From early September to approximately March—every year the past six years—we’ve read through John, Revelation, Matthew, Hebrews, and many of the Letters of Paul. On Wednesday afternoons, one of us leads a discussion of a chapter (or portion of a chapter) and the rest of us join in a lively discussion of the passage. This year our focus is Paul’s magnum opus, The Letter to the Romans.

We create these studies within the Zoom platform. Anyone can join us live (and interact with us via the chat and Q&A features) or watch the taped sessions later on Vimeo whenever they like, sessions which are still available at Vimeo for all six seasons.

Our goal in these discussions is to see the face of Jesus Christ as we read these ancient texts in light of the whole witness of Scripture and with the women and men who’ve read them over the the past two thousands years and left us the fruit of their contemplations.

We hope to read Romans as a community with all those from the past but also with you. Here’s what one frequent participant wrote about the experience:

The team is amazing and so well informed and gracious with one another. You are all the best scriptural teachers I’ve ever heard and manage to reach a breadth and depth of meaning that is rarely achieved.

There is a dynamic that operates among you as a group (whoever is present) that releases a clarity of expression you may not be aware of yourselves. It’s a true mark of Holy Spirit working among you and it is quite remarkable.

The study was completely inspirational throughout despite the length of the process. I am so thankful to have found [this study] ... it has helped me tremendously. And I can’t wait for Romans in the autumn.

I hope you’ll consider registering today so you join us live this Wednesday, September 9, at 3 p.m. Eastern US (noon Pacific time), or catch the taped sessions whenever it works for your schedule. We’ve never changed the cost for this discussion experience. Each week runs a little more than 90 minutes and it’s simply $99 a season (for what amounts to a 36+hour experience) per household and can be accessed on any or all of your devices.

I do think this will be the last time we’ll do anything quite as ambitious as these past six years. Seven years is, after all, the number of completion. We will do other things, of course, but more than likely not this. If you’ve been pondering joining us, now is a good time.

Much love and many graces on what happens to be my sixty-first birthday.

Kenneth+

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God makes time for us in human flesh and lives the divine story as a human story, making the human story divine, and so the church has a calendar that marks the occasions of God’s life among us, and marks us with God’s own way of being human.

My friend, Julie Canlis, who has a new book—The Calendar Is Christ—says we’re folded by the church’s calendar into the human God’s actual life as we mark days and seasons, as we feast and fast, keeping time by God’s story.

There are all sorts of calendars—family ones, cultural ones, national ones—and it’s right to mark anniversaries and harvest festivals and independence days—but they do not take center stage in the worship of the church.

The church has its own sacred calendar to keep, that trains us in existing as the human God exists and supports the thriving of all humans under Jesus Christ.

Indeed, the sacred calendar the church keeps belongs to all humans because the Son of God has united himself to the humanity we all of us share. Any person who practices its way of marking time will find themselves being drawn into Christ’s own life. This is why I often call the church’s calendar “the human year.”

Christ alone integrates our familial, cultural, and national identities, upholding, subverting, and transcending them, in order to bring all the diversities of being human together in himself, so that all things may be united in his humility.

This is why our parish doesn’t celebrate the Fourth of July in worship. Our worship is directed to the Lord of the nations, Jesus Christ. A “patriotic” service too easily forgets that Christians are strangers and sojourners—resident aliens in any national story. Our citizenship is in heaven; our allegiance is to Christ alone.

On Sunday, we’ll do what we always do: pray for our nation and its leaders and commend all nations to the care of their true king. We won’t pledge allegiance to a flag, sing patriotic songs, or tell America’s story. The liturgy of America isn’t the liturgy of the church.

America is a beautiful and tragic story. We can regret our nation’s harms, and remember her shining moments, but we’re talking about two different stories (and calendars). It’s vital we not confuse them.

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completing suicide

being LGBTQ

letting your kids eat junk food

smoking cigarettes

voting for Kamala

voting for Donald

drinking whiskey

living on death row

being an ISIS fighter

driving an SUV

driving a Prius

denying climate change

believing that Black Lives Matter

listening to smooth jazz

wearing fur

eating swine

having sex before marriage

doubting

believing in climate change

being a white supremacist

bearing a tattoo

eating too much

listening to Nickleback

being human

having cancer, any illness

alcoholism

promoting sex trafficking by viewing porn

celebrating Halloween

being addicted to anything

being in prison

being anxious, depressed, fearful

being a “helicopter” parent

being a “slacker” parent

being an atheist

abortion

being a blasphemer

being hopeless

reading Harry Potter novels

denying the moon landing

failure

believing that something can separate you from the love of God

poverty

wealth

being angry at God

following too closely

putting ketchup on a hotdog

being a space cadet

being a televangelist

believing in evolution

being divorced

underestimating God’s mercy

ignoring the homeless

being stupid

dancing

driving under the speed limit

inadequacy at life, at anything

hating God

betraying God

denying God

murdering God

nothing … not even ourselves.

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Athens is a neolithic town. It had existed two to three thousand years when Paul arrives. The ruins of its temples and shrines and courts can still be seen on the Acropolis that rises above the hill the ancient Athenians called the Areopagus.

The Greeks believed that Ares, their God of war, was tried on this prominence by the gods for the murder of Poseidon’s son. The highest judicial court in Athens was on the Areopagus, in its open square. This is also where Socrates and Plato taught four hundred years before Paul arrives. Stoic and Epicurean philosophers would debate and speak on this hill. And today we have just heard Paul preach on this same spot.

Acts tells us that when Paul gets to Athens he walks the city and gets angry about all the idolatry he witnesses.

Herbert McCabe says that when we make idols and worship them we forget that there’s only one place where God’s image resides in the world: in humans. Yes, the Spirit of God is, in the words of the old prayer, “everywhere present and fills all things.” A tree can speak to us about God—of good and evil, of life, of the cross; a mountain or ocean can remind us of the vastness and majesty of God; and the Scriptures call God a lion.

In Romans, we learn that all of creation reveals God so that those with five senses who deny the existence of God are without excuse. (Aside: Yes, depression and the harder realities of existence and the evil we see—even our wayward thoughts and actions—can cause us to doubt. Lots of people struggle with trust. Church is where we struggle together to trust in God.)

The Psalms tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God, that stars sing, that trees clap, and that all of creation is shouting praises to God if we could but hear it. Even so, the image of God is found in nothing in creation but the human person.

Making clay or wood or gold objects of things in creation and worshipping them—things that have eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, hands but cannot help or embrace us—leads us to forget that the divine image resides only in our fellow humans. Idolatry leads to the dehumanization of humanity.

The peoples of the Ancient Near East—even the pre-Columbian, pre-colonized peoples of Mexico’s Yucatan, the Mayans—would sacrifice their fellow humans, often their children, to placate the gods they made: for success in war, for abundant crops, for good fortune. The ancients had a god for everything. They also sacrificed their animals to them. They would bring the best of their crops and let them rot at their feet.

Temples to the gods of war, led to deep human suffering and death. Temples to the gods of fertility, where sex was sold, eroded the bonds of conjugal fidelity. Temples to the gods of harvest, along with the greed of those who hoarded resources, led to scarcity for the poor… a lot of nonsense in pursuit of gods that do not exist and that have no permanence.

Because of the human cost—not to mention the constant, pointless harm to animals— we can imagine why Athenian idolatry rattled Paul. From an early age, Paul had prayed the Shema: “Here, O Israel, the Lord are God, the Lord is One.”

For anyone who experiences the One God, the God who actually exists—the God who sees us and hears us, with arms to embrace us—idolatry makes no sense, is foolish in the extreme, and leads to horrific violence, harm, and lack.

We can see why Paul was angry about the “junkyard of idols” that Athens had become.

We are no different but our gods have different names: defense, celebrity, athletics, the dollar, intelligence, convenience, freedom, power, self-reliance, the sculpted body, the cosmetic face, and so on.

What would Paul make of Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., Chicago or Manhattan? What would he make of us? In the end, as an ambassador of the crucified God, Paul would be gracious to us, curious, and engaging.

Because Paul knows the One God and has beheld God in the flesh of the resurrected Christ, Paul does not stay angry, which leads to sin and harm. Instead, Paul gets creative. Paul gets curious. Paul gets attentive. He starts talking to people where they are, in the street. He listens to all sorts of people. And after he’s invited by the Athenians, Paul gives a speech in the open area of the Areopagus.

Paul says that that while wandering through their city he became fascinated (not angry!) by all their gods. He compliments them on being serious about religion. He tells them that he came across a shrine to THE GOD NOBODY KNOWS. It seems that the Athenians were not taking any chances tempting fate and built a shrine to an unknown god just to make sure they’d covered all their bases.

Paul tells them that, unlike their gods, THE GOD NOBODY KNOWS requires no blood sacrifices and needs nothing from the Athenians. You do not need to have any special knowledge or ability to be in relationship with him. There are no secret passwords or gatekeepers to access his mercy and care and love. This God is public. This God is available to everyone.

This God made everything. He doesn’t live in temples. He dwells in everything everywhere all at once. He is not made. He makes. He made humans and gave them time and space to search for him in the darkness we have made of the good world and to not only seek him but to find him.

This God does not hide from us. He is not remote. He is near. He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves; so near to us that we can sometimes miss his presence. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He dwells in us and gives us movement and breath. Indeed, we are his offspring. Paul says all of this.

Paul uses the words of their own philosophers, who perceive true things about the One God: that in the One God we live and move and have our being.

And if all of this is true, then it doesn’t make sense at all to make gods from clay or stone or bricks or straw or glass or gold. We don’t need anyone to sculpt or mold or chisel or build a god for us. In fact, all we need to do is to look at our neighbor to see God, to look at the person sitting right next to you in the pew. Every person we meet is an icon of God.

Unlike an idol, icons are persons God makes. In the case of the Son, God begets him, and we, his human brothers and sisters, are made in his image (in his icon), and so we can paint images of the Son and the saints and these are not idols but depictions of what God has begotten or made.

If humans had had cameras in the time of Christ, we would have photographs of Jesus, but soon after he ascended to the right hand of God artists started painting Jesus. And these depictions are not idols.

If we were to go to anyone’s home and begin to rip up photos of their children or grandchildren or of special occasions like weddings or reunions, we would upset them. We might even start a fight. The photos aren’t the people themselves, of course, but they do represent the person we love—the offspring of God. These images are sacred. We do not worship these images, but we do revere them and cherish them because they are depictions of the persons God loves, that God makes, that we love, that help us see God. Unlike idols, these images contain the only images of God we have in creation.

And while God used to excuse our ignorance in making idols, that’s in the past now. We are in the present where God has made himself known in the human, Jesus Christ. God has made it possible for everyone to see this by raising Jesus from the dead. And God has made Jesus the judge of all his fellow humans. This is the gospel Paul preaches.

There is one human whose judgments we can welcome—whatever they mean for us, whatever they will make or remake of us—because Christ’s judgments heal. All judgment has been given to the Son and we already know what that judgment is: “Father forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.”

This forgiving judgment applies as much to the Athenians as to the Roman and Jewish leaders who murdered Jesus. This forgiveness fell on Judas and Peter, on Caiphas and Pilate, on those who nailed his hands and those who stood by weeping. This forgiving judgment transcends time and space. It falls on you and it falls on me, and wherever and whenever it falls, it heals and restores.

Paul is telling the Athenians that THE GOD NOBODY KNOWS has a face and a name. It is the face of Jesus Christ. Because he has seen the risen face of Jesus, and listened to him, he does not assume that the Athenians lack all connection with God. He is not there to reconnect the Athenians with the God who causes them to live and move and have their being. He is there to identify the God that sustains them in breath and animates their lives by pointing the Athenians (and us) to the cross and resurrection.

In the gospels, it is an assumption of Jesus that everyone he meets is already a recipient of divine regard and kindness—and forgiveness—before they say or do anything, regardless of their histories, dispositions, and prejudices.

Jesus approaches everyone the same: they are not outside the mystery but inside the mystery, with an origin in the love of God. No person is alive because of an indifferent roll of the dice, nor are they made from evil or for evil.

Anything in them that is not of love is considered an aberration, anything unholy is considered an infection. Whatever is out of sorts with their being made in the image of God is only there for healing and restoration—that the glory of God that’s already resident in them might be made plain.

Jesus assumes that the end of everyone he meets is by the desire of God the same as their origin: to live and move and have their being in God’s creative love.

One of the greatest conundrums of contemporary Christianity is that the followers of Jesus and the churches too often do not share the ease with which Jesus trusts that everyone is already—because held within the saving intention of the Father—his sister and brother, even his enemies. Amen.

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We enter these visitations with them annually, to see and to hear and then to say, “Rabboni!” … “My Lord and my God,” … “were not our hearts burning within us as he was talking with us on the road and explaining the Scriptures to us?”

We see Jesus in the breaking of the bread and in the eating of the honeycomb and by the lakeside coal fire. Easter is too great a mystery for one Sunday.

But last week we looked at the Good Shepherd, the One who lays down his life for the sheep, the One who loves us more than his own life. We learned that shepherds would (and still do) lay down at night on the ground before the gate of the sheepfold, putting their bodies between the sheep and predators, their life before anyone who might try to steal or harm the sheep.

Today, we are taken back to the night that Christ is betrayed into the hands of lawless men. We hear some of his last words to his disciples at the “last supper” on the night before he died for the sins of the whole world.

In its wisdom the church’s lectionary won’t let us separate the death of Jesus from his resurrection, his rising from the dead from his death on the cross. You cannot pull them apart. They belong together. You don’t get to the resurrection without graveyards, without tombs hewn from rock.

So, hear the gospel: By the death of God in the death of Jesus, God has made death the way to eternal life. Jesus tells us that the way we come to live forever is by taking up our cross.

A meal with friends can take us to a place where we lose track of time: in the sharing and in the joy, in the togetherness of it all. In the food and wine and conversation, we sometimes glimpse eternity (either for good or ill). I suspect Jesus made every meal like this, always landing on the good side of that equation and always only for everyone’s good.

But on this night, the night before he dies, in the Upper Room, after the foot washing, and after the breaking of the bread and the passing of the cup, for the first time at any meal with his disciples, Jesus tells them that he is going away.

He tells them not to let their hearts be troubled, not to be fearful or anxious because his departure is about going on ahead of them, about preparing a place for them (John 14:1-14).

In his novel, No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy, gives us a final scene between Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his wife. The sheriff is now retired. He does not know what to do with himself. She wants him to find something—anything—to do outside the house because she has things she needs to do and doesn’t want him under her feet. Over breakfast he asks if he can share with her some dreams he’s been having about his father, and she agrees to be polite and listen:

Jesus tells the disciples that he’s “goin on ahead” of them, to prepare a place for them. He says that in his Father’s house there are many rooms—the King James renders this “many mansions.”

When I was in sixth grade I spent a late winter and spring with my step-grandparents in Pontiac. I was a Florida boy, and I’d never spent time in a cold state. My stepfather was on a preaching tour with my mother, and me and my sister were sent up north. I never thought I would ever be warm again.

We were enrolled in Webster Elementary School just west of downtown Pontiac. My sister and I were two of about fifteen white kids in the school. In the cafeteria we got to enjoy the best soul music. I learned about Goody Afro picks and communed with Stevie Wonder. We were made to feel at home. I loved it. One day, we took a field trip to the Dodge Mansion (now Meadow Brook Hall). I’d never been in a place quite like it. Room after room after room. I remember thinking you could get lost in it, could hide from your family and not be found (at least not for a very long time).

But Jesus isn’t talking about a big house somewhere. He has a very different sort of dwelling in mind.

Remember, his disciples knew nothing about what was coming later that night and the next day—not even Judas. When Jesus says he is “going away,” they perhaps think he means he is going back to Caesarea Phillipi or maybe as far away as Damascus, where they could escape all the trouble that the good that Jesus does had stirred up.

Jesus says he’s going away to prepare a place for them but that he will come back for them and bring them to where he is. He tells them that they already know the way there.

But Jesus isn’t talking about Nazareth or Capernaum or even Bethany—just a few miles away—he’s talking about the place where his Father dwells in unapproachable light. And he isn’t talking about a place made with human hands.

Thomas boldly says, “Look, Jesus, we don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?” It’s a great and true question and Jesus’s answer immediately makes clear that he’s not talking about a place like Pontiac or the Dodge Mansion, but a place beyond our wildest imaginations. Remember that Paul, who was taken to heaven for a moment, tells the Corinthians that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

Jesus tells Thomas and the others that he is in himself the way to the place where the Father is. Jesus is, in his person, the GPS, the Google Maps, the dropped pin that takes us to where the Father dwells: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” What he is telling them, though they could not possibly understand this yet, is that his way of dying towards living is the way to a life without end.

Jesus says that no one gets to where the Father is except through Jesus. The Son of God tells the disciples that if they know him, they know the Father. Jesus tells them something profound: that they have, in fact, seen the Father. Then Philip says to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father.”

And Jesus’s response to Philip is one of the most important moments in the gospels, for in it are hid all the treasures of wisdom: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Jesus continues, “…how can you ask, ‘Where is the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. I don’t just make them up on my own. The Father who resides in me crafts each word into a divine act.”

All the Son’s promises to us—that he is going to prepare a place for us, that he will come again and take us to where the Father dwells—are as good as done in the moment he says them.

At the very end of his final words to his disciples, in a prayer the Son invites them to eavesdrop on, Jesus makes it clear that they (and we) are brought into the oneness that is the Father and the Son:

“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word [hint: that’s you and me], that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:20-23).

This Easter, let us wake up to something the first women and men who followed Jesus understood at a cellular level.

Those who afterwards share everywhere the good news that Jesus Christ is no longer dead, that the Son has gloriously risen, never to set again, understand that the dwelling place Jesus goes to prepare for us, so we can dwell where the Father dwells, is his own risen body.

What Peter and Paul are talking about in their letters, what Peter says to us today about being built into a dwelling place for God, is about becoming person by person, stone on stone, the body of Christ.

Today, Stephen imitates Christ on the cross when he asks the Son to receive his Spirit, just as Jesus asks the Father to receive his. Stephen unites his prayer to the Son’s prayer on the cross, asks that all his killers be pardoned. In praying as the Son prays, in dying as the Son dies, Stephen dies but does not stay dead. None of us will.

Hosea says that on the Third Day God will raise us up with the Son. The first Christians came to experience and to trust that this meant that in the Son we are seated at the right hand of the Father.

In his final moments, drawing his final breaths, Stephen sees himself in the risen Son standing next to the Father and lives on by the Spirit in the place where the Father dwells. And so will we.

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Luke tells us that one of them is Cleopas, who according to tradition is the brother of Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus. This has led some to assume that his fellow traveler is the companion of his life, his wife, Mary, who had stood at the foot of the cross with her sister-in-law, Mary, the mother of Jesus.

This is where I land because it makes sense that after the resurrection, Jesus would be found, as he was in Genesis, walking with a man and a woman, so that Mary and Cleopas are here standing in for Eve and Adam, who walked with God in the Garden.

Luke tells us that they are deep in sadness and deep in conversation when Jesus comes alongside them on the road, and even though he is their nephew and teacher, they are prevented from recognizing him. It’s not that Jesus did not look like the nephew they knew but that they were kept from recognizing him.

Jesus asks them what they are talking about so intently. They are surprised that he does not know all the horror that they and all the people of the metropolis have just witnessed over Passover. The one that they had hoped would deliver Isreal from the Romans was instead crucified by them and, in a great tragedy, their own leaders.

The two travelers share with Jesus how just that morning some women went to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices and found it empty, and that they saw a vision of angels telling them that Jesus was alive. His tomb was empty, the women said (remember that Matthew tells us that the women had also encountered the risen Jesus alive), but the rest don’t know what to believe.

Jesus is astounded by the couple’s lack of belief, how they do not seem to understand what the prophets have told them: that the Messiah must suffer before entering his glory. Luke tells us Jesus starts with Genesis and Exodus and then on through the prophets, the psalmists, and sages, shows them as they walk along how all the Scriptures point to him, though they are still all the while prevented from seeing him for who he is.

I wish my friend Stephen Proctor had had one of his drones flying over the heads of the three of them on the path to Emmaus, filming their expressions and recording the words of the anonymous Jesus as he opened the Scriptures to them. What a fascinating sermon we could overhear!

The journey would have taken a bit more than two hours for the average human, and Jesus is one of us even after the resurrection. Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama says, Jesus is the “three mile an hour God.” But let’s consider that the couple are grieving—not only walking along in silence but in “intense conversation,” perhaps pausing to look one another in the eye, searching for encouragement as they walk home, something to give them hope for their work that begins again on Monday.

And let’s assume that when Jesus joins them and begins to open the Scriptures to them, they ask burning-heart questions, stopping here and there to pay attention to his answers. They are older and the terrain is rough. Let’s say it took three and a half or four hours.

I wonder what sorts of moments he highlighted in Moses and David and the Prophets. Did he tell them about his promise in the Garden that he would redeem their ancestors from shame and death by crushing the head of the serpent? I wonder if he said he was the Ark that delivered Noah and his family from the great flood. Did Jesus talk about the time he visited Abraham as a stranger with two other strangers near the Oaks of Mamre and foretold of a son that Sarah would bear and Sarah laughed at the opening of the tent?

When Abraham decided to play God and have a son with someone other than Sarah, did Jesus talk about how he appeared to the exiled and left-for-dead Hagar in the wilderness and revealed a well of water at the very moment she and Ishmael were dying of thirst? Did Jesus share how as the Angel he stopped the hand of Abraham as Abraham raised the knife to sacrifice Isaac? How he appeared as a ram in a thicket to himself be the sacrifice?

Did Jesus say he was the Angel that wrestled Jacob near the brook or who appeared in Jacob’s dream as a ladder on which angels were ascending and descending from heaven? Are you beginning to see how Jesus is everywhere in the Scriptures; how Jesus is so many things for them and for us?

What about when Moses, tending the sheep near Sinai, saw a bush burning (but not burning) and heard a Voice from within the bush telling him to take his shoes off his feet because he was standing on holy ground? Remember: when the Angel tells Moses he is going to deliver the children of Israel from slavery and death in Egypt he tells Moses that his name is I AM … the Good Shepherd, the Light of the World, the Door.

Did Jesus say he was in the bronze serpent that Moses lifts in the wilderness, when after Israel are delivered from Egypt they are dying from snake bites? Did he say that he was the bread that fell from heaven to feed them and the rock from which they drank?

Did Jesus walk them through Psalm 22 and Isaiah 52-53 and tell them why he had to suffer (and continue to suffer in us), how his stripes heal the nations, and how God does not abandon him in facing death but is with him always to the end? I wonder if he went to Isaiah 6 and told them that he was the One whom Isaiah saw on a throne, whose robe hem fills the temple and to whom the seraphim cry aloud “holy, holy, holy.”

I wonder if Jesus went to Zechariah and talked about the One with wounds on his back, about how he received those wounds in the “house of his friends.”

Did Jesus talk about the prophet Jonah, and how his three days in the belly of the fish were like his three days in the tomb and in hell? How the fish of death that swallowed him could not keep him down?

We can only speculate what parts of the Scripture he opens for them but because of their witness and the witness of the first Christians we know that during the forty days that follow Jesus opens all of the Scriptures to them, shows how all of the stories and songs and prophecies point to him, and he keeps doing this for us today.

They arrive at Emmaus and it appears as though Jesus is going to walk on, but they urge him to stay for dinner, not only because hospitality is deep in their culture, but because evening is at hand and (let’s be honest) they want to hear even more and to remain in his presence.

And Jesus consents to their prayer. He stays and sits down to supper with them. I wonder if his mother Mary is among the house guests (tradition tells us she lived with Cleopas and Mary). I imagine his hosts gathering the food and preparing it as Jesus listens to their stories and drinks their wine.

And if the risen Jesus is anything like the Jesus we see in the gospels, he is setting the table and folding napkins and pouring the wine. Remember: Jesus is always among us as the One who serves. And as he does this Jesus watches how his words and presence are beginning to heal their sorrow. Joy is returning to their faces and hope to their movements.

Then something very unusual happens. When they sit down to supper, the host, in this case Cleopas, would have taken the bread to bless it and break it and pass it, but instead Jesus does.

When Jesus takes and blesses and breaks the bread, their eyes are opened to see their Lord and God. And in the moment he breaks the bread and his face is unveiled and they finally recognize him, he disappears in an instant but also remains, for now he is the broken bread on the table and now he is in all who remain around the table to eat, and he is here with us and will in a few moments be in the bread and in the cup on the table behind me.

When Cleopas and Mary get ahold of themselves, for joy can overtake us and leave us a little stunned, they get up from the table—perhaps a table that Joseph or Jesus had crafted for them—and walk the seven miles back to Jerusalem.

It’s not the same seven miles at night that it was in the day, especially in the world of that time. There are no streetlamps and probably not a paved walkway but a dusty and rocky path along which they might encounter predators or bandits. Torch light is all that is illuminating their path along with whatever light the moon and stars were giving that night.

But I do not think that in the darkness and cold of that night that they were afraid of anything or anyone. Jesus is their torchlight. Their hearts are burning with good news, for they have seen the risen Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

Every Sunday, here in this little church, we take ordinary bread and bless it and break it and give it. And no matter how dark our world is, we recognize the Morningstar rising in our hearts. And we are not afraid.

We leave this place to show others and sometimes tell others that we, too, have seen and heard the risen Jesus and that he is alive. This can look different for us than it was for them. Today or Wednesday, we might encounter someone who is anxious about the state of the world and be the peace they need to see.

Perhaps the person we meet will tell us as the disciples tell Cleopas and, that they too have seen the Lord. Maybe the ones we meet after we leave here will show or tell us about Jesus.

Sometimes someone who doesn’t look like we would imagine Jesus looks will call and tell us that they are about to be evicted from their home and we are able to give from our abundance something that keeps a roof over their head. They, like the Son of Man, are threatened with homelessness, and they are, if we have the eyes of faith, Jesus calling us on the phone.

And sometimes we sense it’s time to share the good news with a stranger or a longtime companion on the journey of life. We tell them what we have seen or felt or heard: that God is one of us and suffers with us and wants to impart his crucified and risen life to us. We tell them in our own words what Jesus tells us, “Take up your cross and walk with me.”

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The crucifixion—the beating, the crown of thorns, the mocking, the nails, the wood, the gambling for his clothes, the humiliation—is something we did to God, not something God did to God’s Son.

The cross, by contrast, is what God makes of our crucifixions (of Jesus and all the others in history), what God makes of all that we intend for evil.

God converts the crucifixion into the cross, into the highest possible good for all humans and the cosmos—and only God can do that.

We cannot convert our violence to good ends or make something good or true or beautiful from violence. Only Someone who does no violence can bring violence to an end.

God never needs or intends or uses evil, but God can and God does convert evil, just as he converts the violence Joseph’s brothers did to Joseph—selling him into bondage and shame in Egypt—not only to Joseph’s good but also to theirs. God rescues not only the crucified but those who crucify.

Violence can never be redemptive or beneficial, but God is able, in a mystery, to bring from our greatest evil a restorative love that heals all persons and all things.

Yes, Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 says that all this happens by “the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” but that does not mean, as some teach, that we are God’s agents in carrying out the murder of his own son, but rather that in wisdom the Father, who knows everything that will happen before it happens, foresees what we will do to the Son.

When for love of the world the Father sends the Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world through the Son might be saved, the Father foreknew that we would reject and murder the Son and his plan is to intend our evil for our good. This is the way cruciform sovereignty works: it starts with a weakness that is somehow stronger than any force in the universe, rescuing us not from death but through it to a life without end.

The history of God-with-us in the flesh of Jesus and apostles like James teach us not to read Isaiah 53:10 (“it was the will of the Father to crush him with affliction”) as “The Father is the one acting in the Roman soldier who makes gashes in the back of Jesus, the crowd who mocks him, the executioner who fastens his hands and feet to wood.” We can easily see that this is false when we read what the eyewitnesses report happened to Jesus.

The agency is ours. And yet God surrenders, allows this harm, and voluntarily gives Godself up to crucifixion. By the cross we come to see that somehow surrender is the mode of God’s sovereignty.

Many things can be true at once: yes, nothing can happen unless God allows it, and Jesus willingly laid down his life (“I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”), yet we are not acting as God’s agents when we kill Jesus. God knew from before the worlds were made that we would do what we did and we did in fact do it, and God made something good beyond what we could ever imagine—something satan could never imagine—from the crucifixion of the Son of God.

God does what only God can do with our evils: the Father uses the occasion of our worst violence to our human brother, what we do to our Lord and God, and makes of this most terrible event the greatest possible good and mercy and conversion for us and for the cosmos.

And here we are today, standing with the eleven, hiding behind closed and locked doors and, according to the gospel we just heard, suddenly the resurrected Jesus appears. He speaks peace over his disciples three times: Peace not vengeance for their betrayals; Peace not anger at their denials; Peace not recrimination for their abandonments. Christ speaks peace and only peace over them three times, and breathes the Holy Spirit on them.

In Luke’s account of this same moment, Jesus asks for food and eats dried fish and honeycomb. Is Jesus a ghost, a projection from his followers deep grief? No. He tells them to look again, to see that he is flesh and bones and not an apparition. Yet, his resurrected body is somehow transfigured because he can appear in a room without climbing in through a window or walking through a door.

His resurrected body interacts differently with known physics, which must mean that the world now yields to resurrection and not death; that laws of physics are transcended by what happens in Christ’s body when it is raised from death. The resurrection apparently has laws of its own. Those of us still walking around with death in our bodies run into walls but resurrected bodies pass right through them.

And Thomas doesn’t see any of this, because he’s not afraid and so is not there with them that first night. Thomas tells the rest that he wants to see the wounds of his friend before he will trust their testimony. Jesus consents to his request. God shows his wounds to the wounded, to heal Thomas and the others; shows them that their wounds are not the end of their story but only the next to last chapter.

In the end all wounds are transfigured and cleansed by the Father, as the Septuagint wisely renders Isaish 53:10: “The Lord is willing to cleanse him of the injury,” and to cleanse us of ours.

And with Thomas, we who have not seen, cry out, “My Lord and my God.”

As Jonathan Lane writes:

If the resurrection isn’t an event of history that somehow also transcends history—something that happens not only in time but also to time, that happens to everything, everywhere, all at once—then every analogy or metaphor we label “resurrection” is simply nonsense, like the transhumanist idea that in our deaths we become part of a “singularity” where our “true selves,” our consciousness (which is for them all we ever are), is merged with the digital world.

But if the resurrection is both actual and eternal then it is limitlessly relatable and transferable. A flower that comes up from a dead seed or a marriage that comes back from the abyss or the moral of any good story, whether fact or fiction, can generate intense meaning in our minds and hearts, if the resurrection is not an abstraction or wish fulfilment or untrue.

Resurrection is so many things but it is so many things because the human God actually died, was numbered among the unclean corpses lying lifeless in the grave, and then death could not hold him—and not just his personality but his body.

Let’s learn the lessons of resurrection, which teach us not to reject the analog world God made good from the beginning, nor to think of resurrection as returning as ghosts or as hints of ourselves in some artificial, disembodied intelligence.

In the time of Jesus and the first Christians, dualism was in the air people breathed. To narrow a complex set of beliefs, one form of dualism taught that the material world is bad and the spiritual world is good. The body is evil. The earth is evil and it’s desirable to escape the body and world to a spiritual realm of perfections.

Christianity got infected with it and the fever never quite went away.

This is what dualism sounds like now: “Religion is bad. I’m into relationship.” “Buildings aren’t the church, people are.” “Sacraments are merely tokens. What matters is what’s happening in your heart.”

Each of those statements sounds right. Some of these name what happens when Jesus leaves the room or the religion, and some of these falsely divide things that belong together—the material and the spiritual—and some of it is simply dead wrong.

What these sentiments all share is a downgrading of the communal and physical and an elevation of the individual and spiritual; a pitting of invisible experience over the material means God uses to draw us into union with the divine nature.

When you say baptism is just a symbol, you’re saying the water doesn’t matter. When you say communion is just a memorial, you’re saying the bread and wine don’t matter. When you say the church building is irrelevant, you’re saying that gathering as the people of God is optional.

When you strip Christianity down to an internal experience between you and God, you’ve removed the body (in all its modes) from the faith. But God has always worked through the material world not beneath or above or around it.

When God makes the world, he declares it good and only good, for God only makes good things. The world is not evil. Our bodies are not evil. God formed Adam and Eve from the same clay. He spoke through burning bushes and donkeys. He fed his people with bread that came down from the sky. He took on flesh, bled real blood, and rose in a real and transfigured body.

God did not send a feeling into our hearts. He sent himself, in a body. After the resurrection, he doesn’t shed that body. He keeps it. He eats fish. He shows his wounds. He ascends bodily. Yes, that body is transfigured and so reveals that reality is now subject to the resurrection and not death; and that body appears in bread and wine, and in the poor and the prisoner and the sick, and in all of us when two or more gather.

And if none of this is true, why bother with Christmas and Easter? Why take on human flesh? Why die in a human body? Why raise that body from the grave?

Because Jesus shows us that bodies matter. Because Jesus tells us sacraments matter. Matter matters.

We do not worship water or bread or gathering places or crosses, but God has promised to work through them. God’s promise is connected to the water in the font. God’s presence is plated on the table.

To strip the material away and replace it with internal experience (which we should also not discard) is to tell God that what he has done with the world in making it and then remaking it doesn’t matter.

So many Christians and churches have absorbed this framework so deeply that we don’t even recognize it. We’ve been trained to distrust the physical and prioritize the spiritual without realizing we’re agreeing with an ancient heresy. The material and eternity belong together as the very person of Jesus Christ reveals!

Christianity is not about escaping the world. It is about how God somehow makes the world permanent, makes the world heaven. God works through water, bread, wine, oil, words spoken out loud, mud, saliva, symbols inked on paper, and bodies in a room.

If your faith has no room for the flesh of Jesus or those in whom Jesus tells us he is present to us—the hungry grimy-faced drifter, the imperiled refugee and his children dusty from the desert and cold, the convict in irons, the cancer patient who cannot afford their last trial medication—it has less room for the gospel than you think.

Darcy sees Bridget’s quirks and bad habits and strange family and still—inexplicably, even to himself—regards her as a person he admires and desires.

There’s so much about being a woman that I cannot imagine, and so much about being a woman in the time of Jesus (or even today) that I would not want to imagine—like no one believing what you have to say, nor trusting you as a witness to what actually happens—but I like to think the women in the gospels are drawn to Jesus because, like Mark Darcy, Jesus loves them just as he finds them—“just as they are.” But with the vital exception that, unlike Mark Darcy, Jesus does not need or desire them in the way other men do, and never treats them in any way that makes them feel subservient or beneath him as a man. Not once.

Jesus believes them and Jesus believes in them.

Also, unlike Darcy, Jesus’ love for them is not inexplicable to Jesus. Jesus loves them as he loves himself, knows why he loves them as they are, knows them better than they know themselves, even before he meets them. These women feel the eternality of his regard for them, and his trust in them, from the moment he enters their lives. He knows their stories.

There is a difference in the way Jesus interacts with women—the way he listens to them, the care he takes for them—that brings out the extravagant gestures of feminine affection for Jesus we read about in the gospels, as when Mary of Bethany anoints the feet of Jesus with scarlet perfume and wipes them with her hair. It is an act of authentic love, plain and simple. Jesus tells the other astonished and scandalized guests that she is preparing him for burial. She is already in mourning, six days before his death.

And the women stay with Jesus in his death, standing by and near the foot of the cross as he bleeds out and cries out and breathes his last. With John the beloved they remain with Jesus in the hardest things. And like John they are eyewitnesses of his passion.

And now, after two long nights of grief and heartbreak, it is early morning, just before the dawn. In the darkness, these women—tradition calls them “the myrrh-bearers”—long to be near the body of the One who loves them just as they are without pretense or expectation, who implicitly trusts them, with a love that guides them toward union with the God who dreams them up from eternity and gives them the specific life they each of them uniquely are so that they might bear not only his image but his likeness.

As they journey to the garden in the stillness of night, they ponder their sad task: to redress Jesus’ corpse with the spices and oils they carry and to finish the proper burial rituals, a burial that on Friday had been rushed, as Malcolm Guite describes:

“…they anoint the skin that cannot feel

Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,

Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,

With incense scenting only empty air”

Have you ever seen the painting by Maurice Denis, “Burial or Entombment,” depicting the funeral procession from Golgotha to the garden grave? The image’s radiant yellows and deep blacks are punctuated by the stark white of Jesus’s linen-wrapped body. One of the women leans in and kisses the shrouded forehead of Jesus. This is the devotion that Jesus inspired in them.

They know the way to the tomb, and they know a large stone has been rolled over the entrance of the grave, for they watched Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus lay him in the new tomb that had been carved into solid rock. They heard the sound stone makes on stone as the massive wheel was rolled against the entrance to the tomb. They know they need to convince the guard, or someone, to help them remove it. But will they find someone willing?

They arrive and find the tomb is already open. As in the moment of Christ’s death, there is a “great earthquake,” and an angel whose appearance “is like lightening” descends and rolls back the stone. From his perch atop the stone, his clothing white like snow, his strobe-like figure, flickering between visibility and invisibility, causes disorientation in the guard, who are prostrate on the ground like dead men, but also, like the ground, somehow shaking.

But not the women. The angel has the same message for them that the resurrected Jesus has for everyone, then and now: “Do not be afraid.” He tells them that Jesus is no longer in the tomb, to come and look where he once lay dead as a doornail, to see that he is indeed raised from the dead and on the move. He tells them: “This is my message to you.” And we hear the angel today, right now. His message is also for us. His message is for everyone.

The angel tells the women to go tell the men that Jesus will meet them all in Galilee. But as with the disciples that afternoon, and later that evening, the risen Jesus cannot wait to make an appearance. Even as they rush to tell the men with a strange mixture of fear and joy, Jesus meets the women on their way. Jesus suddenly appears and says “Hello” and they fall to the ground and embrace his feet in worship. His hands are no longer frozen by death in the contortion his torturers imposed on them when the nails were driven into his flesh. Jesus places his gentle, trustworthy, risen hands on their shoulders.

We are told by Isaiah that the feet of those who preach good news are beautiful and these women adore the feet of Jesus. The words Jesus speaks as they caress his feet are the best news they have ever heard and will ever hear, their human brother and friend, their Lord and God, forever back from death tells them, “Do not be afraid.” This is the best news any human facing death can hear.

And Jesus is not alone in being back from death forever.

Near the end of the Stations we prayed on Friday afternoon, at the Twelfth Station, the one where Jesus dies, we read in Matthew about the great earthquake that happened in the moment of Jesus’ death, how the veil in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, but also how, in a great mystery, “The bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead.” Matthew says this happens when Jesus dies.

And, at this same Station, right next to Matthew’s witness, we read these words from Jesus in John’s gospel: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.”

Jesus dies and in that moment resurrection begins. And it has been at work ever since, even in this Good Friday and Holy Saturday world, horrific as it is with death, where we keep on killing one another and burying our dead.

We need courage to trust in the resurrection, to be people with beautiful feet, who bring good news to this world of violence.

I walked three small groups through the Stations on Friday, and each time around we came to the prayer that asks for such courage, the one where Peter denies Jesus three times. We prayed that we might be ever ready to “give a reason for the hope that is in us.” Ponder that prayer with me for a moment.

We can never argue anyone to a place of hope. As the Rev John Ames of Gilead fame says, “nothing true about God can be said from a posture of defense.”

We cannot force anyone to trust in the resurrection. But by the Spirit we can speak resurrection and practice it. We run rehearsals for the opening of all tombs, we glimpse Easter, we trust that love is stronger than death, in the ashes of a Holy Saturday world.

If you find yourself in hell, a victim of natural disaster, drowned by your own ruined heart and participations in evil—do not be afraid or lose hope. A preacher is going to come, the crucified Creator. He loves you just as you are. He is endlessly patient and will in the end transfigure us. He will not leave us as we are. He will make us shine as he and the holy ones shine; he will make us shine like the sun, but unlike our sun, we will shine forever.

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The idea, you see, is that either the man or his parents (even his ancestors) brought about his conditions of blindness and poverty by sin. And once blame is properly assigned there is also the not-so-subtle idea that the disciples are no longer responsible for him. He’s made God or the gods angry and this is now his problem, not theirs.

And if we are honest, these two ideas are similar to contemporary superstitions.

But Jesus sees in the man born blind a person in whom God’s glory is revealed (even in his present states of blindness and poverty), one in whom God’s glory is also going to be made manifest by what God does for and in him.

Jesus wisely does not judge by the blind man’s outward appearance, as the Lord warned Samuel not to do when seeking the next king of Isreal. The Lord, we are told, looks below the skin to the heart.

The disciples are no different than the Greeks or Romans, who see misfortune as a curse for crossing a line with the gods. And those who get too close to the misfortunate, you see, risk catching the same punishment.

But Jesus is a better reader of the Scriptures. There is a tension running through them that must be rightly divided. In the Torah, there seems to be a teaching that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. But the prophets, like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, tell us that God only holds the person who commits a sin responsible for their sins. So, which is it?

We can see, almost scientifically, that bad decisions have intergenerational consequences: A father addicted to gambling and or drugs is going to badly affect the lives of his wife and children. When we—like the father of lies—seek to steal, kill, or destroy—intentionally or unintentionally—our words, actions, and dispositions can bring great harm that ripples out over the surface of time.

We can trace these consequences in families and tribes and nations, almost like genetics. As those who study such things say, the body keeps the score.

But God tells us through the prophets that every individual stands responsible before God for their own words and choices and attitudes—the children are not guilty for the parent’s choices, nor are the parents guilty for the children’s choices—something that the Torah also, in fact, teaches.

But all of this can miss something that Jesus clearly does not: There’s a world of difference between consequences or misfortunes that arrive by living in a fallen world (including our false choices) and the deliberate hand of God.

God always only wills our good and only ever gives humans the good: “Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow” (James 1:17). When we ask for bread, he does not give us stones.

Our only good God is not a dispenser of misfortune. He does not will or bring us harm.

Yes, God will steal from the world and from us anything that is not of love’s kind, and God will kill anything in us and in the creation that is not a participation in love, and God will redeem the destructive consequences of our choices without erasing them, but like a good and skillful surgeon God will do no harm to our essential selves or to the world in the removal of what ails us.

•••••

Jesus spits on the soil, makes mud with the dust and his spittle, kneads it into clay, and spreads the clay on the blind man’s eyes. And as in the formation of Adam from the dust in Genesis, whatever is damaged or misaligned or disconnected or dead slowly begins to be converted by the clay into the tissues and nerves and pathways that the man born blind needs to see. It’s an act of new creation. In a mystery, God and only God can take the soil and somehow make of it whatever any one of us needs to be made well.

But this act of making mud is also a violation of the rules that had been allowed to grow like cancer on the good and perfect gift of the Ten Commandments. By the time of Jesus there were 613 regulations, some of which kept the children of Israel alive when other cultures perished, like washing hands and pots. But many of these regulations in the hands of bad-hearted leaders erect barriers that keep people (then and now) from seeing that God is only good and only wills our good.

Spitting on the ground was understood as an act of creation, of “kneading” clay, and so, like any act of creation, of making, it was forbidden on the Sabbath. But Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath (the Sabbath was made for humans and not humans for the Sabbath) and Jesus never allows rules to keep him from doing good.

Jesus tells the man to go wash his eyes in the pool called Sent; that once he washes, he will be able to see. The man born blind does this and after his eyes are baptized he can see as well as anyone but retains the wisdom he acquired while he was blind.

People immediately begin to doubt whether he is in fact the man who was born blind, the man who begged at their city gate. How could he be, they thought. He must be someone else. Or, if he is the same man, how can he see? He tells them how he was healed and who healed him: “the man called Jesus.” But the people are divided by the healing. Some believe, others do not.

The people drag him before the Pharisees to see if they can make heads or tails of what’s happened. And what follows is one of the most comic episodes in the gospels.

The Pharisees ask the man born blind how he had received his sight. And he tells them about the mud and the smearing and the washing. And they, too, are divided. Some say Jesus cannot be a man sent from God because he does not keep the Sabbath, and some say only a godly man can work such a magnificent sign.

Jesus never allows rules to keep him from doing good.

They ask the man born blind what he thinks of Jesus because, after all, Jesus is the one who healed him, and now the man born blind sees Jesus not only as a man like himself but a prophet.

So the Pharisees, divided by the man’s witness about Jesus, invite the man’s parents to testify. The humor starts with the Pharisees first question, which casts doubt not only on their parentage but whether the man before them was ever really blind to begin with: “Is this your son, who you say was born blind”?

The parents confess that the man before them is their son and that he was blind from birth and that somehow (they don’t know how) he can now see. They report they know nothing about Jesus, who their son says opened his eyes. We are told they deny knowing the how or knowing the who because they fear losing their place in society by being kicked out of the synagogue. They ask the elders to ask their son because he is old enough to speak for himself.

It was widely known that anyone who identified with or followed Jesus would publicly and badly lose their place in the community, so the parents disavow Jesus.

The Pharisees are focused on casting blame (as all of us all too often are), on shaming someone, on the sins that cause calamity to come upon someone, rather than relieving the harm and embracing the harmed. They judge Jesus a sinner for healing the man and judge the man a sinner for honestly telling his healing story. Even so, they want to hear the story once again, and the man who can now see sees through their ruse, sees that they are the ones who are blind, the blinkered ones who like the Accuser accuse.

He refuses to tell the story again because they are not listening and comically asks them if they, too, want to be disciples of Jesus. Humor is usually useless against the humorless. These Pharisees reject Jesus and once again despise the healed son’s witness.

We see in the healed man’s response the depth of his wisdom (probably earned in his state of physical blindness): He reasons that the world has never seen blindness cured in someone born blind and that anyone who could do such a thing must be from God. But the man born blind has only just begun to walk in gospel witness because he also says that God does not hear the prayers of sinners. This part cannot be true, of course, because then God could not hear the prayers of anyone.

It’s important that we divide this story wisely. Some would take this bit of the formerly blind man’s testimony—that God does not listen to sinners— and lift it out of this story, sunder it from the whole counsel of the Scriptures, and teach falsely that God is deaf to the prayers of “sinners.”

Be that as it may, the man born blind bears faithful witness to the One who healed him, says that Jesus must be from God because of the extraordinary good that has been done to him by Jesus.

The Pharisees get angry and throw the man out of the Synagogue. Jesus hears about this, searches for the man, and when he finds him asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man born blind immediately knows that Jesus is the man who healed him, though he’d never laid eyes on Jesus before that moment, because the blind recognize voices better than the sighted. He asks Jesus to tell him who the Son of Man is so that he may believe in him.

As with Photini, Jesus tells the man born blind that he has now seen him and that the One speaking to him is the Son of Man, and he replies “Lord, I believe.” Like Photini at Jacob’s well, God sees him and then he sees God.

The man who first sees Jesus as a man like himself (which Jesus is), who as his eyes begin to open sees Jesus as a prophet (which Jesus is), at last sees Jesus as his Lord and God.

Jesus tells the man born blind that he has come into the world to judge the world and that his judgments heal. This healing always happens whether his appearance opens our eyes or closes them…just ask Paul. He always and only judges in order to heal, not to harm.

The Pharisees see this encounter between the man born blind and Jesus, and they ask Jesus if they, too, are blind. Jesus tells them there is a sacred blindness that heals, but also an unholy lack of humility—a way of arrogant sightedness—that is a dangerous inability to see truly.

As at the beginning in the garden and at the tree, the most serious blindness humans experience is misapprehension of the character of God. God’s love judges us only in order to heal us. Jesus shows us a God that invites us to trust his healing judgments, to live with confidence in his ability to open our eyes (sometimes by closing them), and give us the capacity to see the world and our neighbor as we were meant to see them: by the divine light revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.

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Being that close to these helpless children and the ever-present prospect of death dredged up early childhood experiences of being in the hospital gasping for breath and the very early loss of my father to war. The nearness of Jesus to all of these suffering families and in my own hardships came to the surface.

Before this season, I had been contemplating the person of Jesus for about thirteen years. I battled extreme anxiety in my early thirties and over a period of years, contemplation of the human God helped center my life and became vital to my pastoral call.

I began writing out some of these contemplations in 2010 and sharing them on social media platforms and occasionally in online magazines. In 2013, I wrote an essay entitled “Vulnerable God” for a collection edited by my friend Cathleen Falsani. But I had not discovered a structure for a book, a scaffolding for bringing all of these meditations together.

Around 2018, it occurred to me that the sacred year, which I was annually walking out with the congregation at Holy Redeemer, provided a way to tell the story of the human God, and so I began to focus on the moments in the story of God with us that the sacred year elevates, that disclose his unfathomable mystery.

The original plan for Vulnerable God only foresaw half the number of chapters that ended up being written, but from 2018 to 2024 the bulk of the book was drafted, including six chapters on the ministry of Christ not in the initial outline. The final draft (originally 82,000+ words) went through intense editing from the fall of 2024 through the fall of 2025 and shrank some 20,000 words (including three whole chapters that went way).

I owe a lot to the Brazos Press team and to a number of friends and colleagues. There’s simply no way this book would be here without them. I credit each of them in the acknowledgements.

This book was written very much in the midst of a pastoral life, written in fits and starts—in waiting rooms, on the side of the road, late at night, and just about anywhere I could get a moment to peck out what I was seeing and feeling and hearing … often on my iPhone. It emerges from real engagement with people and the harder realities of existence.

I’m writing all of this to say that Vulnerable God had a long gestation and a longer season of drafting than I ever imagined; that it came through a sometimes arduous (but always joyful) process and by a lot of trial and failure. But it’s finally almost here. You can preorder it on Amazon (which helps the book). It arrives on September 29.

I hope you’ll consider buying Vulnerable God. If you like what you’ve read on here and on other platforms, I suspect this book will be a balm and a delight. Much love and many graces.

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We forget this sometimes but God cannot become what is not good. God does not become what he does not love.

“Human” is also a synonym for fragile, made from dust. And this is why ash is painted on our foreheads as we enter the Great Fast. Ash reminds us that we are human: made as icons of God, made from clay, made vulnerable.

What is painted on our foreheads in ash is the cross, which reminds us that though we are going to die we are loved by the God who dies for us and with us. And his cross means that even death cannot separate us from his love.

Humanity fell away from love when we failed to keep a fast way back when but God’s love is so authentic that God becomes what God makes and what he loves to keep the fast for all of us. The Son falls with his human brothers and sisters and in the wilderness we have made of the world resists every call to be inhuman.

Jesus our brother has already kept the fast, has reconciled the world to God, so we don’t follow our Lord in keeping the fast to change God’s mind about us or to show God that we are worthy of love. We keep the fast to remember that we are made in the image of God (stillness, not fear; humility, not arrogance), that God has already reconciled us (we don’t have to save ourselves), that the whole law is kept when we love our neighbor.

The fast God wants breaks chains of injustice, gets rid of exploitation in the workplace, frees the oppressed, cancel debts, shares bread with the hungry, invites the homeless poor into our homes, put clothes on the shivering ill-clad, and embraces our estranged family.

The Lent the ancient Christians kept wasn’t for unhealthy introspection or self-mortification. It was preparation for participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent, therefore, is not preparation for punishment but for godly permanence beyond death. We practice resurrection, which is synonymous with loving immigrants, prisoners, the sick, the abused, the outcast. Welcome to the Great Fast!

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Anyone who knows what I consistently preach about strangers and sojourners, about immigrants and refugees—which sermons reflect the deep red rivulet that runs through the Torah, the wisdom literature, the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles—can guess where I am going.

We are told to welcome strangers and sojourners, to be sure to give them loving care. Israel as a people experience immigrant and refugee status in Egypt and Babylon, and Jesus, as the embodiment of Israel in one person, is a refugee from homicidal political tyranny with his mother and stepfather. The experience of Israel and Jesus guides us and makes us compassionate toward strangers and sojourners.

Once immigrants and refugees are dwelling among us, no matter how they got here, our duty to them as the church is neighborly love.

Instead we have frightened our neighbors, many of whom are here because their governments persecuted them or simply to find decent wages for hard, manual labor, and to survive as families.

Having established all of that for those who don’t know me well, and perhaps also for those who do, two things up front:

Priests should not be princes and pastors should not be law enforcement officers. The cardinal interests of the state and the cardinal interests of the church are not the same and are frequently conflicted.

Anyone can be excused for thinking it absurd that a pastor doubles as an ICE agent; that this might upset a lot of people should be a surprise to no one. The interests of the state and the interests of the church are very often in conflict when it comes to immigrants and refugees.

And one can imagine why it might bring some folks, Christians among them, to picket a church or demonstrate across from its entrance. One can excuse them for feeling what the prophets and Jesus and the first Christians felt toward the downtrodden and oppressed. Churches are sanctuaries for the vulnerable, at least that is their role in Scripture and history.

But I am one of those people who doesn’t think protestors should disrupt church services or synagogue or mosque or temple worship.

For the record, I consider some of what I am seeing in Minneapolis—getting in people’s faces and yelling, pushing and shoving, the use of vehicles (trying, like paparazzi, to drive fast and stay with ICE vehicles), hurling objects, riot-like actions, etc.—all forms of pre-violence or things that can quickly escalate to injury—as unacceptable forms of protest.

I am old school and look to black Americans, who give us a political legacy of non-violent protest that’s far more effective in the long-term: sit-ins, singing, laying down in roadways, chants, pray-ins. I see a lot of this sort of “good trouble” in Minneapolis These are forms of protest that cannot escalate to harm for others but may mean that we have to endure harm.

I think setting off car alarms and hand horns to warn neighbors is clever and great, as is letting kids go to school online and hiding and sheltering the vulnerable.

We can see that the use of force by officials of the state is everywhere in question. Masked and armed agents have not been the way of American justice until our moment and that should concern anyone.

But I am writing this because I am

concerned about the protest in the church. I disagree with those who say Jesus endorses what happened there. I agree with Esau Mccaulley, one of our wisest pastors and spokespersons, that this is not the way.

A colleague shared three principles that help me with what happened at the church:

1. do not scare children.

2. do not disrupt worship.

3. especially if you are an outsider to a community.

Question: did Jesus do any of the above in the Temple?

No.

Children were there when he flipped tables, and it might have alarmed them, at first, but children also consistently adored and came to Jesus. Children are not drawn to violent and disruptive personalities.

He did disrupt worship, but (more importantly) he did not recognize what was happening with the moneychangers as worship.

Most importantly, the Temple was his house and his community.

I’ve written about this elsewhere but the word to describe the “whip” Jesus made is the same word for broom. Jesus did not strike the animals, he shewed them. You would not believe the violence people will underwrite by this action of Jesus: drones, cruise missiles, cluster bombs, etc. I have heard it all. Trust me.

And this is the most important thing I want to say about this: Jesus notably did not invite his disciples to join him in turning over tables, and every single time they wanted to invoke violence (calling down fire from heaven, taking up a sword), he rebuked them. He did invite them to pray. He did invite them to resist darkness with light. But he alone drove out the money changers. He knows our weakness.

Jesus is the only sort of human I’d completely trust to go into a house of worship and turn over pews, because as only he could do so, it would be in his actions only love.

In my experience, we are not usually capable of turning over tables without egos or agendas. Jesus turned over tables to make space for prayer, not to prove a point.

I don’t discern that the church protestors were people who loved the people they were confronting, and they definitely were not members of that community. It wasn’t their house.

It looked political not prophetic. And that’s because you have to love to be prophetic, to paraphrase Dr King.

Nations need secured borders but I’d be surprised if 1 in 30 of the people ICE are rounding up are “dangerous criminals.” What we have done with immigrants, scapegoating them for all the ills of our nation, is a deep injustice that can lead to even more harm and violence against them than what we are already seeing. Christians should resist othering any group of people, and especially resist leaders who demonize our neighbors.

Cities Church can lead the way here by openly forgiving the protestors and asking that any prosecutions against them cease.

We are invited into the Son’s very life as God, are made one with him, so that there is no appearance of Christ where we are not mystically part of what Jesus is doing and saying—his many appearances in the Scriptures, his appearance in the flesh as recorded in the gospels, and his ongoing appearances in the world—and there is no human of the past, future, or present whose’s not intended by God to participate in this miracle of permanence.

But Christmas is also quite dangerous. Herod understood this. And the citizens of Jerusalem who participated in his corrupted power knew this. When the Magi arrive we are told that Herod “and all of Jerusalem” were frightened…by a child. They somehow knew that the arrival of this child meant the end of power as humans know power. If you’re a tyrant or benefit from a tyrant’s rule, Christmas is dangerous to your false sense of security and permanence.

Christmas is also dangerous to our sometimes fallen assumptions about who is included in Christmas. These astrologers from the East are following a star because they are drawn to worship the child. Perhaps they knew that their pagan kings were not the real thing and went wandering in hope they might find a good one. The people who were supposed to be waiting for this good king and rejoicing at his arrival, the “people of God,” are thrown into alarm and confusion when these strangers show up.

When the Magi find the child they fall on their knees in reverence and offer treasures that tells of the infant God’s royalty, death, and burial. Do they understand the meaning of their gifts? Probably not. But they don’t bow because they are afraid or seeking to get on this God’s good side. No person in their right mind fears a childlike God. The Magi worship because they find the Love that has drawn them (and everyone) into the story of this God.

The treasures of the Magi reveal that what’s hidden in the heart of the unusual sovereignty this child makes known to us is a Love that dies so all might live, that is buried so all might rise from the grave. In the words of John Henry Hopkin Jr’s brilliant carol:

Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume 
Breathes a life of gathering gloom; 
Sorrowing, sighing, 
Bleeding, dying, 
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

The Magi are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, who had deceived them by saying that he too wished to “worship” the child. But Herod could not worship the child because he could not recognize the sovereignty of authentic Love. He could not humble himself before the actual God, could not become a god in the genuine human sense, because he wanted to be a god on his own violent terms, wanted to bend the world to his will.

In a fallen world, Christmas is dangerous for the innocent. Christmas stirs up the powers that oppose human thriving. Herod flies into a diabolical rage. He orders the killing of all male children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem, going back to the time the star first appeared to the Magi. Having also been warned in a dream, Joseph and Mary flee political terror and become with the vulnerable infant God refugees bound for Egypt amid real peril.

The toddlers of Bethlehem die for the child before the child dies for them (and for all), are taken up into his eventual sacrifice. All such martyrs die with Christ and participate in his death which is the rescue of all persons and the world.

Together with these holy innocents this holy child represents a new humanity, a way of being human as God is human, a way for all humans to be human as God is human, dying so the world might inherit divine permanence. When these innocents are struck down they with this holy child become not eternal revenge or reprisal but indestructible love. When they return from death they bear peace toward all.

Indestructible love will in time reveal Christmas as dangerous for all that opposes human thriving and the restoration of the world. Christmas means that murder has an expiration date, along with the greed, envy, anger, and hatred that fuel it. Hunger and disease and war have no future because of Christmas. These all will end. But Christmas will never end because God is human and has come to make all humans gods.

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John’s gospel opens not with a genealogy or a conception or a birth but with a cosmic pronouncement: in the beginning (before time) there is and always has been an other in the one God who is also God and all things that exist were made also by this other in God that John calls “the Word.”

There’s nothing here about an inn or shepherds and angels or caesar or even a mother. But there is an only Son who is always with the Father and close to the Father’s heart and who makes the Father known, a Word who becomes flesh and moves into the world wherever humans are.

John tells us that this Word, the only Son of the Father, who alone makes the Father visible, not only makes everything we see and hear and touch and taste, but is the light that enlightens every human person and every collection of humans. This Son is their life and their light. And every one of us has received “grace upon grace” in this human called Jesus Christ—”God from God, light from light, true God from true God.”

John tells us this light that illumines every human who has ever lived or ever will live or who lives now, this “Light from Light,” shines in the darkness and that the darkness cannot comprehend it, cannot grasp it, cannot extinguish it (though it tried its worst).

Christmas and danger are inseparable as long as the fallen order of things fends of its inevitable return to nothingness. But, eventually, only the good will remain.

C.S. Lewis speaks of a “deeper magic” that somehow defeats the superficial magic that evil speaks and does (and that is a lot of evil), a magic which is God’s own love for the world, a love that will stop at nothing, even the death of God—especially God’s death—in order that we and the universe might enjoy God’s permanence and God’s smallness.

Every pretension to greatness or power is toppled by God’s own willingness to offer all of God for the life of the world so that the world can exist as God does. This is the deeper Christmas that is found when we are placed by God at the foot of the cross that Christmas makes possible, that makes Christmas endure even when our keeping of Christmas comes to an end. And when we stand at the foot of the cross we become a child as God is a child, able to enter and inhabit eternity.

For John and for Paul, the purpose of God in becoming flesh is to make us children of God, that we might be born “not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” We are born instead by and in and at the cross. The Father sends the Son’s Spirit into our hearts and helps us join the Son in saying “Abba! Father!”

Becoming “flesh” in John’s sense is to finally become a living human by dying. We become human as God is human in Jesus Christ, the crucified God. This is to become the children we must become to enter the kingdom of heaven,

We join the Son’s humanity, a humanity freed from death by the resurrection from the dead, and in Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead, we have not a relationship to the Father that is like the Son’s relationship but as his body in the world and in eternity we share the Son’s own relation with the Father in and by the Spirit.

The Son comes among us, born of a woman, to remind us that from “the beginning” to be human is in this Son to be God.

There’s no analogy or illustration or anecdote or vignette that makes this news usable or practical—it is God’s zeal and not ours that makes this impossibility possible—but God nevertheless uses our hearing of this very good news to make us partakers of the humanity and divinity of the Son by the Spirit. And for that we give with the whole creation our very best thanks this Christmas.

Still, the greatest wonder the shepherds tell us is the unexpected message of the angels: thete’s no reason to fear the uncreated light or the music or the God who is their source. The angels announce peace and the favor of God on all humans with who he is somehow inexplicably pleased, even with all the mess we’ve made of the world. Despite a brokenness that obscures the memory of our true origin, made as we all are in the divine image, God loves all of us and wishes us wellness and shalom.

The shepherds are given a sign that their message is true: a fragile human baby lying in a feed trough, wrapped in the cloth bands in which bodies in that time were bound for burial. The shepherds are told this child is humanity’s savior. And then as suddenly as the light appeared and the angels and their beautiful song, the skies empty and the shepherds are alone again in the silence and the dark.

These ordinary workers, without wealth or power or superior genetics, who tend the sheep who give clothes and food to the masses, are the ones chosen for this astonishing message. Their poverty of spirit and their actual poverty help them trust the angelic song and they set out for Bethlehem to seek this child.

But tonight we have heard other witnesses. The prophet Isaiah says this child brings the end of war. The Psalmist tells us that in spite of fallen human misgivings and uncertainty, the rest of the earth and its creatures welcome the arrival of this childlike God and this child’s judgments: the oceans and all that move in them rejoice, the fields and all that crawl on them exult, and the trees sing. The apostle writes that God has appeared for the salvation of all human beings. It all seems to good to be true.

The shepherds go to Bethlehem and they find the child in the feed trough, just as the angels said. And they find Mary, the mother of God. Lucy Peppiatt says, “Jesus is made of her, not just in her. … is made from her and not just in her.” And they find Joseph, to whom angels appear in dreams, a good man who accepts that something good has happened in Mary and for her and him by this child. And though neither of them can possibly know everything this child means for everyone and for the world, they trust that the divine poverty they are caught up in is from God.

The child comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found, that thorns might no longer infest the ground. The child comes to restore the image of God in us. The child comes to remind us that to be human is from eternity in this Son to be God. The child comes to make us partakers by grace in the divine nature. The child comes to rescue us from death and grant us God’s permanence.

All of this can be terribly hard to trust because looking around in any point of human history (never mind our own moment) any human would have to take all of this on faith. The world we experience puts up a lot of barriers to trusting the witness of the shepherds.

In his sermon for Christmas, Pope Leo quoted our ancient pastor, Augustine: “…human pride weighed you down so heavily that only divine humility could raise you up again” (Saint Augustine, Sermon 188, III, 3).

Tonight the good news is that if we lack humility before this great mystery we are invited to trust, we can ask God to make us as humble as the shepherds, and Mary, and Joseph. After all, it was not to celebrities or the rich or the powerful or the privileged or the strong that God came, with whom God partnered to make the salvation of this child real, or to bear witness to it.

If you think you know the story—that there’s nothing new to hear or to see or to touch—ask God for amazement, for the story of the shepherds is ever new and fathomless. God is faithful and will make you rich in trust and full of wonder; his love will make your knees buckle; not for fear but because the healing that will happen in you when you encounter God’s love will overwhelm you, body and soul.

These silences began before my direct experience of a shooting aftermath, and after Sandy Hook resulted in a meditation for Huffington Post in April of 2013, some four months after that unimaginable calamity.

In these silences I come back again and again to a sense that we will never see an end of school shootings (and all mass killing events) until we realize we all bear responsibility..

This is not to say that the person who brings the violence is not uniquely responsible for the injuries, mayhem, terror, and death he alone inflicts.

But time and time again, in pondering these events, I return to the conviction that I bear a share of responsibility. We all do.

One of the reasons we avoid contemplation around this sort of violence is that when we spend time apart from the loud noise of scapegoating and blaming that ensues—always looking outside ourselves—we will come to understand that the root causes of these crimes (and they are legion) draw us all into the accounting.

It’s easy to get angry with the shooter or his family or friends or whatever authorities might have prevented the bloodshed but then we avoid the hard work that exposes diseases we are all infected with and which lead to violence: bias, hatred, envy, cynicism, vilification, isolation, loneliness, fear, and the whole laundry list that ails us.

Persons who follow Jesus Christ look to him in silence to guide us into his way of responding, and always Christ comes alongside the guilty; is not afraid to be named with the guilty (me and you) in order to accomplish healing for all.

“No man is an island.” This is usually brought into conversation to say that a person cannot survive in isolation from the rest of humanity but I often use it to help me remember that I am still connected to everyone who brings harm and the roots of the harm that they bring are also in me.

The unique role that Christ plays in all of this is that the harms are not in any way present in him; rather, Christ takes all of the harm into himself in order to restore us all to God's intentions in making us.

This is a process, and God has all the time and all times to in patience make us who cannot make ourselves well somehow whole.

This is a mystery but a mystery that I trust.

Christ means we have a unique way of speaking and acting in response to violence.

My prayer (yes, prayer) is that we might do the work in silence that cooperates with his desire to cleanse us from all violence.

I grew up with severe allergies and asthma. There were many emergency rooms visits and several hospitalizations starting at nine and continuing into my mid-twenties. When corticosteroid inhalers came on the scene, they changed my life. 100 percent.

For the next thirty years, my asthma was controlled unless I got a bad infection. If I did, we would throw some antibiotics and oral steroids at it and in a few weeks time I would be fine.

I did not realize until now that my lungs always maintained a bit of inflammation from allergic asthma and as one bacterial infection in late December became multiple bacterial infections by mid-January, I ended up basically homebound and for the first time in 20 years I missed back to back Sundays of worship at Holy Redeemer.

I got a bit better in February and then tanked again, badly.

My internist and pulmonologist were tackling the infection and the asthma with the therapies that worked in the past but I wasn’t getting well. It was decided that I needed a bronchoscopy.

Short story: the infections had “colonized” my lungs and I was 85 percent obstructed! They cleaned out my lungs as best they could (not completely), collected a lot of liquid for testing, and referred me to an infectious disease specialist (to tackle the infections) and an immunologist (to address the resurgent allergic asthma).

Instead of IV antibiotics, it was decided I would go on two very strong oral antibiotics at the same time for several weeks and that worked. I’ll remain on one of them for another week but the infectious disease specialists think the various bacteria are killed off.

The asthma part is also finally getting better. I was skin tested and found to be allergic to dust, dust mites, mold and mildew (indoor and outdoor), and grass and tree pollens. One thing that’s happened in Michigan with our milder winters (the last few years) is that we aren’t having prolonged, deep cold periods that kill off the outdoor mildew, and so that is now a year-round allergen. And that may be a contribuing factor in my case.

I started allergy shots a few weeks ago, and they changed one of my inhalers, and I am certain the prayers of our congregation, family, and close friends have aided me, and for the past three days something is **different** from the past five months.

I am not needing multiple nebulizer treatments and rescue inhaler puffs daily just to make it through the hours and days. I am breathing deeper and there is far less shortness of breath, and my energy for life is returning … slowly.

This has affected all aspects of my work, of course, and every engagement for family and work—weddings, retreats, speaking engagements—all travel—has been canceled … six major moments missed.

I want to ask you to pray for me for something important. A few weeks ago, my doctors felt I would be an ideal candidate for a new biologic called Dupixent. It works wonders for people with seven kinds of servere allergy disorders. I had to be blood tested to make sure I could take it, and after confirming that, we applied to begin this therapy. I qualified and now we are waiting to see if insurance has approved it, and there are encouraging signs but no answer just yet.

It’s been a very odd season and I’ve finally gotten a handle on what’s happening to my body. I now realize that what is often happening to me is an asthma attack like the ones I had as a child, and once inhalers or a nebulizer are engaged, the worst of it goes away. It’s been a big adjustment. Just this past fall, I was swimming and walking and working out hard with a trainer with no breathing troubles.

The hope and promise is that with the new inhaler, the allergy shots, and this new drug, we will get back to what has been my “normal” of controlled asthma. I am starting to trust that that’s where things are going. This kind of disorder definitely has its emotional component.

I believe in prayer and ask you to pray for me and my family, and our congregation, who have all been really great about all of this.

Much love and grace to you all.

In God (the one God made known in the flesh of Jesus Christ), we come to know not “power” as conceived and wielded by fallen imagination but the divine wisdom that flows from the cross, from humility, from surrender, from divine and human weakness, a wisdom more “powerful” than what we imagine strength or control or coercion to be. Jesus tells us his holy cross has “overcome the world.”

All things that are good—and God can do nothing but good—flow from God. They flow from Jesus, the measure of true humanity and true divinity, made manifest in perfection in two moments which are the same moment for eternity: a babe wrapped in swaddling bands laid in a manger and a human wrapped in a burial cloth laid in a tomb.

These two signs show us that we must leave behind the “powers of this world” to understand how Jesus is “powerful.”

God’s power is creative (not destructive), unexpected (not predictable), and leaves everyone who by the Spirit yields to love actually free.

The Chora Church in Istanbul is an artifact of this divine surrender in the world. For 600 years it held a congregation of Christian artisans and intercessors but now it is a mosque, but for all intents and purposes, more or less, nothing more than a museum.

The fallen mind thinks of Chora as an artifact of ecclesial extinction. Yet in its silence and its disintegrating mosaics it sanctifies the world, exists as Holy Saturday in the present fallen order. Like the body of Jesus in the tomb, this shell of a church is redolent with an aroma, a fragrance greater than the energy of a thousand suns. It smells like humility, not gunpowder or currency or ego.

One wonders if it will ever have a Eucharist celebrated in it again but you cannot touch its participation with Christ in his death, which now makes possible its resurrection, and the world’s, and ours.

When we breathe in the air of resurrection, which we can do even now because resurrection is already a cohort of humility at work in the world, we exhale forgiveness, a “power held in surrender,” a love capable of actually healing the cosmos.

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