Category: Sermons

Michelangelo's "Young Slave"

Conforming to Christ: Romans 12 & Michelangelo’s Prisoners

Kyle

Proper 16, Year A

(Isaiah 51:1-6; Psalm 138; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20)

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I want to begin by passing on a word of thanks and admiration from a recent visitor. It was sent to our music directors and acolyte coordinators but applies much more broadly. The Rev. Dr. William Bradley Roberts is a professor and the director of chapel music at Virginia Theological Seminary. He writes,

Seldom am I compelled to write after visiting a parish on Sunday morning, but I must share some impressions with you of worship last Sunday, August 17.

At a time of year when most parishes drastically cut back their liturgical offerings, worshippers at St. Paul’s were led in a manner that most parishes might consider a festival service. We belong to another parish but are regular visitors to St. Paul’s, and last Sunday we felt it had been too long and was, therefore, time for us to worship on K Street. Now I see that inclination as the movement of the Holy Spirit.

The liturgy and music were exhilarating … It was a feast. [… there were so many thrilling moments it’s hard to know where to begin. The anthems were done with elegance … Improvisations occurred at various places that many would easily have assumed were carefully constructed compositions … the people responded accordingly, singing with faith and fervor.]

… I know that parishes often hear from people who are distressed about something, so I wanted you to hear from this worshipper when everything was just about perfect … Sunday was an extraordinary experience at an ordinary time of year, and we came away blessed because of it.

Nice, huh? It’s good to take a moment to celebrate when the occasion presents itself, especially in a parish where perhaps we are sometimes too hard on ourselves. I hope this well-deserved kudos can provide for all of us such an occasion today.

If you’re looking for further cause for celebration, I suggest you check in with the work of our search committee. I believe the recently completed parish profile is a real triumph, not just for the search committee and vestry but for all of us who contributed through our feedback and through our participation in this community.

The document is honest about our many and significant challenges, insightful about our immediate and future needs, and appropriately appreciative of our distinctive strengths and gifts. I encourage you to read it carefully, or read it again, and reflect not just on how our next rector can help us respond to our challenges but how you can too.

I believe we are a church living into the vision Paul presents to us in today’s Epistle lesson:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. (Romans 12:3-5)

Sober judgment and self-reflection? That’s what our discernment process is all about. One body in the Body of Christ? That’s basically the title of the parish profile. A variety of gifts given by grace and exercised in faith? Just look around you on any given Sunday, and not just the ones we get nice letters about. We are indeed discerning, for us, “what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable” and sometimes, to quote Dr. Roberts, “just about perfect.”

And yet there’s one line in this reading that ought to give us pause, give any church pause:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds (Romans 12:2a)

This is the most open-ended of Paul’s admonitions today, and I think the most challenging. On the one hand, the Spirit has called God’s people to be a community set apart. Think of all the imagery that Jesus and the prophets use: light of the world, city on a hill, lamp on a lampstand, salt of the earth, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.

There’s something exemplary and countercultural about our witness and our gifts.

  • It’s why we put on silly clothes and process through the streets on Palm Sunday.
  • It’s why we get up early every weekend to serve homeless neighbors most people would rather avoid.
  • It’s why Dr. Roberts was so surprised and delighted to see a full choir and a full nave in the dog days of a DC summer.

On the other hand, we live and participate in a particular culture, and are trying to reach people who may not be as inclined to critique that culture or offer an alternative vision. God certainly does not want us to create a sanctified enclave. We can’t be a self-satisfied island to ourselves that cannot or will not perceive the remarkable things the Spirit is up to beyond the walls of our churches, among people of other faiths and of no faith at all. Our resistance to conformity must not become a license to judge or to disengage.

So how do we resolve this dilemma between conformity to the world and rejection of it? I believe the answer is right there in our mission statement: Christ-like living. Jesus himself struck the balance perfectly between both participating in his culture and turning it upside-down.

  • He showed up at the social gatherings of common people, and even scandalous people.
  • He taught about the Reign of God using stories and imagery from common life experience.
  • And as we heard last week in the story of the Canaanite woman, he listened and responded on those few occasions where someone accused him of limiting the scope of God’s message of love.

Our transforming journey, the renewing of our minds, will proceed as we continue to conform not to the world but to Christ, who was not against the world but deeply and compassionately for it. Our gifts will sharpen, and our challenges catalyze our growth, as the sometimes gentle and sometimes scouring winds of the Spirit blow upon us. They will blow away, if we let them, the detritus of the self-centeredness and listlessness and fear that are a natural part of any community. God has been with us throughout our life together and is working on us and in us still.

***

There’s a striking if imperfect image I haven’t been able to shake this week, one that came to me upon first reading our remarkable lesson from Isaiah:

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father

and to Sarah who bore you (51:1b-2a)

We Christians might add “Look to Peter, the rock of the church.”

I love this notion of we the faithful being chiseled out of the foundation stone laid by our ancestors, maybe even made of our ancestors. The stone metaphor is limited, to be sure, but it’s perfect for capturing this idea of our slow conforming not to some external ideal but to the image of Christ that is already within us.

This is an idea the artist Michelangelo understood particularly well. In fact, if you’ve been fortunate enough to see his original David at the Accademia in Florence, then you’ve also seen four powerful icons of this spiritual experience. (If you haven’t seen them, I’ve put some photos in the atrium.) Listen to how the museum’s curators describe the four figures who line the hallway leading toward David:

All the unfinished statues at the Accademia reveal Michelangelo’s approach and concept of carving. [He] believed the sculptor was a tool of God, not creating but simply revealing the powerful figures already contained in the marble. Michelangelo’s task was only to chip away the excess, to reveal … Unlike most sculptors, who prepared a plaster cast model and then marked up their block of marble to know where to chip, Michelangelo mostly worked free hand … These figures emerged from the marble “as though surfacing from a pool of water.” (More here, emphasis added.)

These are the non-finito, the unfinished, the prisoners—torsos wriggling free, heads and limbs still trapped in stone. Maybe they capture the way God looks at us some of the time, figures powerful and poised, longing to be fully free. Set free, more and more, from the impediments to our true nature, from the shackles of stone that still bind and paralyze us.

My sisters and brothers, we don’t need to conform to anyone else’s model of success or beauty or even holiness. We are sacred masterpieces in progress, participating, by grace, in the terrifying and liberating process of divine transformation.

Some days, we need the sharpness of God’s chisel and the persistent tapping of a mallet that will do its work better if we can manage not to flinch.

And occasionally, we catch a vision, usually in each other, of the divine perfection that will one day break the surface into radiant, graceful resurrection life. On those days, things are “just about perfect” and we go forth rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

Image credit: “Michaelangelo’s unfinished pieces Florence Firenze Accademia” by Scott MacLeod Liddle via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Transfagarasan-north

“Less certain, more convinced”: A sermon on the end of Romans 8

Kyle

Proper 12, Year A

(1 Kings 3:5–12; Romans 8:26–39; Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52)

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Do you ever get jealous of the disciples? Not for the mighty deeds or the heroic deaths, necessarily, but for the simple fact that they met and knew the Lord as none of us can?

I’m quick to assume that faith came easy for the women and men who knew Jesus of Nazareth during his incarnate lifetime. And yet we have good reason to believe that wasn’t true.

Others saw his signs, his teachings, his authority, and yet they did not believe. The apostles had it straight from his mouth that he would die and rise again, and yet by all accounts they gave in to fear and hopelessness, before even his crucifixion in most cases.

There are a lot of truisms to extrapolate from scripture, and one of them is surely this: If it’s proof or certainty we’re after in matters of faith, we’re barking up the wrong tree. But I wonder if we can’t do better than proof.

* * *

An elderly monk of a friend of mine’s acquaintance was once asked how his faith had changed over the course of his lifetime. I’ll never forget his answer: “I’m less certain. But I’m more convinced.”

That’s the answer of a man who’s seen some things, endured some things, who’s lost love ones, celebrated unexpected blessings, let go of earthly treasure and the illusion of control.

“I’m less certain. But I’m more convinced.”

That answer taught me that to be convinced, to be persuaded, is a dynamic process. It’s a lifelong experience, a full-body knowing, a deep but simple trust in a relationship that has passed the test of time.

The Apostle Paul is a man convinced. And I think it’s important that we understand why.

Don’t put too much stock in his dramatic conversion story. I don’t dispute the claim that he was struck blind on the road to Damascus by an encounter with the Risen Lord. I just think, on it’s own, the experience wasn’t what made the difference for Paul, not in the long run.

Sure, it was a touchstone, a turning point, a close encounter with a grace as raw and powerful and true as any we can imagine. But it couldn’t be enough. It couldn’t be enough to form a faith the likes of which is on display in today’s lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Romans:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35, 37–39)

Stunning, isn’t it? Gorgeous. Transcendent even. But the prose itself, even the idea itself, can’t be the point for us. Verbal pyrotechnics can impress and even move us, like Jesus’s fantastic signs and wonders. Stirring testimony can set us on a new path, not unlike the one Paul started walking in temporary blindness, while he was still known by a different name.

But I think the experience that really has the power to convince, to get in deep in our bones and our spiritual muscle memory, is captured in the space between this passage and one I like to think of as its first draft.

There’s a stretch in the Second Letter to the Corinthians where Paul “boasts in the Lord,” testifying to the experiences that he’s been through for the sake of the gospel. The really dramatic part recounts his sufferings:

Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. (2 Cor 11:24–27)

Now that is a list of dangers, toils, and snares if ever I’ve heard one.

I like this passage because it’s so real and concrete: “Look at what I’ve been through for God!” he shouts to his detractors. Paul remembers these experiences all too well, and he’s not afraid to get specific.

Our passage from Romans comes in a quieter, reflective moment. Notice that he tells us not what he’s done, but what he’s learned, which is that God was with him through all of it, that hardship, distress, etc., never had a chance against the power of the love of God, that the past, the future, the powers of earth and heaven and death itself are as nothing compared to Christ’s abiding presence.

From one text to the other, “I’m still here with God” turns to “God will always be here with me, with us.” We can almost hear Paul borrowing the words of our latter-day hymn to finish it all off: “’Tis grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.”

* * *

The point is this: to be convinced in our faith is to take stock of our life with God and our neighbor, in all its ups and downs. It’s to be slowly persuaded that all the high drama and all the numbing tedium and the joys big and small were indeed working together for the good by God’s power to transform and redeem.

To be convinced is to let it all wash over us and sink in, to move beyond “When will you show me a sign?” to “How can I keep from singing?” Of course we can’t do this in our own time or on our own power.

It’s a lifelong process, a tiny seed of faith becoming a tree wide and strong. It’s a costly process, the faithful pursuit of a pearl of great price. It’s the transmutation of the core of our being, hearts of stone giving way to pure, persistent love.

How could we hope to effect this change without the grace of God? It’s foolish to try to earn this reward, but that doesn’t stop us most of the time. The trick is to learn to shape our efforts as faithful responses to God’s gifts and deliverances. And in that department we have lots of ways to practice.

An idea of such a discipline for today is to pilfer from our patron: why not make your own list of the dangers and the delights of your life, of the arc of your transforming encounters with the mystery of love and hope and peace. It doesn’t have to be all Damascus, shipwrecks, and swords.

If your sounds more like the 2 Corinthians passage than the Romans, then there’s no doubt you’re in touch with the rich contours of your own personal walk with God. If it sounds more like the Romans, then perhaps you’re starting to see how your experience fits into the even bigger story about the people of the way and the God who is with us on the way.

The process will be tender and difficult. Some of you have engaged it in Pilgrims, drawing the ups and down in your life and your experience of the closeness, or the distance, of God in the midst of them.

Yes, the process will be hard. But for most of us, by the end of it, we become a bit more persuaded of Paul’s deep conviction, that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Not layoffs or transfers, not abortions or miscarriages, not defeats in the right battles or victories in the wrong ones, not failed finals or terrifying diagnoses, not panics in the night or failures of nerve, not divorces or bad credit or terrible decisions or disasters beyond our control, not even the suffering or death of a person most dear to us can separate us from the love of God.

We may not know that love, we may doubt it, we may even reject it, but Christ is still there in our hearts, the Spirit is still moving all around us. Sighs too deep for words aren’t the half of what God is praying and doing in us, in our finest hours and in our darkest ones.

I can’t prove it to you. Neither can Paul, for that matter. But the grace of God in Christ, and the experience of a lifetime of love, can convince us. It might be the only thing that can.

Image credit: Transfagarasan-north by Michał Sałaban via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Feet

A sermon for Maundy Thursday

Kyle

Maundy Thursday

(Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 116:1, 10-17; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35)

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A dear friend of mine is the cantor at Congregation Beth El in Bethesda. Each year, my wife and I do our best to get ourselves invited to his Passover Seder. This is one of those years where the Gregorian and Hebrew calendars agree, so the Seder’s lovely introductory question has continued with me since Monday night: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

It’s a borrowed question for us in this place on this night, but I think it’s an appropriate one. What makes this night different from other nights for followers of Jesus? What does Maundy Thursday tell us about what will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the night after that?

**

Our reading from Exodus reminds us that the story that begins today and ends in the wee hours on Saturday is, like the Exodus, a story of liberation.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters keep the Passover meal with stylized embellishments intended to teach the next generation about this movement from slavery to freedom. It is the great redemption narrative of the Hebrew Bible. At Monday night’s seder, our group heard over and over again words like these: “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the L-rd, our G‑d, took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.”

I’m always grateful to be one of the “little ones” receiving instruction. I always need the reminder that God longs to set us free, again and again.

**

Our reading from 1 Corinthians reminds us that, before the drama of Friday and of Sunday, Jesus instituted a tradition distinct from but not totally unlike the Passover meal. It’s at the center of our life together here at St. Paul’s.

What Paul leaves out but Matthew, Mark, and Luke recount is that our Lord desired to eat the Passover meal with his disciples, the twelve. It’s a beautiful reminder of Jesus’s humanity—that he longed to share his final meal with his friends.

After several days of very public words and deeds, overturned tables and apocalyptic teaching, our Lord chose, as some of his last free actions, to take, to bless, to break, to share. As painful as his words in the garden would be (“Could you not wait with me one hour?” “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me”), more powerful for us this night are what came first: “Eat. Drink. Remember me.”

**

Our reading from John reminds us how difficult and how beautiful such intimacy can be. Unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John does not focus on the meal. Instead, he tells us about an accompanying action:

And during supper Jesus … got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

Try to take that in as the disciples had to. This man is their teacher, their master. In the past few days alone he has raised a man from the dead, been welcomed as King of Israel by crowds in the street, had his own feet anointed with perfume worth a year’s wages. I dare say that every one of us would feel how Peter felt, “You will never wash my feet!”

Peter’s part in the story helps ensure that we take the full meaning. It’s true that Jesus says “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” It’s true that this story and this night are a meditation on serving others.

But Peter’s resistance and Jesus’s insistence show us the complete picture. Christian life in community requires a willingness not just to serve but to be served. We have to let go and let God save us. We have to let go and let our community support us. All around town right now, the meek and the mighty are baring their smelly, linty, calloused, embarrassing feet.

If we can’t do that, how could we hope to bare our souls? And if we can’t do that, what will we do when we need Jesus to bear them for us, unto salvation and redemption and what lies beyond?

**

Of the Maundy Thursdays I have experienced, one of them stands out in my memory, probably always will. I don’t know if it truly speaks to the core of what makes this strange and wonderful night distinct from all the others. But it has made all the difference for me.

It was my last year of graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. I was attending both the student ministry on campus and a neighborhood parish not far from where I’d been living. We got word, a couple hours before the service, that the senior warden of the parish had died that morning. He was no older than my own father, a healthy and vital man. There had been no notice.

When the rector came out to the center aisle to preach, he looked … well, exactly like any of us would look after spending the day with the shocked and grieving family of a friend and partner in ministry gone too soon. I don’t remember anything about the sermon but its first line: “This is an impossible moment at the end of an impossible day.”

This church used foot-washing stations, and I can still remember the faces on the first wave of people being washed. One was the parish deacon, a perennially cheerful woman who had known the deceased for many, many years. One was my former chaplain at UW; she had guided me through a few crises of my own and was the first person ever to tell me I should be a priest. I’m sure these two stick out for me because, like the rector, they were people I was taken aback to see so vulnerable in church. Impossible moments will do that. And impossible moments are what the church is here for.

The last face I remember is less detailed. She wasn’t a friend or mentor, just a fellow parishioner about six years old. I don’t think she understood what was making that particular night so different and so painful. She washed my feet gently but diligently. And then, at her mother’s prompting, she looked into my bloodshot eyes and said, “Thank you for letting me wash your feet.”

**

Whatever makes this night different, it’s too damn subtle and complicated and magnificent for sermons. These readings are a holy traffic jam of cultural memory and religious meaning: blood of the Passover lamb mixed with dust of Judean hillsides mixed with water and wine and crumbs and tears and God knows what else. There’s no secret path through the mess that deposits us on the other side with talking points and a doggy bag.

All we have to do—all we can do—is show up and be present to God and each other. Impossible things will happen, some terrifying, some wondrous. At the center of it all is a Lord who is, on this very night before he died for us, an icon of human vulnerability. Take, thank, eat, wash, pray, drink, remember, love. Do this in remembrance of him.

Hope photo

Suffering, endurance, character, hope

Kyle

Third Sunday in Lent, Year A

(Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42)

Image source: “Hope” by Renato Giordanelli via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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I’m breathing slightly easier this weekend than I have for the last few months. We have reached the end, at least as far as the calendar is concerned, of a marathon faith experience even longer than today’s gospel passage. I call it the Third Quarter Blues.

When I arrived back on campus after Christmas break during my first year of seminary, a particularly blunt senior told me how things were about to go: “Third quarter is a straight-up miserable experience,” he said. “It’s cold, it’s gray, it’s long, it’s Lent. Everybody just goes crazy.” It turns out that seminary staff members are not immune to this malady, and I hope in the days ahead that some of my own crazy will dissipate.

I suspect all of us here are feeling the effects of something like the Third Quarter Blues—in our homes, schools, workplaces, and here at St. Paul’s. The time has changed but not the weather, at least not reliably. Perhaps we’re missing that object of our Lenten fast. We long for summer time off but can’t yet see that light at the end of the tunnel. And of course, the long and exhausting work of a parish transition continues.

Call it March Malaise. Call it the Lenten Lull. Call it early “spring” in the mid-Atlantic, with spring firmly fixed, for now, in impatient quotation marks.

Maybe that’s why today’s epistle reading caught my eye despite the sheer volume of the gospel lesson. When it comes to endurance of any sort of affliction, our patron saint is quite the optimistic observer of human experience. Listen again to this progression he proposes: “[W]e also boast in our sufferings,” he says, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us” (Romans 5:3b-5a).

Let’s be clear that Paul is writing about sufferings that go well beyond the doldrums I’ve been describing. The word he uses (θλῖψις) has at its root a sort of claustrophobia; it’s the pressing in of forces upon us, maybe even the cliffs rising up to surround our dire straits. I don’t have to tell most of you how difficult life can be.

Still, big or small, Paul says suffering is a valuable and even indispensable part of the Christian life. How can that be? Well, notice the way he frames his little formula for our spiritual formation. Here’s the passage one more time, but with the introductory and concluding verses restored to it:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)

We stand on God’s grace. We share in God’s glory. Our hearts are filled with God’s love.

In this light, in the light of Christ and the power of the Spirit, suffering is redeemed by God’s presence with us in the midst of it. If we boast in our sufferings, it should be because they are God’s special time for being particularly present with us. Conversely, they are our special time to grow in trust, because we know we can’t persevere on our own.

The verses that follow emphasize the lengths our God is willing to go for our redemption: “while we were still weak,” Paul writes, “while we still were sinners,” “while we were enemies,” we were reconciled to God through Jesus’s death and life.

Death and life, held together in the heart of God’s Son amid the darkness of our tribulations. Let’s call that redemptive suffering and not confuse it with its hopeless counterpart. Unredeemed suffering is suffering with blinders on. It’s like reading those middle verses about suffering and character without their wider framing in God’s bountiful grace.

In our reading from Exodus, the people of Israel are suffering with no eye on redemption: we read, “[they] thirsted there for water and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’” (17:3).

They’ve already forgotten that they are there for glorious purpose, [1] that God has delivered them from bondage and is leading them to a land of promise. Yes, they have trials to endure in the desert, but they seem blind to the many ways in which God is already caring for them there.

Unredeemed suffering can also come from mistaking random circumstance or cruel injustice for the will of God.

Consider the Samaritan woman Jesus speaks with at the well. I heard Bible scholars this week plead with preachers not to portray her as some serial adulterer or other notorious sinner. That conclusion simply isn’t supported by what John tells us about her or by what Jesus says. It’s more likely that she’s a serial victim: five times divorced due to infertility, perhaps, or simply the whim of husbands who held near total power over her in that society.

Whatever her history, Jesus shows her it doesn’t have to define her. Her redemption begins in the caring conversation he has with her—a woman, yes, and also a Samaritan. And it continues as he invites her to that sacred Gospel vocation: sharing with others the Good News of the Savior of the world.

Unredeemed suffering is living with no hope for better, living as if we were alone. It’s trudging to the well each day without thought for the living water that will truly sustain and satisfy us. Unredeemed suffering is never God’s will for us. And its fruit is not character but despair. Heaven make us free of it. Only heaven can.

Redemptive suffering, on the other hand, is how the Spirit works through the inevitable trials of our lives and uses them to shape us in God’s image and draw us into renewed life in Christ. That’s character.

We heard a story of redemptive suffering this week in our staff meeting. As many of you know, our parishioner Bob Cuniff is in his final days of a long and painful battle with cancer. Bob has been in the Pilgrims class this year and desired to be received into the Episcopal Church. On Tuesday, Sarah Stoycos accompanied Bishop Jim to the hospital to serve as Bob’s sponsor in a bedside liturgy of reception. It’s nice having a bishop around.

Before they began, Jim and Sarah met Bob’s sisters, both of whom are Roman Catholic and one of whom is a nun. Bishop Jim asked them if they understood why Bob wanted to become an Episcopalian. While still loving the Catholic Church, Bob believed he had found his true home here. He believed he was on a deeply meaningful journey.

They said, yes, they understood, they were supportive. And so Jim asked them if they too would like to serve as presenters. Again they said yes. What a powerful sign of their love for their brother.

The service for confirmation and reception can be quite short if you strip it to the essentials. When they were finished, Bob said a few words.

He said first that these past few weeks had been among the most difficult times in his life but that he could feel the presence of God there in the room. And he said this: that that experience had been wonderful.

Imagine that: I can feel God here with me in this hospital room, and that has been wonderful.

Hope did not disappoint our brother Bob. And Paul’s Good News for us today is that, by the grace of God, it will not disappoint us either.

**

[1] I realized somewhere along the way that this phrase is from Loki in the Avengers movie. Go figure.

Creche

His whole life for our whole lives

Kyle

Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus

(Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21)

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At first glance, today is a very literal sort of feast. We celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus because it is the eighth day of Christmas and, as our Gospel reading says, “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus.”

Aside from reminding us that Mary got the name from her Angel visitor, that’s pretty much all Luke gives us. Since we couldn’t very well have a one-sentence Gospel lesson, the lectionary leads into that verse with the details that come before it, of the shepherds’ visit to the Christ-child.

And so I found myself playfully revising the message of the Angel: “you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger—and wait ‘til you get a load of what they’re calling him.”

But our commemoration and our Gospel reading start to make sense when we consider what the name actually signifies. You may know that Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “God has saved” [translation by Marion Lloyd Soards in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, p. 97].

And actually, that part is in the Angel’s words to the Shepherds: “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” God has saved. That’s what the shepherds went to the stable to see. That’s who they went to see.

So there’s a more substantial reason to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus today, or at least during the season of Christmas, our great feast of the Incarnation of God in Christ. By speaking “God has saved” on, if you will, the liturgical anniversary of Jesus’s circumcision and naming, we remind ourselves that Jesus’s whole life was his saving act for those who would be baptized into it. His whole life was his saving act.

There will be other reminders of this insight along our path as we walk with Jesus from Creche to Cross and then beyond. When we sing the Great Litany during Lent, we will ask the Lord’s deliverance not just “By thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension,” but also “By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and submission to the Law; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation.”

Yes, when the shepherds brought their flocks, when the Magi brought their gifts, when Mary and Joseph loved and cared for him, Jesus was saving us. Each time he read Torah, each time he swung a hammer, each time he healed the sick, each time he welcomed a child, each time he taught the crowds, Jesus was saving us. His whole life was his saving act. His whole life he was saving us.

So perhaps there’s one last reason why it’s a good and holy thing for us to celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus on this particular day. For many of us, New Year’s Day means a renewed commitment to live lives more in touch with our deepest desires: health, wholeness, relationship, thanksgiving, generosity.

If, with God’s help, we are to succeed, we’ll do a little bit each day—with every decision, with every simple act. Thus, we’ll experience God’s gift of salvation and fullness of life in the same way Jesus offered it.

So remember that the next time you’re feeling bored or overwhelmed by what feels like a trivial task, or dozens of them. Remember it when you fall back into old habits despite your best efforts, or fall into new ones by a power you didn’t know you had.

Remember it when you meet someone who’s having a bad day, or someone who can’t remember the last time he or she had a good one. Remember the baby, the boy, the man whose mother named him “God has saved.”

And remember how he did it: with his whole life, for our whole lives. Thanks be to God.

Moon image

Waking up, keeping watch

Kyle

Advent 1, Year A

(Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44)

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A recent early-morning flight had me picking up fellow travelers on the Virginia Seminary campus at half past four. A few minutes later, as we crested the hill that opens up onto Arlington and the District, which were still beautifully lit against the darkness, one of my companions said, “I hate getting up this early, but I love being awake.”

If we’re to understand today’s readings properly―if we’re to understand this season of Advent―I think we need that 4 a.m. mindset.

Take a minute to get in touch with it: think back to that all-night study session in high school or college, to sitting vigil while awaiting a late-night childbirth, to watching the sky grow light on a chilly camping trip or an eternal third shift finally give way to the steady march of morning.

Yes, the dead of night can be a time of great frustration and loneliness, as all of us have experienced, some much more often than we’d like. But at its best, the chilly moonlight can illumine for us a dazzling facet of the human experience. When the Spirit is hovering in our midst, the dead of night comes alive with possibility.

Just ask Robert Frost, who wrote with longing, “These woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep.” Or consider Jandy Nelson, who wrote of two fearless sisters that

sometimes in the pitch of night
they’d lie on their backs
in the middle of the path
and look up until the stars came back
and when they did,
they’d reach their arms up to touch them
and did

Or if we want to get right down to it, we can ask the writer of Psalm 130: “My soul waits for the LORD, more than watchmen for the morning, * more than watchmen for the morning.”

The point is that the darkness of night and early morning can be a time of clarity, of focus, of yearning―a time when our waiting reconnects us with the courage of our convictions. What distinguishes Advent from Lent is that in the later season we are called to turn around and repent; in this one, we are called to wake up and keep watch.

Listen to what Paul tells the Romans: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”

This is a call to alertness and action, to take up the practice of our faith with the focus and vigor of a promised new beginning. “[S]alvation is nearer to us now” because the God of our Salvation approaches. Jesus is coming, again. It is a matter of the greatest urgency.

And yet we don’t know exactly when it will happen. The morning has a way of sneaking up on us. That’s why we need to stay awake, as did the wise bridesmaids with their lamps. We sang about them in our opening hymn this morning, and we’ll visit their story in the closing hymn as well.

But for now Jesus tells us a different parable: “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

The danger of our reflecting on the second coming of Christ, as we do every year on this Sunday, is to let this promised coming be a source of fear and dread. After all, the foolish bridesmaids do not enter the wedding banquet. And from today’s lesson, we hear: “two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

But these are parables about being alert. The stories include consequences, surely. But the intention isn’t to scare us, it’s to shake us out of our sense of complacency.

“I hate getting up this early, but I love being awake.”

Here again, our Advent imagery of light in the darkness is useful. These opening days of our new liturgical year are for sober, but ultimately hopeful, contemplation—on our lives and the place of our coming Lord within them. It’s 4 a.m. reality check time. That means matters are urgent but our surroundings calm. There is time enough for focus, there is still and quiet enough for us to see and hear things we otherwise miss.

I think the line between urgency and anxiety is razor thin, and the Spirit in the beginning of Advent beckons us right up to that line. The guiding light that keeps us from stumbling over the edge is Jesus himself, with those familiar words “do not be afraid.”

As the season opens before us, he is still and already shining out in the darkness, guiding us on the righteous path, redeeming us in the brightness of his resurrection, protecting us as our impenetrable armor of light.

The question for us isn’t so much “how can we avoid being caught off guard?” but “how can we respond in faith, hope, and love as the Morningstar rises in our hearts once more?”

That is our question for the week, how do we respond to Jesus shining in our hearts? There is no place in our lives as individuals and as a community where we shouldn’t ask this question, because there is no darkness that can overcome his light.

Let’s think briefly about a timely example, the matter of our annual giving to St. Paul’s. In the coming weeks, we’ll be filling out pledge cards, making the commitment to give back to God. We do this out of our sense of gratitude, as Bishop Jim wrote so eloquently in the Epistle this month, and out of our sense of mission, as Fr. Shakespeare reminded us via email.

Thus, it is good for us to feel some urgency about our giving. It will affect how we are able to serve our neighbors near and far. It will affect our corporate life of worship and of welcome. It will affect our very souls, as God continues to teach us the painful but unavoidable lesson that to be truly free in this life is to learn to let go.

But my prayer is that all our deliberations about giving can take place against a spiritual backdrop of 4 a.m. stillness. We’ll be tempted to fret about trendlines and bottom lines, comparing this year to last year and yesteryear. But they are the past. We’ll be tempted to fear the worst about the year to come, about the changes and chances we cannot predict. But they are the future.

In our giving and in all our seeking and serving, may we remember St. Paul’s admonition: Now is the moment for us to wake from sleep. Now is where where God’s reality meets our response. Now is where we have our impact. The night is far gone; the day is near.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, help us to wait for your coming with urgency but without anxiety. Be for us our Light and our Salvation. Amen.

"Singing Pilgrims" by Ahron de Leeuw via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Pilgrim Virtues

Kyle

Proper 20, Year C

(Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13)

Image source: Ahron de Leeuw via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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Let me start by saying that I’m as confused by our Gospel passage today as you might be. A manager “squanders” the resources he’s been entrusted with and receives notice to get the books in order, such as they are, and prepare for the pink slip. So he scrambles around cutting deals with his master’s debtors, hoping to ingratiate himself and receive eventual welcome “into their homes.”

As we get ready for Jesus to pounce on the manipulative manager, the punchline all but set up, we hear instead that the master “commended” the manager’s shrewd strategy. And just as we get our heads around this shocker and prepare for Jesus to write both men off as “children of this age” rather than “children of light,” he tells the crowd to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” [pause] What’s the deal?

Well, let’s first commend Jesus for his shrewdness too. A story with not one but two surprise endings certainly grabs his hearers’ attention—no mean feat in his time or ours. And a parable that leaves us asking “What’s the deal?” has achieved the overriding objective of any parable: to get us thinking hard.

A lot of very smart people have thought very hard about this peculiar parable, and I read quite a few of their attempts to make at least some sense of it. Several of them seemed to me to put too tidy a bow around a messy story dripping with ambiguity. Jesus, and Luke, were quite capable of being clearer if they wanted to be.

The interpretation I found compelling and relevant to our life together has modest ambitions. It starts by picking up on a little translation detail that would be easy to miss:

When the manager is contemplating possible landing zones for his self-made golden parachute, he speaks of being welcomed into his associates’ “homes” using a greek word that means home, house, or household. When Jesus talks about the friendships we are to forge, the promised “eternal homes” would be better translated with “tabernacle,” “habitation,” or simply “tent.”

The persuasive commentator then puts this small detail into a broad perspective on the Christian life:

“Jesus does not promise to provide what the unjust steward sought, the stable abode of those who have possessions and security. Rather, [he] promises the unstable abode of the wanderer, the refugee, and the pilgrim, whose mobility requires the dispossession of goods” [Scott Bader-Saye’s “Theological Perspective” from Feasting on the Word (Westminster John Knox): Year C, Volume 4, pages 95–96.]

So we might paraphrase Jesus like this: You might as well throw that dishonest wealth around with some abandon, because you can’t take it with you on the journey I’ve got in store for you.

This exposition doesn’t “solve the puzzle” of this parable, but I don’t think that should really be the goal. What if, instead, we just sat with the question our commentator suggested: What would it mean, what does it mean, for the people of God to be pilgrims rather than citizens, tenants rather than landlords, sojourners and wayfarers rather than the kings and queens of our own castle keeps? Here’s my stab at some … let’s call them “Pilgrim Virtues”:

First, pilgrims know that absolute security is an illusion. They do their best to bring provisions for the days ahead, and to steer clear of the most dangerous obstacles. But no one is immune to famine and disease, to cycles of violence and random tragedies.

(On that note, let me pause and bid your continued prayers for the victims of the mass shooting at the Navy Yard on Monday morning; for their families, friends, and colleagues; and for all those affected by violence throughout the world. If you know someone touched by this tragedy, or if you experienced resonances with some past trauma in your own life, please remember that the clergy and people of St. Paul’s are here for you. Just speak to someone after the service and we will do our best to connect you with the help you need.)

So pilgrims are not surprised by the worst that life can throw at them, but pilgrims are also thankful, as we know, for the gifts they have received. They don’t have the luxury of mistaking those gifts as signs of their own value or of a contingent blessing based on good behavior or worthy offerings. Pilgrims know what it’s like to be out of meal and oil, and they’ve learned the hard way to trust that God is present anyway. If they hadn’t learned to trust and to be thankful for what they have, they never would have made it this far.

Pilgrims can also be on the lookout for opportunity. They are blessed with an awareness that the story of their people is still being written. They are resistant (though not immune) to the temptation of glorifying “the good old days.” If they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t have ended up as pilgrims in the first place, because the memory of what was is seductive. It seems like a much easier dream to chase than the promise of what could be. But of course the pilgrims have it right, and the alternative is usually folly.

So what do these pilgrim virtues have to do with us? We might start by asking what false security we’re hanging onto. To add some wayfaring imagery to Bishop Jim’s question from two weeks ago, what treasures are we dragging through the wilderness that should have been left in Egypt? Some things are worth carrying, as the Israelites knew. But only the essentials—pilgrims travel light. We can’t limit our soul-searching to physical things: some old ways of working and worshiping, of relating to each other and our neighborhood, will probably need to change. God is doing a new thing, but none of us knows entirely what. That’s why we’re on a pilgrimage.

How about thanksgivings? What do we have to celebrate, right here, right now, even among much uncertainty? My first idea is the incredible talent and dedication in our music program under Robert McCormick’s steady direction. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our choirs than with more music, and I hope to see many of you here Friday night to support their ministry and join in the fun. Sharing and retweeting our social media posts about the event wouldn’t hurt either.

Another gift I’ve heard the parish buzzing about these past couple weeks is, and you can’t make up these coincidences, pilgrims: the Pilgrims in Christ class. As someone who makes his living as a Christian education consultant in training, I cannot understate to you what a tremendous blessing it is to have newcomers, long-time members, and a team of dedicated teachers so excited for a year-long faith formation experience that meets for two evening hours every single week. If I even suggested something like that to anyone who called our center at the seminary looking for ideas, they’d probably still be laughing at the absurdity. But Pilgrims is transforming lives in this parish, even in a year of transition. I’m thankful for everyone taking the plunge.

But what opportunities to use our many and distinctive gifts haven’t we thought of yet? What life-changing ministries lie just beyond the horizon? What unmet needs are we just starting to get an inkling about? What new ways to share the love of Christ are seeking root in the fertile soil of our hearts and minds?

We’ll miss these opportunities if we’re busy engineering a soft landing into business as usual or serving masters other than the Lord of All. We’ll miss them if we expect them to be unambiguous or tidy or painless.

But those who have taken a leap of faith in this life know the sure provision and surprising pleasures of a pilgrimage in Christ. It takes an ability to stay calm, to keep alert, to let go. It may even take some holy shrewdness.

The one thing we can be sure of is that God will be there in the thick of it, even if we don’t always understand how.

Healing and the Sabbath

Kyle 1 Comment

Proper 16, Year C

(Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17)

Image source: Josh James via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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I am something of a monastery groupie. Maybe that’s not the right phrase. But I follow—with great passion, in person and online—a number of monks, nuns, friars, and the orders they belong to.

My adult faith was largely formed among members of the Order of Julian of Norwich. One of my favorite seminary classes was a Thomas Aquinas course taught, mostly, to first-year Dominicans. Every day, I read a meditation by Franciscan spiritual writer Richard Rohr, whom I was fortunate to hear recently in this his last year before retiring from speaking.

And as many of you heard back in Lent, I am a tireless cheerleader for the various online outreach efforts of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, MA (SSJE for short).

Because I work for a highly regarded Christian education professor, I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with some SSJE staff members on the first draft of a curriculum about writing a rule of life. As it turns out, the first order of business in this curriculum was unpacking some baggage around the word rule, baggage that has some bearing on our Gospel lesson today.

When many of us hear the word rule, we think of an encumbrance of some sort. A rule holds us back, tells us we can’t do something that in fact we’d rather like to do. I think, somewhat bizarrely, of the teacher screaming, “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding” to a classroom full of singing students in the Pink Floyd movie The Wall.

But from Paul Tillich to Paul of Tarsus, the Christian tradition has preached the paradox that rules actually help set us free, that some kind of accountability is necessary for us to become the people that God wants us to be and that we ourselves want to be. The rules may not be the fun part of a game, but games wouldn’t be fun at all without them. Life wouldn’t be possible or meaningful without them.

That’s the sense in which the monastic tradition uses the term “rule of life.” Our rule is that set of intentions and practices that gives shape to our Christian discipleship. Participants in our Pilgrims in Christ class write rules of life, selecting personal guidelines from what they’ve learned helps bring them closer to God and their neighbors:

“I will go on a silent retreat each year” or “I will keep a journal about my struggles with prayer” or “I will volunteer once a month at Grate Patrol or my local food pantry” or (here’s one my spiritual director suggested to me) “I will ask for help.”

A rule of life keeps us centered on the spectrum that lies between freedom and responsibility. Without a rule, most of us tend to go a little off the rails—down one extreme or the other. Sometimes our rule will tell us to get in gear. Sometimes it will tell us to take a break. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what it’s telling us.

I think we’re seeing something like this dynamic in the encounter between Jesus and the leader of the synagogue. Their dispute is about two important aspects of observing sabbath, which is part of any good rule of life. [I’m grateful here to Charles Raynal for his Pastoral Perspective in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, page 382.]

One idea comes from Exodus 20: “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it” (verse 11). That’s the important perspective the leader of the synagogue has in mind: God made this day holy, so you should honor that, Jesus. That means resting, not running around healing people!

The other idea comes from Deuteronomy 5: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day” (verse 15). That’s what Jesus was thinking of: God longs to set us free. So how could I let this woman be held captive by her affliction?

We will each need both these bits of witness throughout our lives, however we choose to observe a sabbath of some kind: the voice saying “honor this time that God has set aside” and the voice saying “be free to receive God’s gift of healing and rejuvenation.” Sometimes there will be no conflict, other times we will feel forced to choose one or the other.

In this particular case, Jesus lets one of his usual rules of thumb guide his discernment: I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly. I came to proclaim Good News to those in captivity, tidings of peace, of redemption, of release. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” You are set free from your ailment.

I think it’s no coincidence that Jesus has to weigh in in the direction he does. I think it’s no coincidence that, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus takes still more opportunities to heal and otherwise lighten the load for the downtrodden on the day he was supposed to be resting.

I think between the loads life puts on our shoulders, and the ones we add of our own design, there’s not a one of us here who doesn’t long to hear these words from our Lord, desperately need to hear these words:

You are set free from your ailment—from your perfectionism, your self-hatred, your addictions, your stubbornness, your anxiety, your illness.

Jesus is always ready to say it if we’re able to hear. He doesn’t promise a life without trouble; he does promise a life in which our troubles are transformed by his abiding presence. If we’re ready to be honest with ourselves about it, then Jesus is ready to start redeeming it. In fact, he was already ready, has always been ready, has always been redeeming us.

This process can only happen fully in community, which means our healing and wholeness is tied to that of those around us. That’s why we pray and read the Bible and confess our sins and listen for the Spirit together.

That’s why Christians have been forming communities in house churches and monasteries and study groups and parishes like St. Paul’s K Street for as long as there have been Christians.

That’s why tens of thousands of people came the National Mall yesterday, to renew our country’s collective commitment to being honest about the prejudice and greed and fear that prevent us from living the generous and interconnected lives God calls us to. Lives that we know deep down will bring us greater joy and opportunity as we share these gifts with our neighbors.

It’s no mean feat to live the lives of grace and peace God desires for us, which is why it helps to have a roadmap, a rule. It takes a commitment to living together, the courage to name the burdens we’re carrying, and the humility to lay them down when Jesus offers to make us free of them.

Our Gospel lesson today warns us against presuming there’s ever a time when we don’t need that gift—and, more importantly, that there’s ever a time when he isn’t offering it.

A common life of uncommon devotion

Kyle

The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin

(Isaiah 61:10–11; Psalm 34; Galatians 4:4–7; Luke 1:46–55)

Image source: Eric R. via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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Earlier this week, I was at a gathering in Colorado that brought together leaders in the Episcopal Church for a couple days of peer training and resource sharing. One of our preachers was Scott Gunn, who leads the Episcopal discipleship organization Forward Movement. As such, he’s also involved in Lent Madness, the yearly tournament that decides which saint will win the Golden Halo.

Tuesday was the Lesser Feast of Anglican spiritual writer Jeremy Taylor, and Scott led us through a different saint’s game, one I think he called Guess How We Got These Readings. It worked pretty well in the case of Taylor; the readings had an obvious connection to his work on Holy Living and Holy Dying, but not so obvious that there wasn’t something to talk about in the sermon.

It would be pretty boring to play “guess how we got this reading” for today’s Epistle, which summarizes rather tersely Mary’s unique part in our salvation story. Diddo for today’s rather obvious Gospel lesson, Mary’s magnificent song of praise. How could we not include that? But our reading from Isaiah makes Scott’s game interesting. Why do we hear this reading in this service? Let me play for a few minutes with one possible answer: more so than usual, I think this lesson invites us to engage our imaginations.

In its original context, this passage from the end of chapter 61 concludes a poem announcing the prophet’s good news to the LORD’s people in exile. Though they had received a double portion of shame and dishonor, their destiny is a double share in everlasting joy. These verses are their song of praise and thanksgiving at that promise. [Joseph Blankinsopp, Isaiah notes, New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3 edition, p. 1064.]
What our liturgy asks us to do this evening is to hear this lesson in a different key, to view it through a particular prism. Try to hear these words as Mary might have heard them, to say them as she might have said them. Does that help us pick up on some new detail? Does it touch our hearts in a new way? I’ll go first.

**

When I hear the collective people of Zion sing “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God”—when I hear that my mind’s eye imagines a civic celebration, a people gathered in joy, a city in bloom.
But when I hear these words from Mary’s perspective, the notion of exulting in God with “my whole being” takes on an added gravity, an essential physicality.

It helps that the Hebrew word in question, נֶפֶשׁ, has a particularly expansive set of possible translations: my soul, my self, my life, my person, my appetite, my mind, my living being, my desire, my emotion, my passion—my whole being shall exult in my God. The words from our marriage vows come to mind as I hear this list: “with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you” (BCP 427).

For Mary, to magnify the God who magnified her meant carrying and giving birth to a son, feeding him at her breast, protecting him as best she could, and being wounded in her own soul by the sword that pierced her son. It must indeed have taken all that she had to make it through. [pause]

With all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you, O God. I exult in you with my whole being. That is the life commitment to which Christ and his apostles call each of us, over and over again. Sell all your possessions and follow me. Hunger and thirst for righteousness. Let your body be a temple of the Holy Spirit. This is our divine vocation: Call it purity of heart. Call it way, truth, and life. Call it new creation.

We commemorate saints because we can never have enough role models for living lives of true devotion. The saints are God’s signs to us that by the grace of the Holy Spirit we too may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
In Mary’s case, that sign is a life both common and uncommon: Bear a child, God said to her. Raise him in the faith. Celebrate his victories and mourn his losses. Exult in me with your whole being. Exult in him.

**
So you’ve heard the line that jumped out to me, and a little bit about where it led my imagination. Now it’s your turn. Be sure to have another look at the reading. As you do, put yourself in Mary’s shoes. What do you notice? What does it show you about God, about Mary, about her son? Ponder these things. Tell a friend. Talk to God. And next time we commemorate a saint, have another imaginative encounter with scripture.

How did we get this reading from Isaiah? The same way as always: someone thought it might help us live our lives in a new way as we try our best to love and follow Mary’s son. For her sake, on her day, let’s try to do it with our whole being.