stocking. But because I’d only made one stocking before, I wanted to practice, to try following my notes and see if I could do it again. So I decided that, as a joke, I’d surprise my husband by making a stocking – not for a family member, but for Doctor Who. And if you don’t know who Doctor Who is, that’s okay; he’s a character in a British sci-fi show, and Doctor Who always has a Christmas special – a Christmas special which actually airs on the BBC on Christmas Day.

 Since the Doctor always shows up for Christmas, then, I decided to make him his own stocking, with a picture of his time machine on it. And from that one stocking, a new tradition was born.

 Yes, I made stockings for all of my children. But I’ve made many more than that. Every Christmas, I surprise my husband with another silly stocking for his collection, a stocking based on something he loves. We have Iron Man and Captain America; we have Harry Potter and Thing 1 from Doctor Seuss; we have a stocking for Despicable Me’s Gru, and for the Staypuft Marshmallow Man, and even Mickey Mouse.

 Along the stairway to our house is a wall of stockings. My husband isn’t surprised to get a new stocking each year; he looks forward to them – and that year’s design is always a secret – and I so much love the planning, creating, and surprising him.

 It’s a strange tradition, I know. Whenever I explain it, I always get some funny looks. People always want to know if I make my whole family new stockings every year (I don’t) or whether my husband gets presents in all those stockings – (he doesn’t).

 Even my own extended family is confused. Earlier this year, my brother was over to visit, and he gazed up at our stocking collection, looked at me, and said, “You know, there are – other ­– things you can make, right?”

 Of course I do. I make other things. I love making things. But I really, truly find joy and delight in making those novelty Christmas stockings – even if no one else gets it. I love our strange little tradition. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to follow the rules.

 Sometimes I imagine – and to be clear, this isn’t in the bible; it’s my own imagination – but sometimes I imagine that, when God was creating humans, when God had the idea to create these free but flawed beings who would live in God’s creation – I imagine an angel walking up, looking at what God was making, and saying, “Are you sure that’s what you want to make? It looks messy, and loud, and it’s probably just going to break all your stuff.”

 And when God nods, and the angel wrinkles his nose and says, “You know – there are other things you can make, right?”

 And God’s like, “I know. I’ve made other things. I enjoy making other things. But these are different; each one is different, unique, and I delight in planning and creating each one – and maybe they’re messy, and maybe it doesn’t make sense… but love doesn’t have to make sense.”

 And when God was planning to come down at Christmas, to get down and play with those unlikely and perplexing creations, to shrink to our size and play by our rules, so that we might see God’s love even more – when God said, “This is my idea: I’ll go down there as a baby” – I imagine that same angel wanders by and says, “Really? That’s your plan? Haven’t you learned anything?”

 And God says, “It doesn’t have to make sense. Love doesn’t make sense. But it brings me joy. And that’s enough.

 This is the lesson of Christmas: that God’s love for us doesn’t make sense – but God loves us anyway. God loves us too much to stay away, but God loves us enough to come down to our level, to squeeze infinity into an infant, to subject God’s self to cold, to poverty, to grief and hunger and pain – so that when we go through suffering, we know we are not alone.

 God loves us enough to do the unusual, the bizarre, the impossible: to come and be with us.

 And it doesn’t make sense. But some of the most important things we do in life don’t make any kind of sense: like telling your family to split the last pieces of pie when there isn’t enough to go around, and you tell them you didn’t feel like pie tonight anyway; or a grown adult getting down on the floor to play Legos or Barbies, or folding yourself down to fit on a playground slide; it’s driving for hours just so you can have dinner with your family, or giving a few dollars to the stranger at the side of the road, or inviting a stray animal to share your home and be your family; it’s sitting with someone who’s sick, even if they don’t know you’re there; telling your mother-in-law the biscuits really don’t taste burned at all, or going to your friend’s favorite restaurant even if you don’t like it. It’s buying coffee for a stranger; it's practicing for hours to bring music to worship, even knowing the beauty is fleeting – just a few moments and it’s over and gone; it’s gathering to worship a God we can’t see, celebrating a baby king sleeping on the hay, lighting candles and singing about heavenly peace on an earth that’s far from any kind of peace at all.

 There are things we do that make no sense, and we wonder how much they matter – but they’re done from love, so maybe those things that don’t make sense are the ones that matter the most of all.

 Love that doesn’t make sense – and love is what Christmas is all about.

 This so familiar story of Christmas, this story which makes us comfortable and nostalgic on nights like this – this story is in fact a strange tradition: a tradition of looking for God in the cold, the hungry, and the helpless, in the most unlikely corners of a dangerous and perplexing world.

 May the God who delights in you, may the God who loves you enough to be born in Bethlehem – may that God bless you, and may you know that you are loved. And may you too love even when it doesn’t make sense, seeing beauty where others see nonsense, bringing peace into the most unlikely places of all. May we all hold onto this strange tradition of generous, extravagant, beautiful, unlikely love.

  God of strange traditions, God of risk-taking and self-sacrificing love: we are so thankful for the tradition, the story, the truth that brings us here tonight. We are grateful that you loved us into creation, even when it didn’t make sense; we are thankful that, when we were lost and cold and alone, you came to meet us right where we are. Meet us here tonight. In Jesus’ name we pray; amen.

[1] https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/annual-2012-gum/

In our modern world, when we need a question answered, we go to the internet. We ask Google, or Siri, or Alexa – who’s the highest ranked NFL team? How do you make chocolate chip pancakes? Where’s the nearest gas station? Will there be snow on Christmas Day? – and the internet obligingly searches the library of human knowledge for the answers we need to know.

 Sometimes, though, what we’re looking for isn’t a fact but an opinion, a suggestion, a story or some advice. I don’t know what your Facebook looks like, but mine is often filled with requests for recommendations or insights: One neighbor asks, “Is there a locksmith in the area!” and another says, “Does anyone have any extra wrapping paper?” or “Where’s the best place to get a haircut?” Family members post pictures of Christmas cookies, asking for the community to vote for their favorite decorations; children of distant cousins ask us to fill out surveys on how much coffee we drink every day. And pastor friends ask, “Which hymns are you singing the Sunday after Christmas?” and “Does anyone have a good story about hope?” and “When did you experience God’s grace most fully?” and “Anyone have any good ideas on how to minister to a divided congregation the weekend after the impeachment vote?”

 And no, that’s not what this sermon is about – except to remind us that Jesus was born into a politically divided and divisive world; Jesus was born into a world where foreigners crossed borders trying to follow their call, and Jesus was born into a world where religious leaders partnered with the government powers in order to line their pockets and crucify the vulnerable, and Jesus was born into a world where the poor suffered while the rich feasted, and Jesus was born into a world where he proclaimed good news for the poor – and Jesus also was born into a world where just the news of his birth drove a fearful and angry leader into a paranoid, murderous rage. Political division, competing ideologies, tribal alliances which outweigh reason or compassion, families divided amongst themselves, economic gaps too drastic to comprehend – none of it’s new. This is exactly the world into which God chose to be born – and I believe that God is with us, still.

 But I digress. We were talking about the internet – and while it can bring out the worst in us, it’s also a place where we can share stories and support. It’s a place to share feedback, recommendations, and advice – and I’ve noticed that, often, once someone posts a question, almost within minutes a few new comments will pop up – comments that don’t answer the question, but instead, just say one word: “Following…”

 And I’ve been thinking about that word a lot this week: “Following.” We often talk about our faith in terms of following, don’t we? The Hebrew people followed a pillar of cloud and fire through the Wilderness. When Jesus called the disciples, he said, “Come; follow me.” And today, we shared the story of the Magi, the wise foreign scholars who studied the skies, who saw a new star on the horizon, and decided: we need to follow that star, and see where it might lead.

 They didn’t know, exactly. They knew that the Jewish holy writings promised a new king; they believed that this star was meant to show them the way. But they didn’t know where that star would bring them; in fact, when they got close, they were distracted by the bright lights of the big city – they thought a new king must surely be in a palace in Jerusalem, and were surprised to find out that he was in fact born in a born in a little town no one had ever heard of. They had set out with their gifts; they had set out with the intention to find and worship this new king – but even so, they didn’t know where that road was going to go. Still these foreigners set out, trusting the promises of a faith they didn’t observe, trusting in a star they didn’t understand – the Magi started following.

 That word – “following” – is so important. Following is something that happens over time – it doesn’t describe a single step, but a process, a path. When we talk about faith, we don’t talk about arriving; we don’t say, “I’ve arrived” or “I’ve got it all figured out.” Jesus doesn’t say, “Come, sit down next to me.” But what he says is, “Follow me” – he beckons, inviting us to start on a journey, to travel with him, to leave behind the comfortable and the familiar, to take risks, and to trust that he will be with us wherever we might go. Follow the leader is, for Christians, a life-long journey. And the good news is, it’s not like Simon Says: one mistake, one missed step, and you’re out of the game forever. No, Jesus invites us to follow, and when we lag behind, when we stumble or get distracted, we can always turn back and follow him again.

 As I said, I’ve been living with that word “following” this week. And I rather liked imagining our faith journey as something akin to following a post or a person online. If we follow someone – on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever the new thing is kids are using these days – if we follow someone, it means we care about what they have to say; we have a connection with them, and we want to share their lives; we believe that what they’ll say is worth hearing; we believe it’s worth following them.

 And when we follow Christ, we affirm the relationship, the connection, that he shares with us; we commit ourselves to sharing our lives and ideas, and listening when he shares his. And we invite his voice, his presence, into our every day.

 And that’s a place to start, I suppose… except I noticed something else about Facebook this week: a whole lot of the time, at least for me, is spent just skimming and scrolling by. Somewhere out there, an algorithm decides which posts I get to see, and even among all those that do pop up, many are – frankly – not something I’m very passionate about, just white noise I pass by in search of something or someone that matters more.

 And that’s not exactly a great way to imagine our relationship with Christ: just one more profile we follow, one voice lost in the cacophony of voices which shout into our lives.

 So then I thought about the way my friends and neighbors use the word “following” whenever a question is shared. There, “following” means: I don’t have an answer, but I’m intrigued by the question; I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping someone else does; I can’t solve this problem, but I want to be a part of the conversation; I too have this question – and maybe we can find the answers together.

 “Following” is a way of saying: I’m in. I want to be a part of this discussion. This matters to me. And “following” says: I’m willing to listen. I’m not going to make up answers that I don’t have. But I’m here. I’m listening with you.

 And there’s something significant about that: because really, isn’t that a lot of what the community of faith is about? It’s a place where we follow together – where we share our questions, where we invite each other to tell our stories, to offer our experiences and advice – and where we listen, where we can say: “That’s a good question, and I can’t answer it; so let’s keep asking together and see what others have to say.”

 That’s what community looks like; that’s what it looks like when we wrestle with God’s presence and follow God’s guidance, together.

 But then I started thinking some more. Because it’s not enough just to show up – often, those friends who start “following” a conversation are just flies on the wall, willing to sit back and eavesdrop while others do the heavy lifting, perhaps chiming in to offer criticisms but rarely with anything productive to say.

 But eavesdropping isn’t enough. Mouthing the words isn’t enough. And letting the voice of God be just one voice among many – it’s not enough. That’s not what Jesus said when he said, “Come, follow me.”

 The Magi remind us that following isn’t easy; although we often picture them standing alongside the shepherds on Christmas night, it’s much more likely that they wandered, searching for the newborn king, for as long as two years before they found him. They journeyed together through months and months of uncertainty, strangers in a strange land, relying on the hospitality of strangers; they ran into trouble with the government and had to run for their lives.

 The ones we call wise men didn’t have the answers. But, much like the disciples, the Magi left everything to follow, to search for the Christ; and when they went back to their old lives, they were forever changed because of him.

 Following Christ isn’t quick, and it isn’t easy. It’s not like following a Facebook post or a celebrity on Twitter, not like following a recipe or a script or following directions – it’s complicated, it’s messy, it’s chaotic sometimes, and it looks different for us all.

 As I contemplated this week, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the Magi on their long, uncertain, sometimes terrifying journey, thinking about what faith and following looks like for us today – the image that came to my mind is an image from the Holy Land.

 Some of you have heard me talk before about the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows, which is the traditional route through the Old City of Jerusalem along which Christ carried his cross. It’s a fascinating place, in this ancient city, full of holy sites intermixed with souvenir shops and cafes, this ancient city full of neighborhoods people have called home since before Christ was born and where they still live today. It’s a city full of history, beautiful, full of the weight and dust of the centuries in a way we just don’t experience in the States. But the road are old roads, from generations before cars; the streets are uneven, narrow, and twisting. In some places the Via is only about as wide as a car – which is interesting when cars try to squeeze through and the path is packed with pedestrians who have no place to go… other parts of the Via are more like a hallway, with no cars but with crowds of people stumbling up or down ancient stairs.

 The Via Dolorosa is one of those must-see, must-walk experiences for pilgrims to Jerusalem from around the world. On any given day, you’ll encounter not only people who live in Jerusalem, trying to get to the store and to work, but you’ll rub shoulders with Christians from all around the world.

 Literally, you will rub shoulders with them. When I visited the Via, the path was so crowded that our tour group was forced to make our way travelling single file, to hide our numbers – I mean, so we could stay together. We were spread into a long line, all following the leader up front. At least, we knew our leader was somewhere up front – we just couldn’t see him. Our line was so long that those of us in the back couldn’t even see the top of the flag our tour guide carried. All these other groups were pressing against us, trying to cut through our line, pushing in the other direction – so intent on following their leader that they didn’t care if they cut in front or cut us off.

 We knew our guide and bus captain were at the front of the line – but we couldn’t see them. And it was nerve-wracking: because we didn’t know where exactly we were, or where we were going; we didn’t have a map, didn’t speak the language, and didn’t want to face those crowds alone. Our guide up front was doing his best to push our path through the crowds, but he was small and quick, and he kept slipping farther away.

 Our anxiety was through the roof – until one of our leaders came back to walk with us.

 Miraculously, we made it through the Via without losing anyone in our group. And I believe, I firmly believe, it’s because we decided to put a leader not just in the front but in the back, a leader who made sure that nobody got left behind, nobody was distracted by a souvenir shop or accidentally tried to follow the wrong guide. That leader was our shepherd, watching out for wandering sheep…. That leader was the one who slowed whenever someone struggled to catch their breath or navigate uneven stairs… That leader was the one who, when somebody needed a break, made sure we could rest without being afraid. That leader was the one who gave us confidence, who calmed our anxiety, because we knew – no matter what – we wouldn’t be lost alone or left behind.

 And that, I think, is the kind of following we do in our faith. We follow God, but God is not just way up or “out there,” far away, out of sight, as mysterious and untouchable as a star in the sky. But the good news of Christmas, the good news of the Incarnation, is that God comes to the back, to walk with us. We follow a God who comes to the back of the line, who knows where we’re going, who encourages us, and who makes sure that we don’t get lost or confused or left behind.

 The Magi weren’t a part of the people God had claimed, but still they come: they come, searching for God with more persistence and more perseverance and more faith than many of God’s chosen people who had grown up with the promises that a Messiah would come. And to me, the fact that they had not just the knowledge to search for the star but the desire to seek out and to follow it shows that God was already present in their story; God wasn’t far away, hiding, but the Spirit was moving in them long before they started moving towards Bethlehem, before they even glimpsed the star or made the choice to follow it. And God is with us; God has always been working in us – even when we didn’t feel like a part of the community, even when we didn’t have a way to name or to claim our faith. In Christ we see that presence written large; at Christmas we know, and we are so grateful, for a God who came to the back, and who walks with us – not just leading us, but walking beside us, as we do our best to follow the way.

 May we follow this Christmas season. May you know not just that the light out there is guiding you but that Christ walks beside you, and the Spirit is at work within you. You are not lost, and you are not alone.

One year, when I came home from college in December, I learned that my home church had decided they wanted to do a living nativity. Our pastor paid to run an ad in the local newspaper, featuring a nativity scene and the words, “For a religion that was born in a barn, an open door goes without saying.”

 I still think that was a great line.

 We didn’t have a barn, but there was an old run-down garage on our church property, which was filled up with bales of hay and twinkle lights in an effort to bring a magical ancient feel to a decrepit aluminum structure. A big electric star was hung at the highest peak of the garage roof. Some of our members brought in animals from their farms: cows and sheep and maybe even a horse or two, giving our downtown parking lot some of the authentic sounds and smells of the stable. Three church members pulled old choir robes over their snowsuits, stuck crowns on top of their warm hunting caps, and wandered the lot “searching for baby Jesus.” Christmas carols blared through loudspeakers while, inside the manger, shepherds milled around and gazed in wonder at the holy family, while neighbors and strangers and curious onlookers traipsed by.

 I was drafted as an angel. My job was to wear an old white acolyte’s robe – over my own warmest winter coat – with a tinsel halo perched on my head, and I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the church, waving and drawing attention and trying to lure passers-by to come and see the spectacle in store.

 My mom still teases me about that time I was a streetwalking angel.

 And I still tease her right back about the time that her church organized a living nativity scene, but the youngest kid they could round up was a four-year-old – so Mary and Joseph spent most of their time trying to keep the precocious “newborn” in his snowsuit from climbing out of the manger on his own.

 That living nativity was far from perfect. But I do remember a lot of laughter. I remember a lot of joy. I remember how it felt to imagine Jesus being born in a garage in a parking lot in my hometown – in an ordinary, cold and dreary, run-down sort of place.

It reminded me what the story of Jesus’ birth was really about. And I also remember, for all the joking and everything that went wrong – I can still picture those lights twinkling, and the crowds of people gathered, and the way the falling snow smoothed out the rough edges and made that circus feel like a holy place after all.

 When we picture the nativity, we often picture something off the front of a Hallmark card – the cattle softly lowing, Mother Mary and Joseph gazing serenely down at a glowing baby, angelic and rosy, no crying he makes.

 But in reality, Mary would have been exhausted: she just gave birth in a barn, with no one mother or sisters to help her, and absolutely no epidural. Joseph was likely overwhelmed, just trying to shush the baby long enough for his young wife to get some rest. The animals were, well, animals – noisy, and smelly, and about as far away from serene as you can get.

 Incidentally, my same home church decided once to bring a lamb into worship to show the kids on Easter Sunday. And during the children’s message, that little lamb did what animals do – it made an unwanted and smelly mess. And the kids learned a lesson that day – not just about lambs, but about how even the best-laid plans can go wrong, and God shows up anyways.

 And that’s what the sheep and the cows and the wonky donkeys and the cats and the dogs and whoever else was in the stable that day did: they were animals. They were noisy, and stinky, and spunky, and real.

 Because that’s what this story is: it’s a story about a God who chooses to be born into the real world. And that’s why I love our children’s Christmas pageants – because they’re never perfect. But they remind us that this is where God meets us, in the chaos and the confusion, and when we put ourselves into the story, God always meets us there.

 Today’s scripture reminds us that the first to hear the good news about Jesus were some humble shepherds – working people, people who lived hard and lonely lives, people who spent all day and all night with their flocks, and who looked and smelled like it, too. Shepherds were the kind of people that were looked at with suspicion, because they were always on the move – as they moved their flocks, looking for water and a place to graze and a safe place to rest, the shepherds would come and go – so they were always, perpetually, strangers. No one really knew them, so no one really trusted them.

 But these strangers, these dirty, tired, lonely workers, these are the first to hear the good news: that Jesus has been born, that God has come into the world, not for the sake of the rich and the powerful,  but for the sake of the outcasts and the hurting people; so that even the poorest and most lonely and despised might know that God sees them, God hears them, God knows their lives, knows their hearts – and God loves them all the same.

 When the rich and the powerful ruler learns that Jesus has been born, he reacts not with joy but with anger and with fear – because this message, this good news, is a threat to him. When wise men finally arrive with their fine gifts of gold and spices, even they aren’t your standard rich-and-powerful, but they’re foreign scholars, people who left home in search of something more – and people who become hunted for it. But this is the Christmas story: a story full of unlikely people, in the dark and dirtiest of places, surprised to find that God is there, too.

 It’s such a real story, because we all know those dark and dirty unlikely places where God still surprises us by showing up: in a tent under the overpass, in the emergency room waiting room, in cots and bunks set up in shelters, in overpriced apartments with no insulation in the walls, in classrooms wearing last year’s too-small, torn-up shoes, in dumps digging through piles of garbage looking for something of value to sell, in nurseries where teenage mothers cry over their unexpected babies, in refugee camps where children struggle to remember the homes they never knew, in cheap hotel rooms where desperate people search for a reason to go on – in the dark and unlikely places of the world, that’s where Christmas happens. That’s where Jesus is born; that’s where God shows up – and that’s where we’re supposed to show up, too, not with condemnation, but with compassion, and with hope, and with love.

 I love the Christmas story. It’s an unlikely story. It’s an unusual story. But it’s also the greatest story. May we find our place in the story again this year.

Almost a year ago, one of my husband’s friends told Mike about the great deals his family had found at Niagara Falls in Canada over American Thanksgiving. Because it’s out of tourist season, and because Canadian children and workers don’t get a break for an American holiday, the prices and the crowds are both pretty low. Mike said, “Why don’t we go to Niagara Falls for Thanksgiving next year?”

 I’m pretty sure I rolled my eyes. I may have laughed in his face. Because Niagara Falls – in November – with children… all I could imagine were all the ways things could go wrong. It could be frigidly cold. It could rain the whole trip. We could get snowed in and not be able to go at all. Our kids might look at the waterfalls, shrug their shoulders, and say, “Meh. What else you got?” - - and we might not have a good answer.

 But Mike was persistent. Our girls were, at that moment, fascinated with waterfalls; they’re growing quickly, to the point where we no longer have to travel with strollers or plan around naptimes. We looked at prices. We discovered all kinds of indoor back-up options. And we booked a hotel we would never, ever, ever have been able to justify splurging on without the off-season deals – a hotel overlooking the Falls. We made a countdown calendar, and our kids have been crossing off the days until our trip ever since before Labor Day.

 Finally, finally, it was time to go. Our girls were nervous about crossing over into another country, only to find that Ontario, Canada looks an awful lot like Michigan. We drove past farms and forests, and lots of wind turbines, and strange foreign restaurants and shops with names like “Home Depot” and “McDonalds.” Our ten-year-old was pretty excited when we saw our first sign for Shoppers, the store mentioned in the musical Come From Away, and our five-year-old was excited with every Canadian flag we saw.

 And finally we started seeing signs for Niagara Falls. We could see the towers of hotels rising on the skyline. We could see the mist rising from the Falls, and the girls rolled down their windows to see if they could hear the water’s roar. We checked into our hotel, rode the elevator to the tenth floor, walked into our room, and the girls immediately ran to the window.

Their jaws dropped. There really is no way to prepare yourself for the Falls: they are just so big; there is so much water, rushing, pouring, constantly, unendingly, more and more and more. And the mist gives a sense of magic and wonder to it all.

 Our oldest looked. And looked. And looked. She excitedly pointed out to her sister the Horseshoe Falls, and the American Falls, and the little Bridal Veil Falls in between; she pointed to the Rainbow Bridge, and the wrecked ship which has hovered above the falls for over a century. And she said, with a contented sigh, “I don’t think I could ever get tired of that view.”

 And then she said, “Can I watch something on the iPad?”

 And we all started laughing. It became a joke this week; every time we returned to our room, one of us would look out the window, and say, “I’ll never get tired of that view… I wonder what’s on TV?”

 There we were, on the brink of one of the wonders of the world – there we were, with all the people we loved most in the world – there we were, in a place people travelled from the world over to see – in a place where explorers would fall down and pray in terror – in a place where kings and queens have walked, where daredevils dreamed the impossible – there we were, and it was amazing… but it was also amazing how quickly we just got used to that beautiful site.

 “I don’t think I could ever tired of that view… I wonder what’s on TV?”

 How quickly we lose our sense of awe; how quickly we take even the most incredible wonders for granted. I remember the first time I ever heard of electronic mail; I was amazed by the idea that I could send a message to someone and they could see it immediately. But now many of us use email daily without a second thought. I remember when our family got our first remote control for the television, and I was intimidated by the idea that you could change the channel without even standing up. And I remember our first VCR, the novelty of being able to record a program and watch it later. These days, my husband can set the football game to record on our DVR from his touchscreen pocket telephone; we don’t have to be in the house or even in the country at the time. And speaking of phones, when I was a kid, video phones were science fiction right out of the Jetsons or Star Trek – and now it stuns me to realize that my children will never remember a world where video phone calls weren’t a thing.

 And we just take it all for granted. We don’t think twice about the once unimaginable wonders around us. Machines that wash our dishes and dry our clothes. Groceries delivered right to your door. Flying machines and even a car that could travel hundreds of miles in a day were once inconceivable.

 I don’t think I could ever get used to those wonders, we say… and then we turn around and ask, what’s next?

 And nowhere do we see it more than every year at Christmastime. And I’m not even talking about the kids who count down the days until Christmas morning only to be bored with their new toys after five minutes and forget them entirely after five days… no, I’m not just talking about stuff. I’m talking about the story of Christmas itself.

 We hear the story every year; we know it so well that we take it for granted:

 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken… and everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David… He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn child, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

 We know the story: a Caesar, and a census; a little town, a man, a woman, and a baby in a manger. We wait for weeks every year to hear the story again; to sing the carols, to light the candles, to bask in the glow – and then we walk away, asking, “What’s next?”

 We know the story; we know it so well, maybe too well – so much so that we can shrug our shoulders, and say, “I’ve been there, and seen that; I wonder what’s on TV?”

 We can become numb to even the most amazing wonders – and this story is one. This is no ordinary story. This is the story of God entering into the world. This is the story of a God who so loved the world that God just could not stay away. This is the story of God entering into the world – not with fireworks and fanfare, but so quietly that, if you blink, you might miss it. This is the story of a God who surprises us, the story of a God who shows up in the lives of people who are being buffeted and shaped by kingdoms and powers out of their control.

 While everyone is looking at Caesar, God is looking to the ordinary people. While everyone is bustling to arrive first, God is looking towards the latecomers, the ones who show up when there seems to be no more room.

 There is a lot on our to-do lists for the month to come: shopping, wrapping, decorating, baking, travelling, taking pictures, sending cards, making calls… But my hope and my prayer is that we will take some time to enjoy the view, to remember what it is that brought us here in the first place. The story of Christmas isn’t about the presents or the decorations: it’s about a God who surprises us, who shows up in the times and the places we least expect it. Where is it, that God would surprise us today? Where are the mangers, where children have no bed? Who are our neighbors, whose lives are thrown into disarray by governments and laws beyond their control? Who are the strangers, looking for shelter, looking for a friendly face? Who are the people outside, longing for a place to belong?

 Do we see them? Do we look? And do we believe that Christ is still being born, that God is still showing up, in humble and surprising ways today? We tend to associate this story with Christmas Eve candlelight services, but the story of Christmas is about as far away from stained glass and organ music and new clothes by candlelight as you can get. The story of Christmas is about a God who shows up in real life, in the messy and difficult stuff of our every day.

 I want to encourage us to make a different kind of to-do list this year. And put on your list things like: smile at your cashier; over-tip your server on purpose, even if they’re having a bad day; donate to the giving tree; give non-traditional presents;

volunteer in the community; bake a pie for your neighbor; buy coffee for the person behind you in line; make it a point to compliment someone every day; donate pet food or old towels or blankets to the animal shelter; offer to babysit for some exhausted parents; visit a nursing home; donate new socks and underwear to those in need; volunteer to serve meals to those who are hungry; bring new coloring books and crayons to the children’s hospital; shovel your neighbor’s walk, or if you hire somebody to plow you out, ask them to do the rest of the street while they’re there; write another letter or make another call telling our leaders to stop separating families and get kids out of detention camps this Christmas; ask a family with a loved one in the service how you can help make their season brighter; pay for someone else’s groceries; invite your neighbor to share a meal with you – do whatever you can each day to find a way to show God’s love and bring hope into the world.

 The good news is, just like the waterfalls which never stop, which keep flowing and flowing, noticed or unnoticed, appreciated or not, night and day, season after season, year after year – God’s love keeps flowing and flowing, and God keeps showing up; hope keeps being born into the world. The good news of Christmas isn’t just about a story that happened long ago; it’s the good news that God is still being born into the world in unexpected and surprising ways.

 My hope and my prayer is that we won’t grow numb, that we won’t grow weary, that we won’t look away. May we have eyes to see Christ in the world this holiday season, and may we have hearts that never tire of seeking God’s presence and sharing God’s love.

  O God, let your love roll over us like thundering waters; let your justice pour out around us, and your grace flow through us. Teach our hearts to be still this holiday season, to bask in your presence, to gaze on your grace. And help us to remember that being present is so much more important than buying presents;

When the Hebrews made their home in the Promised Land, they pooled their resources, bringing their talents and their riches, in order to build the Temple – to make a glorious and impressive house for God. The Temple itself was a building arranged in layers, as it were; the closer you got to the center of the Temple, the more careful and attentive you had to be, because the closer you got to the center, the closer you got to God. The innermost room of the temple was called the Holy of Holies, the most holy place; it was where the Ark of the Covenant rested – and it was believed that the innermost room was God’s throne room; God’s presence was literally, most fully, most powerfully there.

 The mythology of the Ark of the Covenant we find in Indiana Jones and the face-melting scene, that mythology has its roots in the history of the faith, because God’s full, powerful, literal presence is nothing to be trifled with. The Hebrews knew that the God who redeemed them, who freed them and claimed them, this was no tame deity. And that inner sanctuary, the most holy place, was only entered one a year. Only the high priest entered that sanctuary, once yearly on Yom Kippur, on the day of atonement, when the priest would offer incense and sacrifices in order to appease God, to demonstrate the people’s faithfulness, to show their contrition for their failures, and to pray for God to cover their sins for another year.

 The festival of Yom Kippur has its roots in the Exodus. While Moses was up on the mountain receiving God’s commandments, the people down below were losing faith and losing hope. They decided to make for themselves a golden calf, which they worshiped, claiming that this golden “god” had delivered them from slavery. When Moses saw what they had done, he shattered the tablets in anger, and according to Exodus, thousands were put to death for idolatry on that day. It was a bloody and devastating day; God’s people, so recently freed by great wonders and miracles, lost faith; and so they never forgot just how easily temptation and failure could come.

 When the high priest went into the holy place, then, when he knelt and offered sacrifices and prayers before the Ark of Covenant, which held the new tablets God had given to replace the ones which were shattered, and which held a jar of the manna which taught the people to depend on God – when the priest knelt before God’s presence and prayed for forgiveness for the people, it was a day of fear and trembling indeed.

 In fact, according to some traditions, before entering the holy of holies, the priest would have a rope tied around him, in case he was so overcome by the glory of God’s presence that he dropped dead and needed to be pulled out again. The scholars have debated and decided it’s probably not true… but it is likely true that the “veil” which separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple was not just a simple curtain, but was made of many layers, curtains overlapping curtains, making a little maze more than three feet thick – this was a place which truly is set apart, the kind of place no one would accidentally stumble who didn’t belong.

 Ever since Adam and Eve cowered in the Garden, people have entered God’s presence with trembling and with fear. After meeting with God on the mountaintop, Moses’ face shone with such a ferocious light that the people were afraid of him, and he had to hide his face so they could hear what he had to say. The prophet Elijah hid his face in God’s presence, so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed with glory when God passed by. When Isaiah glimpsed heaven, he fell down and begged not to be destroyed, because he wasn’t worthy to stand in the presence of God. And over and over again, when the angels, God’s messengers appear, people fall down in terror; when God shows up, we are afraid.

 This is the tradition which has been passed down through generations: when you come to pray, take care; when you come to God, cleanse yourself first, make amends for your failures, bring promises and sacrifices, with fear and trembling, into the presence of God.

 But then one day, Jesus says, “When you pray, say, ‘Our Father.’” When you pray, say, “Hey, dad.”

 Jesus says, when you pray, talk to God like your parent, someone who loves you, someone who gives you your name and shapes who you become. Jesus says, when you pray, approach God with respect, absolutely, but also with intimacy and affection – because this is how we know God, and this is who God is: God is love.

 How different it is, than bracing ourselves once a year to enter God’s presence with sacrifices and trembling – how different, for Jesus to encourage us to approach God regularly, just as we are, just as we would come for encouragement or help or comfort or advice from a parent, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a teacher, or a friend.

 When you come to God, come to God believing that God loves you, and God’s love is reflected in you. When you came to God, pray, “Our parent in heaven, your name is holy” – not the kind of holiness that we hide away behind stone walls and heavy curtains, but the kind of holiness that is with us and transforms our whole lives into holy ground.

 And then Jesus continues: When you pray, say, “Your kingdom come, and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Or as our children’s bible this morning puts it, “Help us do what you want us to do.” So many of our prayers focus on what we want God to do for us, but this is where Jesus begins: by asking God to help us do what God wants, praying, “Not my will, Lord, but yours be done.”

 Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. And what does that kingdom look like? Well, Jesus started this teaching on the mountainside with those famous beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers, blessed are you who are mourning; blessed are you when you hunger and you thirst. And Jesus said, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Parent in heaven. And he will go on to say, Don’t store up for yourself treasures on earth, but store up treasures in heaven. And everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise person who builds their house upon the rock.

 This is God’s kingdom: where faith is put into action, and where God’s blessings fall on the most unlikely souls. And when we pray, “Thy kingdom come on earth,” we are asking God to help us believe in that kingdom, to help us see it; we are asking God to help us believe that everyone matters, that everyone is precious and beloved by our heavenly Parent. And we are asking God to help us live like we believe it, like that kingdom has already come: we are asking, “Help us to love like you love; help us to do what you want us to do.”

 And Jesus continues, When you pray, say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Give us the food we need for today. He hearkens back to the lessons of the manna, when the people learned on the one hand that the Lord provides, and on the other hand, they learned that quite literally hoarding stinks. When we take more than we need, when we try to stockpile at someone else’s expense, our riches turn to rot; but what we really need is the faith – as he goes on to say – the faith to consider the lilies of the field, the faith to trust God one day and one step at a time.

 Jesus doesn’t teach us to say, “Give me my daily bread,” but “Give us what we need for today.” Because part of God’s kingdom coming, part of our living into that kingdom, is remembering that God’s good gifts aren’t just for me but are meant for us all.

 Give us our daily bread, and forgive us, as we forgive others. Help us to know that we’re forgiven, and help us to forgive. And this is what we sometimes misunderstand about forgiveness: forgiveness isn’t saying that what was done is okay, that it doesn’t matter; but when we forgive, and when we are forgiven, we take away the power that past mistakes hold over our lives today. Whatever has been done to you, however you’ve been hurt, doesn’t get to define you or dominate or control your life. Forgiveness doesn’t mean looking the other way; it doesn’t mean ignoring the truth, but forgiveness frees us to speak the truth without fear, because we are speaking not from a place of anger or vengeance but from a place that comes from the prayer which says: thy kingdom come – a kingdom of justice and a kingdom of grace.

 Forgive us, as we forgive, and – as our children’s bible says – “Keep us from doing bad things.” It’s not a bad paraphrase for a children’s bible, but our kids probably know better than many of us that there is so much in our lives that’s out of our control. “Deliver us from evil” isn’t just about my own little choices but has to do with the systems of evil in which we live. Deliver us from the powers that try to name us and control us; deliver us from the evil that runs rampant around us; deliver us from the evil that tries to worm its way into our hearts and souls; deliver us from fear; deliver us from hatred; deliver us to live as if your kingdom really has come and your will can be done on earth as it is in heaven.

 For kids, we tend to boil the message down to “be nice” and “do good.” But the gospel is so much bigger; it’s about reshaping creation and reshaping the whole world. This little prayer we so casually pray week after week is in fact profoundly political. Literally, politics means “of the city” or “concerning the nation” – politics has to do with how we live together. And when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we name that none of the other kingdoms on earth are holy, and all fall short. When we pray in the plural – our parent, give us our bread, deliver us from evil – we are praying a political prayer. We are talking about how we are connected to each other, how we care for one another, how we will live together – and Jesus certainly has a lot to say about that.

 This is the prayer Jesus gives us to shape us. When you pray, pray simply; when you pray, pray trusting that God is with you, and God hears you, and God cares; when you pray, remember you do not pray alone; and when you pray, let your prayer go beyond mere words, let it make its way into your heart and soul, let your prayer be revealed in your life.

 May it be so.

  Dear God,

Help us to do what you want us to do.

Give us the food we need for today.

Forgive us, and help us to forgive others.

Keep us from doing bad things.

Deliver us from evil.

The kingdom and the glory are yours, now and always. Amen.[1]

I once heard a story about a man named Thomas Hearne, who was travelling on an expedition to the mouth of the Coppermine River in Ontario. But a few days into the journey, Thomas and his companions were attacked, and most of their supplies were stolen. In his journal about the incident, rather than bemoaning what was lost, Thomas wrote, “The weight of our baggage being so much lightened, our next day’s journey was more swift and pleasant.”

 Lloyd Douglas, one of the most popular American ministers and authors of the early 20th century, reflected on this story, saying, “Hearne was in route to something more interesting and important; and the loss of a few sides of bacon and a couple of bags of flour meant nothing more than an easing of the load. Had Hearne been holed in somewhere, in a cabin, resolved to spend his last days eking out an existence […] the loss of some of his stores by plunder would probably have worried him almost to death.

 Douglas concluded by reflecting, “How we respond to ‘losing’ some of our resources for God's work depends upon whether we are on the move or waiting for our last stand.”[1]

 It’s a preacher story, so I don’t know if it’s true – although I do know that making my kids carry their own bags makes them second-guess just how many books and stuffed animals they really need. When we’re sitting still, we can easily surround ourselves with stuff, but when we’re on the move, we reconsider how much it is we really need.

 In our scripture today, we are given a glimpse into the life of the very early church. Luke writes, “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had… and God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them” (NIV).

 It’s a beautiful picture of a community of people living in mutual harmony with one another – but let’s be honest, it sounds a little too Sesame Street, a little too Pleasantville and Pollyanna – just a little too utopian to have ever possibly been real. It makes me wonder, did the early church ever actually live that way? Maybe in those early days, the good news of the resurrection was still so new and exciting that the first Christians just didn’t worry about anything else. Maybe it’s easier to let go of your possessions when you expect Christ to return and usher in the new age at any moment; you don’t have to worry about saving for the future if you don’t think there will be one. Or maybe, even though Luke says, “all the believers were of one heart and mind,” he doesn’t really mean all the believers. Maybe there were small pockets of communal living, which were celebrated and lifted up as models for the rest, or maybe this is the story that the Christians told about themselves, a hopeful image of the kind of community they aspired, in their own faltering ways, to be.

 But even if the story really did start here, with sharing everything and no one in need, it didn’t last for long. Just a few verses later, the Gentiles come to the apostles complaining that only the Jewish widows are being cared for, while Gentile widows go hungry (Acts 6:1-7). The early church quickly faced conflict and division over the question of if and how non-Jews could be a part of the new Christian community (Acts 10, 15). And Paul wrote to the Corinthian church admonishing them, because not only were they divided into factions, but the richer members would feast and leave nothing for when their poorer members made it to the table (1 Corinthians 1, 11).

 Truly loving one another as we love ourselves – it’s hard. Sharing what we have, generously and without reservation, is hard. Keeping an open mind, keeping an open heart towards people who are different from us, who hold different ideals and different views – it’s hard. And trusting that, if we share, there will be enough to go around – it’s especially hard, when we see around us over and over again that there just doesn’t seem to be enough.

 In many ways, the early Christians lived in a different world than we do. Many of us are carrying debt, significant debt, sometimes more than we even imagine or hope to pay back in our lifetimes. And at the same time, far too few of us have any money saved for the future. However, the early Christians also knew about debt and fear for the future; then as now, it takes so little to derail our plans and throw our lives into a tailspin. It’s overwhelming and terrifying to realize that one medical emergency, one mistake, a fire, a downsizing, a disaster – or even just outliving our savings – can leave us begging for help.

 Every day we see signs advertising spaghetti fundraisers and posts for go-fund-me accounts, saying: please help this family, please help this friend, with one more heartbreaking story to tell. Even the most heartwarming stories we share – of children raising money to pay off their classmates’ lunch debts, and engineering students crafting medical equipment that insurance won’t cover, celebrities or even churches stepping in to erase medical debt or help someone in need – those stories are beautiful, yes, but they’re also discouraging, because beneath the warm fuzzies is the reality that we live in a world and a nation where fear is woven right into the fabric of our being, where at any time, any one of us could go into a freefall, where school lunch debt and medical bankruptcy aren’t just real but are common and overwhelming – we live in a society where, in our own fear and in our own greed, we’ve lost our sense of responsibility for one another. I remember once hearing a suggestion that, instead of forcing everyone to make a go-fund-me page when they got sick or a tragedy occurred, we could instead all contribute to one great big go-fund-me fund that could be used by anyone in need – you know, like some kind of social safety net? But somehow it’s a crazy, impossible ideal – even though other nations seem to be able to make it work – it’s a crazy, impossible idea to suggest that I’d be willing to pay more in taxes if it means I knew my neighbors wouldn’t go hungry, that when someone got cancer their family could support them without worrying about how to afford the treatment they need – and if it meant knowing that, when our family falls on hard times, there would be a net to catch us and something in place to help us back up.

 Maybe we imagine that we’ll never be the ones in need. Or maybe we just like to be heroes: we like to feel generous, to hear those sad stories for ourselves, to see misery on display, to be appealed to individually, maybe even groveled to and gushed over – it makes us feel good, feel important and powerful, when we choose to give. And God absolutely calls us to step up and help whenever we see someone in need. But just as important – maybe even more so – just as important is the far less glamorous work of consistent giving, of faithful generosity, of giving back a portion of our resources to God. It’s less flashy, less gratifying, but even more powerful in our lives and in the lives of others when we build generosity into the very fabric of our lives.

 When God was preparing the people to enter the Promised Land, they first had to learn to trust in God. They learned the lesson of the manna, the miracle of bread from heaven – and the real miracle that, somehow, each person always had enough. And God said, “When you enter the Promised Land, remember how, when you were hungry, my grace kept you fed. When you enter the Promised Land, give back the first and the best parts of our harvest for my work. And build into your society care for others, especially for the hungry and the vulnerable, the strangers and the sick and the poor.”

 And when Jesus came to call us back to God’s ways, he said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart” (Matthew 6:21). And he said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow” (Matthew 6:34). And he said, “They will know you are my disciples by your love” (John 13:35).

 The book of Acts paints a picture of a generous community, the kind of place where people are willing to give everything they have in order to make sure no one else is in need. Not everyone gave everything – and I’m not asking you to give everything today. But it is worth asking: what do we give? Do we bring our best to God, or do we give God the crumbs, the leftovers, after everything else is said and done?

 The biblical standard for giving is a tithe, or 10%. Actually, that’s the Old Testament biblical standard; in the New Testament, as we’ve seen, the standard for giving is everything. But on average, most Christians today give about 2.5% of their income to churches.[2] Some give much more, of course, but many give much less. Among the three major religions in our nation – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – Christians aren’t even the most generous, not by a long shot; our friends in the other Abrahamic faiths almost double our giving.[3]

 It’s a shame that the religion of the cross and resurrection, of dying to self and rising to Christ, of loving others as we love ourselves – it’s a shame that our faith is no longer know by our generosity, compassion, or grace. The world outside knows us by our judgmentalism, by our hypocrisy, by our worst examples, by our biggest failures, by our exclusion and prejudice and unwritten rules – but how I wish they would know us by our love.

 Two and a half percent. Some give more, but many give less. And we can say maybe people are giving to secular charities these days; we can blame church politics and scandals, we can blame the lousy economy – but then again, during the Great Depression, the average for giving was 3.3% - in the season which, for our nation, is the literal epitome of poverty and despair, Christians were more generous than they are now. Maybe it’s because there was a shared sense of struggle; maybe it’s because the suffering was so clear and so prevalent, that more were willing to share so needs could be met. In fact, throughout history, the most generous people aren’t usually the rich – the rich are too far removed from their neighbors – but the most generous people are those who don’t have much to share… but who know their neighbors, and try to love them as they love themselves.[4] While big numbers make the headlines, most giving – whether to churches or to charities – most giving comes from moderate households, from modest and ordinary folks, but when all those smaller gifts are put together, they really add up.

 That’s why Jesus doesn’t praise the giving done by the rich, but instead he praises the gift of the widow’s mite (Luke 21:1-4). The one who fed crowds with just a few loafs, who said faith like a mustard seed was enough to move mountains – Jesus knew that it’s not the size of the gift that counts, but the spirit and faith therein (Matthew 14:13-21; Matthew 17:20).

 Maybe you really are giving all you can: friends, God sees you. The Lord who knows all the hairs on your head; the one who clothes the lilies and praises the widow’s gift is with you. God sees your heart. And maybe this isn’t a season when you can make a financial commitment or give any more than you already can. But maybe God is inviting you to step up in another way: we have open seats on committees, work areas and ministry teams; you could volunteer at church events, you could commit yourself to calling and checking in with church members, to visiting, to serving at Alpha House, volunteering in the community, praying regularly for our church and our members, brainstorming creative fundraising ideas. Jesus didn’t come to balance budgets; he came to show God’s love. Jesus cares about what you do with your finances, but more than that, Jesus loves you.

 And maybe, when a little extra income surprises you – a raise, a bonus, an inheritance, a tax refund, or some other unexpected blessing – remember to share and pass that blessing on.

 Many of us are giving all we can. And I honor that; I honor you. But I also know that many of us aren’t giving all we can – not even close. We aren’t giving until it hurts; in fact, we’re barely even feeling it. Maybe you haven’t stepped up your giving in a while. Maybe you give when you think about it, when you happen to come, when you remember to put some money in your pocket on the way out the door. Our church is currently operating at a deficit; we are sustaining many of our ministries thanks to the generous investments of the saints who’ve gone before us. And we are grateful for those gifts, for those investments in the church’s future, for those who made sure their ministry would outlive them – and if you haven’t thought about it yet, what legacy are you going to leave behind you when the day comes? Will you remember the ministries of the church in your estate? Whom will you bless, even after you’re gone?

 Friends, I am so grateful for the legacy that brought us this far, and for the generosity of each one of you and of the saints who’ve gone before. But I firmly believe that we are at a crucial moment in our church’s story: and I believe, with all my heart, that God is not finished with us yet.

 The question is: do you believe it? And are you willing to commit to the work, to invest in the vision, to support the worship, the discipleship, the fellowship, the missions of this body in this place?

 In the future, when they tell our story, will they say: this was the season when the church was afraid; when giving dried up, and they circled the wagons, and anxiously counted the sacks of flour we had left? Or will this be the season when we keep moving, when we trust God enough to lighten the load – to share and use what we have, to dream big and give bigger, to trust that, by God’s grace, there will be more than enough to get us where God is calling us to go?

 May they know us by our faith. May they know us by our generosity. And above all, may they know us by our love.

   We thank you, God, for the saints who’ve gone before us; we stand in awe of the legacy we’ve inherited – and we also stand in awe of the opportunities you’ve given us. We find ourselves in a crucial moment: will we plan for the future with hope, or with fear? Will we be known for our stinginess, or will we be known for our generosity? We pray, Lord, that the world will know us by our love. We pray that you would make us like the earliest church, people united in heart and mind, a community of people committed to caring for one another and to sharing the good news with the world. Send your Spirit on us, as we make our promises and our pledges for the coming year. Fill us with hope; fill us with courage; fill us with peace. In Christ’s name we pray; amen.

[1] Lloyd C. Douglas, The Living Faith. http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/s/stewardship.htm

[2] https://pushpay.com/blog/church-giving-statistics/

[3] The average American Christian donates a little over $800/year; Muslims on average donate more than $1300, and Jews $1440. https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/average-church-religion-donation.html/

When I was a child, I loved the movie The Wizard of Oz. I loved the songs, from Dorothy’s wistful “Over the Rainbow” to the delightful “If I Only Had a Brain.” Like so many young people, I resonated with Dorothy’s discontent, with her dawning realization that the world must be bigger than the little corner she’s experienced – and there is something wondrous in the idea that a mighty wind might turn things upside down and suddenly your world is transformed from shades of gray to technicolor.

 I loved the movie The Wizard of Oz, though I wonder if perhaps that movie may be the root cause of my recurring dreams about tornados. I’ve never been in a tornado myself; I’ve never even seen one first-hand that I remember, except for maybe a distant waterspout. But I cannot count the number of times in my dreams I watch as funnel clouds form, running to warn my loved ones, searching for shelter in a home that’s suddenly made of windows, watching as the clouds darken and still more funnels rush in with terrifying speed, one after another – and then, when they’re roaring right on top of me, I wake up – not in Oz, but right back at home.

 I’m not exactly sure what to make of those dreams, but they happen often enough that I sometimes, in my dream, think, “Wow, this is so weird; I dream about tornados all the time, and now it’s actually happening.”

 I don’t know what it means – but I’m not sure I want to know. So even if you’re gifted in psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, please don’t tell me! I’m thinking a few too many times watching the Wizard of Oz combined with a few too many tornado drills huddled in public school cinderblock hallways when I was still too young to know the difference between a drill and a real storm – all those experiences imbedded themselves in my subconscious, where they pop up again from time to time.

 If nothing else, those dreams remind me that wind is powerful, and it’s nothing to be trifled with.

 We don’t have to look far in the waking world to recognize the power of wind. Windmills spring up around our state and off our shores, trying to harness some of that power for our own use. But when storms blow through, we suddenly find ourselves aware how drafty our homes are; garbage cans go rattling and tumbling down the street, and siding and shingles are peeled away. When the bigger storms like hurricanes and tornados hit, we watch the scenes of devastation unfold on our TV screens: trees are uprooted, whole roofs take flight, schools are flattened, buildings ripped from their foundations, homes and neighborhoods suddenly just gone. And everything that seemed so solid is suddenly revealed to be fleeting and fragile – and we feel fragile, too.

 Wind is powerful, and it’s nothing to be trifled with.

 But this image – the image of wind – this is the image we are given of the Holy Spirit. This is the image Luke uses here in Acts to describe the birth of the church: the Spirit shows up, like a mighty rushing wind.

 In fact, Luke goes one step farther: because the Spirit doesn’t just come as a rushing wind, but the Spirit shows up like a tornado of fire. And fire, like wind, is a wondrous and dangerous thing; it brings illumination and warmth and life, but fire, too, can quickly spark devastation and reshape the landscape forever.

 As C.S. Lewis once described Narnia’s Christ-like lion, “He’s not a tame lion… [of] course he isn’t safe; but he is good.”[1]

 Or as Annie Dillard, a modern theologian, once wrote, reflecting on the ways we often underestimate the Spirit’s power,

 “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”[2]

 We often narrow this story of Pentecost to the Birthday of the Church – and we say, “Isn’t it nice how the church starts, with unity even in diversity? It’s like a reversal of the Tower of Babel, when instead of being scattered, people are gathered together, and instead of being confused, everyone understands each other.” And we have a party once a year to celebrate the day when those divisions were ended, and we all figured out how to get along.

 And I hope you realize how ridiculous that is: to celebrate as if Pentecost was a once-and-for-all kind of event, a bridging of divisions and great coming together… and we celebrate what happened then, without recognizing that two thousand years later, we still hide behind our walls, and divide ourselves along ethnic lines, and struggle to understand each other… and when we do come together in our diversity, we spend more time praising our diversity than praising God.

 But for Luke, the author of Acts, the story of Pentecost isn’t meant to be a one-time miracle, but instead he offers this story as a revelation of the character of this fledgling community. This is who we are supposed to be.

 The church at Pentecost is a church overcoming fear, a church that spills out into the world, proclaiming good news, crossing borders and boundaries, finding new ways to speak, to adapt to the audience around them, sharing the good news in new ways. And really, it’s not a reversal of Babel: God doesn’t make everyone speak one language; the miracle isn’t that everyone understands everyone, but rather that everyone understands someone. The Spirit doesn’t make us all the same, but rather, God finds a way to bring us together even in our uniqueness.

 Pentecost is only in chapter two of the book. It’s not the end of the story, not for Luke, or for the church, or for us. Pentecost is just the beginning; it’s a birth – and birth is where the story starts, not where the story ends.

 And the story starts with this reminder: the Spirit is not a tame Spirit. But the Spirit shows up like a rushing wind, like a tornado of fire, transforming what we imagined was solid and unchanging, reshaping the landscape of the world, and in the process, reshaping us. And as terrifying as that thought can be, it sure seems like the modern church could use some transformation and reshaping today.

 The story of Pentecost reminds us that the church is not what we’ve made it: the church isn’t a building, and the church isn’t a denomination. The church is people. The church is us. We are the church when we gather together, and we are the church when we leave this place and go out into the world. And we carry with us the power of the Holy Spirit, to reshape the world and transform everything.

 Before Pentecost, there was a different understanding of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was reserved for kings, and for priests and for prophets, for people whom God had called to a specific ministry, a specific leadership, in a specific moment in history. But what Pentecost taught the early church, what changed that day, is that the Holy Spirit was given to everyone: everyone is a leader, everyone is called to ministry, everyone is empowered to bring the prayers and needs of the world to God, and everyone is given the gift of prophecy, to speak the truth to power, to name evil and call out injustice, and invite people to a better way of living.

 Back when Jesus started his ministry, in Luke 4, he stood up in the synagogue and read the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

 The Spirit is upon me, Jesus says, for the sake of bringing good news to others, for the sake of justice and compassion and transforming the world. And when the church started its ministry at Pentecost, when the Spirit came upon them, it was to continue that work: speaking truth to people from every nation, proclaiming good news, working for justice and compassion. And that work continues still today.

 It’s not work for one person; it’s work for us all. And it takes all of us, speaking in the languages we know, so that those around us can hear the good news each in their own language, in a way that they can understand, so that grace really resonates and we can all be changed.

 We started with the images of wind and fire… and in those first moments when we realize the whole landscape has changed, it’s terrifying. Even Dorothy was scared to find herself in Oz! But the thing about storms is, they aren’t the end; even forests ravaged by tornados of fire can grow back – and in fact, sometimes it takes that clearing away of debris to make room for new life to begin. The way forward is through resurrection, and before we can rise, we have to lay our lives down.

 So maybe the question is: what do we need to die to, what do we need to let blow away, what chaff and impurities do we need to let burn, so that something new might begin, so that the kingdom of God that is good news to the poor might be revealed in us?

 Dorothy woke up in Oz and realized that the world is much bigger than she imagined, that there are more colors and more kinds of people than she ever could have guessed. And she was changed; by getting to know others, by leaving home, she got to better know herself.

 God invites us into a new world, too. The Spirit invites us to imagine and to live into a transformed landscape, to be changed, turned upside down – and to live into God’s surprising and wondrous new kingdom. May we stop being gatekeepers, and open the doors instead; may we speak authentically, and may be willing and able to adapt, so that others might hear the good news and come to believe. And when the mighty rushing wind of the Spirit shows up, may we have the courage to go along for the ride.

  God, we’re good at asking you to show up, to transform us – but we’re not always sure what it is we’re asking for. It’s hard for us to see what you’re doing, and when we do see you at work, we struggle, afraid to get on board. Give us the courage to invite you once more. Let your Spirit fill this place; kindle your fire in our hearts, and send us to be the church and bring your good news into the world. By the power of your Spirit we pray; amen.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/aslan

Let me begin by saying: I am not ready for Christmas. I’m not ready for the Christmas songs on the radio, not ready for the Christmas movies on TV, I’m not ready to go shopping, not ready to wrap presents, not ready to put up the tree. But I also want to say: if you are ready, if holiday songs and movies and decorations bring you joy, you do you. We could all use a little more joy in our lives.

 Last year, when it was properly holiday movie season, we had fun introducing and reintroducing our kids to some of our old favorite movies: Frosty and Rudolph, White Christmas and Holiday Inn, Home Alone and The Santa Clause. And we also watched my husband’s favorite not-safe-for-kids Christmas movie, Die Hard – and I finally, finally got him to watch my favorite not-safe-for-kids Christmas movie, Love Actually.

 And I cannot stress this enough: it was marketed as a romantic comedy, but Love Actually absolutely is not a family friendly movie. It’s rated R, and if you don’t like movies that are rated R, where people swear and kiss and do naughty things, then you definitely should not watch this movie.

 But it is a beautifully real movie, a movie that goes beyond the romantic comedy stereotypes to show love that’s actually messy, painful, and imperfect. The movie begins with – almost simultaneously – a couple of meet-cutes, a wedding, and a funeral. It follows the stories of a whole group of people whose lives intersect, showing the excitement of new love, the ache of broken hearts, the power of temptation, and the weight of love turned into grief. It explores love between friends, love between dating couples, unrequited love, forbidden love, love in marriage, love between people who worry the spark is gone, love that requires forgiveness and repentance, love between siblings, parents, children – love that is full of possibilities, and love that makes mistakes, and love that has to say goodbye. It’s one of those rare movies that still, sixteen years after I first watched it, still makes me laugh but also makes me cry, every single time.

 It’s surprisingly raw and complicated for a holiday season romantic comedy, but it’s also very much a product of its time; the movie was released in the fall of 2003, just a couple of years after the world was shaken by the events of 9/11, after we were confronted with the realities of terror and death. And the movie opens in, of all places, an airport, with scenes of people greeting one another – I later learned that these were real scenes, captured by hidden cameras, of real people, hugging, running to each other, kissing, laughing, full of this honest and beautiful joy.

 And over these scenes of reunions, a voice begins to speak:

 “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”[1]

 November begins what is for many of us is a season of travel and reunions, a time for joyful arrivals as well as disappointment and heartache and grief-filled empty chairs. But as I’ve spent this week holding space between the Easter story and the saints we celebrate on this All Saints Sunday, the image that’s been with me is that image of an arrivals gate: some are waiting with hopeful eagerness, with their hearts in their hands, scanning every face, yearning expectantly to see a loved one standing there at last – and there are those who are still making their way through the tangle and confusion of corridors and gates, still travelling, not yet arrived – and then there is this gloriously beautiful and undignified moment when they first see each other, and run to each other, and with laughter and tears, embrace.

 That, to me, is as good an image as any of what it is we look forward to, when we try to imagine eternity. We look forward to joyful reunions, to an end of our waiting, to that moment when the stress and anxiety and grief fades away; we look forward to being embraced by and surrounded by love.

 Because we’ve been reading through the bible with our children this fall, our scripture for today is the Easter story, a story we don’t associate with this time of year. We usually read the Easter story in the spring, and it’s easy to talk about new life in that season when the days are getting longer, the ice is melting, the breezes are getting warmer, and the sun shines down on new buds, new growth, and new birth.

 It’s easy to talk about Easter in the springtime. But the good news is for every season: even when the days are growing shorter and the darkness is growing, when the chill seeps into our hearts and into our bones, and the rain washes our plans away – this is when we really need to be reassured, and to believe that the story isn’t over yet.

 We heard today the story of Mary on that first Easter Sunday. Mary didn’t know that it was Easter Sunday; she didn’t show up at the garden tomb expecting to find it empty; she wasn’t at the arrivals gate, looking for Jesus’ face, ready to greet him with open arms after his business trip was done. No, Mary was distraught and grieving; if it was a beautiful spring morning, she didn’t see it; she was just looking for Jesus’ body, so she could properly say good-bye. She isn’t expecting a joyful reunion; in fact, she doesn’t even recognize Jesus when he’s standing right in front of her.

 This is where the resurrection meets us: in those moments when we aren’t looking for it, in those moments when we don’t even begin to imagine that joy is possible, when all our hope is gone – that’s when new life shows up, and the impossible happens.

 There is this remarkable moment when Mary recognizes Jesus. And everything changes: the grief washes away, she sheds her heartache like dead weight, and from that first joyful reunion, the story is forever changed.

 Why does the story of the resurrection have power? Why did the good news of Jesus spread throughout the world, and why does it continue to be shared still today? Why are we so foolish to hold onto hope, when it seems like all hope is gone? It’s because of the resurrection. It’s because Jesus didn’t just tell us but showed us that grace is stronger than violence, stronger than oppression, and love is stronger even than death. The resurrection shapes how we live – we do not live as people driven by fear – but the resurrection also changes our ideas of what happens when we die. We do not live by fear, and we don’t die by fear, either. When we depart, we believe that, in that moment, we also arrive: and the word we use depends on the perspective we take.

 One of my colleagues recently was talking about the resurrection, and he said, “I don’t know what it will be like, exactly, but I like to imagine it’s like a big family meal – like a holiday, when the work is done, and everyone we love is at the table together at last.”[2] It’s like Thanksgiving, in those impossibly rare moments when everyone is there, when the travelling is done, the preparations are over, the frustration and waiting are finished, and all that’s left is to feast – to share laughter and love and gratitude with the people we love the best.

 In my first year of ministry, I served at a retreat weekend, and one evening, everyone was encouraged to go sit, to be silent and still, and to recognize God’s presence, and let the Spirit do in our hearts whatever it is we needed the Spirit to do. And friends, we aren’t very good at that – we don’t know how to be silent and still. But I encourage you to try it sometime: be still, and know that God is with you; be still, and let the stress and the to-do lists and the worries and the fears fade away, until all that’s left is you, and God, and love.

 I remember sitting still that day, when an image came to me – I’ve often called it the only vision I’ve ever had, because it was that vivid and that powerful an image. In my heart, in my soul, I envisioned myself sitting at a table, a great big long table, stretching off into eternity. And my new husband was there. And my mom was there. And my dad was there, too – my dad, who’d missed our wedding, because he died when I was in high school – my dad was there. And my kids were at the table; I couldn’t see their faces, I didn’t know their names, but I knew: my kids, kids who hadn’t yet been born, who weren’t even a twinkle in our eyes – my kids were sitting there, together with the grandfather they would never know. And it was such a lovely, joyful, peaceful moment: when I realized the people I love the most are sitting at the same table, something that could never happen this side of eternity… and that image, that vision, gave me hope: that love really does transcend time, that love is stronger than death, and somehow, love holds us together.

 That’s what we celebrate today. That’s the promise of the resurrection. That’s the promise of All Saints Day: it’s the promise that, when we gather at the table, we don’t come alone, and the ones we’ve loved aren’t really gone at all. They are with us still, and one day, like the arrivals gate, we will run to each other and embrace, we will sit together and feast; one day, the tears will be gone, the wait will be over, the work will be done – until only joy, only gratitude, only love remains.

   O God, you know the people we long to wrap our arms around today. You know the seats that are empty at our tables; you know the grief we carry with us every day. But we give you thanks for meeting us, even in our grief; we thank you for surprising us with impossible joy; and we thank you for the promise that death is not where the story ends. Give us strength to keep going, to keep loving, to keep working, until that day arrives at last when only love is left. In the name of Christ, who conquered death, we pray; amen.

[1] http://www.monologuedb.com/dramatic-male-monologues/love-actually-david/