"Long is the way, and hard..."

Readings: Micah 6;1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12

We’re caught in a funny period in the Christian year, somewhere between the elation of Christmas and the epiphany, and the wonder that comes with Lent and preparation for God’s Easter sacrifice. Our readings this week culminate in the Beatitudes, which anticipate the coming kingdom of God for the blessed, whose ranks are detailed. In fact, all of our readings seem very concerned with detailing who is properly God’s: who receives God’s love, those for whom the promises of heaven are made. The Beatitudes leave much room for inclusion, though the way is hard. They anticipate God’s love for those who exemplify the virtues Jesus enumerates. They exist in sometimes confusing contrast to our other readings, which sometimes seem less concerned with troubling the question of those who belong to God than they are involved in closing ranks and determining who does not.

For me, these texts offer an important reminder. Though Jesus came into history and offered all a view of Heaven, and of eternal salvation in God, what we know to be true in faith is still tempered by what remains enigmatic. Jesus offers us, through the Gospels, a number of irrefutable, absolute truths; but he also remains partially a mystery. The whole truth, the whole picture, we’re made to believe, won’t be revealed until time comes to an end. I believe we’re less meant to relish that end than we are to revel in the mystery, implementing the virtues the scriptures encourage for their own sake, and not because they’re going to bring about the kingdom.

Do the readings bear this out? Absolute conclusions seem elusive. We could as easily read them as a unit, and see all the exclusions in the earliest readings as disclaimers: blessed are some, and we know who is not among that ‘some’. But it strikes me as equally valid to consider the possibility that the places where the texts seem at odds represent actual discord between them, and that rather than being a scriptural inconsistency, this reflects the eternal mystery of divine love.

Micah speaks of a controversy between God and God’s people, and means the people of Israel. It reminds us of the works of God which underlie the covenant: “I brought you out from the land of Egypt,” God recalls, “and redeemed you from the house of slavery; I set before you Moses, Aaron and Miriam” (Micah 6:4). The texts proceed to say that these grandiose gifts—of freedom, of love that moves kingdoms, of prophets—can never be justified by equal deeds, of which humans are incapable. Rather, we’re enjoined to respond to them humbly, recognizing that they’re a grace: “what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with…God?” (Micah 6:8) Faith, in Micah, seems best displayed by accepting grace quietly, rather than through ritual gestures, which hardly seem to make awe requisite.

The following verses seem to set a trap: Psalms both continues the theme that the humble belong to God and sets up a paradigm wherein some are outright excluded from God’s presence; and Corinthians seems to make near enemies of those who have failed to make humility the rule, and in fact attempts to name them in groups. These are curious lead ups to the Beatitudes. But we could also read the exclusion in Psalms as a choice, in that none seem permanently barred from “dwelling on [God’s] holy hill” or “abiding in [God’s] tent”’; entrance to both is granted when people speak truth, revile cruelty, and protect the innocent. Dwelling forever with God requires intentionality, and that can be developed, it seems, by any who hear and comprehend the Scriptures.

And of Corinthians, we might remember that Paul himself sometimes displayed an unfortunate habit for trying to unravel the mystery prematurely: for anticipating the kingdom as imminent, for stockpiling only enough counsel to last until then. He thinks “God’s people,” and imagines a new, primarily Gentile nation, a new gathering of people who freshly understand God’s word, but he forgets situation, location and the possibility that truths remain which are yet to be revealed. Paul condemns where he came from, and locates that place among “Jews seeking signs and Greeks seeking wisdom,” but we’d be mistaken to believe that those exclusions are absolute. Perhaps there are aspects of the divine which Paul felt his former communities were incapable of comprehending; and yet we know that the path highlighted in Micah is the same we’re encouraged to follow again through the Beatitudes.

Paul requires elaboration. Corinthians declares that “Christ crucified [is] a stumbling block,” but in actuality the stumbling block seems to be in assuming that this part of the story is the whole story, or even that this one part has been wholly understood. Christ is not a rigid figure, and does not meditate upon themes of exclusion; that doesn’t seem to be what we’re meant to take from this week’s gospel, or from Paul’s epistle. The truth is that, if God chose “what is foolish in the world to shame the wise… chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,” we have to locate our faith in the grey areas. Spending time delineating who belongs to the kingdom, and who does not, becomes futile; Christ’s love is never in question, but how we approach it may be; and all we can know is that receiving the grace of salvation is entirely personal, and entirely dependent upon our own humility.

If we attempt to dole out numbers for the kingdom, we assume the position of the wise; if we offer absolute declarations regarding who is God’s and who is not, we presume a certain “strength”. We should take from Paul that both decisions require leaving God’s path. Those who think themselves wise remain to be humbled; those who think themselves mighty await undoing by the meek. Arrogance makes little room for grace, and there’s not much spiritual about what is considered static.

It seems to me that the lesson of these early readings is that approaching the kingdom of God is much less about ascending over other humans than it is about humbling ourselves to take it on. Movement toward God seems, here, not to be an upward climb as much as a steady kneel.

We reach the Beatitudes; they shine a light on the way. Jesus numbers the apparently lowly, those whose lives are a kneel and not a climb: the meek, the poor in spirit, the mourning, the hungering, the persecuted, the pure, the peacemakers. They seek no fame and they resist our naming them; naming them is not our job; it seems certain that the work of any Christian is not to point them out, but to find one’s place among them. To be God’s, to be filled with God’s love and mercy, we need to accept these worldly-small but incredibly complicated, even taxing, positions. We learn that to be “little” is to be blessed; to lead “quiet” lives of faith and humility is to be chosen. These are apparent reversals; they’re both mysterious and enticing.

The simple truth of our readings for the week is that they aren’t meant to leave us feeling comfortable and assured; they’re designed to unsettle. We’re approaching Lent swiftly, a time of preparation in which we’ll remember Jesus’s own humble preparations for his ultimate sacrifice. It’s a period of denial, of asceticism, of an emptying of Self into God. The correlating work which we have to do is entirely about humility, about the situations praised in the Beatitudes. The great gift of Lent paves the way for the heavenly kingdom; the mystery of it looms, burns brightly and defies explication. What we know from the teachings of Jesus, what we gain from this week’s readings, is that growing great in Jesus is no key; the key lies in knowing to be grateful for all which we still don’t know, and in the beauty of the perfect humility of accepting grace.

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called Immanuel...

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

No story begins so humbly as that of God’s incarnation.

An engaged girl of probably meager origins and of marriageable age, which two thousand years ago probably meant an early teen, conceives a child, but not with her fiancée. There’s potential for scandal. Her fiancée, not wanting to humiliate her but needing to be “honorable” within his social context, plans to quietly disassociate himself from her. The girl risks disgrace. But into the story is introduced a figure in a dream who assures the girl’s fiancée that he hasn’t been betrayed, that, in fact, his fiancée carries a child of the Holy Spirit, and that she accordingly fulfills an old prophecy—that a young girl would conceive and bear a son, and call him “Emanuel” (Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23).

With the exception of the dream: the story doesn’t sound like a likely setting for the entrance of a person meant to be the hope for all of humanity.

Perhaps our readings this week revolve around precisely that: divine defiance of expectations. Our passage from Isaiah, long interpreted as a prediction of the arrival of Jesus, mentions the child called Immanuel as a coming sign of God: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).

This sign lacks the grandeur of other signs, those found in eschatological predictions and elsewhere, those which carry with them hints of the miraculous as evidence of holiness. There appears nothing grand or awe-inspiring about a pregnant young woman. But Isaiah also says that this child, who will dine on curds and honey, would grow to “refuse evil and choose good,” even in a period of great political distress (Isaiah 7:15). “Immanuel” would be a person who, with apparently superhuman consistency, would always choose the hard and righteous path.

Ahaz, in Isaiah, didn’t wish to trouble God for even this small sign: he was enjoined to ask of God a great sign, but declares “I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test” (Isaiah 7:12). Isaiah, apparently sympathizing with Ahaz, declares that Israel shouldn’t weary God with demands for evidence of God’s interest; the only sign to be offered is that of the child borne of a child who will grow to be principled beyond expectation. No grandeur; no fireworks; no miracle, really, unless we’re to cynically declare that principled people are so rare as to become equal to miracles.

Our Psalm reading entreats God for grand signs, of precisely the sort which Ahaz avoided asking for. “Let your face shine, so that we may be saved,” it repeatedly asks, and reminds God that, without the visible presence of God, the people have been wont to drink their tears, and consume their sorrows (Psalm 80:19, 7, 5). The promise of a virtuous child borne of a young girl doesn’t seem a measured response either to these complaints, or to the requests they give way to. Yet Isaiah, though familiar with Israel’s tribulations, predicts that the child will be the sign. The whole sign.

Romans imbues Isaiah’s prophecy with certain characteristics which it doesn’t seem to obviously hold, among them the notion that the child will be descended from the line of David, and that he’ll be a powerful figure. We find Paul conflating noble Immanuel with messianic notions which don’t seem inherent to the Isaiah prophecy. We find him turning the child into a majestic figure, the virtuous boy into a prince among men.

How do we want to look at Jesus? We hold that he is our salvation; we catalogue and cherish his many great deeds and lessons as evidence of his greatness. We believe that he is the son of God. And yet we do all of this remembering his humble origins. We view him without needing to place a crown upon his head; he requires no such validation. We remember him without desiring that he should have overturned whole kingdoms; he was great without such temporal victories.

Instead our focus is upon his birth. We turn our eyes to his mother Mary, the otherwise ordinary young girl who we now treat with reverence and longing, because God chose her as God’s own mother. Though a child, she accepted the decree of an angel and became pregnant with a gift of the Holy Spirit, risking almost certain social irruption to do God’s bidding. Loving God, she risked her entire reputation and position. She gave birth to a child of mysterious origins, one who would become the sign of God predicted in Isaiah, one who would eventually offer hope, and salvation, to all of humanity.

Those who still had their eyes to the sky awaiting magnificent signs might have missed the one sign that superseded all others, the sign who was Jesus; looking for conventional grandeur, of the impressive sort which catches the attention of all, they might not have noticed the boy born of a virgin, raised to eschew all evil and exemplify all good, who grew into a person worthy of being called God’s son.

Our readings remind us that humble origins don’t guarantee a humble existence. God showed God’s face to humanity through the person of Jesus—through one guy in one historical place, whose mother seemed an ordinary enough woman of faith, who was raised by a stone smith while his actual paternity remained “unknown.” God chose him as the entry point into our world; he chose a young girl to give him life, and humble disciples to eventually give his teachings life beyond his own death. God armed him with a simple message: that love of our neighbors is at the heart of the law. God made that the compass by which good could be discerned from evil (Isaiah 7:16).

Perhaps we focus upon Mary and the manger in this season to remind ourselves to look for God in unexpected places. Not in palaces or wearing silken roves; not paving our lands with roads of gold and infusing our lives with wealth and comfort. God instead entered our world through a child, and made gifts through him of wisdom and grace. The awesomeness of this was not of an ostentatious sort. The awesomeness of this was that it happened through people who we might think of as “just anyone,” in a time that was essentially “just anytime.” The sign was that God came to us on God’s terms; the suggestion is that it could happen again, anywhere and through almost anyone. God might arrive through any of us. We can look for God everywhere, and find the divine easiest to detect when we stop expecting divinity to come within certain parameters. God knows no limitations and bends to no social conventions.

God is beyond us, but is also in an ordinary young Jerusalem girl, and is in the ear of her concerned fiancée. God’s signs are great, but greatness includes the wonder of an apparently ‘ordinary’ child growing to be compassionate and a healer, a moralizer and a savior. God’s domain remains mysterious and eventual, but it is also always here and everywhere, and God can choose to become apparent through it anytime.

Our readings this week remind us that even the spaces where we forget to look for God are God’s spaces, and that even those people who we forget to think of as God’s are God’s people. God’s own willingness to be humble, shown by God’s becoming like us and loving us always, is the true “miracle” of the Gospels, is the revelation of divinity in an unexpected place. Through the girl Mary we begin to glimpse eternity. Into a stable enters our whole hope.




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Sparks in the Darkness

Readings: Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:5-10; Luke 1:46b-55; James 5:7-10; Matthew:2-11




Our readings this week are filled with images which we’re made to find wondrous, occurrences and people who we’re encouraged to think of as extraordinary. In the deserts of Canaan: flowers spring into bloom. In seats of high power: the mighty are brought low. Jesus praises John the Baptist as the best to ever walk among humans, and yet: we’re told he’s nothing like those in Heaven. Desperate situations are reversed, and grandeur even beyond imagination is spoken of as real.

Much of what is detailed exists outside of current time. These things are written of with utter confidence and faith, but also are spoken of as coming, are in gestation and as yet unseen; nothing has come into fruition yet. We’re meant to be inspired. We're asked to believe in the awesome power of God, who alone can bring about such things, and also to know that behind the even the most obvious-seeming situations, there’s potential for great transformation.

Our readings, coming to us during Advent, are likely meant to spark multiple responses. They're evocative, and in layered ways.
On one level, there's the example of Jesus himself. The mild irony of Jesus speaking, in the Gospel, of John the Baptist as the greatest man ever born of a woman is, of course, that we are aware that the distinction more clearly belongs to Jesus (Matthew 11:11). Perhaps Jesus gives the honor to John because John is still merely born of humans, whereas Jesus’ own background is both human and divine; and yet the Incarnation still depends upon Jesus being born among human beings, and of a human mother. God is drawn out of humanity. All of our future hope is concentrated upon one moment, upon the subject of a humble birth in a nondescript place in the desert. The miracle, the wonder of that, cannot be underestimated. It’s greater still than phenomena like burning sands becoming pools, or dumb tongues bursting into joyous song (Isaiah 35:7, 6).

But more personally, readings like these prompt us to demand great things of ourselves. Along with the standard examples of reversals of vices and virtues and their standard costs and rewards—the proud scattered; the humble fed; the despairing sated—illustrations such as lame creatures suddenly leaping, and holy pathways being laid out leading to God on which no unfit feet will travel, lead us to wonder about the untapped resources within ourselves.

We are enjoined to be patient and to strengthen our hearts for the coming of the Lord (James 5:8). We are told that happiness comes to those who place their hope in God (Psalm 146:5). We are made to rejoice in the salvation offered through Heaven (Luke 1:47). Via all of this, we become like the desert crocuses of future Zion, which, Isaiah tells us, will bloom in abundance, and (an odd image) rejoice in joy and singing (Isaiah 35:2).

The attribution of such very human (non-floral) characteristics to inanimate living things suggests to us a hidden layer to the images: humanity behind them; the potential for miraculous human transformation. Behind the mundane is grandeur. Behind the façade of limited human capacities is the reality that our potential is limitless. Behind our everyday responsibilities is the enormous and divine task with which we are charged: to become as magnificent as sating streams in the desert, as gardens bursting into bloom on the arid sand. We’re meant to bring beauty into being, even where it seems unlikely to take root.

The Advent season usually comes across to most of us as an excellent opportunity to be on our best behavior. We shelve some of our vices or lazier inclinations, become extra-generous; we increase our donations to churches, or perhaps buy gifts for strangers.We're less reticent to make donations when they're asked of us. We resume correspondence with those who we otherwise rarely talk to, sending kind words and overdue hellos. We try a little harder.

 These seem to us measured responses to the miracle of Christmas, somewhat adequate ways to express our gratitude for what God did for us through Christ. And acts of kindness are, indeed, great things. But prompted like this, having become so rooted in our annual routines, they fail to parallel the fantastic images we find in our readings. God loves our little kindnesses--they cannot be validly decried; but he also equips us for so much more.

As we delve further into Advent, and draw closer to commemorating that desert birth eons ago, we should explore the ways in which we might, ourselves, seek greater majesty beyond our regular deeds. We can adopt good behaviors which are temporarily outside of our ordinary processes; but what can we do that more nearly approaches miraculous? What can we seek in ourselves that doesn’t seem readily available or likely? What unimagined resources can we try to tap into, and what magical fruitions can be drawn forth? And how can we do this continuously, beyond the Christmas season?

We should always be mindful both of our unimagined and fantastic potential, and of the necessity of maintaining mindfulness always. A desert spring which bursts forth for a moment and then recedes wouldn’t be a miracle that makes the pages of prophecy; it would be a mere anomaly, a tease (Isaiah 35:2). Our deeds should be better than that. A John the Baptist who retreated from his wilderness ministries to a royal palace to don soft robes would not have found his name at home on the lips of Jesus; there’s no comfortable rest to reward us now for being 'good' on some days (Matthew 11:8). The Holy Way Isaiah speaks of is no occasional road (Isaiah 35:8). We aren’t promised easy; we aren’t told to awe over sometimes-behaviors.

Our readings this week ask us to look beyond. They also assure us that, if we do, we’ll encounter things unimagined, things which take our breath away—things that even wait to be discovered in ourselves.

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Unlike Any Other

Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10;  Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19;  Romans 15:4-13;  Matthew 3:1-12

The great British novelist Salman Rushdie once claimed that the retired gods of the pantheon, or other foregone gods of polytheisms, remain more appealing than any divine being hailed by a monotheism. As a reason, he said that the many-gods reflected relative humanity: sometimes they displayed questionable proclivities, or tendencies to falter; they seemed to be absolutely, consistently fallible. But singular gods, he said, including presumably the Christian God, “moralize”; a one god is not “fun,” exactly, or, in Rushdie’s understanding, relatable.


Yet we might instead say that our God has lasted (where others could not) precisely because of God’s transcendence. The many-gods of old might have been more “relatable”, but being human-like also means being subject to life within a span. They were also like us in that they could not last; there’s no god among the Greek pantheon, for example, who could claim our love in the way that God does. Our early Advent readings this week remind us of why.

We’ve never wanted our God to be “like” us: subject to faltering and mistakes, prone to anger or pettiness. The God we love is a figure we aspire to be like, maybe. Our God is one who warrants our love precisely because all of our faults wash away in the figure of God: human imperfections don’t exist in heaven. What is able to remain is divinity, a creator who loves us; a figure who doesn’t exactly moralize, but who instead, in godly love, inspires us to aspire to be more god-like. Such aspirations don’t imply reaching for great power, or grandeur above others; it’s what’s “moral” in God that we love and want to emulate.

The prophet Isaiah anticipated a salvation figure arising among men who was almost god-like. Some have called this anticipated person the messiah. Isaiah offers some bold specifics, including the Israelite house—the house of Jesse—from which this future figure would come (Isaiah 11:1). But other qualities are drawn more generally, and with a much more hopeful stroke: the spirit of God would rest in this person; they would be a person who would fight, with diligence, on behalf of justice for all who are oppressed; their advent would mark, also, the advent of the end of all strife, the coming of a period in which “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard…lie down with the kid” (Isaiah 11:2, 4, 6). The age which this person would usher in was anticipated as one in which all kingdoms would bend ears to hear the word of God, to walk in God’s ways and do righteous deeds. A perfect imprint of God, this “shoot from the house of Jesse” would then not alienate us, but by their very presence make us better, make us want to be godly.

We know how Isaiah has been interpreted; in it, the churches have been inclined to see an anticipation of Christ. That’s why Isaiah comes up in our Advent readings, in the season during which we look forward to the “birth of Christ” part of the Christian story. Whether this interpretation is strong or not almost does not matter: Isaiah has seasonal relevance because, in the person of Jesus, all of these grand qualities came into being. Jesus encouraged justice; Jesus encouraged peace; Jesus did his best to incline the world’s ears toward God.

The 72nd Psalm we receive with the same breathless awe, seeing in the future it anticipated the Christian future. The God we want, the Jesus we love, is one of whom we say, both with longing and confidence, “may [God] judge your people with righteousness…defend the cause of the poor…give deliverance….[and] crush the oppressor” (Psalm 72:2-4). We want that, and believe that, God will nourish us like a gentle rain; we believe that a godly age would be marked by a flourishing of peace, by a joyous calm among the nations (Psalm 72:5, 7). Much different from the gods humanity once believed in: the God we know and love is not arbitrary in dolling out demands and decrees, but rather constant in peace and equanimity. This is who we anticipate. This is who we adore.

Romans sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible prophecies, anticipating in the flourishing of Christ’s kingdom all of the wonders which that Bible spoke of. Jesus is the one who leads to the “glorification of God,” who “became a servant” to bring to fruition the “promises to the patriarchs” for the world, entirely (Romans 15:12, 9, 8). Our gospel reading, too, anticipates rather than involves the person of Jesus: John the Baptist informs those who question him that a person is coming who “is more powerful…he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11).

We expect our God to be great; we love God partially because, through the person of Jesus and the mystery of incarnation, the divine was able to prove that divinity IS great. We know this because of Jesus, who fulfilled all of the lofty goals of the prophets: who cleared a path for people to treat each other well, for justice to take root, for human good will to be the guiding principle of all behaviors.

God is not, in fact, unappealing because God is moral, or even moralizing; rather, the gods who did not last, the phantasms who lived in stories and passed away with the closing of ancient empires, are unappealing for worship because they didn’t bother to be moral, or to moralize, or to offer any sort of guiding rule to better our humble human lives. Perhaps we think of them now and again, when we need to tell a rich and engaging story; perhaps the line from Matthew which says that “every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” recalls them for us (Matthew 3:10). Those gods were interesting, but fruitless; so our God is humbling, and awesome, and we’re called to be the fruit which the divine bears.

Our advent readings are a reminder of God’s greatness, and of the wonder of the person of Jesus. They’re perhaps even “moralizing” words, as they encourage us to walk in ways which suggest godly ways. They speak of a perfected world in which God’s people play a significant part, and they know all of us to be those people, and demand of all of us those high deeds. They don’t expect us to do them out of deference, or obligation; rather, the terms in which the gospel and biblical morals are drawn make us, in their beauty, almost want to be more moral, more God-like. “God-like” stirs in us something primordial, something eternal and joyous; “gods-like” never could, and so the thought of it faded into myth.

We’ve entered a season of anticipation. Plenty around us will cynically claim that the holiday season no longer carries this, that “god is dead” within it; but as we encounter Advent passages, we know that this isn’t true. We look forward, with longing, to warm family gatherings; we include, in our shopping lists, strangers and families in need; we make peace with those we’ve maintained subtle feuds with; and all of this hints to the coming kingdom. God flourishes within our seasonal behavior. God becomes apparent in the places and spaces wherein we remember to look for what is fantastic about Heaven, and all its luminaries. God is; God remains; and the wonder of that doesn’t diminish, but only grows stronger as we await the rebirth of Jesus.

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As in Heaven

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5;  Psalm 122;  Romans 13:11-14;  Matthew 24:36-44

It’s easy to get caught up in the rhetoric which surrounds us…easy to invest in social and political positions which don’t entirely mesh with our religious commitments. It’s easy, too, to place our daily needs above the needs of our spirits, to make concessions which we wouldn’t make standing before Christ, to choose a compromised position which makes all momentarily feel simpler.

The manifestations of choosing the easy way are many, and we’re certainly all guilty of it at points. Perhaps we sit on the sidelines of fights for social and economic justice, finding the actions which activists take too idealistic, too stringent to fold easily into our own lives. Perhaps we participate in political polemics which villainize some in ways which claim to protect the rights of others. Perhaps we stand silently by while others are hurt, or face derision, or tread through “dark nights of the soul.”

After all, what does it matter if some face temporary tribulations, or if systems are unfair, or if some are still marginalized, or if skirmishes occur in distant corners of the globe; what ultimate significance do such things carry if we’re all promised heaven in the end? What more can be asked of us than that we do our best to behave well in an imperfect world?

This week’s readings shun such middling positions. They all hold precious the notion of a coming, perfected kingdom of God, in which injustices will surely be done away with, in which people will live in peace and harmony, but they far from suggest that we should pencil that unknown date into our calendars as, simultaneously, the day on which we ought to begin behaving in a godly manner.

Heaven doesn’t abrogate now; it doesn’t render all of the ills of this age insignificant. And we’re assured that sitting back and waiting to be delivered, rather than doing the work of preparing God’s way now, would prove a mistake in the end: we leave our spiritual “homes” unlocked to moral intrusion if we opt to anticipate forever rather than involving ourselves with improving now. This is articulated best in Matthew’s famous verses, which inform us that “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into; therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Matthew 24:43-44).

What does Matthew mean by the imagery of the thief in the night? The parallel to Jesus, coming as the Son of Man, seems to be that we can’t anticipate a “when” for his arrival, so safeguarding selectively doesn’t work. What’s required is moral diligence—not even anticipating Jesus’s return as imminent and therefore something we should bend our lives to, but anticipating it as a reality, as something that began to be realized at the moment of his assumption. The imperatives of the gospels aren’t distant imperatives; they’re required of us now. We already have to gird ourselves against invaders who would tell us that our immediate needs are more important. Our primary “immediate need” is to be Christ-like, to work toward realizing improved situations now.

We can derive suggestions from our readings for living in a way that mimics the heavenly realm. Isaiah tells us that when God’s house is built, all nations will stream towards it; that globally, all peoples will bend their ears toward God and let the divine dictates become their own, and that they’ll “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” so that all instruments which aided discord among them will become instruments of peace and mutual flourishing (Isaiah 2:4). If this is NOT simply an ideal to be waited for, we can assume the work of realizing it now. We can stop pretending nationality is a definitive human quality; we can treat people as people, and forego anger in favor of fidelity, mutual care and kindness, even intimacy. In the States, doing so would have immediate implications upon how we treat our immigrant communities; abroad, it would require of us greater vocality when people are oppressed by other people. Difficult work, certainly, but if we read the Bible as truth: godly work.

The 122nd Psalm speaks of the whole community—by which we can presume the psalmist means Israelites alone, or read Christianity into that grouping, or, more pertinently, read “our” as inclusive of all—standing at the city gates and doing good. This may be intentionally vague; good encompasses so much in God’s law. But what is certain is that all are involved, the work does not fall upon a select few, and the anticipated kingdom isn’t considered complete without the full participation of this enigmatic community. They should “give thanks to the name of God,” they should “pray for peace” and seek justice—and that ‘they’ is Jerusalem, and if we take ourselves to participate in Jerusalem, that ‘they’ becomes ‘us’ (Psalm 122:4, 6, 5). We are they who must “seek [God’s] good” (Psalm 122:9); by doing so, we begin to realize the eventual participation of all.

Romans speaks of coming into godly living in metaphors of arising from a deep sleep—as if we’re only fully conscious, only fully alive and active, when we do the work which God requires, love in the ways God asks us to love, work in the ways God asks us to work: “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy” (Romans 13:13). Paul requires, in this letter, that we abandon fleshly notions. This would require shelving and forgetting all preoccupations which tell us that we don’t have to do what is right YET—that we don’t have to fight for the rights of others today, that working on behalf of peace and justice is not work we have to do right now. Romans assures us that “salvation is nearer to us” when we forget the things which we allow to become more important than God, and God’s word, and instead put God first (Romans 13:11).

We don’t want to risk sleeping through the realization of all of God’s dreams and anticipations for us; we don’t want to fail to become the people God formed us to be because we’re too busy doing our stuff, and are not quite ready, in the meantime, to do the hard work of being Christians, of being fully “Christ-like.” If we wait, we leave the door untended; we invite thievery into our hearts without, maybe, being conscious of the invitation. We risk losing access to, or perspective of, what is good by choosing to put off “good” until a later date.

The work we have to do, then, is that of diligently watching the “door”—of making sure that sin isn’t allowed to permeate the world we hope to make God’s home. Sin cannot enter in if we refuse to sit idly by while things are widely done which we know to defy God’s will. We’re to clothe and feed the needy—let’s begin by doing that now. We’re to welcome foreigners among us—let’s extend that invitation immediately. We’re to view “us” as a term which excludes none—let’s stop pretending that Christianity is exclusive, that it can be isolated either among pockets of people or in select activities (at designated times) in our lives. Being Christian means assuming tremendous responsibilities—let’s not wait to do that work.

We should be ready for heaven when it comes, and not because we’ve spent our lives dreaming of it. Rather, we should be ready for heaven when it comes because we’ve spent our whole lives making heaven real among us, bringing it to light by the deeds that we do and through the love that we offer to all. Heaven should feel like home because we’ve lived it.

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Light of our Lives

Readings: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 1:68-79; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

Our readings this week act as a meditation on the radical availability of God, first made visible by the relationship of the divine to the people of Israel, then evinced by God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus. Let these chapters serve as a counter to anyone who wants to argue that God is a distant, uninterested figure. To the contrary: the suggestion is that God is not only interested in, but is deeply engrossed in our lives, and that history winds toward a moment in which we’ll all be drawn back into divinity. The preparations for this reunion, we’re told, began even before we did.


In the Jeremiah reading, the metaphor of God’s people as sheep, with God as the shepherd, is used. There is divine assurance that any person who wrongs God’s people does so in a necessarily limited sense. All ills inflicted upon them are ultimately thwarted; God’s people, no matter how tried, no matter how tormented, will ultimately find their salve in being drawn back into God’s company. Via Jeremiah, God says, “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply” (Jeremiah 23:3).



Following is the anticipation of the return of a Davidic king, a messiah who will seek justice for all God loves. These promises, in consideration of what the nation was facing, can leave one breathless at their breadth, at the seeming audacity of what they propose: it would be no small feat to collect, from all ends of the Earth, the Israelites of the Diaspora. Some sheep, some of the people, we might otherwise think, seem certain to be lost—the thought of so many, across such an expanse, and with individual wills, seems to work against the idea of total return. And yet Jeremiah assures us: each and every soul will return. All will fold back into the community which they inherently belong to—God’s community, Israel.

Colossians arises in a different historical situation, but faces, similarly, the threat of fracture: the burgeoning Christian communities are saddled with the difficult task of defining their “borders,” of determining what Christian means, who it includes and who, ultimately, it excludes. Are they a continuation of the people of Israel, a branch of that family, or something radically different, promised decidedly different relationships to God? And, a more pressing question: what happens to this delicate, still ill-defined community when it faces, wholesale, persecution from nations which won’t wait for it to define and secure itself before undermining it?

Paul is addressing communities which anticipate very real, and very potentially divisive, circumstances. And yet he assures us, as did the author of Jeremiah, that whatever happens to God’s people in the short term, in the long term they’ll all be gathered to God. Through the person of Jesus, in whom all are justified, Paul says that “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace” (Colossians 1:20).

So both books, from both testaments, assure communities which feel themselves to be God’s communities, even perhaps in an exclusive way, of their eventual total assumption into God. Yet we can’t help notice, from a critical distance, that the two communities are, in actuality, at least a little different. Does this call into question the exclusivity of either?

This perhaps leads us to an interesting realization: God undertook specific and particular relationships with these particular communities, imbued with intimacy and familial love; but the particularity of those relationships does not amount to exclusivity. Rather, that both communities are engaged, and that both engagements are real and assured, indicates that God’s particular love for us extends beyond subtle definitions: it is available to all, who can call themselves almost anything without compromising that love.

Luke finds that the relationship of Christians to God is a continuation of the covenantal relationship of God to Abraham, saying that the promises made to him were, in fact, made to us as well, and that “us” is inclusive. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” the Gospel says; all who are God’s, all who face the pains of humanity—in the end, a radical all (Luke 1:78). It’s therefore understandable that God is celebrated everywhere, and is manifested everywhere: “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10).

Both Jeremiah and Colossians give us a correct picture of who will be gathered back to God; both could be misread as envisioning a somewhat exclusive eternity; but both actually anticipate a wider salvation, one which is available to all mankind. God’s love, manifested in special ways in the Israelite and Christian communities, isn’t given to them alone; it’s an effusive love, a ubiquitous love, one which seeks and finds all.

God’s love is radically available, and radically assured. We can note in Jeremiah that the sheep whom God shepherds don’t collect themselves back to him, necessarily; even if they stray, God collects them back, taking the care and time to seek, and find, each one. How does God know which belong to the divine, we might wonder, if we don’t yet understand that all are God’s.

But we can intuit, and assume: just as we take pride in the beautiful and unique things we do, just as we thrill in or maker’s marks upon our own works (in the corner of our paintings, in our fingerprints upon the meals we make for families and loved ones, in our names scrawled across the back of hard-earned checks), God must delight in seeing the divine light given into each and every being made by Heaven’s hand. God knows us because we are God’s; and all are God’s, regardless of individual self-identifications.

Our Gospel reading puts us at the foot of the cross. Jesus is surrounded by persecutors who revile him, and who, by his death, appear to have won. But Jesus takes pity: “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he prays (Luke 23:24). He’s mocked, he’s cast in with criminals; he’s taunted with demands that he save even those who persecute them, if he’s so able. Jesus both answers these derisions and doesn’t.

He doesn’t address the rabid crowd directly; he prays on their behalf, though, and he anticipates their return, which is alluded to when the criminal beside him comes to the realization that Jesus is divine. To him, Jesus promises “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). And we know, in view of all of our readings, that that “today” is as every day, just as the criminal is like every individual who has faltered and fallen down; we’re all people who haven’t exactly earned God’s love. We’re sinners, we’re fallible and imperfect; but even in our imperfections, we’re beloved, and given to anticipate paradise.

God loves radically. God invests his love in particular places; God’s love is simultaneously invested everywhere. God forges complex relationships with individuals; God seeks complex relationships with all. And when we begin to realize this, we come to understand that, if we’re ourselves like the sheep waiting to be brought back into the fold, so are the people next to us—they, too, are justified by God’s love. The light of God is in us as we love; the potential for it rests in our neighbors, too, and in their neighbors. And when God eventually calls—when the work of shepherding us back begins—the divine mark in all will come to light, and we’ll all shine in synchronicity.

God’s radical love, if it’s radically and everywhere accepted, will lead to a beauty and a harmony in creation that we can hardly anticipate.


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A New Heaven, a New Earth

Isaiah 65:17-25; Isaiah 12;  Malachi 4:1-2a;  Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

Faith, the inner inclination toward God, the choice to believe, may happen in a flash or develop over time. It’s a feeling, a tendency, an inner movement. But we frequently find that, after the initial moment of epiphany or the first measured decision to believe, faith is something which must be cultivated by continual, conscious action. That action is the basis of our religion, of the moral and ethical organization in our lives which ties us to the holy: to God, His son, and to the Holy Spirit.


Religion is revolutionary. Entering into it is transformative. Our readings for the week certainly exemplify this. They speak of the ruptures and renewals which characterize religious life. The effects of entering into religious traditions, which within Judaic and Christian circles are built upon a notion of communion and relationship with God, are nearly always extreme. Thus Isaiah is able to speak of an eschatological future which is simultaneously a metaphor for entrance into religious tradition: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind,” God says through the prophet (Isaiah 65:17). Living in faith means entering into just such a new world, wherein all is considered possible, all possibilities are imbued with purest hope, and hope is sustained by faith.

The biblical promises and potentialities given through God can initiate a kind of euphoria, can lead us to delight in the possibilities of the kingdom of God. God speaks of that kingdom in the highest, most idealized terms: it’s a place without distress, a place of perpetual youth, and a place wherein death has been conquered by life. People who enter into the kingdom live long, are continually sated, and are able to enjoy innate intimacy with God: “before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear,” God says (Isaiah 65:27).

It’s probable that Isaiah didn’t have only a distant future in mind. The relationship between God and Israel was predicated upon a number of covenantal “conditions,” which existed almost as a map to living wholly in relationship to the divine. If those in the earthly kingdom were able to direct their lives with covenantal and Torah prescriptions in mind, the heavenly kingdom would be, to a degree, actualized, or at the very least mimicked, on earth. In this new kingdom, in the new and perfected Jerusalem, God will rejoice “and delight in [his] people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress” (Isaiah 65:19). Such predictions are common throughout scripture, and yet continually enticing: a world so free of distress and so bursting with joy would, indeed, strike us as a “new” world.

The scriptures do not, and could not, suggest that religious transformation is solely characterized by the new ease of living with God and in God’s image. There’s certainly delight to be found there. But the journey from living without God to living in him is hardly a brief one, and it’s certainly not one we make simple. Even as we hunger for the fulfillment of prophetic promises, we sometimes resist the work required to move toward them. Faith, and religious life, is disruptive; it requires rejecting the empty promises of secular circles, of the world which doesn’t feel inclined toward God. It does not aspire to ultimacy, neither does it exhaust much time imagining ultimacy at all. But because all promises have their glitter, rejections of worldly visions don’t always naturally take root, or appeal to us easily.

Our readings from the gospel and Paul remind us that choosing to live in God is not always a choice the world understands. Jesus does not promise a graceful or pain-free transition from worldly living to Christian living. To the contrary: he assures his followers that “[non-believers] will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name” (Luke 21:12). Societies, he warns, tend to rally against religious living; they tend to want to dismiss and repress it. And he warns that it’s not a condition limited to particular times. To be faithful is to set oneself up as different, to proclaim aspirations beyond the world’s immediate inclinations.

Jesus assures his listeners that even families are not safe from the disruption which moving into faith initiates. Rather, believers will find themselves “betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and…some [will be put] to death” (Luke 21:16). They’ll be hated and despised; all daily pleasantries previously taken for granted will no longer be available.

Our readings vacillate between these two poles, both assuring us that believers will enjoy unimaginable delights, and that the radical decision to believe will lead to strife, grief and innumerable disruptions. And yet they both articulate the same truth. When we decide to believe, and when we elect to form our lives around that belief, our former lives do, indeed, pass away; they dissipate into a now unavailable space. And that can be difficult; it can mean losing familiar access to the people who don’t accompany us. But what awaits us on the other side—the delight of living in radical communion with God, in intimate relationship to heaven and ultimate truth—is itself a new world, and can mend whatever pains are initiated by the disruptive decision to believe. God both requires us to break our hearts a bit, allowing the old to pass away, and promises to fill them with the light of total truth which comes in knowing him. He requires us to leave behind that which is not of him; he also promises us new and limitless homes.

Religious life is a choice. It’s a movement from the comfortable uncertain to radical, unfamiliar spaces of divine truth. Tears may fall along the way; change is never easy. But the space beyond them, the infinite vistas of eternity, are promised as a space wherein tears have no place, wherein life is spent as it was meant to be: in loving God, and in the gift of being perfectly loved by him in return.

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