I was seventeen years old, a freshman at Boston College, a school I loved, in a great city. I’d been accepted into the University Chorale, and was rehearsing solos for the Vivaldi “Gloria.” My biology major didn’t yet feel like a huge mistake. I had great roommates, people I love and good friends still.

And yet, one fall night as I was walking from lower campus to upper, past beautiful grey stone buildings, crunching through crisp fall leaves, I abruptly felt a little like you do after the roller coaster passes over the crest of the mountain and starts to fall. Something inside of me dropped. Dropped away… some mental, emotional, spiritual thing I had been standing on, and which I’d thought was a big solid rock, turned out to be just a trap door, like the ones the condemned man is standing on with the hangman’s noose around his neck. And in that moment, everything I’d been sure of simply… fell away.

God is also speaking to the people, directly, intimately. God doesn’t say, “I am God, the all-powerful!” like that man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. Instead, God says, “I am the Lord, your God.”

Your God.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
    making wise the simple…

Barbara Brown Taylor, who wrote Learning to Walk in the Dark, notes that this understanding seems coded into our faith, too. She says, “From earliest times, Christians have used ‘darkness’ as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death."  Taylor observes that the dominant expectation for most Christians is that we are part of something she calls “full solar spirituality,” and we are strongly encouraged to stay “in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith.” That means: lots of certainty, lots of optimism, and not much space for complexity, nuance, or the grey tones we find between the black letters on the white pages of our bibles.

But things are a little more complicated than that. And if we read a little further into the stories and the songs that make up our sacred texts, we find something that may surprise us: God is there in the darkness, too...

On this very odd Ash Wednesday, which also happens to be Valentine’s Day, let us start with Love.

Someone once told me that the Bible is God’s love letter to us. And there are times when I can absolutely get behind that idea and there are times when, well, it’s complicated.

Tonight’s passage from the prophet Isaiah traverses all this territory. Love letter and complication. It begins, like a proper Lenten passage should, with talk of fasting...

For my friend, the mountaintop was worshiping God almighty with a great throng of people, her singular smallness joining with the many to create a thunderous song of praise. For me, it is the moments of wonder when nature reminds me of its Maker. For you it may be something different—leaf? Birdsong? Volcano? What makes you gasp in wonder? What makes you say “Wow”?

One thing is for certain: you can go looking for mountaintop experiences, but there are no guarantees you’ll find them where or when you expect them...

We don’t know exactly what is going on with this woman, though we can guess that a fever at minimum, was a sign of infection. You or I would be headed off to the walk-in for antibiotics. In first century Palestine, that’s not an option. An infection… whether caused by a wound or an airborne illness such as bronchitis or influenza…it would be a serious matter, most of all for the very young and the very old.

She is probably seriously ill.

And of course, they tell Jesus. Possibly because Jesus is a compassionate listener. But more likely because, Jesus has already earned their trust.

Preaching. Teaching. Healing. Praying. Jesus is doing all these things. And his still-small band of close followers already trusts completely that Jesus will be able to do something about Peter’s mother-in-law.

Image courtesy of FreeBibleImages, for teaching purposes only.

Preaching. Teaching. Feeding. Healing. Praying. 

Needless to say, that is a short list, filled with big tasks. And at the outset of his ministry, Jesus calls four men who didn’t go to high school or college or seminary, and invites them along to do exactly these things.

Why is Jesus so sure they can do this? What does Jesus see in these four men who fish for a living, that they are the ones he chooses to do his work with them?

Here follows:

Ten Reasons Why Fisher Folk are a Good Choice for Companions in Ministry...

I can go shopping alone, confident that I will not be followed or harassed because of the color of my skin. Not everyone can say that.

While I’m shopping, or if I’m applying for a mortgage, I don’t have to worry about my skin color working against the appearance of financial reliability on my part. Not everyone can say that.

I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. Not everyone can say that.

When my children were young, I could arrange to protect them most of the time from people who might not like them.[i] Sadly, tragically, not all mothers can say that.

One of the most important experiences of awakening in my life was understanding the fact that being white gave me certain privileges, some tangible, some intangible. I had always taken my life experience for granted. I had always assumed that all reasonably decent people could expect the same kinds of life experiences. I was wrong. I learned that there are ways in which our lives are chosen for us, even before we are born.

... the God’s honest truth is: we have no idea what Jesus has been up to. He’s is about 30 years old, which makes it, for most of us, about 29 years and 11 months since we last saw him. Where has he been? What has he been doing? Is he looking for a fresh start? We don’t know.

Here’s what we do know: the baptism wasn’t, how do I put this…. typical.

Image:

St Michael and All Angels, Lansdowne Drive, London Fields, London E8 - Mural, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Heaven and earth meet: That is the story of Jesus’ birth.

It starts with its feet planted firmly on earth, with recognizably human endeavors that many or most of us have experienced or can relate to—travel, birth, work, even the experience of being outside at night. And then heaven breaks in.

I’m not sure when hope finally left me, drained from my body. When had it first dawned on me… there would be no child?

A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
    make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
    and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
    and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
    and all people shall see it together,
    for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” ~ Isaiah 40:3-5

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
    so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
    as when fire kindles brushwood
    and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
    so that the nations might tremble at your presence!  ~ Isaiah 64:1-2

This is why I fell in love with this passage so long ago: Completely absent from this tale of judgment is one single word about the usual ways we divide ourselves as Christians. Jesus does not say, “Enter into the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for when someone doubted the Virgin Birth you corrected them! When someone told you they were gay, you reminded them they were sinners. When someone said women could be preachers, you told them they had rejected me.” Completely missing from this scene of judgment is any notion that what we believe enters into the equation.

This is why I fell in love with this passage. It is 100% about reaching out in healing, loving, helping ways to those who need it, and it is 0% about thought policing, or faith measuring, or, my own personal favorite sin, who’s right.

Image: Christ, King, and the Great Bishop who sits flanked with the Queen of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John the Forerunner. (Church of St. Nicholas Toplicki, Repubic of Macedonia, 1537. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia.)

A man is going away for a while, and while he is gone, he decides to entrust his property to his slaves. To one he gives five talents—that’s about $2,000,000 in today’s terms. To the next he gives two talents—the equivalent of about $888,000. To the third, a mere single talent—about $444,000.

These are staggeringly large amounts of money. It almost doesn’t seem fair. How could one possibly know? Where to even begin? What would you do with an old-school “talent”? According to the parable, the first two slaves invested and traded. What would Jesus have done?

Image: The Parable of the Talents by Mironov, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Once upon a time, there was a man who knew that he was going to die. So, naturally, he turned to telling stories. And these stories had a decidedly “end of days” feeling about them—as if he were talking about, not only the end of his own days, but the end of an age, the end of the world. So one day, in that very same holy place wherein he had flipped over the tables and protested against injustice, he said:

“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this..."

Then and now, the people who follow Jesus around tend to fall into two groups: those who find incredible hope and comfort in what he says; and those who are provoked to anger and hostility by what he says (and want to correct him, and show him up). In our passage Jesus is very much speaking to that first group. Jesus is speaking to people who are struggling, and who have come to him for words of healing and comfort.

Still, his words are a little puzzling.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.