Jerusalem is dangerous. What the hell are we doing here?

Lent 2-C Feb. 28, 2010
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35

Cities are dangerous places. The streets are icy in winter, and in summer we trip over the cracked sidewalks. Gangs and guns are a bad combination in crowded neighborhoods.

Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was a dangerous place. The holy city – the place where heaven and earth meet – is characterized by Jesus as the place that kills prophets and all manner of people who come to help it. And yet that is just where Jesus is headed in today’s reading. The Gospel of Luke, that this passage is from, mentions the city of Jerusalem 90 times, and today’s passage is the most poignant and powerful. Here Jesus laments, cries, weeps that his beloved city is so violent and dangerous and corrupt. He describes the civic leadership as wily, predatory foxes, and he himself as the perfect prey for a fox: a mother hen, who has only beating wings and an indignant heart to protect her vulnerable chicks: no armed resistance, no claws or talons, no mighty fortress is this God.

This winter seems a good time to read this lesson, this winter of considerable discontent. Devastating earthquakes—the one in Haiti was very close to us and many people we know, and followed yesterday by one in Chile. Even now, when we may not see daily photos of people in peril, we know that those cities are very dangerous places indeed, where people have little shelter or security. Here at home we also know people living on the streets, in all kinds of weather. As you know my own husband has had a terribly hard time recovering from surgery, and we know other friends or family ill or in difficulty. This parish struggles along, a faithful crew of us, yes, but finances are tight, cracks in the walls leak when it rains, the furnace can’t possibly fill this place with enough heat, and there are few people able to take up the burdens of leadership. Yes, indeed, the image of dear, peep-peeping vulnerable chicks fits us to a T – and who is there to lead the way? Nothing but a cluck-clucking mother hen: what good is she, to protect us from the fox around the corner?

Perhaps the thing that makes me feel most vulnerable is not knowing what the future has in store. A vain hope, isn’t it? A silly thing to wish for, or to put stock in. None of us can possibly know what will happen next. And yet, obviously, we have to base our lives on some predictability, some reasonable guess about what will happen next. That fear hit me terribly when I could not figure out why my husband kept getting sick, and it hits me terribly here, in this parish, when we have a hard time figuring out what of the many important things ahead of us we should do next. When the rain floods in by the office door. When there are near fisticuffs while people are waiting for lunch at the Table. When the heat does not work, or we don’t know how the electrical bill is going to be paid. At times like that, the reality is that we are all baby chicks, with nothing between us and that fox licking his chops except that ineffectual mother hen we keep reading about.

It’s Lent, isn’t it? When everything about church life directs to that very vulnerable and frightening day in the not too distant future when foxy Jerusalem gets the better of Jesus and leads him off to die on the cross. It’s not a future we can control, or be comfortable with or look forward to.

I am sure there were followers of Jesus who wanted him to be anything but that wimpy mother hen character. Who wanted him to fight back with weapons and swords, to change that dangerous city of Jerusalem into a shining city on a hill, safe, secure, prosperous. Don’t we all want the right things to happen? And it is profoundly disappointing when that future does not go our way. Jesus would make anybody mad – the people he confronted, and the people who followed him, both. We all want a good future, a good life, and Jesus, you promised us, and now all we get is this clap trap about mother hens and heading off to death.

Many years ago, when my grandmother lay gravely ill in the hospital, a social worker sat me down and said, “Let go, let God.” It may not have helped then, when I was frightened of the future, to hear that, but looking back on those days, it helps now. I know it helped me say good-bye to my grandmother and to grieve her and to celebrate her life in all its wonderfulness. I could not control her impending death, could not decide what path she should take or how long she would travel that way. I couldn’t do anything about it, but get in my own way of that future that I could not imagine.

That’s Lent. There are things happening around us that we do not like, and they seem to be headed in a direction we do not want them to go. Jerusalem has turned into one dangerous place. What the hell are we doing here?

It’s time to let go, and to let God.

Miracles of abundance reveal the glory of God

Epiphany 2-C
January 17, 2010
1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Psalm 36:5-10
John 2:1-11

How can we look at what is going on in Haiti and think, there is enough to go around. How can we look at what is going on in Haiti and even imagine a world of abundance and grace?

We have been frightened, indeed, by the images of the devastation in Haiti, pictures of people with none of the basics of life: food, shelter, water. News reports do show increased looting going on in Port au Prince, a notoriously violent and crime-ridden city, but there are other things as well[i]. People are sharing. They are compassionate. What little anyone has is willingly given to someone who has nothing. People huddling together in make-shift camps in streets and parks spend their dark nights singing. Things are horrendous, in Haiti; no doubt about it. Horrendous. But there is also hope.

What a curious gospel lesson to read today, after this week of unimaginable pain and destruction. But this story of the wedding feast at Cana is also a story that begins with loss and fear. The wedding planners have run out of supplies. There is no more wine, and wine is essential to the blessing in a Jewish wedding ceremony. Without wine there can be no blessing; without a blessing, there can be no marriage. This is a story that symbolizes the difference between “conventional wisdom” and God’s wisdom about abundance and scarcity. When the world says, there is not enough to go around, God says, Let’s have a party.

Today’s party is a wedding feast. In the Hebrew prophetic tradition, weddings symbolize the time of fulfillment when “God redeems the nation and restores its dignity and honor before the other nations. Likewise, wine in prophetic tradition symbolizes the joy that accompanies” that reconciliation.[ii] In short, God really wants to hook up. It’s the ideal relationship: mutual, joyful, protective. Let’s celebrate it with a party, a party where there is plenty of food to eat and fabulous wine to drink. When God throws a party, there is always enough to go around.

Here we are at Cana, and dreadfully, there appears to be a shortage of wine. Mary and Jesus are there, and Mary says, “They have no wine.”

Mary knows quite a lot about her son. When she tells Jesus, “They have no wine,” she seems to be saying, “Get on with it. Fulfill your destiny.” “She’s been waiting these 30 years treasuring in her heart the hopes and fears of all the years that met in her infant one starry night,”[iii] treasures brought by exotic and powerful wise men who knelt to adore him. “They have no wine, Jesus. I heard all those things about you when you were an infant, ‘a light to enlighten the Gentiles,’ ‘cast down the mighty from their thrones and exalt the humble and meek.’ They have no wine, Jesus. Get on with it.”

That’s Mary, the revolutionary mother, who heard the Good News long ago, and is yearning for Jesus to fulfill it. My friend, Grant Gallup, wrote this from Nicaragua: “[Mary] urges her son to take part in the revolution. She wants him to get on with his commitment to change the water of the world of want into the wine of the revolution of abundance for all. [The world’s] anti-gospel is that there isn’t enough to go around,” but Mary knows better. This is God’s party now. “Jesus, they have no wine.”

And then they had better wine than they could ever imagine – so good that even the drunks could tell the difference -- and there was more than enough to go around.

What does it mean to hear such extravagant promises in a time of such extraordinary loss and destruction and grief? The people of Haiti, and we who care about them, are facing enormous obstacles before their shattered society can be rebuilt.

Where is God?

Right where God has always been: in the midst of those poor neighborhoods, standing with people in their suffering, giving them dignity and hope that it does not always have to be that way. God’s hope for abundant life starts with people like us: people in Haiti who share what they have, who risk their own lives to save others, people for whom the most profound courage is found in just waking up this morning and greeting the enormous tasks that have to be done this day.

Faced with such loss, who can be ready for such tasks?

Jesus, at the wedding in Cana, was not ready. “It’s not my time yet,” he told his mother. Faced with loss and fear around him, he hesitated, but then spurred on by his mother, he acted. All of a sudden, there was enough to go around. “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

Even in the face what seems like unimaginable loss, we can believe in it, too.

[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/americas/17looting.html?hp
[ii] New Proclamation, Year C 2000-2001, commentary on Epiphany by Renita J. Weems, p. 92.
[iii] Ibid.

We are all meant to be mothers of God

Advent 4-C Dec. 20, 2009
Micah 5:2-5a
Canticle 15: The Magnificat
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55

People of faith are viewed by many people in this society as kind of kooky. People of faith are just not realistic. “Religious do-gooders” as one of our elected representatives said, dismissively, of us here at St. Paul’s and of our faith and hope that we can make this neighborhood a better place to live and work. People of faith are just not rational, some people would say. They just don’t have their feet on the ground.

Mary and Elizabeth must be seen as the ultimate kooky “people of faith.” What could be less realistic than the words Mary sings when she meets up with her cousin, Elizabeth? Casting mighty from their seats of power? She, a pregnant, poor, unmarried girl? Filling the hungry with good things? Her cousin Elizabeth is elderly, and is now pregnant for the first time in her life. These are just ordinary people, not miracle workers; how much more delusional can they be?

These two women, and the two baby boys they carry in their wombs, come to us today in the line of prophets. Mary and Elizabeth came from people who read their Bibles carefully. They lived on the fringes of society, where they could see the things that were wrong, where they could see how poor and powerless people were treated. They knew their Bibles well enough to know that God promised that the world would be a better place. They stood in a long ling of prophets who listened carefully to God, and who looked carefully at the world around them, and said, Wait a minute here. There are things going on in this world that are not what God intends. When Mary and Elizabeth listened for God, they heard the great and powerful swooshing sounds of angels’ wings, the Holy Spirit coming upon them, overshadowing and empowering them to see the world as God sees it, and to speak and to act.

And all the world is grateful that these two kooky women, these people of faith, and hope, these attentive listeners to God, said yes.

Meister Eckhart, a popular and mystical teacher of the Middle Ages, said this about Mary: “We are all meant to be mothers of God.” To be mothers of God in the sense of being a kooky person of faith like she was. To be a person who listens closely for the swoosh of those mighty Holy Spirit wings, and who looks closely at the world around her. We are all meant to be mothers of God when we say yes to the promises God has in store for us, and for the world God has created. We are meant to be mothers of God when we open ourselves to be changed by what God has in store for us, when we do indeed go forward in faith, not exactly sure that what God would have us do is reasonable, or socially acceptable, but we do it nonetheless. To be a mother of God is to be willing to be a kooky person of faith.

There is something curious about this song that Mary sings, that we will soon say together. It is in the words of a young woman, talking about the promises God has made or the world, but it is spoken from the point of view of something that has already happened. God has already overthrown the mighty and given the hungry enough to eat. God has already pulled the downtrodden up and sent away the rich people, who were not willing to participate in this way that God would have the world work.

This kooky person of faith seems to think that all those things have already happened, and that the birth of the son she carries is part of this ongoing process of healing the world, of bringing it back to the world God created it to be.

What a kooky imagination this Mary has, to listen to the swooshing, swooping powerful wings of the Holy Spirit, and to begin to see the world as God sees it – to take it on faith, as it were, and to begin to live her life, now, in the real world here and now, believing it to be true.

“We are all meant to be mothers of God.” Kooky. Hopeful. Knowing that the world could be, and is, a better place, and saying yes to God, when God shows us how this could be so.

What then should we do?

Advent 3-C Dec. 13, 2009
Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9: Isaiah 12:2-6
Philippians 4:1-13
Luke 3: 7-18

The news this week has been filled with horrific images of the effects of global warming: melting icebergs, flooded deltas, thousands of displaced people in places like Bangladesh which are only give us a hint of the millions who will be washed out of their homes as the planet warms and the water levels rise. The leaders of the nations now meeting in Copenhagen seem at a stalemate: the bottom line vs. the lives of millions? What then should we do?

Pick an issue, any issue. It seems like nearly everything we face in the world is overwhelming. Global warming. This neighborhood, how messy and blighted it is. This church, how many leaks it continually seems to spring. Household bills, how can we ever make ends meet. Poverty. Hunger. Homelessness. Drug addiction. Gang violence. Yow. Let’s just hunker down and forget it all, because, really, what can we do? What can we possibly do?

I think we need John the Baptist. How lucky then we get him this Advent for two weeks in a row.

John was a powerful preacher, whose bold words attracted many people around him. The message at first read seems harsh: Repent, you brood of vipers! That does not exactly sound like a sermon that would pack them in, yet …

The power of John’s message is that he described the world as it was: it is a world turned upside down. The world of 1st century Palestine was ruled by corrupt and brutal leaders at the top, and put-upon peasants at the bottom. John preached a message that began to allow the people to “unforget” the promises of God, to “unforget” that the world is God’s, and that God rules with justice and compassion and mercy, to “unforget” that even poor people and old people and disabled people have dignity. The people at the top definitely want the people to forget those kinds of messages, to forget that religious faith in God has something to do with life in the here and now and not only in the by and by, that the beneficiaries of the abundance of God’s creation are the people of God, not just the fatcats at the top.

The mists of history make it easy for us in 2009 to forget that the world of John the Baptist was so messy. It was so long ago that we forget that politics and war and economics and all those things that consume our 24-7 news cycle were the ever-present realities for the people who came to listen to what John had to say. The rose-colored glasses we often put on when we read the Bible make us think that words like “repent” have to do only with personal sins. The powers-that-be in our world certainly benefit if we, too, forget that the promises of God mean that there IS enough to go around, that the world CAN be a peaceful and beautiful place, that EVERYONE is entitled, by virtue of being a child of God, to a home to live in and food to eat and a life of dignity and meaning and worth.

Once you get to thinking about it, it is overwhelming. What then should we do?

When the people asked John that question, his response was direct, and simple. Share. Be honest. Be content with what you have. God promises us abundance and life and enough to go around: start living every day as though you believed it. It’s kind of like the old proverb that says if your house is messy, then this is where you start, here, at your feet, and clean this area that you can reach. If the world is overwhelming, and out of control, and we have no power to change those big things, then start where we are: if we have two coats, we share one. If we have enough food for our family, then share with a family who has none. John acknowledges that the people who come to hear his message live in the world: they are not just “do-gooders” but tax collectors, soldiers – people not known for being honest or generous, people caught on the bottom rungs of that upside down world of violence and greed. Be content, John says to those people. Be honest. Don’t cheat. Don’t steal from people who have less than you do. John’s big, grand, global message comes down to these simple instructions. The kingdom of heaven is coming – and this is how we should start to live, now.

What then should WE do? How would John the Baptist answer that question for you, today?

a nothing son of a nobody

Advent 2-C
Dec. 6, 2009
Baruch 5:1-9
Luke 1: 1:68-79
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

“The Word of God came to a nothing son of a nobody in a god-forsaken place.” *

That is really what St. Luke means in this passage about John the Baptist. The first few sentences of our gospel passage for today are all about the rich and famous people of the day, the important and powerful people, the beautiful people, people with a lot to lose. It is important to Luke to place this story of John the Baptist, and what he says about the coming of Jesus, in the political and social context of the day. John the Baptist and Jesus lived in a particular time and place, with particular people in charge – a place of empire and military domination and of a powerful religious ruling class: John the Baptist and Jesus lived lives that were subject to these forces and these powerful actors. AND they were nobodies: “The Word of God came to a nothing son of a nobody in a god-forsaken place.”

The Word of God came to this nothing son of a nobody because the “somebodies” could not be trusted with this Good News. The “somebodies” like the Emperor Tiberias and Pontius Pilate and Herod and Philip and Lysanias and Annas and Caiaphas all had a lot to lose if this Word of God entrusted to this unknown wilderness-wanderer ever got out. In this world of “Haves”, the Word of God came to the “Have-Nots.”

The verses we read today in place of the psalm are the verses that John’s father sings when the boy is born. It is a song of hope: it comes from the past, and looks to the future. It comes from the past, because it is full of the imagery of the Jewish people. It is full of how they understand how God acts in the world, in human history, and what God has promised to the people. For the Jewish people, the world is turned upside down. Instead of a world ruled by God’s justice, we live in a world ruled by corrupt or at best flawed leaders. Instead of living the lives God wants us to live – lives of honesty, compassion, prayer, service – we live lives far from God, lives of fear, addiction, selfishness, anger. The world God created, and the world God wants, is turned upside down. As Zechariah’s little baby boy John would eventually say, “Repent! Turn around! Leave those stupid, wicked, death-dealing ways of life behind.”

Zechariah’s song is also a song of the future: “You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High.” That upside-down world is about to be righted. John, this little baby boy now in his father’s arms, will lead the way.

There is a Hebrew word that is very important here: Tikkun. It means “repair,” and it is often used in the phrase, Tikkun olam, to repair the world. Now this Tikkun is a religious concept, a theological word, but it not something that God alone does: it is something in which we participate with God. This upside-down world is in desperate need of repair, and John the Baptist calls out to us from the wilderness that our repentance is the first step to take in that repair. Our repentance – our turning away from things we do that hurt ourselves, or the people we love, or the neighbors we live near, or the city we live in, or the planet we live on – our repentance from all those things that are dark and painful and destructive is the first step toward preparing the Way of the Lord, preparing for the coming of God with us, Emmanuel. Now, I don’t want to imply that Jews are just “closet Christians,” but so much of what we Christians know to be true is right there, embedded in those Hebrew words: Emmanuel means “God with us.” Get ready, John the Baptist says. God is coming to be with us. The world as we know it will be turned upside down: valleys filled, mountains brought down, crooked, bumpy, pot-hole-strewn paths will be made straight and true, and nobodies like you and me will walk in peace on our King’s Highways.

Well now, some people might think. If God is so all-powerful, how come we still have to read about prophecy? How come the descendants of those power-brokers like the Emperor Tiberias, or Pontius Pilate, or Herod, are still making our lives miserable?

You might also ask, why then do we sin? We do we keep getting angry and doing stupid things, or fall off the various wagons of discipline we try to follow in our lives? Probably because sin and greed and fear are as much a part of what it means to be human as is love and generosity and courage. No matter how hard we try, we seem to spend a good chunk of our time in the wilderness.

I think that is what the wilderness symbolizes in the bible, the wilderness as the place that is rough, and hard to live in, the place of struggle and deprivation, the place of testing – and yet also the place where the people of Israel heard the Word of God, drank the water from the rock, ate the manna from heaven, followed the pillar of light in the darkness that led them to the promised land. From the wilderness came that nothing son of a nobody, bringing to us who dwell in darkness this precious Good News: God’s tender compassion will break on us like the dawn, and the world, indeed, will be turned upside down. Come. You will see.

* William Herzog, New Proclamation 2006, as quoted in Reflections by Kate Huey, for Advent 2-C 2009

The Advent Wind

Advent 1-C November 29, 2009
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

Watch out! It’s Advent! Jesus is coming – and what will he find? Will we be ready?

During these weeks before Christmas, the church directs our reading of the Bible and our prayers to what it means to get ready for the birth of Jesus. It’s a time of anticipation – of being ready on the balls of our feet, the tips of our toes.

Poems about this time of the year, this Advent of watching and waiting, emphasize the changes in the world around us. “Darkness and snow descend,” one poet[i] writes. And another describes how raw the weather can be in December, and perhaps how well it describes the spiritual state we are in these days:

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale[ii]

Our lessons, again, talk to us about the end of time. We read again of the apocalypse, about the coming of the day of the Lord. Our culture surely is full of fearful images of these end days. I mentioned a few weeks ago the movie “2012.” There is another one, “The Road,” about a father and son who wander a devastated earth and find not one shred of humanity or hope.

Perhaps such images are what we can expect from a culture as bloated as ours is – bloated with greed and consumerism and one-upsmanship. When we fear that we will lose everything when God comes, who would not be terrified?

But if we look at the prospect of the end times from the other side of history, we get a different set of feelings. The people who have lost their retirement savings in the stock market crash, or the families who have had to move out of their foreclosed homes, or the parents who mourn the loss of their children to gunfire or war or accidental death, surely anyone who has had to live for even a short time in a homeless shelter – these people might see the end of the world as we know it rather differently. I think such experiences can lead us to understand the “end time” not as destruction but as transformation. A world that is unjust is transformed into one that is abundant, with plenty of food and homes and health for all. A world of community and hope and fulfillment. “Surely the days are coming.” Jeremiah reminds us as he reminded the people of Israel many centuries ago, when there will be justice and righteousness in the land, and when the people will live in safety.

Advent is the time to repent. In a few weeks, we will read the words of John the Baptist saying just that. When the Bible says, “Repent,” it does not mean punishment or retribution; it means change. It means turn around. Turn around your head, your heart, your whole way of life. During this time of repentance, the old way of life – of greed, selfishness, false anger, violence – is what comes to an end, as we wait in hope for this new world that is breaking into life with the birth of Jesus.

Now, there are a lot of things wrong with this world, a lot of repentance that needs to happen, and most of that we as individuals cannot affect. We can’t change the war in Iraq, or stop gang violence, or build enough houses to get everyone off the streets. We can only turn around our own personal heads, hearts, bodies, Our Advent repentance has to start here. This is where we get ready for the birth of Jesus. Here. In our hearts, where we live.

But let me tell you something else: God is big. God can take on this world, and the season of Advent is about hope that God is doing just that – and about God’s dream not only for this transformed world, but for how you and I, each of us, right where we are, start working for this transformation right here and now – that we start living as though we really believed that God comes among us as one of us, to show us that there is a better way for us to live, here and now.

It is hard, living in a city as we do, to look up into the night sky and see the stars. Last night, in the early evening anyway, the brightness of the moon cut through the darkness, a moon so bright it could have been seen in Times Square. To even our jaded, urban eyes, focused as we are on our own problems, or on the heartbreaking state of the world we live in, to even our jaded eyes, looking up into the Advent sky, it’s a sign.

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.

[i] W. H. Auden, For the Time Being
[ii] John Betjeman, “Advent 1955”

Kingship turned upside down

Proper 29-B Nov. 22, 2009
2 Samuel 23:1-7
Ps. 132:1-19
Rev 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

We're not supposed to like kings and queens and royalty in this country, but there is something about the institution that appeals to us. Think about how the press and public treated Senator Edward Kennedy at his death – so much adulation, so many allusions to the Kennedys as our “royal family.” Like any royal, Kennedy certainly had flaws, but we would overlook them when he was able to do what a leader was supposed to do, especially when he set aside his personal self-interest to serve people who needed the care of the government, to help this nation live up to our ideals of liberty and justice for all. Like the Jews of ancient Israel, or of Jesus’ day, we yearn for an ideal ruler, a king like David, a sovereign under whose leadership our lives and our society would prosper and live in peace and security.

This Sunday, the Sunday before Advent, is called Christ the King, a celebration of the reign of Christ. During this last Sunday of the church year, and just before the beginning of the next, the lessons and collect look at the completion of the ministry of Our Lord and the inauguration of his universal kingdom, the new age when all "the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin [are] brought together under his most gracious rule."

Jews living during the time of Jesus needed a hope like this, a hope that life under God's rule would be better than life under Roman rule. Judaism was barely tolerated, a legally allowed diversion from the worship of the Emperor. The Jews could remember the time when they controlled their own country and so resented the Roman occupiers all the more.

The people hoped for a political and religious restoration which would turn things back to the way they used to be. Would God send a military leader? A divine explosion? A plague of locusts?

None of these hopes came to fruition. God intervened, but not in the way anyone expected. In our gospel today, Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king. Jesus answers that his kingship is not of this world; he said, "I have come to bear witness to the truth," and with this, the king went out to suffer and die. Jesus knew what people expected of a king, something out of Star Wars, like that great final battle between Luke Skywalker and the Dark Side, someone to lead them to victory in Armegeddon. Yet Jesus said, I am the man. Yes, I am the king. Now I go to die. Like the poor young woman visited by an angel, who said yes, I will bear this child, who, though born in an ordinary barn, will become king.

The kingship of Christ celebrates the last victory, but it celebrates a victory that turned the expectations of kingship upside down. Jesus went out as the servant to suffer and die, and the forces of evil thought they had won. Armegeddon was fought and good apparently lost because Jesus died on the cross. Lightning flashed, the veil of the Temple was torn in two, and quiet fell upon the earth.

Three days later, after the smoke had cleared from the battle, the light began to dawn quite literally on those first few who had met the Risen Christ and understood for the first time what he had been talking about. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it again. Three days later those few followers understood what kingship this Jesus was talking about. Jesus in his suffering had proven his kingship. Jesus was the Son of Man, his favorite title for himself, coming with power to receive the kingdom from the Ancient of Days. A king with humble human origins, who brought about a whole new order of creation, victorious over the powers of death that would pull us down into misery.

Today, then, we come to the end of the story about Jesus, only to turn around next Sunday and begin again: we will hear from the beginning the story of Jesus’ life among us, what it means to follow him in the Way, to carry some of his kingly burden of compassion for the powerless and the least, to spread some of his Good News that the reign God intends for us is one of justice and peace. To follow him is also to do what Jesus commanded us to do in that last supper with his disciples: to gather with our friends and neighbors, to break bread and drink wine in remembrance of him. We do that, then, in remembrance, and in hope, that with all saints and angels, with friends and enemies and beloved ones, past, present and yet to come, we will gather for this feast around the banquet table in the household of God.