Mostly, tonight is about telling the story of the Last Supper and the arrest of Jesus.  

We celebrate Holy Communion as we tell the story of the night when Jesus first did. 

This should remind us of just how much some of the story of Maundy Thursday – one key portion of it – offers language and gestures which are central to our faith all throughout the year. 

Where would we be without it? 

Just what would going to church entail?

We don’t quite know.  

Of course, that makes it all the more important for us to put that part of the story more squarely back in context. 

We want to be sure we’re telling it correctly and getting what it’s trying to teach us.  

Tonight’s service is about receiving a fuller story, and a fuller message rather than trimming them down to suit.  

When you do that, it becomes clear almost immediately that we need to think much more carefully about the place of grief in this story.  

Because, actually, grief is the story.   

The Last Supper – the founding of Holy Communion – is a practice of hope and connection that will only truly make sense once Jesus is taken from the disciples and from the world, which he’s about to be.  

Jesus is the only one who knows, but knowing it is terrible and unspeakably lonely.  

This shapes the whole evening.

As people reading the gospels later, we can see that. 

This is most clear after the supper, when Jesus and the disciples go to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane.  

Jesus wrestles with what lies just ahead and goes off a distance by himself to pray.  

He asks God for some other way forward before it is too late.   

He asks the others to stay nearby and to pray, too, although he does not tell them why.  

As we see, his grief is almost overwhelming.  

Then, after praying alone for a while, he goes back to where he left his friends, only to find them fast asleep: a horrible discovery. 

It’s then that Jesus realizes just how truly alone he is. 

It’s like someone standing at a payphone trying to call for help, calling every number they know, flipping through the little pages of the address books we all used to have in our pockets—remember those?—but nobody picks up.  

Nobody’s home.  

In the movie, “Dead Man Walking,” a nun, Sr. Helen Prejean, begins a ministry to death row inmates at Angola Prison and to families—both those of the inmates and those of their victims.  

She offers herself as a spiritual advisor.  

But what this will really mean only becomes clear when one of the inmates loses his final appeal, and it is time to help him prepare for his execution.  

He is guilty of the crime, a fact that he admits only reluctantly, even to himself.  

But eliciting this confession is not the point of Sister Helen’s ministry, even if it might provide a degree of consolation to some, and even the man himself.  

Sister Helen’s real contribution turns out to be less abstract. 

She learns that his family will not be there to witness the man’s execution.  

And so she decides that she will be there.  

She says: “I want the last face you see in this world to be a face of love. So you look at me while they do this thing. I’ll be the face of love for you.”  

That points to what is so shocking about tonight’s story of Jesus in his grief.  

Because in the midst of this ordeal, nobody has been prompted…moved…compelled to offer themselves as the face of love for Jesus.  

Nobody has been looking carefully enough to notice his struggle.  

The only kiss that’s offered in the garden is a sign of betrayal.  

Somewhere, I’ve read speculation that the arrest in the Garden would have been worse, and even more painful for Jesus than his crucifixion at Golgotha the next day.  

There’s no way to know, of course.  

However, it is true that the next day, when he dies on Friday afternoon, there would be faces of love distinct among the jeering crowd. 

We know the disciples were there. 

We know that Mary, Jesus’ mother and some of the other women were not just there, but actually closer to him than any of his other followers dared get. 

He did not die alone.   

But the night before, in the garden at his arrest, few had remained for very long.  

By the time the Romans lead Jesus away, there’s nobody else standing there for them to arrest with him—there are no co-conspirators on hand for Judas to identify.  

Jesus’ abandonment is complete.  

We need to sit with that for a moment.

As we tell the story more fully, it’s important to pause to receive that grief.  His grief. 

And yet, something deeper is still at work.  

Because wherever each disciple goes that night after they scatter, the next morning finds them gathered once again. 

Sometime after dawn the next day, they’re back, standing among the crowds along the Via Dolorosa, and then even at cross itself…even if it means they might be next.   

It’s a risk they’re now willing to take.  

Something else inside them has taken hold.  

It might be that they remembered the words Jesus had said at the meal – his promise that he will never abandon us, that he will forever be with us in our trials, and that all who find new life in him will be part of him and he of them.  

After all, this is what Communion affirms.  

That he will always be a face of love for us, and a source of strength as we seek to show the world a face of love.  

It’s only as we step out into the dark night that we learn if this meal provides something that can actually sustain us, or if it’s just junk food.  

Unless it equips us to offer the world a face of love, then we have missed its purpose.  

And tonight, in coming together to hear the story in a fuller form, that’s what we practice.  

We’re here to offer faces of love to Jesus as his final hours begin. 

May it teach us to love the world as he did, and for his sake.  

Amen.  

Dear Friends of Second Church,

I don’t know if you’re aware of the Hallmark Channel, the people who make those Christmas movies where the tough-as-nails-executive-on-her-way-up gets dispatched to some small Vermont town in order to buy out the last local Christmas tree farm, only to fall in love with the farmer and his dog, ditch her stilettos, get a warm hat with a pom pom, save the tree farm, and live a small town life, instead. 

Well, good news.  

They’ve discovered Easter. 

One of their new offerings is called “Easter Under Wraps” — and it’s really pushing the envelope.  

It’s about a woman who goes undercover to figure out what’s hurting sales at her family’s chocolate conglomerate…only to fall in love with the Head Chocolatier of a smaller rival company.  

You can look this up. 

I don’t know if I’ll be getting to it this year, myself — if you do, I’d love a review.  (And it’s ok to like it. I bet I will when I see it.) 

However, I will say that it misses something important about Easter, and by that, I don’t just mean the whole part about Jesus and the resurrection.  (Although I’m getting to that.) 

More basically, it shoehorns Easter into yet another performance of the same old rom-com plot—it’s just like Christmas, except it’s spring, with the holidays providing a generic sort of setting rather than much by way of a theme.  

In that, it misses just how disruptive the story of Easter is and always has been.  

Easter is not just a happy ending — it’s like a low-budget Halloween movie that suddenly becomes an epic…or even a musical.   

It is puzzling and glorious and determined to show us the world in an entirely new light — the light of the one at its center — and also to invite us to join the story rather than just passively take it in.  

There’s nothing “same old” about it, or about any life that seeks to put Easter at the center.   

It means that simple explanations and cozy plots will never quite do, anymore.   Life is just too interesting and precious for shallow treatment — and so are our neighbors, our enemies, and while we’re at it, Creation.  

As we gather to tell the story once again, may it shake us up, shake us awake, and shake the foundations of a world so hungry for truth and so desperate for healing.  

Happy Easter.  

See you in church….

Palm Sunday may be the closest that the Christian year ever comes to engaging irony, and I love it for that. 

If you scratch the surface, there are a lot of levels to the gospel you’ve just heard.  

The tone is celebratory.  The Eagle has landed. Jesus is finally coming to the capital.

His followers are anticipating…what?

We don’t quite know.  Maybe even they don’t quite know. 

But it stands to reason that all those snarky back-and-forths between Jesus and the Pharisees all along the way – you remember those, right? – would have set the disciples’ expectations sky-high.  

Think for a moment about those confrontations – those moments when some local guy from somewhere encounters Jesus and doesn’t like what he thinks he’s hearing.  

The guy asks, in so many words, who in God’s name Jesus thinks he is. 

He doesn’t mean it as an actual question, of course.  

He means it as a put down.  

As a way to bring the crowd back down to earth. 

Whenever someone takes that approach, Jesus always comes right back at him, loaded for bear, right?  

If you traveled with Jesus, you would have known it was coming.  You would have looked forward to it.  

It must have been a heck of show—one that got them imagining even bigger stages.  

You could hardly have blamed the disciples for watching those moments, hearing those moments, and wondering: what if? 

What if this conversation Jesus was having wasn’t with some schmo whose name they never quite got? 

What if this moment wasn’t just happening in some one horse town whose name they can scarcely remember? 

What if he ever went theologically mano-a-mano with the biggest of their big-wigs? One of the Jerusalem guys?  Maybe even the High Priest himself?  On Passover? With the Roman Governor standing right there?  

I actually think our guy would win. 

They must have thought it. 

For them, that’s where Palm Sunday was pointing. 

And yet, as we know, in a way the disciples did not, that this is not what would come next—that this is not how the story would end.  

Instead, Jesus will be dead on by dinnertime on Friday. 

That’s the first irony.  

The second irony is more subtle.  

Because the story will not end on Friday, either. 

The Gospel will not come to rest in Jerusalem. 

It will keep on moving. 

On its way—actually quite early on in its travels—the Gospel will even pass through Rome. 

Rome will prove powerless to stop it, just as Pontius Pilate and the leaders who arrest and convict Jesus will prove powerless to stop it.  

You can’t kill the truth.  

You can’t stop goodness from preaching—from convincing and transforming.  

And so when that first Palm Sunday group walked up toward Jerusalem in the name of a different kind of world, under the leadership of a different kind of king, even they had no idea of just how right they actually were.  

How’s that for irony? 

Every now and again, we see something in the world that reminds us of the power of truth.

Lately, I’m thinking of the recent death of the prominent Putin critic, Alexei Navalny.  

In the evening after the world first learned that he had died, Liz watched the recent documentary about him and was especially moved by a moment that I’ve since seen mentioned elsewhere, too.  

Navalny, who had already survived poisoning, said, “If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong.  We need to utilize this power not to give up…to remember.” 

Along those lines, for us as Christians, Palm Sunday is part of how we remember—how we are urged to find our strength and not give up when we’re faced with challenges of our own. 

Every now and again, we see something in the world that reminds us of the power of goodness.  

This isn’t something visible only in the martyrdom of a moral leader.  

In a quieter way, we see it in the kindness we show for one another as life unfolds.  

Whatever might be on our minds or bending us back into our own situation, we remember one another.  

I was reading yesterday that ever since the UCONN Women’s basketball team won its first national title, they have made a point of leaving time after the game for kids to come forward and get autographs. 

This seems like a small thing.  

Actually, this began with Rebecca Lobo in 1995, which is when the attention and the autograph seeking really first began to take off…to require actual time.  

Her parents would take her out to dinner after every game, and there was a lot of pressure on her and a lot to process, but her mother insisted that Lobo sign every autograph and greet anyone who was waiting to see her. 

In fact, on one occasion, her mom pulled her aside because she was signing autographs but not really paying attention. 

“You look everyone in the eye when you sign,” her mother said,  “especially a little kid, because they’ve waited in line to see you.” 

As things go, of course, a moment’s attention is a small gesture.

But not to the person who’s been waiting on that line.

Not to the person who is quietly carrying whatever life has put on their shoulders lately, and who receives a moment from you or me that helps them make it through the day.  

On the other hand, we remember that in the Gospel, it’s Pilate…it’s Herod…it’s Caiaphas…it’s the villains of this story who have neither time nor patience for the people they can’t use.  

As a result, in their eyes, this dumb parade of palms and cloaks and a guy riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is something between a hassle and a brush fire—it’s an event they don’t have time for led by people of no consequence moved by visions about which they could not care less.  

They’re no longer able to imagine this parade could represent anything more than that.   

They don’t get what it means to be standing on that line, to be hoping for a brief moment of connection, and to recognize how holy, inspiring, and strengthening our connections can be.  

They don’t get it.  

Certainly, they don’t see God in it.  

The gods they recognize surely wouldn’t stoop so low.  

But we get it.  

Palm Sunday is teaching us to remember a very different picture of who God is, what God values, and just how low God would be willing to go out of love for us.  

Remembering that will save the world. 

So it is a day full of irony, a day of triumph, looming tragedy, and triumph once again.  

Its joy points us steady onward, moving faithfully toward the day when the saints come marching in, and everyone will know once and for all which of us are in that number. 

What if we were? 

Amen.  

There’s a story about the great preacher William Sloane Coffin from his many years as a college chaplain.  

Apparently, at a freshman convocation at some point in the 60s, Coffin observed that while the college prided itself on producing great men, in more recent years it seemed content instead just to churn out nice guys.  

We can probably parse that in any number of ways. 

I would hasten to add, it wasn’t that Coffin saw anything wrong with niceness, but rather that he wanted to push us ask what was right about it—and whether that was sufficient. 

He thought it was not.  

And our Gospel this morning seems drawn along similar lines. 

Mark describes a moment of encounter between Jesus, heading toward Jerusalem, and a man with many possessions.  

This in itself was not so unusual, and there are a range of ways that Jesus responds in such encounters.

The Gospels always emphasize his ability to see through externals to the person beneath. 

He could look at a sinner and see a good person in desperate need of healing and understanding.  

He could look at a pillar of the community and see how wobbly they were.  

And he could look at a big shot and see their smallness. 

This week, I was interested to read the obituary of Brian Mulroney, who was Prime Minister of Canada back in the 90s.  

It noted that, while he was the consummate politician while in office, in later years, there were indications that, behind the scenes, he had always been far less affable, if not downright mean.  Notably foul-mouthed. Quick to take offense.  Long in holding a grudge.  

I was sorry to hear it.  That was news to me.  

For their part, though, the Gospels would want to remind us that it wasn’t news to Jesus. 

I say that just to make the point that, in this morning’s story, he’s not looking at some robber baron and telling him to beat it or warning him that he can’t take it with him.

Not at all. 

Jesus looks on this man and loves him.  

But I think the person he sees standing there is a nice guy.  Maybe even a really nice guy.  

Jesus wants to challenge him to become a great man.  A great person.  

By way of getting started, this will demand a particular commitment to letting some things go. 

II.

If you think about it, it’s a great Lenten story, and I’m surprised we don’t preach it more often during this season. 

A few weeks ago, we talked about Jesus going into the wilderness to face temptation for 40 days…this deliberate period of self-denial in order to face his demons and see himself and the work ahead of him more clearly. 

In this later moment with the man, Jesus seems as if he’s about to prescribe the same medicine: saying, brother, you need to get rid of anything and everything that is not God…you need to face your demons…you need to start getting out of your own way.  

Do that, and on Day 41, the angels will let you know where to find me.  

It makes me wonder—if Jesus had taken a different approach, and just named a really high price for joining the disciples…you know: “Why sure you can join, my brother, but there are dues, the initiation fee, the loaf and fish minimum…just bring your W-2 over to Judas, and he’ll tell you your number….”…would the man have been willing to pay that?  

I kind of bet he would have, right? 

He seems like he might be an ROI kind of guy.   

Mark seems to suggest that there is something in him that measures. That calculates. 

It isn’t presented such that it sounds sinister – as in “he’s calculating” – but it’s fair to say that in this important moment when he stands before Jesus, such tendencies get in his way. 

What was that kid’s book – was it Cheaper By the Dozen? – where the dad is an efficiency expert and he insists that the whole family run according to time/motion studies and other organizational principles.   The point of diminishing returns…the Pareto principle…sunk costs…all as principles of parenting.  

Our nice guy probably wasn’t that extreme, but he might have gone to B school with that dad. 

As we said, he’s an ROI kind of guy. 

But Jesus doesn’t ask him for money.  

ROI and the other frameworks he’s learned along the way for making choices don’t help him to say yes to this particular choice.  

It’s asking something different of him.  

That means, even for a really nice guy (which he is), this is a leap he can’t quite make, even though his soul clearly wants so very much to make it.   

III.

What about us? 

Do we have tendencies that seem to get in our way, somehow – especially in the important moments of our lives? 

And by these, I don’t actually mean our flaws.  

More particularly, I mean the shadow side of so many of our virtues, which manage to make us trip over our own feet.  

Here are some places where we know it: 

…Hospitality that becomes an over-eagerness to please.  

…Humor that provides subtle strategy for silencing a room.  

…Attention to detail that devolves into scorekeeping.  

…Spontaneity that shades into indifference.  

…Love that looks more like worry.  

…Niceness that waves off the messiness of true concern. 

What if the very things Jesus asks us to let go are the very ones we mistakenly believe are holding us together?  The essence of the selves we most know how to be? 

Aren’t those the things we try to hold onto at all costs? 

So often, it’s only stepping back that lets us see the shadows.  

It’s only stepping back that lets us find our way toward the abundant life we know in God.  

Isn’t that what Jesus is saying to the man this morning? 

“Show me who you are without…all this…without all that…” 

That man refuses. 

Isn’t that what he says to us, especially in Lent?  

He asks: “Can you walk without those crutches?” as he looks on us with love.  

What will we say?  

On Friday night, Liz, Emily and I went to go see older daughter Grace perform in the school play, which was the Sondheim musical, “Into the Woods.” 

Have you heard of it? Anybody seen it?  

Proud dad stuff aside – mostly – it was a great show. 

The thing about Stephen Sondheim musicals is that there’s always an ironic twist to them.  

For example, there’s one where the music starts out very sad and gets happier and happier as the show goes along.  

That sounds great, right? 

The only problem is that it begins at the end and goes on to tell the whole story in reverse order—so instead of telling us about someone triumphing over adversity, the whole thing is about how, in this case, adversity wins, with the hero of the story getting less clear about that as the show goes on, while for the audience, it gets painfully more and more clear.  

That’s Sondheim. 

So when I tell you that the show we saw last night, “Into the Woods,” is his take on classic fairy tales, well…you might guess how he would run with that.  

There are a lot of really interesting moments I could tell you about, but I’ll focus on just one idea that I took away from it. 

I want to talk a bit about what he’s getting at with this idea of “the woods.”  

Obviously, the whole idea of going “into the woods” is classic fairy tale stuff.  

Little Red Riding Hood does, of course – you probably remember that story.  

But a bunch of other characters also do – Cinderella, Jack of Beanstalk fame, a baker and his wife. 

Each of them harbors some version of a very human wish: for example: a wish for love, for an end to their poverty, or for a child.  

And through one set of circumstances or another, each of the characters has to leave the safe, comfortable, well-known world of the village and go into the dark, confusing, and perhaps dangerous woods to realize their wish.  

A lot of stories go like this, right? 

This is where the twist comes in.  

Because slowly but surely, the characters all get what they’ve wished for, which is great.  

Great happiness ensues.   

There’s only one problem.  

It’s just the end of Act I.  

And this is where the story gets much deeper. 

Because when Act II begins, some time has gone by. 

Several months…maybe a year.  

It isn’t too long after all the main characters’ wishes have come true…and yet already, one by one, they realize that they haven’t stopped wishing.  

Wishing doesn’t end.  

New hopes pull at our hearts.  

Restlessness can set in, sometimes quite abruptly and earlier than we might ever expect.

New challenges need facing.  

For Sondheim, love and happiness are more elusive than fairy tales suggest, and true loyalty and friendship harder to come by and far more surprising than we could ever believe…until we find ourselves in the woods.  

The average fairy tale is far too neat when it comes to the messiness of life.  

When it comes to the human predicament, he’s not going to let even a fairy tale pull its punches.  

As he sees it, life doesn’t send us out “into the woods” just once, or only by our own choice.  

One way or another, we find ourselves out there many times.  

You get the idea.  

You can also understand why some audiences find this pretty gloomy.  

But if you ask me, I don’t think Sondheim is trying to be gloomy. 

He’s just unusually honest about the things that can make life so hard and so beautiful.  

If we wonder why attributes like wisdom, character, and solidarity are not only so important, but also somewhat more rare than they ought to be, and so hard won, even for the best of us – well, Sondheim would gesture toward the woods.  

The truths we find out there never fail to surprise us.  

II.

 Our Gospel reading this morning is the story of a healing.  

It comes from Mark’s gospel. 

In fact, it’s the story right after Jesus comes down from the mountain where he is transfigured before Peter and two of the others—when the narrative begins to point toward Jerusalem and Holy Week.  

The other disciples have been busy in his absence, trying to offer healing and preaching in the same spirit as Jesus, but without much success.  

As far as the preaching goes, they are getting shouted down by the skeptics. 

Their lack of success in healing a boy who has been possessed by a demon surely is not helping to convince anyone, either.  

The whole scene seems tense and chaotic.  

What really makes this story different than so many other accounts of exorcisms and healings are the words of the boy’s father. 

Jesus arrives and takes in what’s happening, and at first, his response has a kind of “o ye of little faith” quality. 

This is directed at the father but isn’t meant just for him, by any means.  

The father pleads with him, saying “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”  

Jesus responds, “ ‘If you can’? Everything is possible for one who believes.” 

But then the father says something that nobody else has said to Jesus before.  

He says, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief.” 

He comes before Jesus in profound desperation, and yet also with total honesty.  

Because the messiness of life has sent him into the woods. 

The obvious answers have not solved his problems. 

His son isn’t just a sick kid—his son is sick in a way that would have scared other kids, and not just them. 

He’s sick in a way that would have prompted neighbors to keep their distance, that would have drained the resources and tested the resilience of a family, maybe even broken a marriage.  

The gospel writer Mark makes clear that it’s been this way for years.  

Who wouldn’t find themselves wishing for something else at some point? 

How could you blame someone else for wishing? 

They’ve been wandering in the woods, confronting all these sad realities for years.  

That’s just to say that, by this point, the easy pieties and wishful thinking are long gone.  

What’s left is utter honesty.  

What’s left is that, when the father comes to Jesus, he still says “us”: “take pity on us,” he says, “help us.” 

Whoever else has fallen away, and however it is that came to pass, he has not fallen away.  

Wherever they need to go in hope of healing, he’ll find a way to get them there.  

Because, by God, somehow, he still believes in that. 

Against the long litany of all the things that father has learned he can’t believe in…must not believe in…there’s one thing he mostly still does—mostly, he still believes that with God, all things are possible.  

The woods have taken so much away.  

But somehow, by and large, they have left him with that.  

And he’s not afraid to name the truth that his heart is full of both. 

That’s the testimony that he steps up and lays right at the feet of Jesus.  

And Jesus immediately turns to the boy and heals him.  

III.

There are a lot of ways to talk about faith.  

Throughout its history, the church has reflected at length about what faith oughtto be, and it has gone on to describe that in a range of ways, each of which names something important for us to hold onto. 

Our Scripture this morning comes at this differently.  

It’s saying that faith is what has the power to abide when all the easier pieties and the lesser loves end up falling away. 

It’s what keeps going when we’ve long since abandoned any worldly notion of perfection.

It’s what we learn when life sends us out into the woods.  

On the further shore of our initial disillusionment, there is the call to seek a life beyond illusion, and in the believing and the unbelieving, the learning and the loving, to know first-hand the healing of God.  

May it be so. 

Amen.

I have a childhood friend who didn’t get his act together for a long time.  

Not that he postponed any of the regular adult stuff.  

He had a job.  He got promoted.  He was married to a kind and patient person.  They had kid and house and dry-cleaning—all that jazz.  

He was a contributing member of society.  A completely nice dude.  

Except on weekends, which is when he would cut loose. 

He was like that guy in a fraternity who always got the party started. 

I don’t know, maybe he had been that guy in college.  

The problem, though, was that he was still that guy, even as his college years got further and further away, and the parties got smaller and smaller.  

Finally, it was just him, and the couch in the basement, and their old t.v., and whatever he was drinking.  

The word “intoxicated” comes from Greek originally, and specifically from the Greek word for arrow (toxon), and then, derivatively, from the word for the poison into which the point of the arrow was dipped (toxikon).  

That would ring true for my friend, whose life was being steadily poisoned. 

Eventually, his kind and patient wife admitted that her patience was running out and that soon enough, her kindness would be running out, too.  

To his credit, my friend heard that and understood how serious it was, and how hard for her to say, and he committed to making changes.  

He got his act together – or as he would be more inclined to put it, each day he recommits to keeping it together, one day at a time.  

He gives a lot of credit to his AA meeting, as so many people in recovery do.  

In his case, he’s from a fairly small place, and the meeting is in the basement of the big white church (one of our churches, I am proud to say) on the town green. 

And while he’s committed to the anonymity of the meeting, he has shared that the first time he went, he was astonished to see so many people he knew – some of them people he’d known his whole life.  

And he was not prepared for how warmly they greeted him…how glad they were to see him. 

That may make it sound as maybe if they were expecting him – and that’s not the case. 

But they knew quite clearly what it was to live with the secret (or perhaps not-so-secret) burden of their dependency, by whatever set of circumstances that dependency had come about, and they knew the grace to be found in facing the hard truth about themselves, and in staying focused. 

They wanted that grace for him, too and were committed to staying alongside him until he came to understand it and to ask for it, himself.  

Moreover, he came to understand in a way he never had before that the people we know – the people all around us, all the time…even the ones we’ve known for years…are almost certainly managing more, and struggling more than we might ever realize.  

Knowing this has made him a whole lot kinder.  

II.

I’m telling you all this because Lent is a strange season in so many ways.  

Its talk of self-denial can be hard to get behind—the sort of thing that can make our friends who aren’t religious shake their heads in disbelief.  

It seems old school, and not in a good way. 

But I don’t see it like that. 

I think Lent’s hopes are very much in line with the hopes of all those good people who were there to welcome my friend. 

When he finally decided it was time to make these big changes that he didn’t really know how to make…when he finally realized that something was poisoning his life…they were there for him, eager to help him find a better way. 

That’s what Lent is all about.  

III.

This morning, we have the Gospel of Mark’s brief account of Jesus’ own time in the wilderness. 

Matthew and Luke give much fuller versions of the story, with an extended back and forth between Jesus and Satan.  

Jesus is hungry and Satan challenges him to turn stones into bread.  Then Satan tries to tempt Jesus to summon the angels in the most public place in the country and tries then after that to straight up buy him off with worldly riches and power. 

There’s a lot going on in those versions.  

By contrast, Mark’s version is almost a blur, sandwiched between Jesus’ baptism and the incandescent start of his preaching career, when he pointedly takes up the mantle of John the Baptist, who has been arrested.  

Jesus steps up to show that this word received by John cannot be silenced.  This movement John began cannot be stopped.  

Yet it’s odd that a story about pausing—about grappling and growing and pushing oneself—gets told in just two short lines. 

Maybe Mark’s point is that it really wasn’t all that bad out there in the wilderness.  

After all, Jesus couldn’t have had much or even any poison that he needed to get out of his system. 

He’s Jesus. 

Except maybe alongside the fiery righteousness of John which Jesus shared with such passion, he was also grappling with the weight of just how much people are trying to carry.   

He knew in a way that even John had not, that the people we encounter, sometimes even the ones we’ve known for years, are managing more, and struggling more than anyone might ever realize.  

Perhaps even at this early moment, he was already no stranger to how disappointing people can turn out to be.  

Certainly, he would come to see that constantly in the journey he was about to begin, even in the words and silences, the actions and inactions of his closest friends.    

But that’s not all he saw.  

He also saw how loveable they were, anyway. 

He saw how flawed and lovely, cringey and magnificent, rotten and sweet they were.   

He knew they were capable of so much, yet capable of nothing without love to turn them into selves worth being.  

That’s what he sees in us, too.  

In that sense, our gospel this morning is less about how Jesus’ learns to engage his own temptations, and more about how he will seek to engage ours—knowing what only he can know, seeing as only he can see, but most importantly of all, loving us into new life, as only God can love us.

When we finally decide that it’s time to make big changes that we don’t really know how to make…when we finally realize that something is poisoning our lives…He is there for us, eager to help us find a better way. 

That’s the promise of Lent.  

May it lead us toward the only truth with the power to set us free. 

Amen.  

I don’t know if you saw the “Barbie” movie last summer, but if you did, you may remember a surprising and wonderful moment that is particularly relevant for us this evening.  

Barbie lives in a dream house, of course, in a land with other Barbies and a smattering of Kens—a dream world in a way, but a world of surfaces.  

Every day is wonderful and yet, for those with eyes to see, shallow and empty. 

Life for Barbie is an endless dance party. One sleepover after another. 

That is, until something interrupts all that—and naturally, discovering what it is will be the engine of the movie.  

But in one particular moment as all that interruption is just beginning, we find Barbie living the dream at another day’s dance party.  

She’s out there on the floor among all the other Barbies—and then out of the blue, she looks at her friends and says, “Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?”

And for a moment, everything stops—everyone is speechless, confused, weirded out.

But it only lasts a moment, and the party starts up again, as if nothing has happened, as if the question has not been asked, as if the music has never stopped—except, of course, for the Barbie at the center of the movie, it has.  

Unlike the others, she can’t help but be struck by her own seemingly random question.  

Except that, as we know, it’s not a random question, at all.  

It’s a question that puts her on the threshold of moral awakening, as the movie will go on to show. 

And it’s a question that many of those around her can’t or won’t ask, for a host of reasons.  

I think this is a helpful lens for us on Ash Wednesday. 

Because I suspect we also know people whom we love dearly, but whom we also recognize as unable or unwilling to ask some of the deeper, harder questions about life.  

The church has always wanted to invite us to joy, which it understands as different than just having fun.  

Fun’s great and has its place—the church gets that, too—but it tends toward distraction, and that’s where the church’s questions come in.  

I don’t think we much need to rehearse those questions here.  

We’re clear enough on what they are.  

The bigger message is that joy points to something deeper.  

Joy is what we find by asking the deeper, harder questions and in discovering the grace in that asking.  

Joy affirms that the sacred is all around us, even in our fun.  

But it takes eyes to see it; it takes a capacity to be thankful for it; and it takes ears to hear it calling us into something bigger than ourselves.  

It takes some getting to—some pushing through—to arrive at joy.  

This is the heart of Ash Wednesday.  

Ash Wednesday invites us over the threshold of moral awakening and into the ongoing work of seeing grace at work, especially as we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.  

It takes a particularly solemn form, and not everyone connects with that. 

I mean, one minute it’s Mardi Gras and then abruptly, the music stops, and it’s Lent, with its promises and reset intentions and ashes.  

I get why some people don’t go for it. 

But it’s trying to carve out time and space for us to do this hard and necessary work of stripping away distractions and noticing the world as a moral field, and so it asks the questions that it’s awkward to ask and puts front and center the realities that we may want to keep hidden. 

Redemption in its many forms is sorely needed by so many. 

Lent reminds us that much of our own ongoing search for redemption and for a sense of God’s presence in our own lives will be found in joining that work. 

That’s what these 40 days are for.  

So we do these strange things, receiving and bearing ashes.  

And we ask these strange questions of ourselves and our world.  

But we do all this in the hope that it will show us the light that shines in darkness, the grace that amazes, and the genuine joy of life in God. 

Amen.  

We have a lot of holidays to mention this morning. 

First of all, there’s Mardi Gras, which we’ll celebrate in great Protestant style by eating pancakes at church rather than by drinking bourbon on Bourbon Street or any other street down in New Orleans…although we did spring for a band.  

Of course, in a few days, we’re looking at the double header of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, which land on the same day this year.  

People who run in my particular circles have been trying to think about ways to we might tie those together.  

I had a pastor colleague who was thinking about getting some candy hearts custom made for her worship service. 

Her thought was to have them say things like, “UR dust.” That was one.  She also had “JC4eva”, “Luv God”, and “Ash Me.”

She was considering one that just said: “Give up” – though everyone talked her out of that one.   

But wait, wait: in terms of holidays, we’re not done yet. 

Let’s not forget that, between the pancakes this morning and the chocolates on Wednesday, later today we have Superbowl Sunday. 

That’s tonight, and although it is not a church holiday or even a civic holiday, it is an event, nonetheless. 

I don’t know if you’re tracking the romantic relationship between the mega mega superstar singer-songwriter-and-all-around-one-woman-phenomenon, Taylor Swift and the tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, Travis Kelce, who is…uh…good at his job, too, I guess. 

Taylor Swift is in the midst of an unbelievable world tour, which is currently in Japan.  

Since around noon yesterday, though, the Internet has been following the progress of her personal jet, which was scheduled to take off from Haneda airport at 10:30 p.m., Japan Standard Time, on Saturday night and then fly the 5500 miles across the Pacific to Las Vegas in time for kick off. 

Even Taylor Swift is doing whatever it takes to be at the Superbowl.  

Of course, I like to think that if anyone from our church found themselves in Japan, wrapping up a sold-out stadium concert, they would still make sure that their jet was gassed up and ready to go so they would make it back in time for Ash Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. in the chapel.  

 I mean, it makes sense because: who knows? This might be the year.

This might be the year…when Lent’s call to seek growth and new energy in resisting temptation…its call to get closer to God, its call to practice noticing and responding to those in need…might really take root in us.  

This might be the year…when Lent’s call for Christians to demand accountability of earthly authorities for their commitment to the Common Good and to a more thorough and challenging form of justice…might really take root in us. 

This might be the year…when we’ll take our cue from Lent’s call to remember those who are sick, struggling, or grieving, not only in our prayers but also in our texts, our emails, our phone calls, cards, and visits, as a way of honoring and offering the love and comfort of Jesus.  

This might be the year…when our hearts get bigger and our consciences more tender and our commitment firmer. 

Lent has always understood itself as kicking off like the Superbowl…as having some of that same urgency. 

As Lent looks ahead to its own contest, it imagines much the same sense of drama, except that in this one, the grappling involved is mostly us with ourselves.  

So as we think of Taylor Swift winging her way to Las Vegas in this elaborate gesture of getting there…being there…well, clearly, what she’s up to is part Mardi Gras party and part Valentine’s smooch. 

But I wonder if it’s also a chance for us to consider the very Lenten questions of what we, for our own part, would be prepared to give up in the name of love—and, relatedly, of how widely we would seek to draw the circle of those we deem deserving of our own attention and care.    

What—who—would get us on that plane?  Alternatively, what would convince us that it’s fine to stay far, far away? 

That’s where Lent begins.  

Its purpose is to get us to see those boundaries more clearly, and to expand them, at least a little.  

The church has always found great hope in that. 

II.

In the coming weeks, the assigned readings for Sunday will not sound especially hopeful.  

Luke’s Gospel describes Jesus as coming down from the mountain of his transfiguration and setting his face “like flint,” it says, “toward Jerusalem.” 

His determination grows as he gets closer and closer, and a change is clearly in the air, because many of the crowds whom we’ve been told early on had gathered to follow him and tagged along from place to place will quietly break away.  

Each morning at dawn, there will be fewer than they’d seen at the previous dusk.  

But in fairness, it was all starting to feel different.  

What had been sort of happy-go-lucky was abruptly seeming a lot less happy and a lot less lucky. 

They’d all noticed those folks watching at the edges at each stop…the ones who clearly weren’t into it…standing back, listening intently with their arms folded and their eyebrows knit.  

These weren’t the kind of people to forgive and forget, and once they started showing up, more and more each time, and once they showed they had Jesus on their radar, well, you didn’t have to be a genius to know it wasn’t going to last much longer.  

The gospels want us to understand very clearly how this story that began with such enthusiasm and joy gets so quickly to Good Friday—and we will.  

But this morning, all that is still yet to come.   

Instead, as we stand on the threshold of Lent, we tell the story of the Transfiguration—this story when, almost like a king in disguise, Jesus seems almost to uncloak and reveal his true identity to his closest disciples.  

Way at the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Mark describes the baptism of Jesus and reports that as Jesus comes up from under the water, the heavens open, and the spirit descends, and a voice declares to Jesus “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” 

Now on the mountaintop, the clouds seem to thicken rather than part, but again, there is the voice, saying, “This is my son, the beloved…” 

The next phase is beginning. 

And now, in addition to Jesus dressed in a white so dazzling that it cannot be earthly, there are Moses and Elijah—the father of the law and the greatest of the prophets, keeping company with Jesus. 

For the disciples, it was like nothing they had ever seen, and they wouldn’t see anything like it until after the resurrection. 

In fact, it was so overwhelming that, to tell the truth, it was more terrifying than glorious. 

We’re blessed that we have Lent to take stock of ourselves and move slowly in the direction of expanding our boundaries.  

By contrast, the three disciples who go up on the mountain with Jesus have their whole world suddenly thrown open. 

They see him with a sudden clarity, and then, in a flash, they see themselves with that same clarity and realize just how far from dazzling they really are.  

The question of just what they will give up for love and what they won’t, and the question of how widely they’re prepared to draw the circle of their own concern – these drop them to their knees. 

And yet we tell the story not out of judgment, but out of hope.  

We tell it, not because their stories are complete, but because they aren’t.  

Just as our stories are not complete.  

And yet there is such grace to be found in the reckoning.  

There is such strength to be formed in struggling. 

There is such love to be shared in growing.  

And it’s not too late.  

This is what lies just ahead for them, and, I think also, for all those who seek to learn from Lent.  

So in this Mardi Gras/Superbowl/Valentine’s/Ash Wednesday season, may we rejoice in more than just the fun of rejoicing.  

May we rejoice in the love with that power to make all things clear and all things new.  

Amen.

In the Congregational tradition, there are only two acts in a church for which we formally reserve the term “sacrament.”  

Maybe we should have a little pop quiz! 

Raise your hand if you know the only two church things in our tradition that we officially refer to as sacraments. (No, you don’t have to.) 

Baptism and Holy Communion.  

As you can see from your bulletin, we will be serving Communion in just a little while, so you’ll get one of them in this morning.   

So: fine, technically, there are only two.  

But after doing this a while, I would also say that we Congregationalists may only recognize two sacraments, but we have a lot of things that come pretty close.  

And of all of those other things that we do, the church’s annual meeting is surely one.  

That may sound like an exaggeration.  

Yet when our tradition began, it was not obvious to many people that any churchgoer should have much of a voice, much less a vote, in what or how things were done.

The notion that the Holy Spirit would guide the churches to lead themselves was held by most to be a recipe for chaos rather than new life.  

Some earlier experiments along those lines had turned out to be cautionary tales in that respect.  

Nevertheless, they persisted.  

In fact, the longer they did, the clearer they were that their original insight drove a lot of important, ongoing reflection into how far a congregation might press the point of who had a voice, and how such perspectives served the greater good.  

As a result, the Congregationalists were early, and often the very first denomination to open their pulpits to many who were not only voiceless, but often, literally voteless within the larger society of their times.  

This is a point of pride for us. 

Truth be told, it’s also an ongoing challenge. 

If it’s truly a principle we still seek to live by, it demands that we ask ourselves who might be without voice in our time, and in our own church today, and how we might challenge ourselves to notice, to listen, and to grow from their particular witness.  

That’s not easy. 

It might make it sound like church is supposed to be some sort of continuous open mic night until Jesus returns.  

The actual vision for the church is much more subtle. 

It starts by knowing both that first, listening without love so quickly falls into judgment, and second, that love without listening is so blandly sentimental.  

Our tradition urges us to hold together both listening and love, to let them nurture (or, switching metaphors, to sharpen) one another. 

Our tradition reminds us that in the moments when we do hold listening and love together, God can seem particularly present. 

These are the times when, like Moses at the burning bush, we sense that our own feet have ventured onto holy ground. 

The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who started as a Unitarian preacher and just sort of kept going further and further out there, might not have entirely agreed.

He once said that he liked “the silent church before the music begins better than any preaching.”  

Much later, the writer Kurt Vonnegut sounded a similar idea, arguing, “People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.” 

(No offense taken, guys, I know what you mean.) 

By contrast, the early 20^th century evangelist Billy Sunday used to say, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.” 

It’s not often that I find myself disagreeing with Emerson or Vonnegut and teaming up with Billy Sunday. 

I emphatically agree that we need more silence and more daydreaming in our lives—time and space for inspiration—of course we do. 

But the church has always understood that we need to be called out of ourselves before we’re called back in, and so part of what that means is that just sitting here, even in a place as beautiful as this one, is not enough by itself to teach us how to be Christians.  

I think Billy Sunday is onto something there. 

Where I would add to that is just to say: if we can’t listen to and learn from voices other than our own, we have no genuine hope of listening to and learning from the voice that is greater than all other voices, including even our own.  

Congregationalism has taught me that.  

Certainly, it has offered me opportunity after opportunity to practice that kind of listening.  

Our Annual Meeting today is another such opportunity. 

It is so woven into our way of being church that we literally cannot be church without it—without your voting on our own leaders, the allocations they suggest from our own resources, and endorsing and enacting the way they propose to live into God’s mission here and now.  

Now, it goes without saying that Peter and the early disciples were also committed Congregationalists…well, at least I think they were.  

The gospels show us that all along the way, they seem to have had many ideas about where they thought Jesus ought to go and what he ought to do.  

It took them a while to learn to listen. 

They don’t listen very easily to Jesus. 

They don’t much listen those they encountered along the way—all those people they were initially inclined to dismiss. 

On Easter morning and the days to follow, it will become clear that they don’t even listen to each other.  

It’s worth noting that Jesus made a point of stopping and greeting, healing and including all kinds of people—offering an ongoing lesson in what God’s great community was called to look like. 

The invitation to join was always open. 

It takes the disciples awhile to catch on.  

No wonder then that, as our passage this morning makes clear, from early on in Jesus’ ministry, this work is already exhausting. 

It takes a great deal out of Jesus, personally, in ways that even his closest followers don’t seem to realize.  

Really listening, true attunement, takes a lot of focus, and they are only just beginning, and there is a long, long way to go.  

Yet if we read the story closely, this may not be true of everyone.  

We only see her for a brief moment, but I wonder if Peter’s mother-in-law points to a more developed form of discipleship. 

We’re told that she is stick in bed with a fever, and that Jesus is brought to her bedside.  

He takes her by the hand, we’re told, and lifts her up—gestures of care that, if you think about it, we also use to describe how it feels when someone listens to us. 

It’s language we use to describe when someone responds to what ails us.  

“He took me by the hand.” 

“He lifted me up.” 

Clearly, there is something profound that happens in their encounter.  

Like Peter dropping his nets to follow, his mother-in-law rises to serve.

Mark doesn’t call particular attention to it, and maybe he deliberately leaves it for us to discover, but in any case, it’s worth noting that she actually feeds Jesus.  

She serves him.  She welcomes him.  She attends to his needs.

To put it slightly differently, unlike the other disciples at this stage, she is attuned to Jesus.  

She’s listening and responding in a way that’s different from the way that they do, and frankly, more advanced.  

In contrast to them, she responds, not by dropping her nets, as it were, but by picking them up.  

Right away, she lets herself be claimed by the work of service to the people right in front of her.  

In a way the others won’t get until much later, she knows when she’s standing on holy ground, holding together listening and love in the name of a better world.

She’s called out of herself, only to be called right back in. 

But notice: she’s called back in, already different than she was before, already transformed, already more equipped to encounter and respond to the need around her than she was before. 

In this moment, she even picks up on the unspoken need of Jesus himself. 

As we seek to hold together listening and love, may we also learn to hear the spoken and the unspoken, and come to know the presence of God.  

Amen.  

Dear Colin,

First of all, congratulations on your baptism, which happened just a few moments ago.  

You may remember the part right at the end where I described you as “the newest Christian in the entire world,” and everybody clapped.  

It’s amazing to realize that’s true. 

It is also amazing to realize that now, even just a few moments later, it’s already not true, anymore.  

You have already been at this whole thing longer than some other people—at least a few.  

In your own way, you’ve actually been at it for a while. 

You played Jesus in our Christmas Pageant this year.   

You were excellent.  

That gives you a little bit of a head start.  

The Roman Catholic calendar identifies January 7^th, the day after Epiphany, as the celebration of the Baptism of Jesus—and here you are just a few days later, getting baptized yourself.  

Be advised that the next thing would be moving to Egypt. 

(You’re not moving to Egypt, right?)

In a far less literal fashion, your baptism marks our intention that your life will follow along the path of Jesus’ own life, and that the Holy Spirit will guide you ever more deeply into the love and life of God.  

Colin, if you’re not quite sure what all that means just yet, don’t worry: it’s our job to teach you.  

And you’re already absorbing all kinds of lessons. 

Psychologists tell us that for babies, one of the most fundamental and important things to learn—and surely one of the hardest things to learn—is the place where a person and the world meet.  

For babies, it is astonishing to realize that, for example, mom is not simply an extension of themselves, but that their own arms and legs, hands and feet are. 

A little later, they begin to grapple with the idea that while they may be the center of their parents’ universe, that doesn’t mean that they’re the center of the whole universe. 

Some people really struggle with that one.  

And that’s where baptism really comes to the fore. 

Because baptism into the life of Jesus is about “waking up to a life beyond the self, a life of communion”… a life in which we are called to be “responsive to others.” (The language is Mike Higton’s.) 

In fact, the church’s traditional teaching was not afraid to call baptism nothing less than “dying to the self.” 

That may sound a little jarring at first.  

The point was not to make a morning like this into any sort of gloomy occasion. 

The point was that the church saw joy, meaning, and hope in baptism’s “rising to life.”  

It marked the start of new life.  Of true life.  Of all that awaits us as we learn to engage the world. 

Baptism has always been at pains to remind us that, while the world is so much bigger than we are, it still needs us so profoundly.  

The world needs all the love and care, the curiosity and humor, the creativity and diligence that God gives us, offered back. 

It needs us to walk in this way. 

Baptism promises that as we do, God offers us our deepest joy.  

Colin, the world needs you to walk in this way, and the church is here to invite you into its own joy.  

II.

Our Scripture this morning comes from John’s Gospel. 

In some ways, it’s an odd text to accompany a baptism. 

The gospels have a lot to say about the months before the arrival of Jesus—all those angelic visits for Mary and Joseph and for the parents of John the Baptist, Zechariah and Elizabeth. 

The gospels also have a lot to say about Jesus’ birth and days immediately afterward, which is when the magi arrive. 

But then, with the exception of one story in Luke’s gospel, the trail goes cold.   

We know nothing about Jesus’ formation as a young man, which is to say, we know nothing about how he came to recognize his own call to engage the world. (Some non-canonical gospels give us a little more detail, but not much.) 

Instead, the story picks up at his own baptism, which we think happened when he was about thirty years old, and which marks the beginning of his public ministry.   

What we’ve heard this morning comes even a little bit after that, as Jesus begins to call his disciples.  

Of course, the point is that he is inviting them to join his life and engage the world. 

Yet this particular story puts its own spin on that. 

You’ve heard that Philip is the first one Jesus approaches. 

“Follow me,” says Jesus, and Philip responds immediately.  

It’s as if he gets that invitation, and he flat out runs to his friend, Nathaniel, who may or may not be sitting under a fig tree when Philip whooshes up with a trail of dust flying behind him. 

Now, the Talmud, which is the second most important book in Judaism (and just as ancient) refers to the image of sitting under a fig tree, studying the Torah, as a particular vision of the good life.  

It’s a vision of being plugged into both the goodness and abundance of Creation as well as the goodness and abundance of a life in God.  

So back in John’s Gospel, when Philip goes and seeks his friend, Nathaniel, maybe Nathaniel really is out there under some fig tree, resting his legs for a minute.  

Or maybe the point is not so much to tell us where he is, but more about the kind of person that he is. 

A little later, Jesus will say that Nathaniel is someone in whom “there is no guile.” No deceit.  

He is particularly honest.  Particularly open.  Particularly dedicated to the big questions and not distracted by the small stuff.  

Philip goes to right to him because Nathaniel is that friend who is particularly grounded…the one who will know the real thing right away, and knows it more clearly and more deeply even than Philip does. 

Philip goes to Nathaniel because he knows that Nathaniel is one of those people who is ready to rise to life when the real thing finally comes calling.  

And he’s right.     

III.

Colin, what are we going to do to get you ready to rise to life when the real thing finally comes calling?  

How can we teach you that cherished, celebrated, cuddled, fussed over and worried and prayed about though you are, you are not the center of the universe, and that this is the best news you will ever hear? 

Because the real thing is going to come calling. 

Now, before you were born, your mom was involved with a show on Broadway called “Come From Away.”  

It’s the story of how a bunch of airplanes headed across the ocean had to land unexpectedly on an island and stay put for several days at a moment when the world was hurting and very scared.  

The remarkable thing, though, is that the people on this island were neither too hurt nor too scared to welcome all these stranded strangers into their homes—in fact, to comfort them.  

Somehow, by the grace of God, they were awake to lives beyond themselves, and in a bewildering moment for the world, they still knew how to care for the people abruptly there before them.  

When the real thing came calling, they stood up, just like Nathaniel stood up.  

Colin, they may never make a hit musical about anything that happens here at this particular church, however merrily we may roll along, but when the real thing comes calling, I hope you’ll see us stand up.  

I hope you’ll see all the love and care, the curiosity and humor, the creativity and diligence that God puts in our hearts, offered back to people who need it and to projects that deserve it.    

I hope you’ll recognize the joy we have in offering these gifts, and that this will help you to be ready when it is your turn. 

In a world that can be quick to stoop to what seems expedient, may you live into the promises made for you in baptism this morning, and be someone who rises to life…and soars.  

Amen.