Don’t you think it a little strange that the Holy Spirit made a sound like a violent wind? And this sound filled the entire house where the disciples were gathered? Wind is almost non-descript. Although we speak of it as howling, it doesn’t have a real pitch until it makes the things it blows against vibrate, like the reed in a woodwind instrument.

Recently we recorded the sound of the wind on Mars. One of the instruments on our Perseverance rover has a microphone. The wind on Mars sounds like the wind on Earth. Maybe that’s evidence that the Holy Spirit is on Mars too— our triune God is too big to be constrained to just one planet.

When the wind blows, it sounds a lot like white noise, which is the name we give non-descript sound: tuneless, but there. We call it white noise because all of the audio frequencies or pitches in musical terms have equal intensity. And that is very similar to what we call “white light,” where all of the wavelengths of visible light are equally reflected , so the light doesn’t seem to have a color. Whether we’re talking about sound or light, what I want you to remember is that the entire spectrum of possibilities is contained in it, even though you can’t pick out a specific sound or color of light.

When we read about the first Pentecost, the first things we are told about the Holy Spirit’s arrival is that it was sudden, it sounded like a really violent wind, and it filled the entire house. This next part is kind of freaky. The disciples became like the channels of a radio, each filled with the spirit sound, but then speaking it in a specific language—not a jumble of every sound, but a distinct language! The Holy Spirit made each of the disciples into a loudspeaker broadcasting a specific set of sounds. It’s just like the way you can use a prism to split light into the colors of the rainbow: proof that all of the colors were there in the first place: we just couldn’t see them.

Apparently, curious on-lookers in multi-cultural Jerusalem also must have heard the commotion on that first Pentecost, because we are told that people gathered when they heard the sound. But the really interesting thing that happened  next, is that these people, who all spoke a variety of languages, could each hear something in their own language. The Holy Spirit needed people who were filled to the brim with that very Spirit of Truth, to speak of it to all kinds of different folks, using language that each of the different people could understand! Do you see what this means for you? The Spirit of Truth just sounds like rushing wind when we blabber on about God, and faith and love and hope in a one-size-fits-all way. The Spirit of Truth needs the voices of all the disciples to speak that truth in the particular way that people need to hear it. We are to be the voices that decode the great rushing wind into the Words of Truth in the languages that people understand.

Who each of you are, and how each of you speak is a special message that only you can decode for someone who speaks your language.  My language might sound like rushing wind to some of you, but I know there’s at least one of you for whom it will be what you needed to hear, because the Holy Spirit brought us together. The next time you have an opportunity to talk to a someone face to face, whether it’s family, friend or perhaps someone you are meeting for the first time, remember to use your words with love and confidence, not necessarily because they are words you need to say, but they might be the life giving words of the Spirit of Truth that the other person needed to hear.

Mary Magdalene was in such grief; John tells us she went to the tomb while it was still dark. She went looking for her beloved Jesus, only to find the tomb had been opened. The massive stone that was to have sealed it, had been rolled away. So she went straight away to Peter, and the mysterious disciple that John often refers to as “the one whom Jesus loved.” Mary told them what she had seen, and they took off, in what must have seemed like a foot-race to the tomb, basically leaving Mary in the dust. The guys went into the tomb—first, the so-called beloved and then Peter, and when they saw the burial linens and no Jesus, they went on home. Why? What did they do at their homes? Did they eat? Did they go say kaddish, the ritual prayer for the dead? It was still the festival of the Passover, so who knows how they kept that covenantal obligation to remember how God delivered their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. But Mary stayed. She stood weeping outside of the tomb, in despair because she thought someone had come in and taken the body of Jesus. Finally, she got up the courage to look inside. First she saw angels, and then she saw Jesus. But she did not recognize him until he called her name. He warned her not to try to hold onto him, because he was going to another dimension of life with his creator father. And then, he commissioned her to go and proclaim his resurrection to the others. She did not argue with him, she did what he asked, and that’s why Mary, of all the disciples became the first to proclaim the good news of the risen Christ: hope rising from despair.

The most important message of that time, and perhaps of ours, was that if you go looking for it, hope will find you. If you give up and go home too soon, you might miss the incredible message: hope rises inexplicably from despair, even from death.

If there is any meaning in the senseless death of a man who sought to do good by healing the sick and teaching people to love as God loves, then it is that there is nothing that God cannot redeem, because in a universe of endless possibilities hope has to be among them. We teach our children that Jesus died to save us from sin. Shouldn’t we teach them that Jesus LIVED to save us from sin? After all, sin is separation from God, and Jesus surely taught the people how to get close to God! Jesus’ life taught us that nothing can separate us from the love of God. His death taught us that there is no way we can destroy God. If you are a fan of physics (and you must have known as I was going to work science into this one way or another), it’s kind of like the first law of thermodynamics: “divine energy can neither be created nor destroyed…” The resurrection teaches us we can move from a focus on the death of Jesus  and the despair over the loss of the young teacher into the hope that the life of Jesus literally embodied! Not only is love stronger than death, but so also is hope.

That is why this day matters. The living God redeems everything created, every living thing, every rock and every drop of water by resurrecting all of it anew, and the process continues even after 13.8 billion years. There is no force of nature more mysterious and more hopeful than resurrection, and without death we cannot know that. That doesn’t mean that we have to like death or that we can’t grieve when those we love depart, but it does mean that throughout the universe all things are made new and if we don’t believe the physics that tells us that is true, then believe the story of Mary Magdalene, who went looking for Jesus, and found him, not dead, but very much alive.

We are all made of stardust and we have been marked as Christ’s own forever, even before baptism, because the God of hope breathed life into us. The tomb will always be empty because Jesus still lives, and it cannot contain him. If you cannot find him, don’t give up and go home like Peter and that other guy. Look again, Like Mary, and be found, like hope, rising from despair.

A week from tomorrow, the launch window opens for Perseverance Rover’s journey to Mars. My journey began many years ago at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. I led a team that was early in development of what is now one of the instruments (SHERLOC) that will work from the robotic arm of Perseverance to discover more about the composition of the Martian minerals and organic materials, and now I am a member of its science team. I am also keeping a weather eye on the Martian environment as a member of another instrument suite aboard Perseverance called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). If our launch is successful, Perseverance will touch down on Mars on February 18^th of next year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this mission to Mars and how it intersects with my mission as a Christian. You see, whether lay or ordained, we all have a mission—our heritage as followers of Jesus. How we carry out the vocation—our individual missions as Jesus followers—is unique to each one of us. My own formation as a Christian and quest to find my vocation has been a long and rambling exploration. I kept praying for a teacher or guide to help me figure out who I am, and it didn’t dawn on me for decades, that exploration itself WAS my vocation. I am an explorer-priest, and my vocation is to use both the exploration of creation and the exploration of relationships in God’s Kingdom to learn better how to live into the promise inherent with being made in the Image of God.

While I look forward to another opportunity to explore an alien landscape over the next few years, I’m even more enthusiastic about continuing to explore the Kingdom of God by pooling the things I learn about nature with the things I learn about God and God’s people in order to be a more faithful follower of Jesus. I invite you all to explore your own path. At any age, we can make a mid-course correction if we realize we are called to go a different way in the here and now or going forward into the future.

The times have abruptly changed us as Church, but that does not mean our commission as Christians is any different than it ever was. How we live that vocation evolves over time; that is a hallmark of living things, and the fact that our relationship with God is a living thing is proof that God is near, all around us and active in the world through us. Seize the day and your best life!

This is a “both/and” day: a festival day that we look forward to celebrating with our church family. And here we are, faithfully gathered in our red clothing, but it’s no festival day for a family that has lost a brother, a son and a father; a community that has suffered another senseless loss that leaves them wondering if their lives really do matter in a land under a constitution that says in its 14^th amendment that “no one shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

As Christians, we are also simultaneously living as the Body of Christ on Earth, simultaneously living within earthly civil institutions, while trying to live the Kingdom of God into being. Maybe the Day of Pentecost has something to teach us about how to live in both of these realms at the same time?

This is why we turn to The Word as often as we can; to gain insight into the challenges of living as good citizens of public society and faithful Jesus followers, true to our baptismal vows. Sometimes something that might be confusing in the Bible, maybe even contradictory, actually helps us to solve a mystery. The Gospel of John tells us in chapter 7 that “as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” But of course, the Hebrew Bible is full of references to the Spirit of God. Today in Acts 2, we heard St. Peter reference the prophet Joel, who speaks of God pouring out the Spirit upon a host of prophets.” In fact, the Spirit of God is prominent in Genesis, where God creates and breathes individual people into life. How many times have you read a passage in the Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament) that speaks to the Spirit of God” falling on someone? So, what could John have meant when he said, “for as yet there was no Spirit?”

This is an urgent conversation for the faithful to have because understanding what John meant could be a matter of life and death for the church as it grapples with a full plate of challenges at this moment in our evolving history.

I invite you to consider this possibility: what if John was talking, not about individual believers upon whom the Spirit had fallen through the centuries, but rather the collected assembly—what we call the church? What if John meant that the Holy Spirit was coming to breathe life into the Body of Christ on Earth? What if physical churches on Earth are only sustainable if rivers of living water flow from the heart of the collected assembly of believers, as John says, just before that part about “as yet there was no spirit?”

We are entering a transformative period in our church and in our communities and country, as we make preparations to emerge from the “time out” in which we’ve been living for the last twelve weeks. If we can shift our thinking away from consideration of what we believe to be our “inalienable” rights, to instead thinking of what our inescapable responsibilities are to God, to other people and to ourselves, then we will liberate a host of possibility, opening the floodgates holding back “the rivers of living water” that can flow from the heart of our church. Jesus said, “‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”

To be alive at all is a privilege, and we all possess varying degrees of privilege, both earned and unearned that not all of us share. Unearned privilege makes life easier for the person who has it than life is for the person who does not. My time in quarantine has been much easier because I live with two other people and three wonderful animals. My time in quarantine has been made easier because I have a job where I can work from home or drive up to the church with my own transportation without exposing myself to a potentially dangerous infectious disease. My two sisters, do not possess these privileges that I do. And based on demographic statistics, I am less likely to die of COVID-19 if I do get it, than is a person of color. I am a white woman wearing a cloak of unearned privilege.

As Christians, the concept of unearned privilege should be familiar to us, because the Grace of God is truly and completely unearned. The concept of individual rights doesn’t seem to have served anyone well in the Bible; brother has betrayed and even killed brother in pursuit of the cultural dead end of “birthright.”  Jesus challenged that culture and turned it upside down by saying “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” If we can stop focusing on our individual rights to the exclusion of our individual responsibilities as ethical humans and think more deeply about our responsibilities as members of the Body of Christ, we will recognize that the church is itself a living organism, into which God has breathed life with the Holy Spirit. God breathed life into a man named George Floyd. Another human squeezed that life away, while his colleagues looked on, apparently unable to exercise the moral judgment to intervene. It is our responsibility, both as individuals and as a church, to seek justice for everyone, because that’s what Jesus would do. On today of all days: the church’s birthday, for goodness sake, let’s harness the power of whatever unearned privilege any of us might possess to seek justice for all, as we have vowed to do in our baptismal covenant. Know this: if we can harness the unearned privilege of God’s Grace to the task of ensuring that the rivers of living water flow from the heart of the church, then all will bathe in the sweet waters of justice.

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

I will, with God’s help. Amen.

London-Heathrow Airport is a huge and noisy place. It is a cacophony of different languages, a collage of diverse clothing styles and religious garb, a palette of colorful fabrics draped around people who are unafraid to use color boldly. The profusion of color, sound and tastes in this huge airport, washed over me on Friday, when I arrived to begin the long journey home. I walked the perimeter of the terminal many times, achieving nearly four miles before I even boarded the first of the two flights home. I had three hours, so thought to get some exercise before spending all that time cramped into a narrow seat with the other people, packed like sardines in a tin.

Everything I saw at this hub of world travel, seemed fitting and right, the diversity of it all, actually quite wonderful, and reminding me why I prefer English gardens, which are similarly a wild consortium of foliage and flower, a place where you can know that faeries are hiding under the coral bells because they would feel too buttoned up in a formal French garden.

I can imagine that on the day The Advocate Jesus had promised arrived in Jerusalem, filling the apostles with the fire to talk to diverse people in languages they had not previously known, it might have been a bit like London Heathrow Airport. The author of Acts tells us that there were devout followers of the Hebrew God from every nation on the entire Earth. They probably dressed in a variety of ways according to their cultural norms, some walking to pass each other on the left and some on the right, crashing into each other and various beasts accompanying them. And the noise of all of their native tongues, in addition to crying babies and braying donkeys must have been overwhelming!

When the Holy Spirit blew through town with that rush of what sounded like violent wind, I wonder—was it like actual wind, kicking up the dust in everyone’s faces and roaring in their ears? And after, when that moment of clarity occurred, and everyone could understand the apostles speaking about God’s deeds of power, what was that like?

I wonder if that Pentecost was something like the U.N., where you only hear one translator’s voice speaking into your ear through the headset, translating some diplomat’s speech into a language you can understand in near real time. AND, I can also imagine hearing all of the voices at once, like a gorgeous choral arrangement that is nothing comprehensible when only one of the parts is sung, but comes to life in full color only when all of the parts are sung together.

If we close our eyes and put ourselves in Jerusalem in conditions the 21^st century American may never be able to relate to, maybe we can get a glimpse of the spiritual awakening that happened on that day we celebrate as Pentecost. On that day, the crowds heard the harmony of diversity in God’s message for, perhaps, the first time.

There is a big difference between the noise of people simultaneously offering independent and competing monologue to defend their own points of view and the swell of harmony when diverse people are spoken to in the inclusive language of God’s love, proclaiming the good news that all are included and welcomed with open arms into the Kindom of Heaven. That is a language that should speak to all of God’s created beings.

At the end of Jesus time on Earth, the followers of his Way, were all about him, in spite of his message that they should be about their own reconciliation with God. Even his own followers often didn’t get it. That’s why we have the story of Phillip demanding of Jesus, “Lord show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus must have been so exasperated. “Guys, don’t you get it that the words I speak to you are the Father in me talking? Man!”

In the last days of something, it gets noisy. There is often a clash between new voices that emerge, and more familiar voices saying “let’s just keep things as they are.” There will always be people who dismiss the message of God’s love and dismiss the ministry of Jesus by saying we’re all a bunch of crackpots, or in the case of those who sneered on Pentecost, accuse the miracle of being the result of drunkenness. The harbingers of change are nearly always rejected when they prophecy by those who have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. They complain and lament and even sabotage the new thing coming to birth, seeding dissent and doubt and rancorous debate— They are tone deaf to the harmony of God’s expansive message that all are loved and all are wanted.

The apostle Paul understood this well, and perhaps this is what drove his energetic mission to the gentiles. I think that he got it that people would never understand the magnitude of God’s mercy and love, unless they were exposed to the breadth of humanity to whom it was offered.

It’s a unique system, friends. Unless all are welcome, none truly are. It’s never been an affinity club or social organization for people whose interests mirror yours. Unless we speak the language of God’s deeds of powerful love with the voice of the Holy Spirit, who demands that we include everyone, no one will really hear the words.

The gift of Pentecost is the reminder that the reason we have a voice is to communicate—to reach other people in words they can understand with their hearts. Our skills and tools for communication are not just there so we can get our own needs met, but so that we can nurture one another, helping reconcile all people to God. If you don’t hear the language of love reaching your hearts in church, then we’re not doing it right. It’s not about any church institution or doctrine, it’s about communication as hospitality. We welcome people into the kindom of God by reaching out to them in their own tongues, trusting that The Holy Spirit will help us.

Resurrection is everywhere. It’s so obvious, that I can’t understand how anyone can miss it! Everything in the entire universe is resurrected bits of something else. So why does it surprise us that we would speak of the resurrected Jesus?

Now here is a real mystery: every day a stone is rolled away to reveal an empty tomb. Each moment that we live is one in which we escape the death of the old us and embrace the resurrection of the new person who has awakened rededicated to God and ready to evolve. If you don’t like who you are, change it. If you do like who you are, refine it, there is still work to go, and every day is full of resurrection: multiple opportunities to be the hero you want to be. Evolution is a string of resurrection events leading to change over time: a process. Without resurrection, without evolution, there would be nothing. Renewal isn’t a task that is accomplished and then it’s done, like slapping a new coat of paint on the walls of a room that has become dingy by years of living. Resurrection, or re-newal, or re-cycling or re-demption are all processes. They are on-going! And if the universe resides within the living God, then the whole universe, including us, is literally restless, and so it will never be done. You will never be done, a work in progress. So, don’t ever give up. Great artists or great athletes or people great at anything, are the ones who steel themselves with resolve, because they know that the journey is a long one. And sometimes you can’t see the incremental progress until you look at the road behind you and realize how far you’ve come. Sometimes it’s tedious, and sometimes you get hurt, and it seems like you have to start all over again. And the beauty of resurrection is… it ALWAYS come again. Just like God. Resurrection is everywhere and always, and you engage in it before, during and after your life here on Earth. Resurrection transcends our understanding, because it’s a paradox that something is forever, yet forever changing!

My life’s journey to walk in faith began before I was formed in the womb, and so did yours. Where is that journey now? Where do you stand in your ability to tap into the endless well of resurrection? What do you imagine the next chapter to be? Do you even recognize that there will always be another chapter of your life to unfold? I promise you there will be whether you are intentional about it or not. You can have a role in your evolution, or you can just let your environment make it happen to you. Is that what you really want? Aren’t you just bouncing up and down to see who you can become next? Don’t just focus on your children or your grandchildren and who they will become—you are not done yet! There is no retirement from evolution. Holy cow! That is AWESOME!

Resurrection is not just a story about something that happened on a Sunday morning nearly two thousand years ago. Resurrection is your story. So perhaps you’re wondering how to get the most out of it? The short answer is: it’s different for everyone. But here’s what has worked for me, and I can tell you—I am genuinely excited to be alive.

First: get enough sleep. Make it a priority. If you can’t sleep, find out why. Second, you must engage in some kind of spiritual practice where you tune out everything but you and God. How you do that is up to you. Some people do yoga, others sit quietly in a chair meditating and listening. Others pray, having complete conversations with God. Jesus gave us an example of how to do that, even providing us with a sample prayer and telling us to do it in private. Prayer is not a performance, even though it might require practice to get comfortable.

Get into a rhythm where you can feel the breath of God propelling an ever-expanding universe. However you are comfortable connecting with God, make it happen as often as you can, because God does not filter your resurrection through someone else’s agenda.

And finally, don’t shy away from loving as many people as you can; they are a gift because God emerges in relationship and we are social animals.

There are lots of things you can do to facilitate your own resurrection, but these three things are a good start: resting, getting in touch with the divine that underlies everything, and loving other people are the three big ones. That’s what Jesus did and it worked for him. He rested, he prayed and he loved the people that God sent to him until the end.

And the stone was rolled away. That’s your story too. Alleluia, Christ is risen, and so are you! Thanks be to God!

Now you’ve heard the highlight reel of our faith history from beginning to new beginning, well it was new as of 1,986 years ago. So, where’s the rest? No sequel? Is there no canon that continues the chronicle of the New Covenant in action after the gospels were written? There’s a lot more to be learned about both the glorious and the despicable behavior of latter day and present-day so-called disciples. These stories are important. So, why in the world would we think that God has stopped talking to us and inspiring us to tell the rest of the history?

Our God is living and active. And by the way, even if we get things wrong about God, someone can still learn from what we say and what we write in the future, even if it’s only to say, “I am going to try hard to do things differently.” Have we put ourselves out of the business of writing the next chapters of our faith history because we are afraid we’ll get it wrong? Or are there no new additions to our canon because we really don’t believe in a God who is still living and loving?

I have been all over this world: the arctic, the Antarctic, fourteen to sixteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks, and I have sat on the floor of the Pacific Ocean in a submarine. I have seen with my own eyes what God has made, and I have absolutely no doubt that God is living and active. You don’t have to go to such places to know that. So why then do we think that only this limited subset of writings about God is all that there will be going forward? If people are reading it less and less, and research indicates that to be the case, isn’t it possible that we have given poor instruction about how to use it? Or maybe the people need to hear stories that speak to them in their own contemporary context? Isn’t it possible that we have boxed God into a coffin by ending the story when it only was just beginning? Jesus did not come to start a church—his followers did that. Jesus started a renewal of life. When you read the stories about Jesus and pay attention to the way he told us to live, he didn’t say anything about church. He talked to people in deeply personal and practical ways about fulfilling their potential as children created in the image of God. That is the mission of the Christian!

What will the scriptures yet to be written say about our time? Will they talk about institutions who fought with one another over doctrine, or will they talk about how we walked hand in hand with each other to resurrect lands torn apart by endless war, how we worked tirelessly to teach people the skills and give them the opportunities to be lifted out of poverty. Will we welcome the stranger in the name of Jesus or will we be recorded as saying, “Sorry—no room at the inn?”

Speculating about the future is far less fruitful than building it. And I cannot even imagine anything more exciting than building the future and writing about how we worked with our creator to do it. Humans have gotten a lot of things wrong about God and about creation during our relatively brief tenure on Earth by geologic standards, but there are a couple really important things that we have gotten right. The first is that there really is one force so powerful and so unexplainable that it created and still enervates this universe, we don’t even have words to describe it. That power, that creative energy—that IS God. The second thing we got right, is that yes—there IS resurrection always and everywhere. It is still happening, and you need to write it down or record it in your smartphone or take a photographic image to remind yourself and your descendants what it looks like, so when things get tough, they know to look for resurrection and maybe be part of making it happen.

Our faith history tells us that people have always suffered from a failure of imagination, a lack of creativity, and a failure of spirit, and in spite of that—we are still here and we are still loved. And yes! We are still evolving toward the fulfillment of our potential to be compassionate, intelligent children of the light Because of resurrection, redemption—renewal. Be the story and then tell that good news. God is not done with this story.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Last summer, I witnessed the secularization of the chapel at my seminary, which had been closed the year before following the graduation of my class. It was a very poignant occasion for generations of alumnae and faculty because St. John’s chapel was beloved and the focal point of our community of disciples in formation.

We worshipped in that chapel every day. It was the place each new student signed the matriculation book in a special liturgy of welcome, the place where we prayed and learned and answered the call of the Holy Spirit as individuals and as a community. It was the place where we went to seek the comfort of worship when things went wrong and we needed healing. We could count on the great cloud of witnesses to hold us up when we entered into that sacred space.

A couple hundred people steeled themselves for the liturgy of secularization.  The bishop began, “We who are gathered here know that this building, which has been consecrated and set apart for the ministry of God’s Holy Word and Sacraments, will no longer be used in this way, but will be taken down…”, and he paused as his voice broke. The bishop had also been formed at that seminary, and he loved St. John’s chapel as much as any of us.

I tried to think about other things so I wouldn’t cry, like whether or not my return flight would be on time. All I could think about was the Christie’s auction that had taken place the previous month in which strangers had bid on the artwork that had adorned the walls of our holy space. The sound-track paying in my head was “They divide my garments among them; they cast lots for my clothing.”

Somehow, I made it through the liturgy, but the ceremony became intolerable when the recessional began and emeritus faculty members, alumni themselves, carried out our most sacred artifacts from the walls and the altar as we stripped a building that was now no longer our church.

As we stood together on the lawn in front of the chapel in the June evening, nearly all of us shed many tears and held each other up. We knew that what we had shared in deep support of one another over generations of seminarians could not be deconsecrated like a building. We knew that you can strip the altar, you can strip the whole building, but a community of disciples formed by love and shared service cannot be stripped of its identity because that shared service to and for one another is the real church, not the building where we met, however symbolic of the experience we shared inside of it.

If we embrace and follow the new commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples to love one another as he had loved them, it forms a deep and unshakable bond between us as disciples. That bond is life sustaining. And it’s necessary to do the work of being Christ’s hands and feet in the world.

When we serve one another by tender ministration the way Jesus taught his disciples to do with the foot washing, we are inoculated against grief and doubt. And that’s why the Maundy Thursday liturgy of many churches memorializes Christ washing the feet of his disciples by offering the congregation the opportunity to wash one another’s feet.

This year, I invite you to look at the chair and the wash basin and the towel. Consider what opportunities you have taken in the last year to serve one another and what opportunities you let pass you by.

Some of you will not be here next year for any number of reasons, and there’s no reliable way of knowing who it will be. If tonight turns out to be your last opportunity to serve each other as Jesus served his disciples, will you sleep tonight, knowing you gave each other your all in the responsibility we affirm as Christians?

If tonight were the last celebration of the Holy Eucharist ever to be had in our church—if the stripping of the altar were to be permanent, would your heart be torn in two like the Temple Curtain when Jesus was executed?

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Love is not some sanitized “thoughts and prayers.” It’s often uncomfortable and up close, maybe for people you don’t even like. The love of a disciple is the work of building relationship. It’s the kind of love that serves tenderly with a wash basin and a towel. It’s the act of feeding one another with material and spiritual food. And it’s a time limited opportunity for each relationship you have, because you don’t always get tomorrow.

God willing, our stripping of the altar tonight will be symbolic and temporary. You owe it to yourselves as a disciple AND to the people you love to think about what your lives might be like, if tonight were the last time you will come to this altar for the holy food and drink.

Who would you be if you never see each other again? John tells us that “Having loved his own who were in the world, he [meaning Jesus] loved them to the end.”

Please dear God, and beloved disciples… can we commit to doing likewise?

I am guessing that there is not a person here who hasn’t been tempted to do something you know you shouldn’t do—the kind of thing that might make you shrug and throw up your hands, saying, “the devil made me do it.” I’m talking about the kind of things that you know could cause harm to you or to others. Texting and driving, eating a steady diet of burgers and fries, getting involved with someone who you know to be abusive (but you think they’re really attractive anyway), tossing your candy wrapper out of the car window, staying up way too late night after night, spending every waking minute on Facebook, driving a motorcycle without a helmet, and refusing to get a colonoscopy because you don’t like the preparation…

Do any of these things seem like behaviors you’ve noticed in either yourself or someone you know?

Our lives are full of temptations that beckon us, big and small. It is part of the contract for having a brain and lots of sensors like eyes, ears, taste buds, and tactile skin sensors. It is simply awesome that we get to have this sophisticated machinery. However, none of it comes with an instruction manual, and the development of careful discernment, also known as good judgment, is a lifetime pursuit. There are resources to help: parents, teachers, siblings, friends, written history, our Holy Bible… and God. But the actual decision-making is left to us.

Your community, whether it be family, friends, church, sports teams, classmates, and colleagues helps train you to make moral and just choices; to make good and healthy decisions that will enable you to fulfill your potential.

When the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, it was so he could be trained in the making of right choices. That’s what the testing was about. We cannot imagine what doubts and other destructive temptations the demons put before him during the forty days in the wilderness, but Luke tells us that at the end of it, when Jesus was hungry and weak, the devil mocked him by suggesting that he magically change a stone into a loaf of bread. Jesus resisted. The devil put before him fame, fortune and power. And again, Jesus held fast.

He had been told directly by God in front John the Baptist and John’s followers that he was God’s son just before the Spirit had led him into the wilderness, and I cannot even imagine how shocking that might have been; he surely had a lot to think about!

Can you imagine discovering at the age of thirty that your father is not your father at all, much less that your father is God? When you learn something truly shocking about yourself, it really throws you for a loop.
You might begin to question everything about your life, and maybe some
things that previously seemed confounding finally start to make sense, but there is likely to be a lot of processing, and most people want to get off by themselves to try to digest what a dramatic self-revelation might mean going forward.

Jesus was already a righteous man of God at the time of his baptism because, well, he went to receive baptism from John as a symbol of his turning to God. The Bible gives us his birth narrative and a tiny bit about him as a child, but mostly we don’t know much between then and the baptism. I wonder how much he already knew about who he was and how he got here? What had Mary and Joseph told him in his growing up years?

No matter what his previous life as a carpenter looked like, no doubt Jesus had a lot to think about after God’s dramatic revelation about him at his baptism. And because Luke tells us he “returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (Luke 4:1), he must have had quite a tumultuous head full of thoughts after that baptism. So off he went into the desert, and we’re told that Jesus passed the exhaustive testing by the devil.

This wasn’t about eating or drinking too much, and it wasn’t about driving without a seatbelt or trying to text behind the wheel, or whatever the first century equivalent might have been. It was the gut wrenching and soul-searching stuff that keeps you up at night and prevents you from eating for forty days. It was the evil intent to rob him of his confidence in following the Law and trusting in God. It was the lure of riches and power, easy satiation of his hunger.

And Jesus stood his ground. He passed the testing—all that the devil threw at him. Wow, Jesus! I wish I was that steadfast under fire.

Unfortunately, that was not to be the end of it the devil’s attempts to undermine Jesus’ relationship with his father and the accomplishment of his mission of salvation through forgiveness and love on Earth. Luke says, “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.”

And that is how it has always been for us as well. We might be getting on with life just swimmingly, and then the demons find us again because it has become a more opportune time. Self-doubt and recrimination; hurt and anger leave us vulnerable, and many of us succumb to the temptation of power and wealth, forgetting responsibilities to God and neighbor—to make moral decisions followed up by righteous behavior.

The nature of life is such that there will always be another temptation, another decision to be made, another test of our resolve to be the children made in the image of God. And that is why we were made to live in community, because as much as we need to pay attention to our
own relationships with God, we will never be Jesus, and that’s why he left us with the Holy Spirit and told us to love one another.

Until you draw your last breath, there will be demons who seek to undermine you, but there will also be love unimaginable and the promise that when we call upon God we will be heard. Don’t be afraid of asking for help from God, and don’t be surprised if it comes to you looking like one of us– your friends and family.

What do you think it means to prepare the way of the Lord? If God sent a messenger to prepare that way, then I’d think the preparation must have been as important as the arrival. If you think about it, there are lots of things for which preparation is so essential that without it, or if the prep is improperly done, you can get into trouble. For example, suppose you get to the end of the semester in school and it’s time to take the final exam, but you haven’t attended most of the classes and you haven’t studied. Taking that final exam would probably produce a lot of anxiety! I used to have that dream near the end of the term every year that I was in school. That’s a lot of anxiety dreams.

John, whom we call the Baptist, received mission instructions directly from God to proclaim the importance of repentance. And repentance simply means turning back toward God. When the prophet Isaiah foretold that mission, he described John as “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Luke 3:4-6)

And Malachi’s prophecy is similar: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight– indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” (Mal. 3:1-2a)

These prophecies about the messenger who prepares the way of the Lord don’t sound like messages about joyful preparation for the arrival of a new baby. They sound like warnings. “But who can endure the day of his coming?” Yikes!

It kind of makes you think– Advent has a bit more to it than preparation for Christmas Day– the celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. However we are all trained to think of Advent as the appetizer before the main course– a season to whet our appetites for Christmas. And that’s not really our fault. Christmas has been marketed to us as a completely different cultural celebration for our entire lives. We have been manipulated into thinking about it in exactly the same way people contemplating marriage have been taught that diamonds last forever. They don’t. And we don’t have to reject that other Christmas– the one that must have awe-inspiring lights, a perfectly conical tree that is pre-lit with LEDs that are programmable in five different color patterns, and stockings hung by the chimney with care. I love that Christmas as much as you do. And I love running around my home decorating, staying up too late, and scheming about how I can improve over last year’s decorations. AND… I also love that God is so near to us as to choose to live within us. So why wouldn’t I celebrate both Christmases without having to toss out either one?

I prepare for both holidays– they just have different preparation. For cultural Christmas, I decorate the house with those little Christmas village things my dad gave me when my folks downsized to a condo. I bake, go to parties, hang up lights, and cajole the family into helping me hang up red and silver balls on the tree.

For the other holiday, the one where we celebrate Christ coming into the world, I prepare differently because there are no decorations for that. It’s kind of the opposite, like what you do before decorating. You put away the harvest wreath and the pumpkins and gourds, and you clean, putting things in order in preparation for what is to come.

During Advent, we prepare for the arrival of the messiah, or ready ourselves to receive the Christ consciousness into our hearts by doing the same things. We put our hearts in order, and we do the things we say we will do in our baptismal covenant– renounce evil and other distractions and turn our attention back to God, expectantly awaiting the “Lord whom we seek [who] will suddenly come to the temple.” (Mal. 3:1). We ARE that temple! And who can endure the day of his coming? We can– because Christ has promised us never to let go of our hands in the middle of the street: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20).

The days between now and the conclusion of Advent aren’t that many. Soak them in and savor this time because each one is a gift: the raw materials with which you can leave a legacy of memories for someone else. Whether it’s the cultural time leading up to secular Christmas with silly songs, lots of cookies and ugly sweaters, or it’s that special time where we put away the things that we don’t need in the season of anticipation of the coming of Christ consciousness into our own hearts– Advent; you can have both. But don’t confuse one with the other, because this is where we live and how we must live: one foot in this world and the other in the kingdom of God.