Days of the Dead Proper 25B

 All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, means “Saints’ Evening,” the night before All Saints’ Day. Halloween begins three days during which the Church reflects on the lives of those who have gone before us – those who made significant contributions to the Body of Christ, Christ’s Church. It is thought that some of the tricks, treats, costumes and customs with which we are familiar evolved from Celtic harvest festivals.

 

All Hallows, All Saints and All Souls, like the fall season itself, is a time to reflect on the cycles of life and death. And for those who follow in the way of Christ, it is a time to remember that this fleshy, time-bound existence is itself bounded by a greater reality of hope beyond mortality represented and embodied in these saints and souls, a vast company and communion dwelling beyond time and forever.

 

Fr. Sam Portaro, in his reflections on the Saints of the Church, Brightest and Best, observes that laughter is a component of Halloween, “the crazy laughter that comes of surprise and of fear. We would rather not talk about the fear, yet it is the fear we commemorate these latter days of October, when the chill of winter wafts in and around the dying warmth of summer, when the trees and all of nature echo the theme of death. All the little hobgoblins in sheets, emulating the spirit world of ghosts and skeletons, as vampire and all manner of horrid creatures, move us to laughter, for laughter is our way of averting fear.” [Portaro p. 198]

 

Yet, laughter has been in short supply the past two years of a world-wide pandemic amidst an already divided and dangerous world of wars, economic inequalities, and all manner of mortal afflictions, of which we are even more cognizant as the evening news walks us through over-crowded hospital wards of our peers and contemporaries tied to ventilators and therapies hoping to survive; as doctors and nurses experience the very same PTSD symptoms from critical patient overload as many of our fighting men and women experience throughout the world.

 

On Halloween we attempt snicker at death and dress up to disguise ourselves as if we might possibly fool the grim reaper. But we are those people who need not run from our fears. We follow Jesus. The same Jesus who is depicted walking straight ahead to a truly fearful end in Jerusalem. In chapter twelve of Mark, his adversaries are doing anything and everything to trick him with trick questions about paying taxes to Caesar, marriage in the after-life and all manner of ridiculous things to humiliate him and discourage his followers. [Mark 12:28-34] Yet, Jesus keeps feeding hungry crowds, healing all manner of persons from all stations of life of physical, mental and spiritual dis-ease. Jesus is already living in the very kingdom and reign of God that he announces wherever he goes, calling anyone listening and watching to follow him in his fearless journey to Jerusalem.

 

A scribe, one of several groups of people trying to stop him, asks him a question: Which commandment is the first of all? Jesus responds with the Shema Y’Israel: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’[Deuteronomy 6:4-9] To which he adds a second: “And in your spare time after loving God with your whole self, the God who loves you and forgives you no matter what, you will also love your neighbor as yourself, as stated long long ago in Leviticus 19:18.”

Unlike his fellow Scribes, Pharisees and Herodians, this scribe replied, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” That is, more important than the power brokers who maintain the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem that along with Rome has monopolized the wealth and economy of all Israel. The Scribe agrees with the warnings of prophets throughout the centuries before Jesus who decried this monopoly and concentration of wealth among the very few in Jerusalem at the social expense of the rest of those who sowed and reaped the fields that fed them; those who fished and raised livestock that fed them; the craftsmen and artisans who clothed them and furnished the homes of the Empire and the Jerusalem aristocracy. This Jesus is the real thing, thinks the scribe. It’s not the rituals but what we do for others that demonstrates that we walk in the Way of the Lord.

 

The text concludes: After that no one dared to ask him any question.

 

To walk in the way of Jesus’s twin commandments of love is to walk in the Way of the Lord. It is just one way in which we seek the Lord with all our hearts. And it is one way that we live in communion with the saints and souls who in their days of decision also walked in the light of Jesus’s twin commandments of love while facing any and all fears.

 

May these days of All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls reminds us of who we are and whose we are. As we reflect on the lives of All Saints and All Souls, may we acknowledge, as Sam Portaro urges us, just how hard it was for them, and is for us, to look death in the face and say, “I know you and I shall see you again.” But it is harder still to scan the flickering light of life’s vitality in the face of a dying friend or relative and say, “I know I shall see you again.” [Ibid p.201]

 

May All the Communion of Saints and Souls inspire us to be those people who sustain the virtue of Hope in a world that often presents scant evidence that such Hope is justified. May we dare to hope beyond the constraints of mortality that day by day we might take one step at a time into the Reign of God Jesus calls us to follow. Amen.

It's All In the Questions Proper 25B

 

It’s All In the Questions

Often, we come to our sacred texts looking for answers or directions. We have come to think of The Bible as a kind of cookbook filled with recipes for success in this life, or even worse, a kind of do-it-yourself handbook on how we can get more than we can ever ask for or deserve.

 

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Friar, Priest, and writer on Christian Spirituality, suggests there are three questions we ought to be asking the sacred texts we read: 1. What is God doing here? 2. What does this say about who God is? And 3. What does this say about how we can relate to such a God? To these three I would add a fourth: What question is the text asking us?

 

Our Bible, Hebrew Scriptures, Christian Scriptures and a collection of inter-testamental documents important to both Jews and Christians, is primarily about what God, for generations going back some three or four thousand years, has been doing for us – not so much about what we need to do for God. In our Bible, God is consistently portrayed as redeeming or saving us from ourselves. From the outset in Genesis 1:26 we learn that we are made “in the image of God.” Yet, we constantly miss the mark. Sin, an archery term for missing the target, is the word most often used to describe the human condition. Curiously, despite everything, God is portrayed as continuing to Forgive us and Love us, no matter what.  

 

Take Hebrews, which we have been reading for four weeks now. God, in Hebrews, is in the Word that became flesh and blood in Jesus. Chapter 7 reminds us that once upon a time Israel needed hundreds, even thousands, of families descended from the Levites and the Cohens to operate the Jerusalem Temple’s sacrifices day and night. As a child growing up west of Chicago, as we would drive from our house to my great-aunt Grace’s even further west, we would pass a small oil refinery smack in the middle of a suburb called Melrose Park. You could see flames and smell the chemicals 24/7, any time of day or night as the refinery never rested. So it was in the Temple.

 

Some forty years after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, however, Rome burned the Temple to the ground. All the Levites and Cohens were out of a sacred job – a very important job. Important to maintaining a right relationship with the God Israel understood had saved their people over and over again, as Psalm 126 reminds us. It should be observed, that the response of Israel to this tragedy was to ask questions of itself – to scour the sacred texts asking themselves: Where did we go wrong? We must have seriously missed the mark to have suffered this tragedy. It must be our fault. The texts asked them to remember who they are and whose they are.

 

Hebrews asserts that with the continued presence of Jesus we now have a single high priest who, through what he does and says can lead us on the way with no Temple and no need for other priests. We need only the example of what God’s Love and Forgiveness looks like when embodied in a person like one of us. The Word became Flesh and Dwelt among us.

 

Enter chapters 8-10 in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem begins with him asking his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” That’s the question for all of us, isn’t it?  Throughout this journey the disciples have not a clue, witness the episode where they, while Jesus is busy feeding hungry people and healing people from all stations of life of physical, mental and spiritual ailments, the brothers Zebedee, James and John ask to be appointed to positions of power and authority – to sit on Jesus’s right-hand and left. They imagine him sitting on a throne!

 

Jesus replies that we must be servants of all, and in John’s Gospel he is pictured on his last night before his crucifixion getting on his knees and washing the disciple’s feet: the role of the youngest child-slave or servant of the household. This is what it looks like to be created in God’s image.

 

Now, Jesus and his crowd of followers, enter Jericho [Mark 10:46-52].  At the gates to the city is a beggar named Bartimaeus. He is blind. He has heard about this man Jesus and what he does. Immediately we see, if we are listening to the text, that he, unlike the disciples, knows exactly who Jesus is as he cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

 

People are annoyed. People from Jericho are tired of his begging day after day, and Jesus’s followers think Jesus is far too important to be bothered by this literal outsider. They try to quiet Bart. Bart’s desperation, however, is more powerful than their attempts to further marginalize him. He cries out again, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stands still and orders the crowd to bring Bartimaeus to him. Bart immediately throws off his only possession in the world, his cloak, and because of his faith, because he knows exactly who Jesus is, he can see. We are meant to see that God is in the welcoming mercy that transforms Bartimaeus, and those of us who can really see and hear what is happening, from an outsider to an insider who follows Jesus to Jerusalem, the Cross and his Resurrection.  

 

Now we know that he already could see what we, the crowd and the disciples could not see. That Jesus is the living image of the God who loves us and forgives us and wills to do everything possible to save us from ourselves – including teaching us not to marginalize people like Bartimaeus, who, unlike the rich young man just two weeks ago could not imagine parting with his possessions to care for the poor and follow Jesus.

 

When I was in Seminary, we visited one of the oldest Synagogues in New York City. The Rabbi invited us to ask questions. One of my classmates asked, “We know what the role of a priest is in our tradition. What is the role of the rabbi in a synagogue congregation?” I will never forget his answer. “The role of the rabbi is to lead and teach others through the stories of God as told in our sacred scriptures in such a way as everyone becomes a rabbi. So, my role is to put myself out of business!” If I hear Hebrews and Mark correctly, I should be feeling uncomfortable right now! With Jesus on our side, we no longer need a kingdom of priests! We are all called to live into being the image of the living God for others.

 

In our texts for today, God is in Jesus’s mercy shared with all people – especially the outsiders. This shows us that God forgives and loves all people, all the time, no matter what. So, what does this say about how we can relate to such a God?

 

Are we called to be insiders like the blind disciples and the rich young man? Or, are we called to be more like the outsider Bartimaeus, who although he is blind, can really see God is right in front of him? May God help us to see more clearly. Amen.

Melchizedek and Servant Ministry Proper 24B

 

Melchizedek and Servant Ministry

“You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek,” says the author of To the Hebrews. Just who is Melchizedek? He is mentioned only twice in the entire Hebrew bible: in Genesis chapter 14, where we are told he is King of Salem, or King of Peace, and again in Psalm 110. Among the Israelite priests who served and maintained the Jerusalem Temple, there was no “Order of Melchizedek.” Yet, Psalm 110 imagined a day when one, a Priest-King like Melchizedek, would mysteriously return as a messiah to restore Israel and “all the nations.”

 

Psalm 110 refers back to Genesis, where after Abram and his forces have won a battle and are collecting the spoils, in rides this mysterious Priest-King Melchizedek, literally “king of righteousness.” He shows up from Salem to offer Abram bread and wine. As a priest of “God Most High,” he blesses Abram: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” Here the text itself is hopelessly ambiguous, for it simply says, “And he gave him one tenth of everything.” A tithe. There is no way to be sure whether it was Abram giving a tithe to Melchizedek, or the other way around.

 

Then Melchizedek disappears until several centuries later in Psalm 110. And does not reappear again for many more centuries until To the Hebrews describes Jesus as “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” As Psalm 110 suggests, this Jesus is also a messianic figure.

 

Which may explain why the disciples, and specifically the Zebedee brothers, James and John, in Mark chapter 10, imagine Jesus sitting on a throne commanding heaven and earth and the entire cosmos. Somehow, they miss the significance of Jesus’s actions, serving the needs of others, and several times placing a child in their midst as an example of his devotion to “little ones”: the poor, strangers, children and even sinners. Instead, the brothers Zebedee demand that Jesus do “whatever we ask of you.” About this time every week through this long stretch of the Mark narrative, I imagine Jesus letting out yet another long sigh.

 

This time, however, he is patient with them, asking just what it is that they want. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” [Mark 10:37] They still do not get it.  “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Sure, we can, they say without thinking. They think his “glory” will be vanquishing the Roman Occupation and sitting on a throne ruling the world! While we, the readers, know his glory is his death upon a Roman Cross, the consequence of having served others, offering his life “as a ransom for many.” [v45]

 

Besides, says Jesus, it’s not for me to say who will sit where, “it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” [v40] The other ten disciples are angry with the Zebedee brothers for attempting to jump the line ahead of them. Lest we think scornfully of them, we all need to remember, the disciples are merely a stand-in literary device at this point for us – for you, for me, and most of all for the church. Patiently, Jesus says you are all imagining me as some sort of Gentile tyrant or warlord! I come to serve, not to be served. “Whoever wishes to be great among you must become your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” [v 43-45] Of all. “All” is my favorite theological word.

 

Now, as our diocese begins the process of seeking to elect a new bishop, and Christ Church Forest Hill looks to what our future might be, we all need to let this sink in. We are all called to be servants. Servant ministry is the model Jesus lives every minute of every day. It is not a particularly glorious life, but it is faithful to the will of God Most High, who sent Melchizedek to bless Abram and serve him a simple meal of bread and wine. Which meal Jesus transforms into a memorial for us all; which meal is meant to remind us that he gathers us here to his table, the altar of his sacrifice as a ransom for many, that we to might be servants of others. All others.

 

I remember how excited I was when I first understood Melchizedek as the archetype of Jesus. Servant ministry without fanfare. He shows up, serves the meal, offers a blessing, and disappears, only to return as Jesus Christ to be  king of peace and king of righteousness. I told one of my mentors while I was still in Seminary that the church is called to a life of Servant Ministry. “It will never sell,” he replied. “People aren’t going to be attracted to become servants.” He said we are all more like John and James Zebedee – we all want power and authority, or at least to be near those with power and authority. It just won’t sell.” I felt crestfallen like the young man last Sunday who left Jesus grieving, my Servant Ministry balloon temporarily deflated.

 

Not so Jesus. As we will see next week, he and the men and women following him come to Jericho where a blind beggar named Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus. The crowd and the disciples try to quiet him. But of course, Jesus says, “Bring him to me.” Jesus is undeterred. He comes to serve, not to be served. Even blind Bartimaeus can see that! But that’s all for next week.

 

The Jesus of To the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark knows who he is and why he is here. And we are those people who know he is still here, now and forever. Try to imagine what he thinks of how we have interpreted his calling us to “follow him.” I used to have a token in my pocket of a laughing Jesus to remind me whenever I reached into my pocket how silly some of all this we call “church” must look to him. Thank goodness Jesus knows how to laugh!

 

I suggest we ponder this story as we look for a new bishop, and as we think about what our parish will look like one, two, five, or even ten years from now. How can we become more like servants than like the Brothers Zebedee?

 

This day we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name.” Knowing what Jesus imagines such “steadfast faith” looks like, what do we need to do to become servants of one another, and others? All others? For that is what we are meant to be! Amen.

 

 

Jesus looks at us and loves us Proper 23B

 

“Jesus, looking at him, loved him…”

“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”  Hebrews 4:12-13

 

The “word of God,” logos in the Greek, is commonly understood to be scripture. Also, as God’s word, as in Genesis chapter 1 where God literally speaks creation into being. And yet, by the end of verse 13 logos also means “an account” or “a reckoning.” A judgement. And yet again, we also understnd logos, Word, also means “Jesus” as the incarnate or enfleshed presence of God.

 

The author of this treatise To the Hebrews chooses her words carefully, and chooses “logos,” a word that, theologically speaking, carries a lot of freight and a lot of meaning. When I first read these two verses while on silent retreat as a newly minted priest, just as the writer asserts, it shook me to my very core. In this context it is speaking of a moment of profound judgment: do I or do I not live according to the Way of the Lord?

 

Reverberating in my recent memory that day, I recalled Elie Wiesel, one afternoon, pausing in our conversation which took place between my graduation from Seminary and being ordained a priest, and suddenly saying, “Kirk, I could not do what you are about to do. I could not be a rabbi. I could not possibly bear to take on the responsibility for a congregation of people.” I felt the earth tremble under my feet, the universe shift, and realized later, that was the moment I really understood what my life was about to become. If Elie Wiesel, mentor and teacher, could not imagine taking this on, I thought, who was I to think I could do it?

 

The author of Hebrews gets it just right: the word of God is active, is living, is sharper than any two-edged sword and can pierce to the very center or one’s soul to judge our thoughts and intentions.

 

Meanwhile, a man stops Jesus, kneels before him and asks, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” After a brief conversation about the word of God and how we ought to live, we are told Jesus looks at him, loves him and says, “Sell all you have, give it all away to the poor and follow me.” I have some idea how that man must have felt. I suspect at one time or another we all have felt the word of God piercing us to where it divides spirit from soul, joints from marrow. He was shaken to his core, and, we are told, walked away grieving, “for he had many possessions.” [Mark 10:17-31]

 

Jesus loves him, and this is what he tells him. This is the only individual we are told Jesus loves in the entire Gospel of Mark. Mark uses the word “love” sparingly, and only in the context of the two Great Commandments: To love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And to love your neighbor as yourself. The disciples, we learn, are equally shocked. If this is what he says to those he loves, what will he say to us? Besides, we already left everything behind. What more can we do? And can it really be that difficult for those with massive wealth to inherit eternal life?

 

Yet, it is out of love that Jesus knows what gets in this man’s way of living eternal life here and now: his many possessions are occupying too much of his time and effort. Jesus knows that it is not true that “He or She who dies with the most toys wins!” Rather, she or he who loves God and loves neighbor, all neighbors, here and now is already living “eternal life,” right here, right now.

 

Amy-Jill Levine, in her book, The Difficult Words of Jesus (Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2021), does a masterful job of interpreting this difficult text among others, and I urge those interested in the Word of God to read her book for themselves. For interpreting the Word of God is a demanding task. And as we have learned at Noonday Prayer recently, to read and interpret the word of God we need to first allow the text to confront us; then be transformed by the text; only then will we be comforted by the text. If we look to scripture only for comfort, we will only hear what our own ego wants to hear.

 

If we allow the text to confront us and transform us, then we might begin to hear Jesus, who asks us all to follow him, to say that you cannot earn, deserve or inherit eternal life. Rather, we need to live eternal with him, here and now. And that, as St Paul lays out in the First Letter to the Corinthians chapters 12 and 13, which we have also been reading at Noonday Prayer, will mean different things for each of us. That is, what the man in the story is needs to do is not necessarily the same thing you or I need to do when the Word of God takes an account of who we are and who we can become.

 

We don’t know what the man in Mark ultimately decides to do. I know I have walked away from certain situations grieving the loss of a job, or a relationship, only to conclude some time later that I really did need to make a fundamental change to move on; to live eternal life with Jesus here and now in some new and different way. This only happens if we let the word of God, be it scripture or Jesus himself, confront us and initiate a fundamental transformation that brings us to a new and better place.

 

Levine does, however, imagine that this man reappears in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus is arrested. For in Mark, and only in Mark, we learn that “a certain young man was following Jesus wearing nothing but a linen cloth. The soldiers caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” [Mark 14:51-52] That is, he truly gives it all away!

 

Levine goes on to say, “There are multiple speculations on who this man is and why he is there. I’d like to think he is our questioner, who sold all he had, gave it to the poor, and in this last attempt to be with Jesus, divests of everything. We can imagine his fate. In doing so, we might imagine our own. Should our epitaph be, ‘He had everything,’ or ‘She had it all’? Might there be better inscriptions?” [Levine, p.30]

 

How about, “Jesus looks at us and loves us.”

 

May God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirt confront us daily with the Word of God so as to transform our lives, that we might become those people whose comfort is in living in the Way of the Lord; living eternal life, here and now. Amen.

To Become Children of God Proper 22B

 To Become Children of God Proper 22B

We begin this week praying, “Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve…” Suggesting, perhaps, that although we may be hesitant to address God with all that is in our hearts, God, through an “abundance of mercy and forgiveness” never ceases to give to us “more than we either desire or deserve.” And we may as well admit, we desire an awful lot.

This prayer does not mean to suggest that whatever it is we hesitate to ask for will be given to us, but rather that God is always ready to give us more – more than we can even imagine.

When I had been ordained a priest only a couple of months, my Rector and mentor, The Reverend Frank M. McClain took me to Dekoven House on the banks of Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin, for a three-day silent retreat with the clergy of the Diocese of Chicago. It was my first three-day silent retreat, and it was led by a bishop from Scotland, The Right Reverend Richard Holloway who led us in meditations on Hebrews – sometimes called an epistle or letter, but more likely is an early Christian treatise by an unknown author on the nature of the most unimaginable gift of God to this world, Jesus. God’s Son. He is the subject of endless books which seek to tell us just who he is and what he is all about.

Possibly written before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (and therefore before the writing of the four gospels), and possibly written by a woman of great renown, Priscilla, Priska, a time already of great turmoil and persecution for the emerging communities of followers of Jesus. I say followers because the earliest communities of Christ were gathered primarily by his invitation to “follow” him. Which is an emphasis the author makes in this treatise when she reminds us, “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching,” [Heb 10:25] which text we are instructed to read every Good Friday.

Amidst the turmoil and change following Jesus’s death on a Roman Cross and rising again on the third day, a primary question on nearly everybody’s mind, Jews and Gentiles alike, was understandably, “Who is this guy?” The text known in its original Greek simply as, “To the Hebrews,” seeks to answer this question, and does so in perhaps the most sophisticated and eloquent prose out of all the New Testament literature.

Beginning with the first four verses of chapter 1 we hear that, 1) long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways through prophets, but now speaks to us by a Son, 2) through whom he also created the worlds, 3) that this Son is “the exact imprint of God’s very being,” 4) that he sustains all things, 5) through his death as one of us, a human, he accomplished the priestly purification of our sins, 6) and was exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on High, having become “much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs!”

That is, he was there at the beginning of all things, and will be here at the end of all things, so that therefore, this Son of God is the constant source of our salvation, which is, as we pray, beyond anything we might desire or deserve. Much of the turmoil and confusion that surrounds us on all sides every day results from taking our minds off of the invitation to live our lives in the Way of God’s kingdom, allowing other voices and other ways to distract us and mislead us in what has felt, especially these past two years of the Pandemic, as if everything around us is in constant flux and change. Competing voices from many different directions seek to entangle us in endless argument and debate, such as we hear about in Mark 10:2-16, where a group of Pharisees seek to entangle Jesus in the ongoing arguments and debates of his day.

In the midst of this entanglement, we are told, people were bringing children to him “in order that he might touch them,” but the disciples sought to prevent them from even getting near to Jesus. To which Jesus responds, now for the third time, by taking a child in his arms and declaring that anyone seeking the Peace and Shalom of God’s kingdom must receive it like this little child. As precious as this sounds to us, these children in first century society had no privilege, no status, no rights, and their presence was seen as a nuisance. Nonsense, says the Son, who was there when all things came to be! The rule of God belongs to such as these: vulnerable, weak, and powerless people who often are seen as a nuisance to the rest of us. To receive life in his kingdom, we must admit we too are vulnerable, weak and powerless against the turmoil and chaos of our own age and our own ways of thinking.

We may note that the text does not idealize any particular characteristic of children, but is talking about the receiving of the kingdom by powerless persons; those who make no demands and have no stakes to claim. The rule of God comes as pure grace to those of us who are at the crossroads and byways of life, experiencing things changing day-to-day, at our wits end, and comes to any and all, regardless of status, or of no status at all.

This is where the sophisticated language of To the Hebrews speaks to us. The language of the argument sounds strange to contemporary ears. Yet, this treatise means to confront us with new ways of knowing Jesus, and to convert us to experience him as the one, the Son, who is always present. He was there before the beginning, He will be there till the end of time, says Hebrews, and is always ready generously, with mercy and forgiveness, to give us more than we can possibly desire or deserve. The only outstanding question for all of us is are we ready to receive what he is freely giving without money, without price, and without condition?

The gospel, the good news, is that amidst life’s many changes and distractions, God’s Son stands, unchanging and unchanged, both at the beginning and at the end. He is here, now and forever! That we can depend on.

May almighty God inspire us to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but to encourage one another; so we might become eager to be taken up into Jesus’s arms and received as blessed children of his Father’s kingdom. Amen.