Most of you know that I am married, in part because I use two last names and in part because I wear a traditional wedding ring on my left hand, and also in part because I have spoken to you about Jonathan, my spouse, at some point.
Jonathan is an English teacher, teaching 7th and 8th graders over at Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Junior High on the Eastern side of Davis. He has been teaching English for as long as I have known him, and even a few years before that. As a self-proclaimed word nerd, it surprised no one in my life when I chose him as a partner.
One of the things that is most excellent about Jonathan is his curiosity about the work that I do, and his willingness to take part in some of it, including, but not limited to, talking out my sermons with me when I’m in the brainstorming spitballing wondering stage.
I can’t cut corners when talking with Jonathan about the assigned texts for the week. He does not have a graduate theological education nor a pastor’s library from which to draw; in addition to his degrees in English, History, and even a minor in Religious Studies, his Jewish upbringing in the Christian hegemony of the United States has made him a thoughtful, and good, and moral person, and so his collaboration is a treasure.
As he is my beloved, I could spend a long time telling you about him, but you are perhaps wondering what he has to do with you, on this second Sunday in Lent. Well, I’ll tell you. But first, I’ll tell you about the Bible.
As progressive protestants, our relationship with scripture is so rich, because we are not limited by an allegedly literal reading of the Bible nor by a top-down hard-line “this is what the Bible says” approach from our preachers and teachers. We are free to read the Bible for the complex collection of literature that it is, from generations of God’s people throughout their known world.
Our scripture has histories, and poetry, and apocalyptic literature, and interpersonal correspondence, and narratives, and wisdom, and prophecy. The people of God have been theologizing their experience for millenia, and that’s reflected in the dozens of centuries of events chronicled in the Bible.
The people who compiled our lectionary had a lot to work with, and I do not envy them their task. This week, they gave us such an interesting collection of texts, full of different ways to imagine God. What a treat! This week, Jonathan’s English teacher chops got to shine, because on top of talking theology and history, we’re talking about imagery and metaphor.
Think back to your last English class, and remember those units in figurative language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable” and imagery is defined as “visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.”
If you’d be so kind as to pick up your bulletin—or, if you’re with us online, please click over to that window—and review the pages with the scripture printed on them. I want you to skim and then please shout out—or type in the chat—any figurative language that you encounter. This is the kind of audience participation feared by congregations and middle school classrooms alike!
[The congregation begins to shout out answers]
Excellent work, everyone. So many participation points were scored for today.
Why did I have you do this? Oh, several reasons. For one, I like causing a ruckus. Two, I like tricking people into exegesis.
What’s exegesis, you may ask! It comes from Greek words that mean “to lead out of” and it is our fancy word for the critical interpretation of scripture. It’s the act of reading scripture and extracting meaning. There are books and books of exegesis done by other people that you can read, and you can also sit down with your Bible and scribble in the margins and wonder about what it says, whenever you like.
If our scripture did not contain figurative language like these phrases we have just identified, and was simply a list of literal and declarative sentences about God, it would be a lot shorter and a lot less interesting. So, the main thing our exegesis has taught us is that there is more to the stories in our scripture than meets the eye.
We are in the second week of the season of Lent, the 40 days leading to Easter. Last week, Ernie led us through Jesus’ 40 days of temptation in the desert, which recall the Israelites 40 years of wandering, which recall the Great Flood’s 40 days of deluge. Scripture is full of self-referential instances like this, reminding us of the connection between all these characters in God’s story, including us.
In our scripture during this season, we follow Jesus on his journey in public ministry, ultimately leading to his arrest and execution. This week, we read a terse exchange with some religious leaders. They tell Jesus to leave town, because Herod is trying to kill him.
This is interesting, because more typically in our lectionary, we read stories that set the Pharisees against Jesus, arguing with him about any number of things. This instance, though, seems like perhaps they are more aligned than that, giving him a heads up that he is in danger. It’s also possible that they are simply trying to get Jesus out of the way.
Jesus replies by insulting Herod and them. He starts his reply by saying, “Go and tell that fox for me,” insinuating that they are in close contact with Herod, enough that they could pass along a message. As religious leaders, they should not be cozying up to the Roman occupying forces, friendly with the empire.
By calling Herod a fox, Jesus makes his understanding of Herod’s penchant for deception quite clear. Foxes, metaphorically, tend to represent suspicion and craftiness. Someone who is sinister and cunning and practiced in dishonesty might be called “sly as a fox”. Jesus holds Herod in fairly low esteem.
His message is not simply to name-call, but to remind Herod that his authority is not ultimate. Jesus answers to one more powerful than Herod, or Caesar, or any earthly leader. And because he is loyal to no God but God, he has work to do in the world, and Herod will not get in the way of that work.
There are wounds to heal and demons to cast out and that ministry cannot be waylaid by the likes of Herod. Jesus does not cower in the face of Herod’s threat [1]. His primary concern is continuing to bring forth the kindom of God, even though that puts him in grave danger. We who know the whole story know just how much danger Jesus will be in.
Jesus continues his figurative language journey by exclaiming, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Inasmuch as this is a reprimand, I don’t want us to lose sight of the idea that God desires to hold us close, keeping us together and free from harm. The image of a hen gathering her chicks is quaint, but the imagery is especially rich when we recall the idiom “a fox in the henhouse” points toward the danger of trusting someone with questionable intentions.
With Herod the fox prowling God’s proverbial henhouse, we are left to wonder:
Who has our interests at heart? To whose authority should we submit?
Is it Herod? Caesar? Empire?
Or is it Jesus? The God who loves us? One another?
One of the reasons that we are gathered here this morning is because we need help answering this question. If it were clear to us, we could go about our lives with much less to-do around confessing and repenting and praying and learning and growing. But as it stands, as we repeat in our liturgy week after week, we have failed to love our neighbor as ourselves, and so we gather to worship the God who created us and who loves us dearly—just as a hen gathers her brood, so our God holds us close.
Meanwhile, wars rage as empires grasp for power. We are lured in so many directions, by so many foxes who would have us believe that they know what is best for us. Wouldn’t we like to make some money, gain some influence, live a life of leisure! But by submitting to the powers and principalities of this world—the imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy—we deny the authority of God.
At the start of this service, we said aloud the decalogue, the ten commandments. We began, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me. You shall not make for yourself any idol. You shall not invoke with malice the Name of the Lord your God.”
Martin Luther is famous for his theological claim that we are all simultaneously saints and sinners, and so just as we receive these commandments, ask God for mercy, and confess the sin that so easily entangles, we are beloved.
Every day, we choose the idolatry of individualism and power over the collective liberation freely given to us by the God of grace. But it is God who brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and it is God who liberates us from the power of sin and death. It is not by our own power that we are free, not by our own power that we are healed. And it is not by any earthly power, either.
With these truths, we cannot devote ourselves to powers other than God. We cannot cause harm to one another in the name of God. We cannot fight wars in the name of God. We cannot legislate away human rights in the name of God.
In this season of Lent, we are invited to ritually reimagine our relationship with God. We pick up spiritual practices that reconnect us with God’s presence, and we throw off everything that hinders.
You may have, at some time, done some type of fasting as part of your Lenten discipline, abstaining from a food or drink that you considered a vice. If your relationship to those substances is hindering right relationship with God and with your siblings in Christ, then by all means, leave it behind.
But the invitation to a holy Lent runs deeper than our diets. Could we fast from consumerism? Could we fast from perfectionism? Could we fast from overwork? Could we fast from self-loathing? Could we fast from prejudice? Could we fast from idolatry?
Jesus flouts the authority that Herod so desperately wants to exert, and returns to the fundamentals of his ministry. He has healing to do. In this season of Lent, I invite your pursuit of Christ-like-ness to include this same disregard for the fox in the henhouse. We have healing to do. Amen.
Hoping for Fish and Fishing for Hope
If you have not been to seminary, you may not know that they teach us a lot of different things. We learn about scripture, tradition, and church history, of course. And we learn how to properly set the communion table, and how to not drop a baby during a baptism, and how to read Greek or Hebrew, and how to provide a non-anxious presence during a tense vestry meeting.
It differs, of course, by denomination, but I spent two years in the classroom in Berkeley, including a summer as a hospital chaplaincy intern, followed by a year-long practical internship in Colorado followed by a final year back in the classroom in Berkeley. I learned to preach and teach and pray with the people of God, entrusted to me as their pastor.
They did not, at any point, teach me to fish. And yet, here I am, about to interpret a story about fishing.
In our Gospel story this morning, Jesus is at the lake, doing what he was known for doing—proclaiming the good news, that the reign of God had come near. Teaching people that they were beloved, and that as God’s beloved, they had responsibilities to one another. If the entirety of our scripture is any indication, he was probably doing this via extended metaphors and cryptic parables. On this particular morning, he was also confusing some fisherman.
Simon, as well as his fishing comrades, the brothers James and John, have been fishing all night and have come up short. They, and presumably others, have been on the lake for hours, doing the grueling and unglamorous work of catching fish for their families and their neighbors.
The story that many of the fishermen on this lake are telling themselves, each other, and probably others, is that there is no hope. There are no fish. “We have worked all night long and have caught nothing.” They’re cleaning their nets, they’re packing up, they’re going home.
And Simon is not naive, he knows what a night of complete loss means for his family. He is perhaps trying to recall how much food was left in the house, how many coins stashed away. Thinking of alternate strategies for the next night of fishing. Should they try a different part of the lake? Should they try a different net? Should they try a different time? How can they adapt? What if they fail?
But Jesus interrupts that distress and says “put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon explains the reality of the situation, but then says “Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.” Simon may be lacking in riches, and in the current moment, decidedly lacking in fish. But Simon has hope. When Jesus instructs him to keep trying, Simon could have said, “there are no fish. And if we try again we will have to clean our nets all over again, and my already-sore back will be aching, and we’ll be even later getting home, and we will still not have any fish.” This would not have been unreasonable, frankly. It is simpler to cut your losses and go home.
But last week, Pamela told us that the Apostle Paul told us that faith, hope, and love abide—notice that “cynicism” is not on that list, nor is “giving up” or “giving in”. Packing up your toys and getting out of the sandbox is not generally a fruit of the Spirit.
It is so much easier to be pessimistic about our world. What’s really difficult, what’s really contrarian, is pushing ourselves to hope for what is possible.
I imagine Simon taking a deep breath, pushing back the nay-saying voices in his boat and even in his own heart, and casting that net into the water one more time.
I imagine the awkward silence, as they all wait for something to happen. So far, in the Gospel According to Luke, there are stories and rumors spreading about who Jesus is and what he says and does. He has been teaching in synagogues and being “praised by everyone” it says in chapter 4. He has also been unceremoniously run out of town for daring to proclaim that he is the embodiment of the promises of God. He has also cast demons out of people possessed, and healed hordes of weary people. It is with this reputation that Jesus says, “let down your nets”.
The story doesn’t say how long the nets were in the water, but at some point they were teeming with fish, so much so that they could hardly carry the weight. Simon is afraid, as he cannot comprehend how this is possible. But he doesn’t throw up his hands and say “where were those fish three hours ago?” He falls to the ground at Jesus’ feet and claims that he is too sinful to deserve such a miracle. Jesus is, as we know, in the business of grace and abundance, and so this net full of fish is merely the beginning.
Simon, John, and James bring their boats to shore and join with Jesus on the way. That’s it. That’s how these lowly fishermen become part of the greatest story ever told. They have hope for their future, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. So they change their lives in order to be a part of the future they hope for.
You have not been told by Jesus to continue fishing when there are no fish. But you have been told by Jesus to love your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And you have been told to do that when you are heartbroken, and soul-weary, and your mind is numb and your strength is failing. And when you scarcely love yourself, let alone your neighbor. You have been invited and commanded by the God who is and who was and who is to come, to trust in the truth of your belovedness and your worthiness.
We have all been given this commandment, and we have all received this invitation. And we are all languishing. We are approaching the third March of this pandemic, during which we have suffered to differing degrees but we have all suffered. We are living in a country that seems to be holding on by a thread.
This may feel like absolutely the incorrect time for your preacher to insist upon hope. “Take heart!” I say. You roll your eyes. But hope is a discipline. I first heard that axiom from one of my personal heroes, Mariame Kaba, a Black muslim woman, who is a prison-industrial-complex abolitionist. She has seen the worst of our inhumanity in her decades of work, and yet she continues every day, with hope. And Saint Pauli Murray, a trailblazing Black and indigenous Episcopal priest, wrote that “hope is a song in a weary throat.”
We are called to hope, even and especially when it seems impossible. We are called to build God’s beloved community together out of hope and truth and trust and whatever else we’ve got lying around.
One of the ways that we can and must work toward a better future together is being honest about our collective past. It’s likely that this week in the news you’ve encountered something about anti-semitism and something about antiblackness. That’s actually probably true every week.
The previous week included Holocaust Remembrance Day, on which a school board in Tennessee decided to ban Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel detailing the events of the Shoah for a middle-grade audience. I own a copy of both volumes of Art Speigelman’s masterpiece, I read them in high school, and they are crucial to our children’s understanding of the horrors of antisemitism in a format appropriate for their cognitive and emotional development. Book banning is always a travesty and is always fascist.
Don’t get me wrong, there are books that I don’t think should have been published, because they contain dangerous lies and enrich dangerous liars by their sales, but they are free to be published alongside the truth. And we should ignore those books, and instead pick up books like Maus, that tell the truths we find hard to read. When we do that, we keep our history alive, even when it hurts.
We teach our children and ourselves about what was done in the name of power and greed and hatred and bigotry, and we do everything in our own power to prevent it from happening again. We have to understand the harsh realities of our history and apply that understanding to modern problems. And we have to do that alongside our hope for a world in which those realities are seen as unrepeatable atrocities.
Because we have not done that, we have raised a generation who denies the Holocaust and who disregards how antisemitism still runs rampant in our world. And that generation is raising another who holds even more firmly to those dangerous lies, and uses that unsound framework to make sense of the rest of the world.
This is apparent this week because Whoopi Goldberg, in her role as a host of The View, claimed that the Holocaust was not about racism because Jewishness is not a race. And Whoopi, who is a Black woman, was suspended from the show. Meanwhile, her costars and hosts of the past, largely white women, have made other inaccurate and harmful claims—including racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, and other bigoted remarks—while facing little to no actual repercussions. Perhaps they’ve been “canceled” on twitter or something, but they’ve kept their jobs.
While Whoopi’s statement is factually inaccurate, her being singled out for consequences is also a problem. While it is true that people of all races can be Jewish, it is not true that Jews have not been racialized, and that the genocide perpetrated against them and others by Hitler was about their collective ethnicity more than it was about their religious beliefs. It was about creating a master race of people. Whoopi’s experience of race and racism as a Black woman in the 2020s is different from Jews in the 1940s. Both experiences are the result of white supremacy.
This nuance is hard to grapple with in our age of binary, black-and-white thinking and sound bytes for television shows like The View. It is important for us to know more than one sentence or one paragraph about the deadliest events in our world history, even though it is uncomfortable, and even though we feel generations or continents removed.
The legacy of the Shoah continues in antisemitic violence across the world. The legacy of genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America and against enslaved Africans continues in racialized violence, poverty, and oppression throughout our nation’s laws and our social order.
In our liturgy, we have ritualized confession and absolution. Every week, we name aloud our sins to our God, and we are assured of our forgiveness. In order to move ourselves, our nation, and our world forward into the fullness of the future that is possible, we have to begin with confession of sin.
We also commit to humble repentance. Every week. We must learn about what harms we have perpetrated or what harms we have benefited from, and we must tell the truth about those harms, and we must commit to putting an end to those harms.
We must be repairers of the breach.
Tomorrow evening, Carole Hom and I will host an information session about our upcoming Sacred Ground circle. This will be an opportunity for anyone who is interested to learn more about the curriculum, our planned schedule, logistics, all that good stuff. You can read all kinds of information about what Sacred Ground is, via the links that have been in the announcements and newsletters lately. But what I am going to take this opportunity to explain this morning is why you should join us.
For the next few months, we’ll be meeting every three weeks, having done some assigned reading and watching on the history and legacy of whiteness, of the indigenous peoples of this land, of Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and what it means for our present and our future.
We will be open and vulnerable and honest with one another about what we didn’t know before, and about what we will do with what we are learning. We will support each other in the struggle to understand our complicity in these realities. Especially if you are a white person, for whom this curriculum is largely designed, you will be invited to reflect deeply on the nation you have inherited.
We will do this so that we can move forward together in hope. You may presume that we can move forward together without looking to the past. But without a firm grasp of the eras that have felt hopeless, we cannot begin to fathom the degree of disciplined hope we will need to practice. We could instead move forward with reckless optimism, presuming that the past is behind us and all that matters is our good intentions and positive vibes.
Conversely, you could be of the opinion that it’s too late. That the harms are so large that reparations are impossible. That there is no way forward.
Womanist theologians (Black feminists) say that God "makes a way out of no way". Following the example of some fishermen, we will trust that God is making a way. We will trust that the way forward is together, in hope. Amen.
Beloved Children of God
When I served my seminary internship in Littleton, Colorado in 2012 and 2013, part of our congregation’s ministry was in partnership with New Beginnings, the congregation inside the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. I got to know the chaplain there, at the time, an ELCA pastor named Emily. She was the perfect combination of deeply compassionate and tough as nails that I imagine is required for work in an environment as dehumanizing as prison.
One of the most useful things I learned from her was that, in pastoral counseling and especially during conflict mediation, it was required to say “beloved child of God” alongside the name of any person you were talking about.
So if someone was sitting with her, telling her about a disagreement they’d had with someone, they’d have to say, “and then, Casey, beloved child God, said” and go on with the story. You can imagine that, in the heat of the moment, or with the editorializing we might do as we recall a situation, this is difficult to do. And that there are perhaps other names we might want to attach to the people we disagree with.
I have tried to adopt this practice into my own life, whenever I am saying unkind things about someone who has harmed me or someone that I love. It is not meant to erase their harm or excuse their harm, but to remind me that they, too, are a beloved child of God, who receives grace upon grace from the one who created us and calls us good.
In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians this morning, I heard Chaplain Emily.
Paul writes that the same God who gave us life and who gave us every good and perfect gift that comes along with that, gave life and gifts to everyone else. That the people in the community with whom we have disagreements, conflicts, and otherwise strained relationships, are also beloved children of God, with a variety of spiritual gifts that differ from ours.
I see the church at Corinth squirming in their seats, grumbling as the letter is read aloud, perhaps not for the first time, as they struggle to live together in love.
The church at Corinth is a specific group of people from a specific time and place in history, but in this instance, stands in for all of us.
Professor Lincoln E. Galloway writes that “This was a difficult message to hear in a context of divisiveness that may have been based on philosophical differences, socioeconomic status, cultural markers, and competing constructions of the Christian faith.” [1]
It is possible that the different ideas they had about how to be church together were equally good and equally correct and equally faithful. But they had differing ideas, and they’d decided to define each other by those differing ideas, and harm each other with those differing ideas.
Nobody likes to be scolded into reconciling with their sibling. But we do need to acknowledge that sometimes, our differences are not changeable, we will have to agree to disagree, and that diversity of thought and opinion is necessary for our common life.
God is the source of diversity. This does not mean that our differences do not matter, or that we should minimize them in an “I don’t see color” sort of naivety. But rather, we should truly see each other for the beloved children of God that we each are, and collaborate to celebrate our diversity every chance we get.
It is perhaps cliché this morning, on the weekend we commemorate the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to mention the God-given nature of our differences.
Dr. King’s vocation was leading people whose differences had been weaponized against them into the joy of equity and freedom in their belovedness.
Dr. King worked tirelessly to access voting rights for Black Americans, and for the fair wages and protections of labor unions, for the reality of his children to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
His dream was not for his children and their children to deny the color of their skin or the history they carried in their bodies, but for that to be a cause for celebration, not oppression. That we might regard each other as siblings, and build a common life together out of joy and abundance, not scarcity and fear.
In the Gospel According to John, Jesus tells us that he came into the world so that we might have life, and have it abundantly.
Professor Elisabeth Johnson writes that “abundant life does not mean a life of ease, comfort, and luxury or an absence of sorrow and suffering. But it does mean that in Jesus we have an abundant, extravagant source of grace to sustain us, grace that is more than sufficient to provide where we fall short and to give us joy even amid sorrow and struggle. Abundant life means that in Christ we are joined to the source of true life, life that is rich and full and eternal, life that neither sorrow, nor suffering, nor death itself can destroy.” [2]
Our Gospel story this morning is about that abundance. Jesus performs the first of many miracles, turning water into wine at a wedding. The physics, the chemistry, the exact “how” of the situation is unknown to us, so we’ll focus on the “why”.
Why does Jesus—after telling his mother that this was not the time—instruct the stewards to fill the ablution jugs with water, and then to draw that water—somehow, now wine—and serve it for the wedding guests’ delight. Does this wine fundamentally alter the guests’ lives? Contribute to their righteousness? Enact justice? Not this miracle, not yet.
The first place the adult Jesus reveals himself to be a worker of wonders, he does so in service of joy. He does so in order to allow a celebration to carry on into the wee hours of the morning. He contributes to more dancing, and more laughing, more sharing of stories, more healing of broken spirits, and more kinship.
Yes, perhaps, in the grand scheme of God’s earth, a wedding ceremony running short of wine is not an emergency. But it is a matter of life.
You probably expected me to say a matter of life and death, because that is the turn of phrase that is common. But in this situation, a wedding—whose, we do not know—is, like every wedding ought to be, a celebration of abundant life.
These people, through their experience of abundant joy, have grown closer to one another and closer to God. Abundant life is about more than surviving, but thriving. It’s about knowing and being known. It is to be so connected to God, to have such an intimate relationship with our Creator, that the giving and receiving never stops. This abundant life is represented by the joy of fine wine at a wedding. [2]
Before we take this image too far, I want to be clear that I do not mean that God insists we must consume a substance to have abundant life.
Alcohol is not a prerequisite for joy, and in many cases, it stands between us and the life God has called us to. In certain circumstances, drunkenness and levity and frivolity can be a source of fun and enjoyment for some people, but very easily, it can be dangerous.
It’s unfortunate that the story here involves alcohol, because that makes it just one degree harder to understand the real miracle. The real miracle is not six jugs of wine that nobody had to pay for.
The miracle is that it is one of God’s priorities that we experience joy together.
This is one of the first ways that God reveals Godself to us through Jesus. This is not a show of power and might, it is not a physical healing, it is not a political change, it is a moment simply of joy.
I wonder if you can remember a recent instance where you felt the presence of God in a moment of joy. These can be small moments, or significant occasions, but either way they connect us to each other and to God. Especially when we can much more easily recount recent instances of frustration, or fear, or grief. And perhaps we struggle to allow ourselves to feel joy, because we are so weighed down by everything else.
This may be going a little rogue in a sermon, but I am going to read you a poem. It is one of my favorites by one of my favorite poets, and when I started writing about joy I realized it was just the thing. It’s called “Don’t Hesitate” and it’s by Mary Oliver.
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Joy is not made to be a crumb, dear ones. Mary Oliver understood this, and Jesus certainly understood this. Jesus will perform many more miracles during his life, and we will read about those in the coming weeks and months. He will go on to restore sight to the blind, to liberate the captive, to let the oppressed go free. He will restore people to their communities. He will show us how to open our doors and lengthen our tables.
But first, very first, before we get to all of that, he shows us what it’s all for. What is it that people cannot see? What is it that people are being excluded from experiencing? What is the abundant life that is possible, when we invite everyone in? Connection is for everyone. Kinship is for everyone. Community is for everyone. Healing is for everyone.
We know this because Jesus has shown us. Jesus has revealed himself to be about the work of transformation—both literal and figurative. His life and ministry usher in a new era, where justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Where we are all called beloved. Where we are all welcome at the table. Where we all know the truth, and the truth sets us free.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
—
[1] Lincoln E. Galloway, “Second Sunday After the Epiphany” in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: Year C, 62-66.