St. Luke Anglican Church

In celebration of Easter, Kimberley draws our attention to the impossible and trustworthy nature of the resurrection of Christ Jesus. Our God is in the business of doing the unimaginable, of moving the immovable. What are the unlikely-to-be-moved boulders in your life that you struggle to give to the God who raised Jesus the Christ?

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Human beings, even today in the modern West, have an obsession with royalty. There is something about the gravitas of a king that preoccupies our hearts and our minds. We long for someone to step into authority and begin to set things aright. Palm Sunday marks the Christian celebration of Jesus as King as he processes into Jerusalem before his passion. What kind of king is he? What sort of kingdom does he establish? What does he use his authority to accomplish?

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The story of ancient Israel is one of cyclical disenchantment and re-enchantment. The blessing of covenantal relationship with God that once was a gift would become to them a burden, yet God would remain and renew his promises. God's covenant with God's people is no longer primarily about our public and corporate standing within our communities but rather our internal posture before God and the fundamental reworking of ourselves that God initiates. James encourages us that it is from this point inside is where we now move outward, no longer the other way around. In Christ Jesus, God wants to rewrite our stories, not do away with them, and write something new upon our hearts.

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We mark the fourth week of Lent by continuing to look at the Ten Commandments. Jame's challenges us to receive that the Ten Commandments give being and purpose not only to us as individuals but as a community. Looking specifically at bearing false witness and coveting, we face the ugly truth of what following our lusts and delights produces not only within us, but what it causes to our neighbor. Luckily, James encourages, God is interested in sharing his table with those who betray him.

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When God answers our prayers and we finally find the freedom we want, what happens next? What do we do when we’re finally there? James offers to us that the Ten Commandments provides the guidelines and framework for life after and within freedom. Just like navigators using the stars as an external pattern of orientation of being and purpose, any way of being structured around anything other than the reality of God’s relationship with us will be unstable. James leaves us with challenging question: What is it fundamentally about us that we tend to gravitate back when we are invited into a different reality of peace and joy?

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In marking the second week of Lent, James helps us to focus on the contrast between the Way of Empire and the Way of Christ. The never-ending quest for power by worldly empires, and the empires within our own souls, is marked by the right to assumed authority based on might and to take, take, and take. The result, however, is nothing but anxiety and fear. In the relentless pursuit of power, the Way of Empire proves to be the road to Death. In contrast, the Way of Christ is ultimately about losing, not winning, and relinquishing power, rights, and death - not final death, but the death of all that is already killing us. In this, the Way of Christ is the road to Life. The cross, the Imperial symbol of ultimate power, is taken by Jesus and turned into a token of powerlessness that goes forth to heal the very wounds of power.

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As we enter the season of Lent, we remember that it is a time, like every wilderness narrative in Scripture, by deep and formative change. In these experiences, we can pursue two paths: Our way marked by self-determination and inflaming the ego, or the Way of Christ and humility, justice, and peace. One prepares us for lives of peace, purpose, and significance, while the other leaves others to pay for the price in the wake of our choices. The season of Lent reminds us that the first steps upon this "Way Other Than Our Own" are awareness, confession, and repentance.

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To mark Ash Wednesday, James invites us into a raw and vulnerable experience as we reflect on our shared human reality: we are dust. Yet, in that nature, the Psalmist notes that God knows that our form is dust and still chooses to breathe his Breath and send his Spirit into us. It is in the midst of this awareness of our mortality, frailty, and weakness, marked by the ashes we wear on this day, that we can meditate on the new life that God is forming there in the dirt through Christ Jesus. "There is love in the ruins," Walker Percy. We are thankful for our partners in ministry, Rev. Shanté Buckley and Lift Community Church!

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Was the Transfiguration of Christ before Peter, James, and John only a singular event in history? James points us to the fact that each of us has quiet and dynamic encounters in which a light shines within us and unveils not only our true selves but also the Way of Christ before us. Theses transcendent moments of transfiguration are universal, bodily, and transformational experiences. To round out Epiphany and prepare for the season of Lent, we can look at the Transfiguration of Christ as the light within our hearts that reveals his Way to cause a change of form within ourselves.

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In recognizing World Mission Sunday alongside Epiphany, James invites us to share in a wider perspective. We are not called to simply be solitary and individual thinkers in private faith, but to take our place in the family of Christ around the world and throughout the centuries. More than that, us here in the West are the very "nations," the "ends of the earth," to whom the Gospel of Christ Jesus was brought to by the faithful witness of generations. James encourages the listener with helpful reframing and practical wisdom about how to faithfully live out the Great Commission today.

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