Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Lent IV, Year C
March 27, 2022
 
It is an oldie and a goodie, this parable of the Prodigal Son.  Church folks know it well.  It is about the kid who takes an early withdrawal on his inheritance, takes off to Vegas and blows the whole wad.  Once he is reduced to homelessness, he decides to go home and ask to work for his father for minimum wage.  But the father, takes him in, cleans him up, and throws a big party for his return.  But the older brother, the one who stayed back on the farm and did his chores dutifully, objects strenuously, to which the father says “get over yourself, your brother was lost, destined to die, but here he is: found, alive, we are preparing a feast.”
 
But I want to go back to some particulars in the middle of the story.  After the so stated period of “dissolute living,” there is a famine and jobs are scarce, but the younger brother is lucky to get a job feeding pigs.  Of course, the Jews hearing this story did not keep or eat pigs.  In fact, for them, touching a pig rendered them unclean before God, and one who did so had to undergo a ritual of purification before the priests, and then, rejoin their community.  But the younger son was hungry and, as the text says: no one gave him anything.  Back home, even the poorest of the poor were given something as a matter of decency and respect for God, if not the beggar.  Two strikes. 
 
But then, or as the text says “when he came to himself” [comma] he decides to go home, confess his sin, and accept the consequences.  It is a curious phrase “he came to himself [comma].”  The comma is a small and underappreciated centerpiece here.  A comma is a punctuation mark, indicating a pause between parts of a sentence. (It is also used to separate items in a list and to mark the place of thousands in a large numeral, but that is not the case here).  Neither Ancient Hebrew, nor Biblical Greek has commas, or periods, or question marks.  The sense of the sentence tells you what to do.  Where we put a comma, they might well just start another line for emphasis.  All this is to say, that there is a pause there.  When he came to himself, pause, there is moment to think, to notice, to give silence to a moment of realization.
 
True, I am a grammar nerd, but I read this comma as significant.  The pause might just need to sit there, echoing in our imagination for a bit.  How does he come to himself?  How do we come to ourselves?  Does the necessity of “coming to” happen all at once, through a process, or just a flash of holy hope in the depths of despair?  The philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard defines sin as the despairing refusal to be ourselves.  He goes on to say that getting to that despairing place is a not necessarily a bad thing, but if we stay there, stuck there, we are never fully alive.
 
This is where the story gets personal for this sinner.  I can bear witness to what that comma was in my own experience.  Without getting into the gory detail, I can say that I thought I had years ago taken my place on the wagon of sobriety.  I had recognized that I was not one who can drink alcohol.  While many can, I cannot.  Whether this is genetic or situational is a matter of debate, but the chemical nature of dependency means my brain, with alcohol, flips switches that bypass the off button.  The disease of alcoholism is fatal when left unchecked.  I had been on the wagon, but I had never really taken my seat, put on a seat belt, and taken it slowly.  Instead, hung my feet off the sides, and drove too fast across some really uneven ground, and, as a result, fell hard.  I had talked with my family too much and not enough.  On a morning in late September, I sat on the floor of our living room and talked to the dogs. “I surrender.”  I felt really physically, emotionally, and spiritually horrible.  But then, I felt really good, even right there in the horrible.  I made some difficult phone calls.  Others stepped up and gave me space to go for help.  Janice was supportive and anxious and weary.  Her journey is her story to tell.  There have been many angels along the way.  I guess I had begun to come to myself [comma]. 
 
When I check myself into residential treatment, I walked into a lobby, gave my name, and went back through an empty dining room to a conference room.  With the nurse and clinical director, I answered a bunch of questions, signed a bunch of papers, answered the same questions again, and was told that the house manager would meet me in the dining room.  Anxious, ashamed, nervous, and emotionally raw, I walked out into the dining room, and found the table to be full.  People were eating, talking, and laughing… a lot.  One woman said, “I guess you are new.  You are in the right place.  We can help.”  Apparently, I interrupted a staff meeting as folks introduced themselves one by one.  One guy put his fork down, grabbed my suitcase, and showed me to my room.  The woman who had welcomed gave me a brief tour: the snack room, the laundry room, and the meeting rooms.  Then, she got me some lunch, took me to the dining room, and set a place for me at the table.  I asked her how long she had worked there.  She laughed and so did the others.  “We are here for treatment, just like you.  You may feel awful right now.  We have been where you are.  It gets better” [comma]
 
It got better.  It still does.  I experienced coming to myself not as some gargantuan self-actualized achievement, rather as a real, complete, and unconditional surrender, giving up, and letting God welcome me back to me, welcoming me home.  [comma].  And you all did the same.
 
It’s funny how we call today’s gospel the story of the Prodigal Son.  Jesus never calls it that.  The word prodigal is a describing word for one who spends money or resources freely; one who is extravagant.  True enough, the younger son does some expensive dissolute living, but he does not die.  He comes to himself and goes home where his father welcomes him, cleans him up, and throws a big feast to celebrate.  The father is not duped.  He knows his child, his children, and he loves them beyond ways words or actions can measure.  With no promise of perfection or smooth sailing for the rest of time, he seizes a moment, celebrates the son’s return, and shows him what love does.
 
The son is not a hero because he left and came back.  The older brother is not a hero because he never left home.  The hero is the father’s unwavering and unchanging love for all of them.  Some might call the father one who spends resources freely; one who is extravagant. [comma]
 
This is a story of the prodigal alright, but not the Prodigal Son so much as the Prodigal Father who welcomes the one who ran off, the one who stayed home, and everyone he can find, making a place at the table, so we, too, can come to ourselves [comma] and find our way home. 

Hope
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Lent III, Year C
March 20, 2022
 
We were getting ready for the business portion of our weekly Staff Meeting at Emmanuel last week, and I asked everyone what their favorite movie was.  I will not give up my colleagues, but I said one of my favorites is O Brother, Where Art Thou, (starring George Clooney) which is a stylized version of Homer’s epic Odyssey tale, set in the 1930s as the four main characters break out of prison.  I could go on about that film, its genius, its wit, and its extended metaphor.  I can quote from it extensively, but we can save that for coffee hour.  Then I was telling somebody else about the choices, and she said, “What is it with men, and prison movies?”  Then I thought about it and remembered that I love Raising Arizona (Nicholas Cage) which also begins in a prison, and then there’s the Great Escape (Steve McQueen), another classic, and then I went and watched Cool Hand Luke (Paul Newman), but really, the best prison movie men seem to love is The Shawshank Redemption (Morgan Freeman and Tim Robins).  There are so many great lines there, so many metaphors for life, so many so excellent expositions of Lenten themes.  My next book shall be entitled: Lent at the Movies, featuring all of the above.  
 
I stayed up way too late that night, watching Shawshank again.  And so many lines struck me.  A recurring theme is when Red, the main character, goes before the Parole Board.  They ask him the same question each time.  “Do feel you have been rehabilitated? Ready to reenter society?”  Red answers “Yes, sir,” and each time, year after year, Red’s form is stamped “Rejected.”  Near the end of the film, he goes before the board again, and he is asked the same question: “Do feel you have been rehabilitated?” And he says the following:
 
Rehabilitated? Well, now, let me see. You know, I don’t have any idea what that means. I know what you think it means, sonny. To me, it’s just a made-up word. A politician’s word, sonny, so young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here. Because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then. A young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man’s all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? That’s just a [B.S.] word.  So, you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time.
 
And, spoiler alert, Red is set free.  Preachers love this movie, and with good reason.
 
In God’s relationship with humanity, and humanity’s relationship with God, there is always a tension between our broken-bless our hearts, hot mess selves, and the holiness, righteousness, and perfection our pandering selves attempt to curate to please the Almighty.  We are apt to believe that God keeps score, that Church really has an attendance record that gets faxed to heaven, and that if we just did enough, prayed enough, kept our morning quiet time, read the Bible more, we will be good enough for God.  All of that is the self-centered curation a type of prison we inhabit.
 
There are some who profess to feel none of that guilt, borderline of full-blown narcissists, who are sure that they are right, righteous, entitled, deserving, and worthy of admiration.  These folks are not unsuccessful in this world, but they hurt people quite a lot, with heaps of self-justification as to why that is just fine.  Such folks may have no use for God, or such a shallow view of God so as to use God like everyone else.  They rely on cheap grace, their own wit, and a limited view of reality.  The bad news is that this offense is on our rap sheet too.  Same prison, different way of being there.
 
Somewhere in our sordid story of prison time, we resort to blame.  We are the real victims!  It is the system’s fault.  Then warden, guards, and parole board are corrupt.  And, when we are honest, we throw the blame on God for all sorts of random tragedies, some of which we perpetrate, doing so in the name of our own self-styled truth: “my truth” as we like to say.
 
When Jesus comes to us, he tackles all the tough reasons that lock us up.  Like anything difficult, we are complicated.  There is no simple answer or solution.  Today, Jesus is asked about a couple of tragedies where innocent people suffered.  He gives a partial answer, only, saying that we may feel better about such things, believing that those who suffered were somehow lower on the holy tote board, but that is not helpful.  Nobody has a clean slate, and that should keep us humble.  The right definition of humility is not just I am no good – it is I am no better than anyone else and I am no worse than anybody else either.  The question of suffering never gets a good answer.  It never has, except to say that God does not desire, require, or exempt us from suffering.  The miracle is that God can use it, but that is not all that helpful if you are the one suffering while others are not.
 
Finally, he tells a parable.  A man plants a fig tree.  For three years, it bears no fruit.  He tells the gardener to cut it down, but the gardener implores the man to give it another year.  The gardener will tend it and feed it, and if it does not bear fruit, it will be cut down.  This is both hopeful and grim. But Jesus never explains the story.  He rarely does, so it is open to interpretation.
 
There is one more fact that his listeners were bound to know.  Fig trees never produce fruit in their first three years.  Thus, the gardener stacks the deck for success, asking for more time.  All of a sudden, no matter how we seek to twist the metaphor, and label the parts, we are not hopeless.  Hope is the connective between our mess and God’s glory.  Hope is the winning ticket, and the get out of jail card, but unlike in Monopoly, Hope is not free from suffering. God suffers for us.  God suffers because of us.  And as Hope (another good name for God), God does not consign us to rot in solitary confinement.  Turns out, we are not even in prison at all – only the prisons of our own making.   
 
Back in prison, before his friend Andy escapes, Shawshank Red warns him: “hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”  But Andy says, no, “hope is a good thing maybe even the best of things and good things never die.”  And when Red finally gets free too, he heads off to find Andy, concluding: “it is a terrible thing to live in fear… Get busy living, or get busy dying… So, I hope”
 
We hope our way to freedom.  Amen.

​In spite of yesterday’s climatological slap in the face, we are getting close.  I have begun to map my driving through Child’s Peach Orchard to go anywhere west of the church.  There is nothing like seeing life rise in the orchards: blooms, bees, and babies.  All of it. Every blossom tells us there will be strawberries, peaches, blackberries, apples, and grapes, all through the divine gathering of species and critters.  We will feast on such things, but not just yet.  This already but not yet time is an in-between time, and even in-between spaces are holy.
 
I have about a thousand pictures of the Grand Canyon, trying to capture a different kind in-between time and none of them do it justice.  What looks like still life is not still at all as pressure and time and rock and rain wash a new land.  Inevitably, we have to accept the fact that we cannot capture a moment in time.  Sometimes, we have to put making art aside in order to be the art of life in all of its multisensory glory.
 
Walt Whitman uses word art to shape this idea.  In his poem, Song of Myself, he says: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”  Perspective, he claims, is everything.  What we see depends on when, where, and how we look.  In all matters, large and small, we are part of the picture too.
 
Luke’s Gospel today is word art, giving us look into Jesus, who is an eternity and a moment.  Where he stands in this picture is crucial to placing ourselves in the picture.  Jesus is at a wayside, a viewpoint on the Mount of Olives, looking east across a narrow valley to the walled, mountain top city of Jerusalem.  We find all kinds of fortifications on mountaintops, but not many teeming cities.  What makes Jerusalem particular is its strategic position with 360-degree views, one can see whatever is coming from Jerusalem. Just as important, it has a unique water source welling up beneath it.
 
Those who study civilizations know that the presence of plentiful fresh water is the first and most important need for groups of people to survive.  The major cities of our country can be mapped as waypoints on waterways of sustenance, travel, and trade.  Water is life.
 
Where Jesus stands in today’s story an unobstructed viewpoint.  The place affords a panoramic eastern view of the ancient and modern city, then and now.  The picture of that place on the front of your service bulletin for today comes from a Franciscan church built on the site of a Byzantine church, built on the site of a pagan shrine, where travelers marked their arrival, making offerings to what they believed were the local gods, seeking their favor.
 
From where Jesus stands, he sees Roman soldiers at the gates and on the parapets guarding, commanding, and flexing the muscle the empire they preserve.  Jesus sees the grand towers of the Temple, the sacred center of Judaism, with its ornate ceremonies, animal sacrifice business, and lots of pious and elaborately bedecked religious leaders.  Within the walls as well are a host of others come to trade, negotiate, and curry favor with all kinds of power. 
 
Jesus has made clear that he goes there, and belongs there, at the symbolic and geographic center, the crossroads of religion, commerce, and empire.  He is the Word of God, water crashing over the rocks of time, drawing us together in an ocean of God’s love.
 
The elite religious folks come out to meet Jesus, trying to redirect his flow.  They tell Jesus that Herod wants to kill him.  Herod is a local boy, a nominal Jew, who made a backroom deal with Rome to get appointed governor, biding his time with the Jews, waiting for Rome to snuff them out and give him a real kingdom to rule on his own.  That will not go well for him, but the Romans want him to keep the peace and dispatch with any rabble rousing.  Convenient that, religion leveraging amoral politics to wall off the threat to their way of life.  Jesus dismisses Herod, likening him to a fox in the henhouse.  Jesus is there for all of them, to the whole of Jerusalem, religion, empire, pagans all of them.  He tells them God is not about domination, but about gathering.  He wants to bring them together as a hen gathers her chicks.  Where they see conflict, competition, and the physical structures of power, Jesus sees an orchard, fallow, but fertile.
 
In a preview of coming attractions, he tells them they will welcome him in God’s name, but it will not be all sweetness and kumbaya.  He knows that principalities and powers work to preserve themselves at all cost.  Their beliefs about power, authority, and control will be exposed for what they are: selfishness, greed, and bottomless ambition.  Such things do not surrender quietly.
 
Modern-day Jerusalem is much like it was then. The structures are of ancient and insistent powers.  On closer inspection, we may see glorious gold Muslim Dome of the Rock, the El Aqsa Mosque, The Western wall of the Temple - the so-called wailing wall - where Jews go to lament and hope for restoration.  There are spires of Christian churches and immense Church of the Holy Sepulcher, literally built around, the place of Jesus’ crucifixion.  That place is a teeming amalgam of Christianity: Eastern and Western traditions, reeking of incense and multi-lingual noise.   In the background, there are modern structures of commerce national pride, with power lines, satellite dishes and skyscrapers.  Police and soldiers are everywhere, not with spears, but with Uzi machine guns to keep the peace.  Someone will have to explain to me the concept of arming and invading as peace keeping.  Such things are ironic and sad misnomers.  There is little secular peace in this view of humanity.
 
And yet, can we see the Holy humor in all of this?  The political, cultural, and social intersection of East and West, the sacred spots of the three main monotheistic traditions all within five city blocks of one another?  Crumbling structures of power built one on top of another?  Jesus will show this to be a perfect place to begin setting things right.  Love prevails, but not through right religion as righteousness, not with guns and bombs for national victory, and not in dividing the haves and the have nots in some twisted form of moral calculus.  No.  Love is not a battle to be won.  It is a force that shapes all life and whatever goodness we see.  If we look carefully, love gets its way, as surely as water carves the earth. 
 
Of course, what we see depends on when, where, and how we look.  In all matters, large and small, we are part of the picture too.  Jesus stands at the crossroads and provides a complete overview.  God is the Gatherer.  Nothing stops God.  Not the worst we are.  Not the worst we do.  Not the powers we put in place of God.  We may not see this from our particular perch, but as sure as the water greens the grass, and shapes the rocks, Love shapes everything.  This is the view Jesus sees, and helps us to see.  And unlike all things, all moments, all of our worrying or wondering, God’s glorious gathering action is the best view we have of the Way home.   

Mark Twain once said that a classic piece of literature is a book that everyone talks about, but no one ever reads.  He placed the Bible at the top of his list of classics.
 
This does not mean that people do not know something about the Bible.  The highly regarded pollster, George Barna, who happens to be an Episcopalian, has been tracking what he calls the “State of the Bible” for years (https://www.barna.com/research/sotb-2021/).  His results are fascinating and sobering.  In 2021, 73% of Americans identified as Christian.  50% of Americans claim to be “Bible users,” which Barna defines as one who reads some part of the Bible four or more times a year.  This is a low bar, for sure, but it is up from 48% in 2020.  When asked where Jesus was born, only 72% of those claiming to be Christian Bible users could identify Jesus birthplace as Bethlehem.  In reading the whole Barna report, the findings tend to bear out what Twain said over 100 years ago.
 
This is not to throw shade on anyone who does any Bible reading.  While the Bible is the best seller of all times, four billion and going strong, is a complicated collection of stories that span more than four thousand years or storytelling.  The title, Bible, comes from the Latin word for library, and that is really what it is.  Each book comes from a different time, place, author, or group of authors, and has been translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin into most all but the most obscure of written world languages.  The Bible’s existence is a miracle, really, having been preserved more or less intact for a massive chunk of human history.  If you have shown up for worship, tuned in on-line, or read the Bible on your own four or more times of the year, you are deeper in your Bible engagement than most.  The fact we can read the Bible for ourselves, or even own one, sets us apart from the majority of those across time who have lived with the Bible as text for their faith.
 
Polling of self-identified Christian “Bible users” also tells us that most favorite story in all of the Bible is… Noah’s Ark.  The most well-known story, meaning people can recount it in detail, is Noah’s Ark.  It is no wonder people think God is mean.  Jesus’ birth story is third.  In both categories, the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine and Jesus feeding the five thousand come next.  Crucifixion and Resurrection just barely crack the top ten.  You all can draw your own conclusions, remembering that Mark Twain also said there lies, damn lies, and statistics.  Or the cynical quip that 90% of all statistics are just made up.
 
As we tell and consider the stories we read today, we are engaging in precious, rare and important work of Biblical study. I am suspicious as to why today’s stories, for all of their familiar bigness, are not among the most memorable or most favorite of stories.  Moses is a major player in the Old Testament.  Our Gospel mountain top, glowing white Jesus event, called the Transfiguration, is a story we tell often, twice a year. In our three-year cycle of lessons, where most of the stories only come up once in three years,
 
We start today with Moses.  If it were not for Cecil B DeMille’s epic movie “The Ten Commandments,” I am not sure we would know it as well.  Remember that scene where Charlton Heston as Moses comes down from the mountain, toting two stone tablets, and clearly, wearing a coat of red makeup on his face, and having had his hair teased out all frizzy? I laughed out loud when I saw the film.  That was the cinematic attempt at capturing the glow and aura of one who has encountered God.  Moses had gone into the clouds, and he came back to tell the Israelites what God revealed to him.  Proof this divine encounter was the hairy, showy, glowy countenance.   Due credit to DeMille, it is a hard thing to convey.
 
When Jesus goes up on the mountain, he takes three followers as witnesses.  A cloud descends.  Their report is that Jesus was praying, and suddenly, he glowed radiant white, then Moses and Elijah appeared for a heavenly conversation.  About the best Peter, James, and John could do was watch and listen, as a straight up mystery was happening right before their eyes.  But, Peter, whose middle name might as well be ‘bless his heart,’ pipes up: “Why don’t we build a house for each of the holy rockstars, and hang out here with God.”  But then comes the booming voice, the same voice from Jesus’ baptism, “This is my Son, the chosen, listen to him!”  Peter got the message.  Listen.  Yeah.
 
From this point forward, the text will tell us over and over that Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem.  If we were writing a movie script for this, the music would get more serious, and the pace would quicken.  This central moment provides triumph, and clear revelation of identity, but it creates urgency as well.  We might need an intermission here.  When we come back, the music is more foreboding.  The quaint stone and thatch villages and seaside miracles are fading into the background.  The pace is quickening. The story is moving toward a confrontation toward Jerusalem, the center of politics, religion, and commerce.  The time to face all of the worldly powers is at hand.
 
The Transfiguration this story is not among the favorite or most popular ones, but it deserves a good look.  It is hard to get our mind around it.  The details are wispy.  How we see it depends on perspective.  It looks like a Moses scene, but the light does not come from the outside, burning the subject’s face.  The light comes from the subject himself.  That light has always been there, veiled as it were in Jesus’ humanity, but now the divine light is Jesus.  This is a hard story to tell.  It is impossible to understand humanity and divinity all rolled into One.  It is good idea to hear it often and see it regularly.  Mysteries are really important to lively faith.
 
This time around, I hear this story differently.  I have always thought this was about the disciples seeing Jesus transfigured before them.  I have always thought that they were witnesses and by standers for a holy moment where Jesus changed, transformed, and converted from earth stuff to God stuff.  Lucky disciples.  But then, Jesus has always been the earthy God.  He is always changing, transforming, and converting darkness into light.  What happens on that mountain is not Jesus’ transfiguration.  The transfiguration happens is in its witnesses as they know Jesus as God.  The change this story is happening all of the time, as we come closer to the light, the mystery, the Power and the Glory as the prayer says.  The transfiguration, yearning to be known, embraced, and lived… is ours. Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany VII, Year C
February 20, 2022
 
World History.  Ninth grade.  Our teacher was Mr. Porter Smith, an LSU fan among Bulldogs, he fancied himself a missionary of the human story.  The text book was insanely broad and decidedly western in focus, but over the academic year, we romped all the way from the Ancient Sumerians to the Cold Warriors, which was then, current events.  Pedagogically, Mr. Smith was a cause-and-effect guy.  Borrowing rather poorly from the Newtonian physical principal that all effects have causes, and all causes have an effect, intended or unintended.  As lenses for big surveys go, it was effective, but we did not have much time for nuance.
 
Mr. Smith was a big believer that people learn what they write, so every week, we were assigned two three-page papers, to be hand written, in ink, on notebook paper.  Naturally, we all raced out to purchase the widest ruled paper we could find and those new-fangled erasable pens.  Papers were returned every Monday with a few words and phrases underlined, and a circled letter grade at the top.  Topics were huge like: the reasons for the rise of the Roman Empire, the impact of the Norman Conquest, or the causes and effects of World War I.  With no Google to help us, we were impelled to kick it old school, and read the textbook.
 
Inevitably, our world weary ninth grade whining erupted with every assignment.  We complained about the grind of Porter’s Papers behind Mr. Smith’s back, and when my classmate, Lara, slipped up and called Mr. Smith, Porter, to his face, her grades went from Bs to Ds for the next two-week series of essays.  The whining persisted.  “Why, Mr. Smith, do we have to do this every week?”  “Aren’t these assignments the subject of volumes of history?”  “It makes our hands hurt to write so much.”  “This is not fair!”  If you have ever been a parent, an adolescent, or had parents, which is, well, all of us, you can predict his response.  That’s not fair!  Right.  Life is not fair.  Life is not fair, Bubba (he called us all Bubba).
 
I do not remember most of what I once wrote, nor would my present self be impressed with what my ninth-grade self deemed definitive, but I do remember that statement, repeated regularly and often.  Life is not fair.  And as an adolescent, college student, husband, parent, pastor, and friend, I have said this, thought this, and lived with this is life’s many chances and changes. 
 
As random tragedy strikes, dishonesty thrives, relationships fail, the poor suffer disproportionally, where, when, and to whom we are born determines much of our lot in life rather than any other factor.  It is easy to say life is unfair, throw up our hands in resignation, and become as existentially discouraged as a scorned Shakespearian lover.
 
Our biblical lessons chronicle heaps of unfairness in the life of God’s people.  Joseph, beaten and sold off by his older brothers, suffers in slavery, is unjustly indicted, and goes to prison.  His Israelite descendants are sacked, pillaged, enslaved, and occupied many times over.  St. Paul squabbles with the Corinthian church because they believe that their faith should afford them special treatment and guaranteed happiness, that is what the tv preachers of their day promised.  And Jesus, Jesus scorned with ridicule, challenge, and disbelief turns around and tells us to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, and turn the other cheek to be smacked as hard as the first one.  This is no way to build a movement.  This is no way to impose any restorative justice.  (I will say here that in no way is Jesus condoning domestic abuse.  This is not his topic or focus.  Any attempt to justify such violence is wildly misguided and anathema to the dignity of every human being).
 
As we know, Jesus’ encounters with the forces of political dominance, the forces of strict and transactional religious potentates, and with followers much of the time, does not go well.  They don’t get it.  When faced with pure love in person, they all balk.
 
A newspaper Seattle reporter once asked Mohandas Gandhi: “What do you think of Western civilization?” He answered “I think it would be a good idea.”  Any serious look at the process and evolution of civilizations reveals the necessary establishment of codified laws.  The first laws we know of were established by Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, which was Abraham’s original home town, thus, the idea of law baked into the God story from the beginning. 
 
And Lord, how God’s people have clung to and contorted rules as exclusionary, onerous, and requirement for earned blessing.  What started with the 10 commandments, guides for living in community, were extrapolated into 613 laws, complete with a rubric for harsh punishment.  That is some intricately crazy stuff in there, telling us what to do if our tunic has mold, or our neighbor steals our donkey.  Following Levitical law was tedious.  It is no wonder those folks were uptight as they took themselves too seriously and God’s grace, not seriously enough.  All of this got done at the hands of religious folks who, bless their hearts, yearned for a God that kept score.  Before Exodus got to Leviticus, the Law went from basic loving standards to a complex system.  
 
We may think we have evolved, but our sense of justice and fairness tends to be skewed to our highly particular point of view.  Where we stand depends, largely on where we sit.  Even though we intone to our children that life is unfair, we bend over backwards to try and make it fair for us.  Most of the polarization and division in which people stew is based on grievance: outrage that somebody, somewhere, getting an easier or better life than us.
 
In just about every encounter, Jesus pushes us to change everything: change our worldview, change our view of others, change our view of ourselves, and when we can, act out of love without a transactional expectation.  In going to the cross, Jesus takes on the deepest horror we can imagine, showing that life is not contained between a birthday and a death day. Life is bigger than we know; bigger than our limited ability can imagine.  We are not built to fade away, we are created to rise.  There is music and laughter and abundance for all, and lots of cake.  Occasionally, we catch a glimmer and cannot say grace enough.
 
Mr. Smith was it wrong.  I have been wrong.  We have been wrong.  Life is fair.  We enjoy it through no innate ability of our own, not through our own goodness, good work, great thinking, or strict legal adherence.  The fact that we live in all kinds of sin, along with the 100% of all others being sinful, in corrupt systems, and with a long record of atrocities, the great wonder is that we know anything of goodness and loving kindness.  We find joy, peace, patience, kindness, and all that, not because we worked for it, legislated it, and made it so, but because God’s light outshines our deepest darkness.  This case against life being unfair may include lots of historical and experiential evidence, but that case has already been settled for good.  Love won.  Love wins.  The tragedy of human history provides more insight about us than about God.  When the final exam comes, the history we studied and crafted as an epic tragedy is, really, a comedy of Divine Ecstasy.  Life is fair, Bubba.  Life is fair.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany VI, Year C
February 13, 2022
 
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
 
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
 
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
 
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
 
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
 
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
 
Joyce Kilmer, a fellow Episcopalian wrote that old chestnut of a poem in 1913.  Tragically, he was killed five years later in World War I.  Though nothing else he wrote is ever read, this poem is one that I was forced to memorize and recite as a school kid in Georgia.  Later, as Boy Scout, I backpacked in the Joyce Kilmer National Forest in western North Carolina. In the late 1930s, Kilmer poem and tree lovers set aside a wilderness that timber barons had never touched.  It is a gorgeous place with many three and four-hundred old trees, groaning under the weight of longevity.  Kilmer never made it to North Carolina, he wrote Trees in New Jersey.
 
Due respect to Kilmer, and to trees, the poem is not well regarded in literary circles.  While it has quotable nuggets, the poem combines sing song couplets with mixed personified metaphor and sappy sentimentality.  As such, Kilmer’s other memorialized legacy is an annual Bad Poetry contest at Columbia University.  You may, of course, draw your own conclusions as explaining art kind of ruins it.
 
The thing Kilmer does capture is the large place trees occupy in our natural, physical, and metaphysical consciousness.  Trees embody so many things: deep roots, long-term growth, rhythms of time and seasons, bearing fruit, and even when dead, providing wood for shelter, and fuel for fire.  In an interview on NPR, ecologist, Suzanne Simard, summarized a number of peer reviewed studies saying: “Trees are [in fact] social creatures that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans.  Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain.”  She goes on to explain that trees send messages of stress and danger as well as working cooperatively to share light and nutrients.  Natural scientists are give that cellular explanation to what Kilmer, however awkwardly, observes.
 
Trees point to Holy presence too.  The earliest of God stories tells of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, right there in the center Eden.  The earliest God stories people tell take place in a land where trees show them the places where water flows, food is plentiful, and life can flourish.  In a hot climate without air conditioning, shade is more than desirable; it is necessary for survival.  Not surprisingly, we hear all kinds of tree stories in Hebrew poetry. The very first Psalm, number one in the Hebrew Hymnal intones:
 
Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked…
Their delight is in the law of the Lord…
 
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;
everything they do shall prosper.
 
In his poetic work, the Prophet Jeremiah borrows from Psalm 1 saying:  
 
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
 
They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
 
Trees are not just nice images, they are living examples of thriving, abundant life.  Like most great teachers, they do not give advice.  They just show us how to live.
 
And yet, even massive, thriving trees are not eternal, at least in the form we call tree.  We have a clear example in the front yard of Emmanuel Church.  The great Emmanuel White Oak, weathered three centuries, sent out seeds for who knows how many other White Oaks, created tons of biomass as rich soil for other life, provided food for birds, bears, deer, and ultimately, people too.  That great oak is now a shell of what it once was, but it is not finished.  In time, it will take on new forms of matter and energy, no longer what it once was, but part of what is and is to be.  There the Oak stands, not explaining anything, rather, showing us life even in death when we are willing to look past the surface of what we see.
 
I am not going all Neo-Celtic Druid here.  I am rooting us in context for the person and work Jesus.  Having spent some time as a carpenter, he knows his trees.  But, when he gives his sermon we hear today, he draws into a new way of framing how we see things versus the way things are.  His people, like us people, tend to equate apparent wealth, cool stuff, happiness, and status with some sort of divine reward (#blessed).  Jesus reveals that our way of seeing is incomplete, and wrong side out.  Instead, Jesus looks points to the fringes, the messes, and the gaping wounds.  Where there is poverty of all kinds, hunger for love, material needs, grief, and ridicule, he says, that is where God gets busy. 
 
[The political among us might call this radical egalitarianism.  The literary among us might call this foreshadowing.  The theological among us might call this a theology of the cross.  Whatever we call it, Jesus calls us to the see the forest, not the trees.  We are all interconnected.  We are part of a larger whole.  We are all a mixed bag of woe and blessing.  Jesus tells us to beware of false perception, shallow roots, and material assumptions – to beware of the narrow view from wherever we sit.
 
On this eve of Valentine’s day, beware the scourge of sentimental couplets, heart shaped chocolates, or greeting card sentimentality that commodifies love as a single expression or fleeting feeling.
 
God is love.  The whole miraculously birthed, divinely present, teaching, preaching, healing, reviled, scandalized, arrested, tried, and crucified Jesus is love.  The resurrected, living, present, and eternal Jesus is love.  The wildly creative and active Holy Spirit is love.]
 
In Jesus day, the Romans were well known and much feared deforesters.  They ravaged resources to build their ships of empire.  They left behind dead branches as signs of their destruction, and when it came time to deliver the final blow, they fashioned crude crosses of dead wood to torture and kill all who stood in their way.  For all the world, they looked like they were the winners.
 
And yet, one such set of branches, the detritus of perceived dominance, was fashioned into a cross for Jesus of Nazareth.  On Good Friday, the blood of love mingled with the dead wood of a cross and trickled down into the soil.  And that crude instrument of death was transformed into a new Tree: the tree of eternal life.  No longer a sign of death, that tree has sprouted branches, seeded new lives, and stood in front of us to show us that what we think we see is not all there is.
 
Kilmer was right.
 
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
 
Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany 3
January 23, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
​Have you ever heard of Josh Wardle?  Yeah, me neither, until this week.  I share an interest in word games with many of you: scrabble, crossword, and the New York Times Spelling Bee game.  Some folks are more drawn to numbers and go for Sudoku.  Either way, puzzling is good for the mind.  Playing at just about anything is good the soul.  Tom Duke turned me onto a newer game called Wordle.  Josh Wordle created it and named it Wordle as a twist on his name. As a software engineer, it was relatively simple for him to create.  Wordle is completely free.  It has no app, no ads, and it makes no money.  To play all we have to do is go to https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle.
 
The premise is simple.  You have six tries to find the five-letter word of the day.  When you are wrong on guess, Letters that are not in the word turn grey.  When you find a letter that is in the word, but not in the right place, that letter turns yellow.  When you find a letter correct and in the right place, it turns green.  Players have have six tries.  Once you find the word, or fail to find the word, the game is ends, until the next day, when there is a new word.
 
As the story is told in the January 3rd New York Times, Josh Wardle’s girlfriend and partner, Palak, likes to play word games.  She plays lots of them, so Wardle made Wordle for her to play.  The two of them, only, played Wordle for months as a fun diversion from their working life and pandemic isolation.  Palak shared the game with her family, they shared with friends.  Down the line, somebody shared it Tom, and he shared it with me.  On November 1, 2021, there were 90 players.  On January 3, 2022 there were 300,000 players.  As of this week, there are 2.6 million players.
 
The idea that catches me is the immense power of what marketing people call ‘word of mouth.’  The concept is also called storytelling.  I googled Josh Wardle and found the article entitled “Wordle, a love story.” Since then, story has been told in countless articles, news reports, and good old-fashioned face to face communication.
 
It is not much of a stretch to use this technology assisted example to understand how we got the Bible.  After all, the Bible is a library of stories, songs, and recollections.  In a world where few could read, word of mouth, storytelling was the only media.
 
Each of our lessons for today tell pieces of the God’s story with humanity.  The oldest one is about Nehemiah and Ezra, unearthing old scrolls in the rubble of their destroyed and almost forgotten temple.  The people gather from far and wide to hear the story with interpretation, finding their way back to the God they thought had abandoned them.  Imagine coming back to a long dead ancestors home after a wildfire like scorching and destruction, and having heard bits and pieces about God and God’s love for the world, imagine unearthing an entire Bible, and hearing it read for the first time.  Certainly, that would clarify what was lost in chains or storytelling and the intrusion of other more harsh and competitive god stories from Babylon, Assyria, and Persia.  Those stories were of many gods warring for affections and sacrifice and obedience.  It is no wonder that the One God, Yahweh, the Great I Am of the Hebrew story might come off as angry, particular, and nationalistic.  Even with all of that baggage, the One God remains merciful, forgiving, compassionate, and tenaciously loving.  God’s story characters are not mighty and hardly righteous superheroes, rather they are deeply flawed, and thoroughly human.  Only in cahoots with God do they get some things right, and keep the story alive.  As that sing on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others.”  This is what so compelling about the One God among the various gods to be worshipped at the altars of success, status, and competition.
 
475 years later, with his people under the thumb of yet one more oppressive empire, Jesus takes his place in the story.  Early in the telling, when Jesus is stands up to read at Temple worship, he reads from a copy of what Ezra and Nehemiah found.  Flying in the face of liturgical tradition, he does not read the portion appointed for the morning. Jesus turns to the text from Isaiah’s ecstatic dream of restoration and wholeness.  Jesus’ boldness in speaking those words in the first person implies that he is God’s restorer and revealer.  After only two verses, he sits down.  These things were supposed to go on for much longer, with rabbinical commentary added on.  Instead, Jesus drops the mic.  The Temple folks do not take it well.  We will hear the rest of the story next week.
 
Some 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the former bounty hunter of illegal Christians, Saul, has his own experience with Jesus, becoming Paul, who tells the story all over Asia Minor and nurtures these Christ following communities when they get outside the lines of love, grace, and mercy.  His letters to fledgling churches are part of our story too.  Today, we hear from a letter Paul writes to the church at Corinth. Remember, is not unlike the Las Vegas of the Mediterranean.  There are plenty of salacious attractions for human attention, and a band of hucksters cashing in on self-styled religious fervor.  Paul’s culturally contrasting words to a mad, mad world are sublime and calming, echoing resonant harmony with Jesus’ embodiment of God.  And so, the story spread, mostly by word of mouth, to these words we read, speak, sing, and pray today.  This is how we connect to the story, join the story, and keep telling it.
 
The image of the body of Christ and its many members is worthy of much more reflection for sure, but Paul delivers his own mic drop here too. “Strive for the greater gifts.”  Here again, the story continues.  Spoiler alert, Paul will write: “the greatest of these is love.”  Not the feeling, the lose yourself in it way of seeing, being, and doing kind of love.  What Paul invokes is Jesus’ powerful powerlessness.
 
I do not see it as an accident that Josh Wardle’s domain name for Wordle is “powerlanguage.”  The power of words attracts us.  It is no accident that we call our story the Word of God, and Jesus, the Word made flesh.  The power in reading, speaking, and telling of the Word propels us, helping us find our place, shaping our belonging, affirming our ultimate worth, and nudging us not to do more, but to be more present who we really are, and whose we really are.  This is power language: this wildly self-emptying love, which is worth whatever we have to give up to find.  Word up.  Drop the mic.  Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Snow Day
Epiphany 3
January 16, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
For some reason, I have been thinking a lot about coaching lately.  I am not sure why… I could be because my Georgia Bulldogs won the National Championship last Monday.  Mercifully for you, that is not what this sermon is about.
 
For pre-season soccer at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, where I was Chaplain, teacher, and JV soccer coach, we took the whole team to rural New Hampshire.  There, we had plenty of field space, cooler temperatures, and a singular focus on preparing for the season.  We stayed in a long defunct ski lodge with spartan, dormitory style accommodations and family style meals.  The best part of the experience was that the whole place was off the internet grid.  There was one rotary landline phone for emergencies in a locked office, thus the boys were out of contact with girlfriends, gaming, and helicopter parenting.
 
With ice on knees and ankles, we relaxed in the evenings and made our own fun, playing pool with the one surviving cue stick, Trivial Pursuit, and lots of card games.  One evening, Rodrigo, one of our players, amazed us with card tricks.  The one that got everybody was a trick where he would have a boy we chose pick a card, remember it and shuffle it back in the deck himself.  Rod then took the deck, and sprayed it all over the room.  While he sat in his chair, he told everyone to gather the cards. Rod put them back in the deck, fanned it out face up, and asked the boy to find his card.  It was not there.  He told us to look all around the room for the card.  We could not find it.  We looked again, and far across the lodge, by the fireplace, we found the card barely sticking out of a pile of firewood.
 
How did he do that?  We were consumed with figuring it out.  We suspected the boy we chose must have been in on it, but he had stayed at the table next to Rod.  For the rest of the trip and the rest of the season, we pleaded with Rod to tell us the secret.  His only reply was “magic.”  We are now Facebook friends.  He lives in Europe.  Every now and then, someone from that team will ask him how he did it, and he only replies “magic.”
 
I think of Rod every time I consider the Gospel we hear today.  It is one of seven miracle stories in John’s Gospel: three healing stories, the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus Walking on water, and this, the first one changing water into wine.  It is not just a little water changed into wine either.  Jesus changes all of the water into wine: 6 jars, 25-30 gallons each, that is 150 gallons of wine.  That is, more or less, about 600 standard sized bottles.  He had servants as witnesses.  He had a wine steward declare it to be really good wine, normally served first.  Magic.
It is hilarious to search the internet for sermons that try to make sense out of this miracle.  There are the puritanical grape juice adherents who cannot believe that Jesus would condone raucous partying.  There are the wine enthusiasts, who note the wine was weak and much safer to drink than water.  There are the social anthropologists that point out the fact that weddings, at that time in history, were week-long celebrations, involving the whole village as well as out of town guests.  And there are the demythologizers who dismiss the story as John’s brand of gaslighting propaganda.  All of these explanatory gymnastics revolve around the big question: how did he do it?  Our rational selves are sure there is a trick.
 
Sometimes our humanity gets all bogged down in how things happen, instead of the more important purpose of storytelling: why things happen.  John is not at all concerned about the mechanics of God’s work, he is too busy being astonished at all of the miracles at hand.  The fact that through embryology we can trace human development down to the molecular level, does not make it less astonishing.  The more we learn, the more we learn about what we do not know.  Even the smallest thing we can observe or conceive is made up something smaller.  Though matter and energy are finite, matter and energy are on the move, all of the time.  So much for explanation.
 
If not how, why do the water and wine thing?  Why is Jesus is reluctant to get involved before his mother gives him a shove.  This sets up the idea that the human Jesus was not completely aware of the divine, eternal Jesus, what the theologian Richard Rohr calls the “Cosmic Jesus.”  Why six jars? Well, those were empty ritual vessels reserved for religious rites of purification.  God is all about repurposing here.  Why a wedding?  Well, it is a time of new life and celebrating a new version of family.  Why good wine?  Why so much wine? Why just have the servants be the first to see the miracle that is Jesus himself?  Why did it take this for the disciples to believe in Jesus?  We can point to the why all day, and that is the point.  Questions without one final answer lead us into our own faith, asking where God’s abundance touches us, what miracles we might have missed, and where we might be amazed beyond explanation.
 
God knows what God is doing.  God gives us a glimmer of God’s infinity in all creation.  God is a profound and infinite mystery.  When we take all three of these things together, we begin to put ourselves into God’s unfolding story.  If nothing else, we watch this Jesus carefully.  As living, cosmic Christ, he is not bound up by the rules of time, space, or limited humanity. 
 
Jesus does not do magic tricks.  Jesus shows us who God is, what God does, and how we might see past our own horizons.  The story is not really about a wedding, water, wine, physics, or hasty fermentation.  The story is about God.  We do well to watch this Jesus carefully, not to discover how he does what he does, but why he does what he does for all to see… and just be amazed and grateful.  Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany 1
January 9, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
​
Please turn to the mysterious illustration in your service bulletin.  You see a duck, right?  That is a picture of a duck.  No?  Perhaps you see a rabbit.  Thus, this is a picture of a rabbit.  Whatever you see first, is what you see.  If someone tells you they see something different, then you can go looking for it, or just argue with them.  Perhaps you have seen this illustration before, so the illusion of the first time is lost on you.  What we have here is a picture in which you we may find a rabbit and a duck.  Of course, it is just a picture, and not an actual rabbit or duck, but what we see depends on our frame of reference.  If you had never seen a duck or a rabbit, it would take no form at all.  Experience gives us the imagination to see things.
 
When I was a kid, my best friend, Elizabeth, and I had two major passions: climbing trees and imagining we were something or someone else.  Elizabeth lived in the oldest surviving house in continuous use in Athens, Georgia.  To this day, the house is known as Pink Chimneys.  Other homes claim the moniker of oldest because, while built in 1788 Pink Chimneys was moved from a neighboring county to downtown Athens in 1840, then to its current location in 1856.  There were numbers on the heart pine floor planks so they would reassemble them in the right places.  I will let the preservationists argue the facts, but for us, the house super old, creaky, drafty, haunted, and purely magical.  It was a perfect palate for our imaginatively created worlds.  Being that old, it was surrounded ancient trees.  The magnolias were gargantuan, and perfect for climbing. 
 
On Sunday’s after church, while the grownups shared sandwiches and a more liquid lunch on the generous front porch, Elizabeth and I would gobble down a peanut butter and honey sandwiches, change into our play clothes, and begin scaling the magnolias, quietly.  We climbed as high as we could go (like 80 feet high!), then hide in the canopy, and eavesdrop on our parents as they critiqued the sermon and shared juicy town gossip.  We played like we were birds, chirping, and signaling one another.  These days, such adventures would require ropes, helmets, and safety harnesses.  Clearly, we survived. 
 
Elizabeth and I are still friends, and when we get together, we recount our adventures.  My memories and her memories match exactly.  While many of the trees fell victim to ice storms and the progress of intown development, a few of those immense scions of deep time remain, reminding us that we were once more fearless and imaginative.  I will never forget seeing my grounded world from 80 feet in the air, hiding out above the parental sight line, and hearing the things grownups talked about when they did not know we were listening.  I promise this is going somewhere.
 
Embedded in this past week was the actual day of Epiphany, January 6th.  It is a day to match experience with imagination.  It is the last of the 12 days of Christmas and is remembered as the day the Wise Men from the east visited the Christ Child.  In many cultures, Epiphany is the gift giving day.  It is the day we hold up the belief that Jesus comes for everybody, not just the stable attending originals.  And the word, Epiphany, is loaded.  It implies an “aha” moment, a happening, or observation of something that changes how and what we see, feel, or experience the world.  It is like seeing a place you have always known for the first time, like from the top of a tree, or being given a second chance to stare at a picture.
 
Wasting no time, the next story we tell is the story of Jesus’ Baptism.  Between baby and God man, we get very little detail.  What we do know is that two of the Gospels skip the birth narrative altogether and start where we are today.  Whether it is an Epiphany to the shepherds, the wise men, or onlookers by the Jordan River, the stories are packed with big special effects: signs of wonder, a voice from heaven, and awestruck people who know this child/man is big news.
 
Maybe, we are so accustomed to the stories that we miss their outright shock value and implications.  Christmas has been mass marketed, and Jesus’ Baptism story is repeated three or four times each year.  If we have lots of babies, we go there even more.
 
I am convinced that like we do with creation, sacraments, and the stories of God’s incarnation, God’s insistent and persistent epiphany among us gets relegated to a shelf in our minds; reserved as mythic legend or fodder for Sunday school felt boards. 
 
Wake up.  That is what Epiphany says.  Wake up not to a God with a beard and white robes hurling lightning bolts from the sky, rather wake up to the God who decides to love us, to love with us, and to act in and through us, despite our dulled or limited vision.  Wake up to the knee shaking wonder and miracle that is life and love.  Life and love eclipse everything with their power and presence.  This is the God we are here to meet.  This is the God who, when met, gets our attention. 
 
Is it a duck or a rabbit?  The answer is yes.  What we see depends on what we seek.  Get that imagination working.  We were created with that too.  Get into a new head and heart space and expect Epiphany.  If all else fails, climb a tree.  Climb a mountain.  Look out a forgotten window.  Be amazed.  Tell us about it.  Shock us.  Shock yourself.  It is all Epiphany.  Amen.   

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent III, Year B
December 19, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
When I read Deacon Karulyn’s reflection for the week, it shot me back to clear and vivid memory.  Our daughter, Emily, was a toddler and our son, Sam, was about six months old.  I was serving at St. Luke’s in downtown Atlanta, and Janice at a school-based health clinic in southeast Atlanta.  To say that logistics were complicated is an understatement.  Janice left at the crack of dawn, so mornings were mine to get us all out of the house and to our respective places for the day.  Feed the kids, dress the kids, pack the diaper bag, and bottles, and extra clothes (Sam was a hurler).  Emily also needed extra clothes for something called messy play (which I call daily life), lunch, and a signed off daily report from the day before.  Then we loaded the car buckled the car seat and infant bucket.  Sam went to his child care center, and Emily went to hers, which of course, were not in the same place.  God help us if one or both got sick or I forgot something for the field trip or teacher appreciation day.
 
That is just the context for the memory, and this where Karulyn’s reflection on the ear worm struck a literal chord.  As soon as we were underway, the cry came from Emily: “Nooosic!”  Thus, ours was a singing commute.  The soundtrack came from a cassette tape called Wee Sing.  Wee Sing is a panoply of Bible songs sung by cute young voices.  The first 10 times it is cute… it can get annoying.  The big favorite was the very same song as our Deacon’s.  I got the joy joy, joy, joy, down in my heart, and then comes the call and response.  Daddy: Where?  Emily: Down in my heart.  Daddy: Where?  Emily: Down in my heart.  And on and on as nauseum.  The tune would stick with me all day.
 
I will never forget one warm spring morning with the windows open and pollen haze in the air, at the long light at Ponce de Leon and Peachtree, when we were doing our 4,335th run through of the duet.  Mid joy, joy, joy, I looked to my right and a woman was looking at me, thumbs up, laughing hysterically.  Then, she sang along.  She chose to get that joy, joy, joy, down in her heart.
 
This is a long way of saying that the refrains of our brains can be valuable reminders of our faith.  This is that season.  Lots of refrains echo in our memory:  O Come O come Emmanuel, Hark, the Herald Angels Sing! All the greatest hits.  Even shopping has a holiday soundtrack as market tested tunes nudge us toward jolly generosity.  Not all memories are happy, that travels with us too.  In that way, the season can mix up our emotions.  None of them are good or bad, they just are. 
 
Before we move from joy to love (flip) this fourth season of advent, I am reminded of a helpful quotation.  The Dali Lama gets credit for this, but it is lodged deeply in many wisdom traditions.  It is this: “Suffering is inevitable.  Misery is optional.  Joy is a choice.”  Notice that it does not say happiness is a choice.  Then happiness movement is big business.  And it leans toward something real called toxic positivity.  I find so called self-help mantras to be neither about myself, or particularly helpful.  There are scads of titles about happiness.  For joy, we need to go to the Religion and Spirituality section.  Joy is deeper, and can be experienced even in grief.  Joy is about loving, and loving hard.  Joy and love are the twin engines of whole-hearted living.  Both have verbal roots.  They are actions.  And they are a choice.
 
Today, with the fourth candle lit serving as count down we see that Jesus’ birthday comes next.  Our eyes are set on Bethlehem, but we are not yet there.  In fact, we take one last detour, to Cousin Elizabeth’s house, where Mary goes from Nazareth to Hebron, an 81-mile walk, 27 miles out of the way toward Bethlehem.  Clearly, that is a choice, and given her condition, an inconvenient one, at that.
 
Luke opens with the line “In those days Mary set out and went with haste” to visit her extended family.  Word reached her that Cousin Elizabeth, who was way past her childbearing years, was also expecting a child.  This was the other miracle baby.  In that culture, the expectation of birth was cause for public celebration and in Elizabeth’s case, a sign and wonder of God’s doing.  But for Mary, not so much.  An unmarried pregnancy was the opposite: a scandal bringing shame on her family and her family to be.  By law, her seemingly scorned husband to be could have her stoned to death to save face.  Joseph chose not to exercise that right.  While he is a largely silent character, that one crucial choice is lodged in love for Mary, for the child, and for God.
 
Given that fact, it is no wonder that Mary made haste to get out of Nazareth, away from prying eyes, away from grumbles of condemnation, away from human judgement of what she knew in her heart that God was doing.  When she proclaims the Magnificat (My soul proclaims the Lord… the whole thing), the traditional Song of Mary, she does not submit it in writing, nor are all the words hers.  In fact, they are assembled from Psalms, the Book of Daniel and other radical Old Testament prophecies.  Mary is not doing her own thing; she is connecting her condition with a deeply held belief that God is not finished with the world.  Far from being a potted plant, a holy pawn, Mary despite all appearances and social mores, chooses not to be miserable, she chooses to be joyful.  Her change in geography reflects her decision to move toward celebration instead of wallowing in condemnation.  What better place to be than with family and a fellow miraculous child bearer?
 
Along with John the Baptist in utero, and Elizabeth and Mary and all the other celebrants, despite all appearances to the contrary in a world of pain and suffering, we catch a vision of our own opportunity of choice.  Other more modern prophets riff on this theme as Professor Dumbledore tells Harry Potter “It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”  The legendary basketball coach, told his players “The choices you make in life, make you.”  And, even, the fictional soccer coach, Ted Lasso, draws on the greats, saying, “choices are chances fellas.”
 
Joy and love are choices, and those abstract words are, really, actions.  If there is any earworm we need in journey of now, it is this: Suffering is inevitable, misery is optional.  Joy is a choice.  With Joseph and Mary and Elizabeth, with shepherds and angels and seers men from the East, with coaches and coworkers, with children and check-out clerks we have every chance to choose what we make this life.  The choice is ours and no matter what we do, or what we do not do, God has already chosen us.  Amen.