It’s a dramatic day today, with two very different scenes: in one, the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, with the crowds shouting Hosanna! and spreading palm branches before him; and in the other, the long night of Jesus’ arrest and trial and his torture and death. In the first story I imagine bright sunshine and birds singing along with the people, lots of hubbub and excitement – the hustle and bustle of the city and of a great parade, all the rowdiness of crowds outdoors. And Jesus is poised in the midst of it all, giving somewhat mystical orders to his disciples to procure a donkey and colt, confidently claiming the symbolism of the old prophecies of the Messiah king. And we celebrate it ourselves by singing one of our loudest and most confident hymns, ‘All glory, laud, and honor,’ and we march along with our palm branches in a way completely different from any other Sunday. In a very public, right out there in the neighborhood kind of way – this is a story to be proud of, it looks like.

But we don’t get to relish that scene for very long, for before we’ve gone too far into the service we hear about the other scene instead. Isaiah talks about one who is beaten and despised; the psalm cries out, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble.’ And then we heard the other part of Jesus’ story, what happens just a few chapters later in Matthew’s gospel: Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, and being put on trial before the religious leaders and then the Roman governor, and his best friend deserting him, and all those crowds of people who had just been shouting for joy now shouting for him to be killed. And Jesus is mostly silent in the midst of it all, allowing all of this to happen to him. And he is tortured and mocked by the soldiers, and is crucified, and dies, and strange events happen, an earthquake and people being raised from the dead and the temple curtain being torn, and a Roman centurion, a soldier, says that this must have been God’s Son – but realizing it too late to do anything about it.

It’s a lot of story to take in in a short space of time – and it’s a lot of emotional ground to cover, too. Jesus looks very different from the first scene to the second – in the first, he is telling his disciples exactly what to do and looking very authoritative; in the second, he is completely silent except for two confusing and enigmatic answers to the high priest and to Pilate the governor, answers that mostly amount to no answer at all. And yet in both scenes Jesus seems to be actively choosing to act as he does. He chooses quite deliberately how and when he will enter Jerusalem, and does so even though anyone can see that this public display will only antagonize those in power. And when he is arrested as expected, Jesus seems to choose to go willingly, and not to give an answer to the questions asked of him, not to defend himself against their accusations. In one scene he chooses action, and the crowds like that: Jesus being the powerful ruler, coming in to be their new king, flying in the face of the forces aligned against him. In the other scene, he chooses not to act – and the crowds don’t like that at all. When given the option, they shout out that they want the criminal Jesus Barabbas to be released instead of Jesus called the Messiah. And as Jesus hangs on the cross, he is mocked by three different groups of people, all of whom say something like, You could save yourself and you don’t – why not? obviously you’re a fraud after all. What fools we were to think you were powerful.

Every time we read a story from the gospel, we’re invited to imagine ourselves into the story – what would it be like to be healed, or to be called as a disciple, or to be there when Jesus fed the 5000? But Palm Sunday is the one day when we make that completely explicit, by reading the long gospel story in parts, [...]

Have you ever come to a place where you have given up all hope? Has it ever felt like God waited just too long to help? That’s what I’ve been thinking about from the gospel we just heard.

The last of our long Lenten gospel readings. And what a powerful one. Mostly it’s a story we think of as the raising of Lazarus. But really, that part only happens at the end. And so the story is even more about Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters – and about the long wait before the miracle comes.

All three of them, it seems, were close friends of Jesus, a family with whom he was deeply intimate. Judging by the order in which they are named, Martha was the oldest and Lazarus was the baby brother. And Lazarus, their beloved brother, and Jesus’ dear friend, falls terribly ill, so they send for Jesus. And Jesus does not come. And Lazarus dies.

And the next day, Jesus does not come. Nor does he come the following day. It is only when four days have passed, when all hope has been abandoned, that Jesus shows up. The belief at the time was that the life force of the body stayed nearby for three days – but by four, it was gone. And by four days, the body would be beginning to decompose. And only on the fourth day does Jesus come.

And it is not as though he were unavoidably held up, or far away, unable to get there in time. The story says he tarries – he stays where he is two more days on purpose.

When he finally does come, before he’s even got to the house, Martha comes out to see him. We don’t know the way she greeted him. But I would imagine that she is confused, outraged, bewildered. Lord, she says, if you had been here, Lazarus would not have died. The question beneath it I hear is: where the hell were you? Later when Jesus comes nearer to the house, her sister Mary comes to him and asks the same question. What must they have been suffering and thinking in those dark days after their baby brother died?

A few weeks ago I received a box from Nancy Jacobs, a former member of this church who has been a longtime member now of the church I grew up in, St Margaret’s in Bellevue, WA. Among other things, she included a few copies of a journal from 1988 called Sharing, a small magazine that was devoted to stories of Christian healing. That issue had the story my mother wrote about our family – certainly a story I’m aware of at some level all the time, but one I hadn’t recently reflected on. I read the story again in a whole new way this time. It’s the story of my sister, who was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 12, and our family’s suffering with that through her teenage years. Now that I have children of my own, it struck me very differently – I felt more keenly what it must have been like for my mom. My family was part of St Margaret’s during that time as well, and the year my sister was diagnosed, 1970, they had a healing service for her at church. It was the time in the church when healing prayer was especially popular, the so-called charismatic renewal, and many people came. Everyone there talked about how my sister was glowing that night. The cancer was in remission and coincidentally, the doctors in charge of her care decided the next day by a drawing of straws to try no treatment at all. My parents took this as a sign of God’s action: my sister had been miraculously healed.

But a few months later, things started to go downhill again. In fact, after that healing service happened, over the next five years, my sister relapsed four times. In the early 1970s, there weren’t a lot of options yet for what to do for leukemia. My sister said, what’s the point of a healing service if you’re not healed, and I’m sure my parents thought the same thing.

Meanwhile, I had been born – an unwelcome turn of events from most people’s perspective. But after a few years they checked the family again, and checked m[...]

In the New York Times this last week there was a story about a private school in Manhattan called Friends Seminary, a school that was founded in the 18th century by Quakers. The Quaker meeting that began the school is now having doubts about staying connected with the school. It’s not uncommon for churches and their schools to part ways, usually because of liability issues or the school getting too big for the church to manage. But in this situation, the meeting is concerned that the school has become un-Quaker. Tuition is over $32,000 a year, and so only a fairly elite tier of students attend. Since Quakers have simplicity and equality as core principles, this rubs many of the meeting members the wrong way, you could say. The Quaker process, however, does not allow for taking a vote about such things – you sit in silence together when debates heat up and wait for consensus. So there have been a lot of discussion, with a lot of sitting in silence, and no clear decision yet.

It happens that I’ve been reading about Quakers this last week, in particular about their views on money as I prepared the adult ed forum for this week. Their practice is to be very intentional about money, always conscious of who is affected when they think about buying something or taking a new job – which is partly why they were historically such good businesspeople, very frugal and conscientious in their management of things. And it struck me in my reading, and in this current situation, that being a Quaker is very, very difficult. No question is simple and straightforward – their principles are unyielding and their commitment to integrity is absolute. But just how to apply those principles in any given situation, always within the counsel of their community, never as lone ranger individuals – it’s a complicated process. They struggle to see the way God sees, listening to each other for the Spirit’s guidance. No wonder there are now only 520 Quakers worshiping in Manhattan these days.

I was thinking about this because we have a few stories today about seeing the way God sees, and in both cases, it’s clear that it takes work. In the first story, the prophet Samuel is told by God to go and anoint a new king, since Saul has not turned out well. Samuel goes to the home of Jesse and watches his sons, waiting to see which one of them God has chosen. But it’s not the one he thinks. Samuel is impressed by Eliab, but God says, don’t judge by appearances or height – I look at what is within. So Samuel looks at every other son, but none of them are the one. Finally Samuel insists that they call the youngest, who is out watching the sheep, and lo and behold, David turns out to be the one, and Samuel anoints him. Samuel has to ask for what he is not seeing before he sees the one God desires. And, curiously, David also gets the seal of approval for his appearance – ruddy and handsome, with beautiful eyes. But this seems to be a bonus, not the main point.

The John story is about this same tension of seeing and not seeing. It’s a healing story, but the majority of this long passage is about what comes after the healing. One of things that’s unusual about the story is that it’ s an instance where the person healed doesn’t ask for the healing at all – the man born blind is more of a teachable moment at first, as Jesus answers his disciples’ question about whether sin had something to do with his blindness. Jesus heals the man, it seems, to prove a point, tells the man to go wash in the pool, and then walks on. He sort of leaves this guy to his fate – and with what happens afterward, you almost wonder whether he would want to thank Jesus or not.

Because first his neighbors start on him: Is this the same guy? He used to sit here begging, and now he’s walking around able to see. What is this? How can this be? And so the man tells them about what happened, how Je[...]

This week the news has been particularly horrible to read. At the beginning of the week we saw pictures of the devastation by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then we began hearing about the problems with the nuclear reactors, and about how paralyzed the leadership in Japan seems to be at addressing the crisis. We’re familiar with the pattern of tragedy in the news – a terrible calamity happens, the death toll is calculated, survivors are found, the story recedes from the headlines. But this is a tragedy that seems to be getting worse and worse, rather than better with time. And as the fears about the reactors have risen, WWII survivors have relived the horror of Hiroshima; more recent memories of Chernobyl or even just Three Mile Island have replayed in many minds. I’ve remembered the nuclear fear of my childhood, when it seemed possible that Russia could decide to bomb us at any time. The already staggering tragedy going on Japan has now touched all of us, and it has stoked all of our fears.

And when we’re not reading about Japan, we’re reading about Libya – the brutality there, and now the possibility of our involvement in stopping it. Heartbreaking and scary all at once.

This week also happened to be the week that Jim and I had an appointment to meet with an attorney to begin drawing up our wills, something we have put off for far too long. It meant that Monday evening we spent pulling things together and talking about who should be guardians to our children if we both died. And since our attorney also recommended considering advance directives for health care, our drive to Berkeley to the appointment on Wednesday was filled with discussion about what kind of end-of-life decisions we wanted to make. How do we want to die, in other words.

Perhaps picking up on all of this, Frances asked me as she went to bed Wednesday night, ‘Mama, when am I going to die?’ I said none of us know that – but that I hoped it wouldn’t be for a very, very long time. She wanted to know how it was she would get to heaven, and I said that since I haven’t been there I don’t know, but that I believe that God will hold us and take care of us when we die.

So I have been thinking a great deal about death this week – as perhaps have many of you. First of all, a question: how many of you have made out your wills? How many have done advance directives about health care? You may not know that even our Book of Common Prayer notes that it is the duty of every Christian to make out a will – it’s there at the end of the prayers for thanksgiving for a child, that we should put our affairs in order to care for those we will leave. It is well worth the spiritual energy and time to do so, to focus on our own mortality and what will be left when we die.

But even if we don’t do that, events like the catastrophe in Japan bring home our mortality to us in a big way. Scenes of such devastation, such vast numbers killed in seconds, are so hard to comprehend. We struggle to take it all in. It just goes on and on. And perhaps we wonder, how can God let something so horrible happen? How can so many lives be snuffed out so quickly? Doesn’t God have anything to say about such tragedy? Couldn’t God stop it?

I’ll admit, when I began to try to see how these questions fit with the readings presented to us for this Sunday, I wasn’t sure how they did. That conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the gospel is all about birth, not death. But then I began to imagine the scene, what Jesus and Nicodemus thought of each other as they talked. There’s Nicodemus, a Pharisee, scholar and teacher, sneaking in to see Jesus at night when no one is looking. He says, ‘We can tell – I can tell – that you must be from God, because you’re doing amazing things.’ Jesus responds, ‘Ah, you can see that because you have been born from above.[...]

When I was a young girl I went through a period of playing with horses – not real horses, but the model Breyer horses with the beautiful flowing manes and raised hoofs all sculpted out of plastic. I coveted new ones, and whenever I could save up my allowance I would go buy one, looking over all the models and planning which one I wanted to buy next. With the horses I would act out various imaginary adventures for hours.

My great-aunt Edna, then in her 80s, would come occasionally to stay with us, and she came to visit while I was in the grip of this particular enthusiasm. One day while she was out of her room, I wandered in. There on the bed was her handbag, and before I even quite realized what I was doing, I reached in and pulled out a $20 bill – and pocketed it. Later that same day I went to the toy store with a friend – and with that $20, I bought a beautiful Breyer horse.

Well, it didn’t take long for my aunt to notice the missing money, and she mentioned it to my dad, who then sat me down and got me to admit the ugly truth. Since by then the money was spent, he paid my aunt back himself – I had to apologize – but I got to keep the horse, which seems amazing to me as I look back on it. But maybe my dad realized what would happen – I never could play with that horse without feeling kind of sick about it, and ashamed. And I certainly never, ever again took something that wasn’t mine.

Temptation – and its consequences.

Today we hear two different stories of temptation – the archetypal one of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the story we call simply, The Fall. And the one of Jesus in the wilderness, confronting the devil. Similar temptations in each story. But vastly different responses.

Adam and Eve live happily in the garden of the Lord, a beautiful, lush place where all they need is provided. All is well. They have only one rule they must obey. And before long, they are tempted to break it. In comes the serpent, craftier than any other animal, and engages the woman in conversation. He simply asks a question. He’s perfectly reasonable. And he promises that they will be like God – you don’t have to be ignorant and limited like you are right now, you could be like God. You don’t have to depend on God – eat the fruit of this tree and you’ll know what he knows. You’ll know good and evil. The woman thinks, well, the fruit does look tasty. And it’s sure pretty. And hey, I want to be like God. So she eats it, and the man eats it with her. And the first thing they experience is shame – their eyes are opened, just like the serpent says, but they don’t like what they see. Suddenly being naked is no longer ok – what is good and natural and created by God now looks tainted and shameful to them. So they make clothes and cover themselves up. They know good and evil – or perhaps more accurately, although before they knew only good, now they know evil. And nothing is ever the same for them again. At the beginning of all the stories of Hebrew Scripture, temptation wins, and ruins everything.

And then we hear in the gospel of Jesus, at the very beginning of his story. Right after his baptism, he heads off into the wilderness to prepare himself. He fasts and prays for 40 days – part of why our season of Lent is 40 days, echoing his experience – and at the end, the devil appears, and offers Jesus three temptations. He’s perfectly reasonable. He even speaks in the language of scripture. You’re hungry, Jesus – and you will come into contact with many who are hungry in your ministry. Why don’t you use your power to make these stones into bread? You’re something really special, Jesus, you can do things others can’t. Try it out, jump off this cliff – you’ll be able to get them to listen to you this way. You want to get people doing things your way? You could have all the power you want over them. All you have[...]

Have any of you ever had a mountaintop experience? By that I mean, an experience that was spiritually thrilling beyond anything else you’d felt, a time when you felt close to God and everyone around you, at peace with yourself, in love? Sometimes feelings like that come when we’re on a retreat or a weekend like Cursillo, or on a trip into the wilderness, or when we have our first child. I remember as a teenager going to spiritual renewal weekends, what a high I would be on for a few days when I returned. Or the thrill of backpacking up above treeline, how deeply settled I feel when I’m up there. But however wonderful, that feeling of exaltation doesn’t last, does it? Sometimes it’s only a little while, sometimes a few days – but eventually, we have to go back to work, we have to balance the checkbook and clean the bathrooms, we have to sit in traffic as we drive back across the Central Valley, and it all fades away. It’s the nature of mountaintop experiences that they don’t last. But that doesn’t mean they don’t change us.

I think we use the term ‘mountaintop experience’ because of the very story we heard today, the story we call the Transfiguration. It’s a story that comes in each of the synoptic gospels, and we always wrap up the church season of Epiphany, this season we’ve been in since Christmas, with this story. Before we go into Lent – the valley of Lent, you could say – we hear about the mountaintop. It’s an amazing story. Jesus takes his best friends and closest followers up the mountain and something incredible happens – he becomes dazzling with light, his clothes shining white, and Moses and Elijah, two pillars of the Hebrew tradition, appear with him. Peter and James and John have been wandering around with Jesus and hearing him speak and watching him heal and seeing him do amazing things, but this tops everything. And Peter, dear Peter, is absolutely beside himself. He just doesn’t know what to think or what to do, it seems, and so he starts babbling: ‘Hey, it’s a good thing we’re here, Lord, because you and Moses and Elijah should have some places to stay in up here! Wow, we could really do something great for you here! We could –’… but then there comes a voice, interrupting and silencing Peter, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son…listen to him!’ And Peter shuts up and falls to the ground, and so do James and John – and then the vision ends and just Jesus is there, looking normal again. And he says, get up, and don’t be afraid. And they go down from the mountain, and Jesus begins his journey toward Jerusalem and death.

Poor Peter. Of course he babbles and doesn’t know what to do. Maybe he wants to prolong the experience – maybe even in the midst of having it he already fears it slipping away. Maybe he really is frightened – his best friend shining like the sun and a voice from heaven booming out. It’s terrifying. You don’t have a close encounter with the living God without being terrified. That’s what it seems like, at least – every time an angel of God appears in the Bible, the first thing they say is, do not be afraid. Jesus says it too – get up, and do not be afraid. And Peter does seem to calm down – at least, he’s able to walk down the mountain with Jesus and continue following him. But his first instinct is frantic action, this idea of building some kind of booth or tabernacle – maybe it’s trying to provide some ritual religious context for what he’s seeing, or maybe it’s less coherent than that. Either way, Peter’s instinct is to put parameters around this wild and uncontrollable experience. What he is seeing is utterly beyond his ken, utterly incomprehensible – it freaks him out, and he wants to regain his equilibrium and sense of control. And he wants to sustain the experience, the moment of total intimacy with Jesu[...]

So the word gospel means good news – when we read the gospel we’re meant to hear in it good news for us and the world. Which is why in the Episcopal tradition we end the reading of the gospel with, ‘The Gospel of the Lord…Praise to you, O Christ.’ But there are some days when the gospel reading may not leave us feeling quite like we heard good news. My preaching professor in seminary said that in preaching, we always needed to bring the good news – in other words, a good sermon shouldn’t just be a harangue from start to finish. You can have some haranguing in it, but you have to wind it up with the good news. Well, today’s clip from the sermon on the mount seems to be more harangue than good news – to be fair, it’s still just the middle of the whole sermon. But we get several commandments from Jesus in that reading today, and then if you weren’t yet feeling overwhelmed, it’s wound up with one ultimate commandment: be perfect.

Now before you run screaming from the room, let’s explore this a bit more. How many of you here would call yourself a perfectionist? How many of you don’t call yourself that but…you can’t stand it when you make mistakes, you get irritated with other people when they make mistakes, and you work more than you should? Or if that’s not you, then how many of you were raised by a perfectionist? Did you always feel loved, even if you got dirt on your dad’s shorts or crashed the car or got a B in biology? Yeah, none of perfectionism is good, is it? But looking at the gospel reading today, it looks like God is a perfectionist too. ‘Be perfect, just like God is perfect.’

No. Let’s sweep that one out of the way right off the bat. Time for a little Greek lesson: The word translated ‘perfect’ is ‘teleios,’ which comes from the root word ‘telos.’ Telos means purpose, end, or goal. Teleios is variously translated perfect, whole, grown-up, complete, mature, full-grown. It does not mean perfect in the sense of never being wrong, or without flaw. Lesson here: When you read scripture, always, always remember that you are reading it in translation.

So our passage could also read, ‘be a grown-up, just like God is a grown-up – be the fulfillment of God’s purposes, just as God is always fulfilling God’s purposes.’ Which is maybe less scary, but if we think about it, no less daunting. And what Jesus said just before it – love your enemy, turn the other cheek, pray for people when they attack you, go the extra mile – none of that is easy stuff either. Easy to get back on the perfectionistic bandwagon – if I don’t do all these things, I’m failing.

Well, yes and no. You know that old debate about nature vs. nurture? Whether people have innate tendencies toward particular temperaments, or whether everything is learned from their environment? It seems like mostly these days experts say it’s a mix of the two: children do seem to come into the world with the beginnings of personality already intact, somehow inherited from the genetic pool they’re descended from. Two kids raised in the exact same environment don’t turn out the same – sometimes they turn out radically different. This has amazed me with my two kids – I don’t know yet how they’re going to turn out, but they’re definitely two different people, and they were personalities from the start. It’s an amazing thing, raising a kid – where on earth do they come from? I mean, really come from?

But also, how kids are raised – the home they’re part of, the schools they attend, the culture that surrounds them – shapes them as well, highlighting or downplaying elemental parts of their personality. I just watched the 2010 documentary ‘Babies,’ which films 4 different babies from radically different cultures around the world: [...]

Our 4 year old, Frances, loves hearing stories – and somewhere along the way it became enshrined in ritual that Mom or Dad telling her a story can get her through anything: long walks home, teeth brushing, and so on. After several months – years – now of ‘tell me a story,’ it’s easy to run out of ideas. But happily, Frances has started offering suggestions. So she and I are now embarked on a series of Frances and Aidan stories, about a brother and sister who are almost but not quite like a future version of Frances and Benjamin. A regular occurrence in their relationship is arguing and putting each other down, sometimes escalating into yelling – until Mom or Grandpa or someone intervenes and they apologize and remember they love each other. It’s a pretty obvious theme, and one I not so subtly hope will offer a way forward for Frances when her own brother grows up enough to be a pest. Siblings have a way of bickering and fighting – but hopefully, also a way of reconciling and loving each other fiercely. Something like what we can do in community.

I talked some last week about how Jesus wasn’t always nice – how he didn’t always say things that made people feel comfortable. Today’s gospel would be a good example of that. This is sort of the ‘if you thought you were doing well, think again’ text. It’s not enough not to murder – don’t even get angry and insult people. It’s not enough to steer clear of adultery – don’t even think about it. And if you divorce, it’s even worse. By these standards, every single one of us has broken God’s law. With standards like these, how can we not? So what do we do? Well, we can throw up our hands and not even try…or we can get hyper-critical and judge everyone around us… both of those are tempting – but I think by these we’re missing the point.

This language about ‘the law’ can steer us in all kinds of wrong directions. There’s a kind of Christian thinking that says, the law has nothing to do with us, it was just the old covenant: Jesus set us free from it altogether; there’s another related kind of thinking that says, the fact that the standards of the law are so high and we can’t meet them is God’s way of steering us toward Jesus as our savior; there’s yet another kind of thinking that says, Christians are still supposed to follow all the rules, and otherwise, we won’t get to heaven. All of these theologies can co-exist in anyone of us without us realizing it – that’s why we can end up secretly comparing ourselves favorably with others when we’re living righteously, while tossing it all out and saying, ‘well, God doesn’t care, I’m forgiven!’ when we’re not. And then worrying about whether we’ll get to heaven or not in the end.

I think part of the problem is our understanding of what the law is for – tangled up maybe with what we think civil laws are for, or the kinds of rules we teach our children. In those cases, laws are about rules: do this, don’t do that, and you’ll stay within the bounds. Break those laws or rules, and you’re out of bounds, and punishment will follow. But God’s law isn’t that. It’s about relationship. Commandments and rules in Hebrew scriptures are meant to guide us to right relationship. Look at the 10 Commandments, the most basic set of rules in scripture: rabbinical writings in Judaism point out that the first four of the commandments are about being in right relationship with God: you shall have no other Gods before me, do not make idols, do not swear falsely by God, honor the Sabbath day; while the next six are about being in right relationship with each other: honor your parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet what belongs to your neighbor. They[...]

One January several years ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Israel.  It was one of those tours set up for clergy, in the hopes that we would be inspired to one day take a group of parishioners on a similar pilgrimage (with the same company, of course).  It was a whirlwind 8 days of driving around in a bus and jumping in and out of various holy places – not my preferred method of seeing a place, but ok enough for a first experience.  One of the places we visited was the Mt. of Beatitudes, the site revered as the place where Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount, what we just heard from today in the gospel.  The site of that sermon is on a slope high up above the Sea of Galilee, with a wide-open vista to the south over the sea and the surrounding mountains and hills.  It was very green this time of year – like California, the rains bring green to what is usually a dryer place – and the morning we were there, the sun was shining warm and the sea was perfectly calm.  It was an amazingly beautiful day to be outside.

And God surprised me there.  It was only the second full day of our travels, and we had already visited numerous holy sites in Nazareth and Cana and Mt. Tabor (the site associated with the Transfiguration).  I was one of the few non-English clergy in the group, and we were led by two English priests who had prepared a liturgy for us in each holy place.  One of those priests is a friend of mine, but we differ somewhat on how we approach worship.  And by the second morning I was already sick of the worship.  Every holy site had a church on it, many of them, to my taste, ugly, overly ornate buildings.  And in every site we heard a scripture reading related to the site – that part was ok – and said a prayer, and sang a hymn…a six-verse English hymn, sung at full volume, in a tempo that began slow and became even slower as we went.  Clergy, especially male clergy, especially English male clergy, tend to sing really loud and really slowly.  I was not liking it.  And I was also encountering what was for me at the time a fairly typical set of doubts, which run something like, I’m a priest, I should like this, but man, this is SO churchy, maybe I’m in the wrong profession, etc.  So in this state I arrived at the Mt. of Beatitudes, filed in along with the others to the very ugly little church, endured the hymn, and fled outside, down to the garden where I could see out over the lake and feel the sun.  I thought, that’s it, I must be a pagan.  Get out of the church and go outside, stop the hymn and be still in the silence – clearly the response of a pagan.  I should write the bishop immediately.

But as I sat out there in the warmth of the sun, hearing the birds and seeing the sea sparkling below, I remembered suddenly where we were.  This was the place where people think Jesus preached.  Gathered around him on the grass, or maybe up above him on the slope for the purposes of acoustics, were crowds of people, sitting outside and listening to this man.  People who spent their days outside, farming these hills and fishing on this sea, listening to this person who spent most of his time also outside, wandering, teaching, healing, feeding people.  Whenever Jesus had a crowd, he took them to some place outside where they could all spread out and hear him.  And all of this he did in the region where he grew up and came into adulthood, in the beautiful area around the Sea of Galilee, a place he must have loved for its beauty something like how I was loving it, how I love places like Sierra peaks or California hills or the green fields of Oxfordshire.  This Jesus lived much of his life outside and, apparently, loved being there.  It was a Jesus I had never really connected to until that moment.

Now, lest you think that my great epiphany of this pilgrimage was that we should just tear down the churches and go outside (and we should do some of this), let me hasten to add that I had a few more moments of transcendence along the way, some o[...]

We have the gift of an extra Sunday in our Christmas season – extra time to settle into the feast of the Incarnation, which of course does last for 12 days, whether you’ve still got your tree up or not.  And what a gift for us here, as we start together on the incarnation of our life together.  I wasn’t able to be with you on Christmas Eve, but I do get to celebrate the last part of Christmas with you.  It’s the perfect season for starting out together.  We’ve known about each other for a long time – I knew about you and a few of you knew about me way back in July, and then over the months, more and more of you have come to know more and more about me, and I about you.  But only today are we putting flesh on it, so to speak, all of us meeting each other and starting the long adventure of getting to really know each other.  We’re incarnate to each other starting today – not just as a set of hearsay or ideas, but real people, starting real relationship together.

It’s rather like getting married, actually.  After a period of courtship – writing letters, phone calls, progressing to visits across the country – we decided to get engaged.  We planned our marriage, set up the house, got our parent’s permission (Bishop Mary), and now here we are, married.  I suppose the wedding ceremony will be the installation later this month, but legally now, we’re a done deal. And so now we start learning about each other in earnest, learning what it’s like to live together.  We’ll learn all kinds of things to love about one another, things to cherish and delight in together.  And probably we’ll learn things about each other that annoy us a little too, things we’ll have to learn to live with or work through together, just like in any marriage.  It’s the nitty-gritty of life together, real incarnate life, that we’re starting today.

We had three options for our gospel reading today, you probably noticed – there are several stories about the infant and child Jesus and not a lot of time to tell them in church, since starting next Sunday we start telling the stories of the adult Jesus and his ministry.  So today we could have heard the story about the 12-year-old Jesus going to the Temple, seeking out the wisdom of the elders there and worrying his human parents.  Or we could have told the story of the visit of the wise men, the story of Epiphany, which is this Thursday.  I’m confident that you all will be here for the 7:30 Eucharist on Thursday to hear that one, so I took the risk of saving it till then.  Instead, I picked our first option, the story of the flight to Egypt.  It’s the scary story in the Christmas series – the dark reaction of worldly power to the beautiful story of the Nativity.  Joseph is told in a dream to take the baby Jesus to Egypt, out of harm’s way, because Herod the King is seeking to destroy him.  While they are in Egypt – in the part left out of today’s reading – Herod orders the death of all baby boys in Jerusalem.  Only when Herod dies does Joseph get the word that it is safe to return, and even then, he has to settle in another town to feel safe.  Love comes down at Christmas, and finds the world to be a dangerous place.

It’s a story that makes a point:  in other words, incarnation is not all rosy.  There are a lot of sweet images around Christmastime, the pretty crèche scenes many of us have in our homes showing Mary all lovely and the gathered animals around the manger so peaceful.  We dress up the children as angels for the pageant, we light candles and sing gentle hymns like Silent Night, we make and eat too many sugar cookies and treats.  All of that is wonderful, and all of it is right, for there is a lot of sweetness in the story of God coming to be with us in the person of a little baby.  But of course it’s only a piece of the story, for we know what comes to pass when that baby grows up – how he will anger people and say and do challenging things, and how he will suffer and die on the cross.  Some of the older[...]