If you think about it, the Gospels don’t tell us nearly as much about the disciples as they seem to.

They’re sort of like an ice cream store with twelve different kinds of vanilla – well, eleven, anyway.

The most important thing about them is that they come to believe. 

The second most important thing is that they eventually come to embody the Church, quite literally. 

Their bodies are the first ones there. 

Of course, earlier, they had been the first followers of Jesus, and again: this is literally true.  They literally follow him. 

But in story after story, it’s clear that they themselves don’t understand a lot of what they’re witnessing. 

For miracle after miracle, healing after healing, feeding after feeding, even exorcism after exorcism, they have front row seats. 

They know it matters to be there and don’t want to be anywhere else. 

They get that this matters, even if they’re not sure how. 

What the gospels never much try explain is how any of it matters to them, personally, or the difference that it makes, although there are a few exceptions.

After some spectacular cowardice, Peter will become much braver. 

After some spectacular skepticism, Thomas will become far more certain about the resurrection. 

All along, the women prove far more grounded, and yet, in loving Jesus, they are particularly emboldened, steeled to remain with him in his dying and to tend to his body after his death, even at great risk. 

But aside from that, Scripture never tells us about more specific changes—how being with Jesus made James more forgiving, or Matthew more generous, or Philip more patient. 

In a strange way, for them, joining Jesus both changes everything and, well, nothing in particular. 

At least: nothing someone would go on to record for posterity.

Our Scripture this morning is, of course, recorded for posterity. 

But it is striking that, here, too, to be with Jesus on the mountaintop both changes everything and, well, nothing in particular. 

So, in the “changes everything” column, we have the appearance of Elijah and Moses, the uncloaking of Jesus in a “flashing, lightning white” (Ruden), the voice of God coming out of a cloud. 

In the “nothing particularly changes” column, we have the disciples’ fear and astonishment. 

Matthew and Mark’s versions of the story include Jesus explicitly telling Peter, James and John not to tell what they have seen, which is a detail Luke does not even bother to mention because, well, of course they won’t. 

And this is where he’s telling us something very important.   

Because what will keep this secret safe? 

It isn’t safe because they’re quiet. 

It’s safe because even now, with all they’ve seen, they are not yet truly changed. 

There’s nothing really different about them…some way in which can’t help but radiate what they now know, even if they make sure not to breathe a word of it. 

Faith isn’t who we are, or what we have, even in the wake of the most dazzling revelation.

It’s in what we learn, “however slowly, partially, imperfectly” as we find some freedom from the worship of anything less than God.[1] 

And it is relentlessly specific. 

We see it in the adult children who learn to become more patient with their aging parents, or the perfectionist who learns to become more patient with herself. 

We see it as we learn a version of forgiveness that is not just some version of pretending to forget, but about discerning the ways in which renewed relationship might yet be possible. 

We see it as we learn to give less attention to superficial concerns, and superficial people, and more to what’s deeper and to the people who are ready to go there with us. 

These are not new commitments that life particularly demands us to declare out loud—that’s not the point.

The point is that we know when someone is living in a new way – when the prevailing wind inside them has shifted, somehow, and they’re intent on a new course. 

Because you cannot keep the secret of a changed heart. 

You cannot keep the secret of a changed mind. 

You cannot keep the secret of a life that has finally been changed by Jesus. 

By contrast, even to be a disciple is not that hard, relatively speaking. 

Front row tickets to the miracles might not be as hard to come by as we might think.

We might even hear the voice of God on a mountaintop.  

But to be changed, however slowly, partially, or imperfectly, may be far more basic and even more astonishing. 

Our Scripture this morning offers a final story of epiphany, concluding a season that began with the magi following the star to Bethlehem, and which now ends, all these weeks later, with this story of Jesus’ transfiguration. 

But it leaves us consider how he might be calling us to new life in him, radiant in our generosity, dazzling in our kindness, and wondrous in our capacity to give and to love. 

May any such life turn out to be the worst kept secret in the world. 

Amen.

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[1] See Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed, 21.

Faith in our time is often on the run from negativity, and it’s not hard to understand why.

We want faith to represent an alternative to all that, well aware that we have enough it in other parts of our lives. 

What we don’t have enough of is hope.

And so we come to church, which draws us in, describing a God who created us and names us good, and whose knowledge of us goes so deeply that even our worst attributes don’t render us summarily unlovable.

This is a place that believes we are each loved unconditionally. 

The rest of the world is not like that. 

I saw a bumper sticker once that said: Jesus loves you. The rest of us think you’re a jerk.  (Actually, it used a stronger word.)

Sometimes, that seems almost true. 

If so, no wonder that we come to church, hoping that the one who still loves us will be right here, waiting. 

That’s so important. 

But it also means that the church can stumble a bit when it tries to do more than just welcome and reassure us. 

It’s hard to tell people you love them and then shift gears to focus on sin.

Usually, we don’t try. 

We offer a few broad strokes during the Prayer of Confession, then move on as quickly as possible. 

And yet the spiritual life has always recognized that the ongoing task of turning toward the good cannot be separated from the ongoing task of turning away from the bad—and furthermore, that often, the bad has an allure that makes turning away from it a genuine decision, and not a particularly easy one, or a one-time choice. 

We should talk about that more than we do. 

And this is why I value Ash Wednesday—this night when we try to name some of the hardness of our lives, and of the human condition, in general. 

Life is not easy.  A lot comes with it. 

So much of what we look to put our hopes in turns to ash.

The science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft once wrote a story about a couple that meets a genie, who offers them wishes, as genies in stories always do. 

The couple asks for eternal life, and they get their wish. 

Unfortunately, they forget to ask for eternal youth, and so their wish turns out to be a curse, condemning them to an existence in which they get older and older and older, without even the hope of an eventual end to their suffering. 

So much of what we look to put our hopes in turns to ash.

Along those lines, not for nothing do the ashes that we use tonight come from the remains of last year’s palms from Palm Sunday.

They are the somber residue of what’s left, one year later, from what is always one of the happiest days in the church calendar.

They remind us that crowds that cheered Jesus when they thought he had come to overthrow Rome were the same ones that came out just a few days later to celebrate his crucifixion.

They tell us that a cozy religion that merely confirms our preferences and prejudices can’t save us. 

Only an open and honest heart, willing to listen and learn, can do that. 

Only a conscience that cuts us to the quick can do that. 

Only a sense of purpose that knows we don’t have forever to get it right, and that today matters because tomorrow is not a given can do that. 

Only a life in God can do that.  

To a certain eye, this is a weird and gloomy thing to come do at church. 

But its meaning is that when everything else and everyone else falls away, the love of God in Christ Jesus will not fall away. 

Even in times when we manage to burn down our entire life, whether on purpose or out of sheer carelessness;

Even as the earthly governments or the material resources or the physical health we put our faith in seem to have suddenly evaporated;  

Even when, as Yeats once imagined, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”;

Even then, even now, the love of God in Christ Jesus will not fall away.

The point is not that, tonight, we wear ashes. 

The point is that, tonight, even the ashes must ultimately testify to the power of God. 

Ashes remind us of what endures and what can’t, and they call us to turn toward the good and away from the bad.

God’s love is a love cuts through our deepest illusions, meets our deepest longing, and offers us new life. 

And in that, there can only be hope. 

Amen. 

We’ll begin this morning with two brief suggestions of what it is to be “complete,” one explicitly about love and the other, not. 

We’ll start with the one about love.  

It’s from the Tom Cruise movie, “Jerry Maguire.”

Any “Jerry Maguire” fans out there? 

If you are one, you already know where I’m heading.  

Jerry Maguire is a rom-com, really more rom than com, about a high level sports agent who somehow gets a vision of the shallowness of it all and then, not on purpose, abruptly blows up his whole life.  

He writes a memo that ends up getting himself fired.  

He’s abandoned by all his clients except one—inevitably, perhaps, the most frustrating and time-consuming one.

He’s summarily dumped by his girlfriend.  

The only one who is willing to join him on this steep, seemingly relentless downward spiral is an assistant in the office to whom he’s never really spoken before.   

It soon becomes clear that, for her, this is a real leap of faith, and risky in a way that Jerry’s situation may not be, however bad in the short-term it may seem.  

But her faith turns out to be well-placed. 

Jerry slowly grows as the commitments of his new life begin to claim him—and he falls in love with the assistant, named Audrey.  

At one point, they are riding in an elevator together, and he notices a deaf couple speaking in sign language, certainly unaware that he can understand their signing.  

“Oh,” he observes, sort of moved, “He just told her, ‘You complete me.’”   

Well, of course, when that line comes back at the end of the movie, and Jerry looks at Audrey and says it to her, you’re not surprised, but you’re still happy.  

Very clearly, this is what their life together has done.  

So that’s one way to talk about being complete. 

More quickly, now there is a second anecdote about being complete that bears mention.  

When I was in college, one of my favorite professors had a side gig as an editor of a multi-year project – The Complete Papers of James Boswell, the great 18^thcentury British writer.  

The project started in 1949. From what I can tell, it’s still going strong.  Boswell turns out to have had a whole lot of papers.  

In fact, there are so many papers that my professor and his team were proud just to publish at long last a comprehensive list, a complete catalogue of all the papers that were out there, sitting in one collection or another, both the ones they’d gotten to and the ones that were still to go.  

They deserved to be proud.  Just that step had taken many years, and they did it. 

In fact, according to my professor, they were having a small party to celebrate when they heard the mail come through the slot in their office door.

Party or no party, someone always goes over and checks, right? 

Well, that happened…and guess what?  

It turns out that there was news. 

Someone had written to tell them that they’d located a bunch of new, heretofore unknown letters.  

That “complete” catalogue they were finally celebrating? 

It was already wrong.  

On earth, there’s no such thing as “complete.”

Now, I realize that this is a long introduction to Paul, but the point is that he wants us to see that, like it or not, we are already wading in these waters. 

“Love will never come to an end,” he says.  

It sounds very “Jerry Maguire” of him.  

But wait for it.  

He continues, “Prophecies will cease; tongues of ecstasy will fall silent; knowledge will vanish.  For our knowledge and our prophecy alike are partial, and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes” (v. 8-10).

His idiom is churchy, but his point is much broader.  

What he means is that so many the things that seem so full now – so complete – so self-evident as to need no explanation or hesitation, may eventually turn out to be partial. 

For a while there was a play that ran in New York called, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.” 

I never saw the play, and neither did the Apostle Paul, but he would have agreed that perfection and completeness (as we understand them) can pass just that quickly.  

Jerry Maguire is surely right that, without others, our very selves are incomplete.  

And yet, Paul suggests, something more fully-fledged remains possible – something we can only find as we let finally go of our own selfish ways of giving and receiving love, and learn to participate in God’s love, which is infinitely more full…infinitely more inclusive and generous…than we may be able to see right now.  

In fact, it’s so full that any notion we may have of love right now, no matter how attractive, is like someone who thinks their junior prom date is meant to be their life partner. 

Any notion of love we might have right now is like someone trying to cut their own hair using the rearview mirror of their car. 

Any notion of love we might have right now is like that couple that refused to give their child a legal name until the child could talk and tell them her name for herself, and who came back 18 months later to announce that the name she had declared before the world was “Picabo.” 

Love like that is wonderful and quirky and adorable and ridiculous…and, thank heavens, it is only scratching the surface.  

It’s only a half-finished picture.  

Because for Paul, whatever fullness may look like to us right now, no matter how convincing its allure may be, God has so much more yet to show and share with us.  

Paul does not question that love as we know it now is already deeply fulfilling in many ways.  

But right off the bat, he’s skeptical about the ultimate worth of a love that is not surprising, that is not evolving, expanding or, frankly, challenging us.  

He believes that true love, a love that really reflects God’s presence, can’t help but do that.  

In this sense, love as Paul understands it isn’t about how someone else completes us or meets our every need. 

It’s about how true love, the love that comes from God, is full in ways that prompt us to become something new. 

True love doesn’t just fulfill us.  It expands us.  

It teaches us to rise to occasions we did not even see before. 

As has been observed: “To continue to give oneself in true regard for the other requires the development of the self also, so that there is more to give.”^[1]

It’s only as we finally begin to live in that way that we finally begin to understand.  

Love is the making of us, which is what I think Jerry Maguire actually means when he tells Audrey, “You complete me.” 

There’s nothing complete about it.  

There’s always more to be said, more to be done, more to be known, and all of it shared.

The minute you raise your glass, you’ll hear the mail come through the slot because God is like that.  

Paul’s promise is that, with God’s help, we’ll learn to love it. 

Amen.  

---

^[1] Enda McDonagh, The Gracing of Society, 39-40. 

The morning after the Super Bowl, several news outlets ran stories mentioning a particular nugget of wisdom from the Eagles’ Head Coach, Nick Sirianni, that seemed to speak to the moment:  “You can’t be great without the greatness of others.” 

In the obvious context of their big victory, it reflects the power of a whole team (and to what happens over a season), as opposed to the talent of a few superstars, however impressive that talent may be (especially in any one game).  

It also reminds us that a lot of our talk about greatness (or excellence) is fundamentally ill-conceived.  

With the example of the Eagles as compelling, living proof, Sirianni reminds us that greatness, correctly understood, shows us just how much we depend on one another, and that even in the moments when we most seem to shine and our personal contribution truly stands out, we should see very clearly that we also remain completely in debt. 

In light of all that it’s taken to get to that point, we look around and must surely notice that we are not standing alone at the top, but joining a circle.  

Greatness, it turns out, only makes sense when it is understood as something that happens between us. 

How that works remains somewhat mysterious, of course, and maybe it’s no accident that the early church came to imagine the mystery of God’s identity in a similarly circular image, as divine perichoresis, literally, an endless, joyful dance between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—each distinct from one another, and yet somehow also one in the dancing.  

Maybe that is why so many of our deepest experiences of transcendence are found as expressions of communion, and happen in community, when who we are takes shape in a holy dance with others (whose selves mysteriously bring out our own self, even as who we are calls forth those selves).  

Those who find it lonely at the top have either misread the map or scaled the wrong mountain.  

Strangely enough, one of the most memorable counter examples to Coach Sirianni I can think of was the head coach of the Eagles when I lived in Philly, Ray Rhodes.  

He was a talented coach, but his intensity glowered far more than it radiated.  It was said that he did not even enjoy winning, because for him even victory felt more akin to avoiding failure rather than achieving success.  

With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine how he would have described greatness, though it’s also really sad to say so.  

It seems like a curse to chase so hard after something without ever knowing what it was, or how close it might well have been all along.  

This is exactly what God wants to deliver us from, and we know that deliverance, in some way, whenever and wherever a truly nurturing love patiently heals us.  

Or as Coach Sirianni might remind us, whenever we look around at one another and say, simultaneously, “I couldn’t have done it without you,” and the dance continues. 

See you in church,

Early in our marriage, Liz and I had one of our first heated disagreements.  

I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was after dinner in our ground floor apartment in Brooklyn and sometime in the fall. 

Actually, I remember one more thing.  

It’s what I really remember about the disagreement: how it ended.  

I was winding down from my closing argument. 

(In case you were wondering, arguing with me can be a little bit like watching an old episode of “Matlock,” about which, you know, I realize not everybody likes “Matlock,” so rest assured: I’m not proud of it. But I get on a roll sort of like that. I speechify sort of like that. I try to bring on home sort of like that.)

Anyway, I concluded with my particular air of aggrieved principle.  

Liz was totally silent. 

I thought I had won.  

Instead, she smiled.  

Now I know that this is deadly. 

With Liz this is when you ought to try to run if you still can.  

However, I did not know that then.  

So, she smiled, looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t know whom you’re actually having this argument with in your own mind, but it isn’t me.”

It took me about a nanosecond to realize that she was absolutely right.

It was an early lesson and remains an ongoing reminder that we can love and care for one another deeply, and yet still, the shadow of our own projections—and especially, of old scripts and prior formative experiences—can rise up without warning yet again to darken the space between us.  

The writer bell hooks, in her own book on love, observes, “the partner I left after many years first courted me with a love poem.  He had always been emotionally unavailable and not at all interested in love as either a topic for discussion or a daily life practice, but he was absolutely confident that he had something meaningful to say on the subject. I, on the other hand, thought all my grown up attempts to write love poems were mushy and pathetic.”^[1]

Who we are and who we’re not; who our beloved is and who they’re not; what love is and what it’s not; these things prove hard to work out. 

False confidence and easy sentimentality are never far away. 

This gets even harder if we decide we care, which of course, we should.  

Caring is holy work.  

James Keenan has argued that, when you get right down to it, mercy is our “willingness to enter into the chaos of another.”^[2]

I’d only add that part of what makes love so powerful is not only that, but surely also how it demands our willingness to wrestle with our own chaos. 

Love that seems only possible if and when the other person gets their act together is only a kind of half-love. 

It both receives and offers far less than it might, and finally, must.  

So where does this get us with Paul? 

Earlier this morning, I admitted that I can’t hear the middle part of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 without thinking about and cringing at something I’ve said or done quite recently.  

I’m not saying that to toot my own horn.  

I’m acknowledging that Paul’s words offer a mirror. 

In my case, though, it may not be a mirror, but more like a scalpel.  

As you’ve heard, it begins by affirming that “love is patient and kind,” but then it quickly slices away the things that Paul makes clear love never is. 

It’s a move that seems designed to cut out any temptation we might have to fall for our own ready excuses and self-justifications. 

“Love envies no one,” Paul writes, “is never boastful, never conceited, never rude; love is never selfish, never quick to take offense.  Love keeps no record of wrongs, takes no pleasure in the sins of others, but delights in the truth.” (v. 4-6)

We might pick at his list.  

If we do, the self-justifications roar back quickly.  

For one thing, it doesn’t sound like anyone I know well, at all. 

Honestly, how possible could love like this be? 

Speaking only for myself, I can only offer others the love I have and the person I am. 

As for any or all of these things that he says I’m never supposed to be, well…hmm…. 

Love that is never touchy or scorekeeping or competitive isn’t necessarily what I’ve got to offer. 

There are days when the tired, grouchy, interrupting, sarcastic me who eats standing up in the kitchen is the only one I’ve got. 

However it is that we got here, that’s the reality my chaos.  

It’s why I need all the genuine love I can find to help me manage it.  

Yet we misunderstand Paul if we hear him saying that, if we can just manage to drum these tendencies out of ourselves, the part that remains will be nothing but unadulterated love – 99% pure, like a bar of Ivory soap. 

If only.  

He knows us too well for that.  

He knows himself too well for that. 

His view is that if God is in the managing, then we can begin to manage it, nevertheless.   

Love isn’t an impossible dream.  

His more immediate point is that to do so, to love as the world so desperately needs, requires constant effort. 

If you spend any time with his letters, you see right away that Paul always understood the love of God to be definitive and life-changing.  

Even so, his understanding of being saved was more nuanced than we often acknowledge.  

As he saw it, to be saved was hardly a one-and-done sort of moment, even for a man who had been blinded by the light of Christ on the road to Damascus.  

Paul knew that, each in our own way, we need new kinds of saving every day—new guidance, new intervention, new formation and re-formation. 

He believed that it was this ongoing work of God that was making him who he was, which was a work in progress at best.    

For Paul, if this is true of the love God has for us, how much more true it must be of the love between us. 

In that vein, his list of nos and nevers is not the call perfection of a hopeless idealist. 

It’s a summons, again, to enter one another’s chaos, seeing that chaos for what it is, and one another for who we are. 

It’s saying we are all works in progress, for which, thanks be to God.  

In the face of that chaos, it names love as a commitment to keep finding and saving each other as best we can.

And it’s saying, above all, that when we do even that much, it is of God. 

It’s nothing less than a glimpse of the life to come, when everything and everyone will be fully their true selves, finally redeemed, once and for all.  

Love “never tires of support, never loses faith, never exhausts hope, never gives up.”^[3] (v.7)

Because in love, our drama and chaos, our projections and evasions, our endless nevers and not yets are answered, at last, by the always of God.  

Amen.  

---

^[1] bell hooks, All About Love, xxi. 

^[2] James Keenan, SJ, A History of Catholic Social Ethics, 22. 

^[3] The translation is from Anthony Thistleton, 1 Corinthians: A Shorter Exegetical & Pastoral Commentary, 217. 

Sermon: Reunited (And It Feels So Good) 1 Corinthians 13

So many people, in and outside of the church, seem to find their way to Paul’s famous words about love in his first letter to the Corinthians.  

I am sure I must have heard it proclaimed and preached on as a kid, but the first time I truly remember hearing it…the first time the words really made an impression…made a dent…was in the spring of my sophomore year in college, when a senior I knew read them aloud during a presentation.  

The presentation was not at all religious, or in any case, that’s not what I remember about it. 

I was with my best friend, and he remembers it just as vividly as I do.  

He doesn’t recall anything religious about it, either.  

In his case, this was a good thing because that would certainly not have spoken to him then.  

As for me, I remember going back to my room afterwards, finding my copy of the King James Bible (you couldn’t be an English major without one), then marking the passage with a bookmark. 

I can prove it.  

I still have that Bible.  In fact, I still have that bookmark.

In fact, I know I do because it’s been marking that same passage ever since—for thirty-five years this May.

Thirty-five years and counting.   

What’s worth trying to answer is why. 

And the answer to that unfolds in stages, which I hope you’ll follow with me over the next few weeks.   

If it inspires you to find your Bible and to dedicate a permanent bookmark to this particular passage, all I can say is: welcome aboard, fellow traveler. 

May it prove to be your ticket to a wonderful journey.  

Paul will get to that journey in due course.  

But before all that, his point is simply that, without love, no real journey is possible.

You may remember how he begins: “I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I have no love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (REB).

(Since his point is about “speaking,” it’s worth noting that by “tongues of men” here, Paul means “human” in general, and not “male,” restrictively. His point is true for anyone who speaks without love.) 

“I may have the gift of prophecy and the knowledge of every hidden truth,” he continues. “I may have faith enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing.”

“I may give all I possess to the needy, I may give my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I gain nothing by it.” 

For Paul, without love, even the most commendable activity ends up being little more than a false start.  

His idea of the sounding gong or the clanging cymbal is a good place to begin unpacking what he means.  

And it’s especially helpful for us, I think, because while our culture seems to speak constantly, and almost obsessively about love, if you listen to a lot of that talk, it seems like many of us have no idea what we’re talking about.  

When it comes to love, we’re practically surrounded by sounding gongs and clanging cymbals.  

Because: who teaches us how to love? 

Our families, sure, though of course, not always. 

Years ago, I knew a couple that had been together for many years.  

They reached an anniversary with a “zero” in it, and to their surprise, a woman from across the street whom they didn’t consider themselves close to knocked on their door with an enormous flower arrangement to celebrate their day.  

“You give me hope,” she explained.  “My parents were never very nice to one another or to any of us. The only happy couples I ever saw were on t.v. But you two make it look like it’s actually possible. Thank you for that.” 

She’s hardly alone.  

When I was a kid, I knew a lot of good role models, including my own parents. 

But when I started imagining the notion of having my own relationships someday, I felt like the songs on the radio gave more direct instructions on how things worked.  

I mean, I didn’t know what a breakup felt like, but I learned early on that when you were reunited it would “feel so good.”^[1]

I learned nothing was perfect, but that at the end of the day, “two out of three ain’t bad,” particularly if the other person was “hopelessly devoted to” me.  

I could go on.  

Not all the advice was bad, of course.  

There were reminders about telling someone you love them “just the way you are,” and warnings the Apostle Paul might have well understood about how “the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip sliding away,” (to quote another Paul).   

Maybe you remember those songs or maybe there were other ones that were especially important for you. 

Either way, the point is: most of those them had a lot more to say about desire than they did about love, right? 

Yet this would not have dissuaded the Apostle Paul, who understood that what’s true about romantic love might well extend to love of any other kind.  

He thought that there was a tremendous challenge in wading through our own misconceptions and through the hollowness of so much received wisdom about love.  

He heard those cymbals clanging constantly.  

In that spirit, one particularly apt reader has understood Paul’s words as a sound engineer might.

They write, “In acoustics or electronics ‘noise’ carries a technical meaning. It denotes the generating of sound or current that accompanies a transmitted signal but is not a part of it, but rather obscures it and partially drowns it out.”^[2]

What is the noise that obscures, or even partially drowns out the signal of love, wherever such a signal might originate? 

Paul would not have understood such a technological metaphor, but he would have understood the question – and he would have been very sure that when it came to a signal, he knew its original source.   

We will pick up his response next week.

But first he invites us to give thought to our own false starts and how we came to make them—each time when we believed we’d found a clear signal, only to discover it was distorted by noise.  

He knows that this happens.  

It had happened to him.  

The wonder was not the abundance of noise – that was inevitable.  

Rather, what amazed him was God’s faithful offer of the signal—that through all the things that love ultimately wasn’t and could never be, it was still possible to discover what love was and is.  

This is why we mark his words and hold them close across all the years.  

For all our missteps that lead us to chase after nothing, Paul wants us to know that there is still the possibility of a love that is not just something, but actually an invitation to everything.  

Thanks be to God.  

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^[1] I am pleased to report that all of the songs I allude to here are from 1978.  Apparently, this was a big year for me.  For the record, I was eight. So it began. 

^[2] Anthony G. Thistleton, 1 Corinthians: A Shorter Exegetical & Pastoral Commentary, 226. 

Dear Friends of Second Church,

I look forward to seeing you at church this Sunday, and then afterwards for our Annual Meeting, at which all members will be asked to vote on the 2025 Council and Deacons, as well as the budget.  

You’ll also hear from me, Barbara Z., and a few others about the state of the congregation, much of which will be celebratory.  

Do come.  It’s a particularly deflating comment on our prospects for vitality when people don’t.  

You may feel like we don’t need you for any number of reasons, or that it isn’t right to hazard an opinion when you don’t know all the facts. (It doesn’t take much to get you up to speed!)

Of course, thanks for your trust. But please don’t let it be the fig leaf covering a more fundamental indifference.

It is also true that a great deal of the love and dedication required to keep things running on Sundays, much less all the other days, remain largely invisible unless you particularly look for them.  

And it’s worth knowing a little bit about that.

Most people don’t see Jenny arriving no later that 7:45 to set up Children’s Chapel and the Nursery; Bob Willett turning on the coffee pot and preparing communion no later than 8; Alexander rehearsing soloists by 8:45; or the deacons looking for the bulletins and muscling the big flower arrangement into position by 9:30, just as the first little people for the Nursery are arriving.  

After church, there are choir rehearsals, counseling appointments, Council working groups meeting, shelter meals to prepare, and flowers to deliver; then later, setting the chapel up for Confirmation class, then breaking it down at 8 p.m. and resetting it for AA at 7 a.m. on Monday morning.  

And then another week begins.  

If you think about it, our life together is sustained by so many quiet acts of faith.  

Similarly, your presence and careful attention at the Annual Meeting are another such act, quiet perhaps (or not so much), but also utterly vital, as we join together as a congregation to decide what we hope to offer our community and the world in the coming year.  

Our neighbors may never see just what it takes for us to make God’s love for them real.

But we can’t do it any other way.

We need your questions as well as your commitment, and we know you will be eager to express your thanks for so much of what we accomplished in 2024…especially now that you may see it a little more clearly.

There’s a lot to share, and always a lot to learn.  

It will be good to have you there.  

See you in church

Back in the early 90s, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward did a movie together that I’ve always liked, called “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” 

They played an old married couple, which, of course, they were in real life and so had no trouble conjuring for a movie.   

But the story was set in the period just before and then during World War II, and the thing about this couple was that they communicated horribly.  

Mrs. Bridge longed for her husband to show a little tenderness or understanding.  

Mr. Bridge would be moved to bring home flowers, only to get irritated by something as soon as he got home and forget the flowers in the backseat of the car.  

Mrs. Bridge never got to see how her husband really felt. 

For a while, you get pretty blamey with Mr. Bridge, who shows love by taking care of things but not in any other way. 

But eventually, you see that there is blame to go around.  

Mrs. Bridge sort of overdoes it with talking and enthusing and keeping things light all the time, in part because her husband never will. 

But this takes its own toll.  

At one point, their son returns after joining the Army, but when he arrives, he’s sporting a sort of horrible little mustache he’s decided to grow and apparently hadn’t mentioned in his letters home.

Mrs. Bridge lives with it for a day or so, then marches up to his room with a big smile, wearing his army garrison cap.  

She salutes and makes a joke out of the mustache. 

Only a talent like Joanne Woodward could really convey this in its complexity, but the joke manages to mock her son’s enlistment, his mustache, and his manhood all at once, none of which she means to do, but which she also can’t undo, having done it.  

What we come to understand is that, much as the Bridges love one another, they cannot find a way say what is truly on their hearts, to speak of their feelings or needs, hopes or fears, what matters and what doesn’t, and so, when life brings its changes, be they large or small, they have no way of bringing them into their life together.  

Change can only make them more isolated and further adrift, turning them into more extreme – more desperate – versions of themselves.  

Scripture has its share of stories like this, too, of course, whether it’s the young Joseph and his brothers, King David and his first wife, Michal, or the two brothers at the end of the parable of the Prodigal Son.   

(The story of Ruth is a notable exception, where a young widow refuses to leave her mother-in-law, finding remarkable words to declare her love and loyalty…but it is an exception.)

Clearly, both testaments acknowledge that when change comes, not everyone has what it takes to rise to the occasion—to live with new uncertainty in the name of new possibilities…or new hope.  

There’s a hymn with the line, “new occasions teach new duties,” but as it turns out, that isn’t necessarily true for everyone.  

It wasn’t for Jesus’ old neighbors in Nazareth, as we’ve heard this morning.  

As Luke indicates, it starts out well.  

We don’t know how long Jesus has been away, or what kind of reputation his family had in the community.  

It seems possible that he arrives home like Mr. and Mrs. Bridge’s son, just out of basic training, proudly wearing his new uniform, carrying himself, shoulders back, with a new-found confidence that everyone in town is glad to see.  

We know they’ve heard something of what Jesus has been up to.  

The city of Capernaum is only about 40 miles from Nazareth: close enough for the headlines to travel in a few days, especially about a local boy preaching and teaching things to draw the attention of a city crowd.  

In any case, when he stands up in the synagogue and takes it on himself to do the reading, and then the preaching, they’re all ears…all smiles. 

They settle in, maybe hoping for something nice and safe and tailored just for a hometown crowd: “Here are 10 Life Lessons I Learned From Little League,” or “What ‘Honor Thy Father and Mother’ Means to Me,” or “Why I Left, Why I’m Back, and Why I’m Staying.”  

But his new mustache should have warned them.

They should have seen that something more was up. 

That they can’t is precisely why they need the message he is trying to offer them, but that’s almost beside the point.  

They aren’t prepared for the transformation he has undergone, and they aren’t able to hear his invitation to live differently, themselves.  

And so the homecoming quickly falls apart. 

The smiling congregation of neighbors and friends instantly transforms, all right, but in the worst possible way.  

They become a howling mob—the first, but certainly not the last that Jesus will encounter.  

They become the only thing that is possible for them to become: a more extreme, more desperate version of themselves.  

Because when it comes to God, there’s no room in their lives for anything unexpected, or beyond their control, or undeserved…no room for anything surprising or puzzling.^[1]

There’s no room for a difficult word, the kind that leaves you looking in the mirror for a while. 

Which means there’s no room for God’s grace, and ultimately, no way for them to bring God into their lives, much less into their life together.  

Mark’s version of the story (6:5) reports that Jesus “could do no miracle there.” 

The closing of their hearts and minds has closed that door.  

For us, of course, it is a cautionary tale.  

Because we all have blind spots and comfort zones. 

We all need the relief and refuge of home, a place to pause from the grind.  

That doesn’t make us bad; it makes us human. 

But Jesus wants us to seek a larger version of ourselves, and to push back against a smaller, meaner one.  

Jesus sees that the path to God is about opening our hearts and resisting the temptation to close them.  

And he knows it’s hard.  But he knows it’s good.  

And he promises that he will be there in the midst of it all, to sustain us.  

In a world that seems determined to drive us into more extreme, more desperate versions of ourselves, Jesus beckons us to seek another way and to find a greater self.  

He calls us to swallow our fear and to swallow our pride, and to reach for his hand. 

Amen.  

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^[1] The “unexpected, beyond our control, underserved” is part of how Dorothee Soelle describes grace. (See her Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology, 79.)

For a while back in the 70s, when people were first beginning to get serious about quitting smoking, there was a promising new therapy that tried to zig where others zagged.  

Most of the other approaches were about slow reduction. Learning to take longer between cigarettes.  Longer between puffs.  Cutting back in half-pack increments.  

Some of you may remember.  

Well, the approach I’m remembering didn’t bother with any of that.  

The key, they said, wasn’t slowly cutting back. 

The best way to quit smoking was actually to ramp it way way up—to smoke way more than ever—to light one cigarette off of another…walk around with your head in its own blue cloud for the entire day, become that person nobody wants to sit next to on a bus…all that…if that’s what it took.  

The idea was to reach the point where finally you knew you’d had enough.  

Enough.  

The thinking was that, on the other side of “enough,” the fundamental desire to light up would simply vanish.  

I have no idea if this actually worked for anybody.  

Even if it did, clearly, it didn’t work for enough people that it became a recognized solution.  

But it reminds me of the relationship between abundance – or overabundance, which is our word for abundant abundance – and its strange little orbiting moon, the notion of “enough.” 

Because it’s amazing how quickly what starts out as abundance, more than we could ever need or use, can turn into just enough…then barely enough…then not enough. 

The gravitational pull of over-abundance shapes the trajectory of “enough,” or of “enough” as the world understands it. 

The possibility of satisfaction and gratitude for where are and what we have—and of course, most deeply, for who we are—this can all be strangely hard to hold onto.  

I remember in elementary school, someone’s older brother actually told me (sternly) that if I ever encountered a genie who granted me three wishes, my last wish clearly had to be for three more wishes.  

It starts early.  

And yet Scripture indicates that God wants something very different for us.  

We see it in a story we often tell a little later in the year, when we remember the feeding of the 5000, particularly as Matthew tells it (Matthew 14:13-21).  

In that one, five loaves and two fish are transformed into a sign of God’s overabundance—a feast with leftovers.  

And yet the point is not that the VIP tent is gorging itself while the others get just a nibble. 

Certainly, this isn’t saying that we Christians are the ones who really belong in the VIP tent.   

The point is that God’s abundance translates into everyone having enough…andgratefully enjoying it.  

Finding nourishment in it.  

Matthew means that God’s abundance frees us from chasing the false things that promise to fill us, but which ultimately leave us more hungry – spirituallyfamished — than ever.  

John’s Gospel fundamentally agrees.  

Now, we should note that John’s story of the wedding feast at Cana does not have much to say about marriage.  

It’s no accident that it’s a story about a wedding that doesn’t bother to include the bride or the groom, toasts or dancing, details about the flower girl or where the happy couple is headed for the honeymoon.  

John trusts us to understand that this is not really about any of them or any of that.

His interest lies elsewhere, not in the wedding but in the wine.  

For him, it’s a story about what happens when Jesus arrives.

He might arrive at your wedding or your town or your job…wherever Jesus shows up to knock on the door of your heart.  

And what John wants to say is that, when that happens, epiphany is close at hand. 

Because to hear him tell it, God’s presence almost can’t help but turn nothing into something, the hum-drum into the glorious, the daily round into a life-defining encounter.  

Even left over water becomes the finest wine, and the emptiest of lives fills with holy business to be done.  

With lovingkindness to practice.  

With fairness and honesty and dignity to offer. 

With imagination and joy to seek.  

With peace to create.  

Isn’t that what fullness really is?  

That’s what it is to taste the vintage, as he understands it. 

And for all our searching, don’t we know that’s true?  

Because the heart knows when it’s finally home, just as a ship out in a storm finally reaches the safety of a harbor.

And it is enough.  

Which is not to say it’s easy. 

If you spend any time with Scripture, of course, you can plainly see that the disciples are works in progress at best.  

In these weeks when we are hearing again about their first encounters with Jesus, we can see that they’re caught in a strange tug of war between the restlessness that makes them drop whatever they’re doing to follow him, and the deep rest that seems to flow from him, guiding them into living the better way he shows that they (and we) might live.  

They don’t ever become perfect, and in some cases, it takes a long time for that better way, that trust in God’s “enough”, to truly sink in.  

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a quick reply to a longer article about AI that got to the heart of the challenge. 

“I don’t want AI to do my thinking and creating while I am busy doing my laundry and paying my bills,” the poster said.  “I want AI to do my laundry and pay my bills while I am busy thinking and creating.”

John might ask us to identify what is the holy work that only we can truly do…the work that requires what is best in us and teaches us to reach for even better…the work of epiphany for us and for our world. 

What would it mean to focus on that work – to make it the center of our attention and to put it at the center of our lives? 

It might finally be enough.  

And honestly, what could be more glorious than that?   

Amen.  

It may seem like a technicality, but we don’t actually know how many magi the gospel writer Matthew had in mind when he described them all arriving in Bethlehem.  

The tradition has come to settle on three, probably because of the three gifts, and it’s also gone ahead and given them each a name, an age, and a continent of origin.

This hasn’t stopped people from trying to find themselves in the story, though.  

For example, at one point, when Western Christians used the term “orient” quite broadly and uncritically, as in “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” there were Chinese Christians who recognized that at least one of the kings must have come from China.  

Because in reporting that the magi came from the east, didn’t the story clearly say so?

Matthew’s story wants to affirm that from the very beginning, the Gospel (the good news) was for all.  

But this hasn’t much stopped people from trying to be sure that people like them – that people like us – were universally acknowledged to have been at the front of the line.  

I’m sure somebody must still be invested in this. 

Maybe Epiphany should take a page from the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics and feature a parade of nations and costumes, with somebody stepping up to light an enormous flame.

Why not? 

That said, I’d guess that for most people now, the hope of finding themselves in the story means something different and more personal.  

It’s about finding ourselves in God’s presence, or if you prefer, maybe its finding God in our presence, the point being that, either way, we have moments we can point to when we know that we have crossed onto holy ground.  

Because isn’t that what an epiphany is, really?  

An experience of “the living God, present and acting [in the story of redemption].”^[1]

And isn’t the next question something like: what do I need to do to have one of those? 

Along those lines, I’ve always appreciated another version of journey of the magi, as imagined by the American author Henry Van Dyke.^[2]  

He imagines a fourth wise man, whom he calls Arteban, who sees the star as the others do and loads up his horse to go meet them and travel in a caravan together to Bethlehem.  

His own gift will be precious jewels: a sapphire, a ruby, and finally, “a pearl of great price.” 

Unfortunately, though, he gets detained on the way by trying to help a dying man, and he misses the rendezvous. 

He has to sell one of the jewels in order to switch out his horse for camels and the supplies he’ll need to cross the desert. 

He finally makes it to Bethlehem, but child and his parents, and the other wise men have already split, knowing that Herod was coming in hot pursuit.  

Arteban ends up giving another jewel while he’s there in order to save the life of some other child who happens to need saving.  

Then it’s off to Egypt, and then the next place, and the place after that, never quite catching up with Jesus, never quite finding himself on the holy ground he’s after, but always trying to do right by the people he meets along the way.

And so it continues for thirty three years, until finally Arteban arrives in Jerusalem on what turns out to be Good Friday.  

He ends up giving the pearl of great price, the last part of his gift for the Christ child, to free a girl who is about to be sold into slavery.  

Of course, he believes that he has failed.  That he has never quite managed to find the holy ground for which he has searched his whole life.  

But then he hears a voice that says, “Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto me.” 

Without his realizing it, his goodness has offered holy ground to countless others all along the way.  

The living God has been present and acting, saving and transforming, right in front of him all along.  

It’s sentimental, I admit.  

Yet the question it raises seems especially pertinent to the life of faith in our own moment. 

Because: is it more helpful to see an epiphany as a moment when God shows up to do a new thing, or is it a moment when we newly recognize something as tremendously precious (perhaps for the first time) – when we understand it as something God has been doing all along?

Like Arteban’s life, our lives are full of missed connections, seemingly fruitless searches, unfulfilled hopes, and perpetual crises.

Are epiphanies supposed to be limited to those people for whom that somehow isn’t true? 

Or does the very idea of a God who comes to live the life we live and know the world we know point to much richer possibilities, not only for epiphany, but also for us? 

Maybe epiphany is what happens when we decide to be present as our faith tells us God is present, and lo and behold, faith turns out to be right.  

I don’t know what’s harder to believe: that God has a vision for the world, or that God’s vision involves us.

But clearly, epiphanies mean recognizing both. 

So, as of tomorrow, we leave the Christmas season behind. 

As of Wednesday, we have already entered the new country of another year.  

Some of us probably started strong, clearly on top of the weeks and months to come, with their resolutions only minor tweaks to a well-oiled machine.  

Others have started this year like they finished the last one, a day late and a dollar short, hoping and praying to make up ground just as soon as they get out of the weeds.  

The hope of epiphany is the hope that, either way, we will learn to be present—to look for the face of God in whomever we see before us—and so know God’s presence wherever brokenness is mended and winter yields to spring.  

Amen.

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^[1] The phrase is from Fleming Rutledge, Means of Grace, although she is speaking more specifically about the nature of Scripture. 

^[2] See Henry Van Dyke, The Story of the Other Wiseman (1895).