Jesus’ parable is more the Parable of the Dysfunctional Family than anything else. A weak father. An absent mother and wife, and two out of control sons. Yet this father is willing to sacrifice his own honor in order to keep his family and community together. It is a story about reconciliation and reunion, not repentance. 

Luke does not describe what Jesus saw when the Tempter shows up. Luke doesn’t even say if Jesus knew exactly what he was going toe-to-toe with—perhaps the Tempter maintained a clever disguise, even showed up as something that looked familiar to Jesus. But whatever it is that Jesus, sees, hears, or knows, the story that follows is a battle of cosmic proportions.

As the ashy grit is smeared on our foreheads we hear the words “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”. These ashes are smeared on anyone who comes forward, infants to the aged, the healthy and the sick, without partiality. A reminder that we are all in this together and we will all end the same way. Our return to dust being the great equalizer of life.

Whether or not they could hear the utterances of the glorified Moses and Elijah, the disciples surely did know that something was off, that Jesus’ was a bit troubled, that there was already a slight haze of fear and trembling in the air. But here, here in the midst of all of it, hundreds of feet above the trials and tribulations of their ministry, above the growing specter of negative attention from the authorities, there was this moment of reprieve, of illumination, of hope.

The very idea of quickly forgiving someone who was guilty of a terrible crime seemed obscene, even a violation in itself of a greater ethical standard of justice. I could not honestly predict how I would react if someone very close to me were harmed by another. 

Absalom was a slave, owned by a member of St. Peter’s, who refused to grant him freedom until he was 38 years old. So telling the story of Absalom Jones necessarily means telling a story about slavery and also a story about race: a story that should leave us discomfited by our own history and by the sanitized ways that it has so often been written and told.

Talking about “call” may not be something most people spend a lot of time angsting over—it seems too churchy. Surely it only applies to those who want to be deacons or priests. But “call” put another way is  the question of what am I to do with my life? What is my purpose here on earth? What gives us and our lives meaning? This is a struggle that I would guess many of us have experienced. What exactly does God want me to do, and when and how is God going to telegraph it to me?

Recognizing the Christ in others is not simply an exercise in getting misty eyed at those who have unexpectedly helped us, it is recognizing the Christ in those offensive people God has a knack for sending our way. Not every offensive person is carrying a word from God, but some of them are most definitely people sent to upset our worldview enough that we don’t confuse our own ideas of God with God.

The idea that church is a nice add-on to one’s personal, individual relationship with the Divine is quite endemic to American Christianity. And perhaps, it’s because the church hasn’t often been very good at explaining exactly what it is we’re doing here. But I think...I think if we’re really honest, the primary difficulty is that being church is really, really hard.

What Paul was trying to teach the early churches was that what was true inside their skin was also true outside it. That wholeness was a matter of many different parts all being themselves and doing their jobs. In other words, unity and diversity were not contradictory terms.