Sunday’s Coming

This week is the Second Sunday of Easter, aka "low Sunday." There is in the life of a church a movement and momentum toward Easter Sunday, and then inevitably a scattering, a rest after the intensity. And yet the gospel lesson does wrestle with the implications of belief, unbelief and doubt.

Regardless of its size, an Easter congregation can be an amazingly diverse audience. Consider the following as a thought experiment about those who will be listening.

It's a truism that Christianity lives and breathes as much (or more) through music as through preaching or teaching, to say nothing of dense theological texts--so Christian preachers and teachers should be on the lookout for ways to incorporate the great hymns of the tradition into our sermons, lessons and other theological work.

Whenever the Israelites' "wilderness wandering" comes up, it presents a golden opportunity--especially in the current U.S. political climate --to talk about immigration.

The three readings for this Sunday have few obvious connections. But they do each point to forms of holiness: Genesis points to vocation, Romans points to faith, and John points to rebirth.

The first Sunday of Lent is the best time of the year to talk about sin. Many people in the church, especially the mainline church, are stuck when it comes to the overlap of sin and sensuality. No one really wants to be the pastor who comes over all judgmental about sex.

I have finally gotten around to putting away the green garden hose I tripped over all fall. After some extended travel time, the sudden frigid weather caught me off guard. Trying to coil cold plastic hose in a chilly garage seems impossible. Getting the job done properly requires time and patience. I was determined to take hours if necessary and to do it with humor and the long view.

Learning to see in new ways is one of the most difficult tasks of the transformed life. Old habits of selective vision, old choices about what to leave out and what to focus on tend to dominate us, even as we search for new ways of living that are in closer communion with the life of the Spirit. Transfiguration--that mysterious transformation of vision that is narrated in today's readings--is a radical, if brief, way of illumination.

Money and what we do with it--this sounds like an even-handed way to determine ethical standards. But in these times of supposed transparency, I can't figure out how a nation like the United States keeps going when it has debt in numbers beyond anyone's ability to comprehend or even pronounce. How many zeros?

The Christian Seasons Calendar that hangs on my wall is open in this season after Epiphany to a painting by Kirsten Malcolm Berry titled “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6). Fault lines are showing in First Church Corinth over which minister is to be credited with success and which one is to be labelled a failure. Paul keeps the focus on God. Once again the little church in Corinth pre-figures so many of our congregational stories.

This is not a Sunday for soft-pedalling the gospel. Moses and Jesus portray the life of faith as a "yes" or a "no" to God with lives that obey or that disobey. It is little wonder that it is common to summarize Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount with one verse, the "Golden Rule" (Matthew 7:12).

For the past 20 years I have toiled in the vineyards of two state legislatures: in California for 12 years and now in Wisconsin for the past eight, along with occasional forays to the U.S. Congress. In these arenas I have represented the interests of state councils of churches, which are really the interests of those who don't have the time, money or wherewithal to advocate for themselves: children, impoverished families, working-class parents with low-paying jobs.

Just as loving mercy is a means to doing justice, so is walking humbly with God. Yet in the sexuality debates raging in the mainline church, humility is seldom easy to find. Both sides cling to the fiction that they harbor gospel truth.

Epiphany is the season uniquely applicable to us who are Gentiles, the grafted-on branches to the tree of salvation, those who do well to marvel at the magnitude of the grace of God Christ that includes us. This is not common in our religiously pluralist setting, especially in our part of the world where the common assumption is that we're not grafted on at all--we're mainstream.

I am among those called to lead people in confessing sin and announcing God's forgiveness in the Sunday liturgy, an essential action never altogether free from the threat of routinized going-through-the-motions. This action is anything but routine, however, when it occurs in the setting I described in my lectionary column for the Century on this week's Gospel lesson.

Boston is dark in January. Very dark. At 5:30 p.m. light has completely abandoned the city. Sure, there is a kind of fake fluorescent light, a pale bluey glow, a TV light. But there is no authentic light, only illusion of it. And illusions only make the matter worse.

There's an interesting variation between the New International and New Revised Standard versions of Isaiah 63:9. The NIV expresses quite beautifully that "the angel of his presence saved them," while the NRSV contends that "it was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them." Both convey Isaiah's revelation that God does not plan to redeem creation by force, by tinkering with free will, or from afar. God redeems creation by becoming one of us, by drawing near to us and being with us.