​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.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent III, Year B
December 12, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
On a regular basis, people ask about my calling to ordained ministry.  I will admit that I really do not mind the question, but the answer is much longer and circuitous than some might expect.  I do not have a one-paragraph version.  I do not have a flash of light, God speaking out of a sunset, or slain in the Spirit moment to describe.  My story is more like a rising tide of awareness, a series of doors that kept opening, and a wrestling match with the twenty-three-year-old not quite fully developed brain trying to make sense of who I wanted to be.  I had checked off my plans: an Eagle Scout rank with Troop 4, Athens, Georgia, high school diploma, Athens Academy, a collegiate level varsity letter in Soccer, and a BA in English, with a focus on poetry, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, including two summers of study at St. John’s College, Oxford.  Along the way, I had worked as a whitewater raft guide, a paralegal, and a clerk/driver for the twelfth Bishop of Virginia. 
 
While I am grateful for an amazing education that pushed me to think critically, interact with certain kinds of people, and write reasonably well, all of this was great, but what I never considered realistically was: great for what?  There followed young adult despair and angst.  With good counsel from some trusted friends and mentors, I was called back to the one constant of my whole life: a lively and curious faith.  Faith was more important in driving me than all the credentials I chased.  In time, I realized that as crazy as the Episcopal Church, or any church can be, these we are my people.  The Church had formed me and I was invited to faith my way -- yes that is a verb – to faith my way through an ordination process.  And the rest happened.  From childhood into so-called adulthood, through marriage, ordination, raising two children, and all the ups and downs of life, I have lived in twelve different places in six different dioceses.  Fortunately for me, Janice is resourceful and agile in her vocation and outlook.  In all of that, when anyone asks me where home is, the best answer I can give is Church. 
 
That is a lot of long sentences that leave out the nitty gritty of life, occasions of profound joy, and my share of trauma, misfires, and failure. Nevertheless, that is shortest answer I can give about my experience of calling.  The best summary I can give is that you know in your knowing place when you know, you know?  That is how we all shape our lives, choose with whom we live our lives, and what we do to sustain our lives.  Logic plays some part, but illogic works in us too.  Faithing is important. 
 
While much of God’s calling is the steady backbeat of life, today we hear super loud calling with the ringer turned up loud and the vibrate setting in earthquake mode.  Our annual Advent guide, John the Baptist, upstages the scene and commands our attention.  At first, he seems like a crazy, ranting relative.  In fact, John is a crazy, ranting, but holy relative.  Let’s play the ‘who are your people’ game for a minute…  John’s mother is Elizabeth gave birth to him long after her child rearing biological clock had stopped ticking, which places him he is among the small club of miracle babies in the Bible This is the biblical version of a flashing red light, saying “pay attention!”  John’s father is Zechariah, a Jewish priest, which lends to the stereotype of priest’s kids tending toward a rebellious walk on the wild side.  And as it happens, Elizabeth is Jesus’s mother’s cousin, making John is Jesus’s second cousin on his mother’s side.  As to familial relations of Jesus’s father’s side, it’s complicated.  The family tree there is more like kudzu.
 
No matter how prickly the package, John’s really zeroes in on the heart and soul of calling.  It is not about pedigree: “Do not say ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor.’”  It is not about intellectual accomplishment, status, or station.  He says that God’s calling is not a philosophical ascent, an intellectual exercise, or something earned as an accomplishment.  When the people ask what they should do, he tells them to be givers and not takers, being satisfied rather than seeking more through positional leverage.
 
Be careful not to use the last paragraph about wheat kernels being separated from the and husks as some form of transactional judgement.  It is not about the good folks being the kernels, and the bad folks being the chaff.  We are all of it: the whole plant.  We all have the kernel, the seed, the DNA.  We all have the self-protective detritus that is no longer useful.  The work is allowing God to do the threshing, to slough off our outer coating, and get to the heart of matters – moving with God’s heart beat.
 
The last line is almost comedic.  After all the talk of axes at the tree, and burning in unquenchable fire, Luke adds this “So, with many other exhortations [John] proclaimed the good news to the people.”  What sounds like hard news is, really, Good News.  This business of ministry is not business at all.  The profit and loss statement is all profit. This what the prophet sees. 
 
As we live out this season in anticipation of gentle Jesus meek and mild, born in a lowly stable with looing cattle, bathrobed shepherds, and the boychoir anthems as the heavenly host, we must know that Jesus is not a cooing little child for long.  While he comes gently, he comes with the force of a storm, not a sunset.  Our calling is not to do holy, it is to be with Jesus.
 
Faithing is a verb, but our doing is not about earning anything or posing as anyone we are not.  God is perfectly capable of being God, even when we run off in on our own.  In God, there is no call waiting.  Living whole heartedly, out of the heart of who we are, out of who we are created to be, is the calling, is true fulfillment, and is our only. real. home.  Amen. 

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent II, Year B
December 5, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
If you have been a child, or been around child, grandchild, of young person left in your charge, it is likely that you have encountered the Where’s Waldo books.  For the uninitiated, the Waldo empire is a vast library of 27 books that began as Where’s Wally in the U.K., and went international with Where’s Waldo about 20 titles ago.  There is no complex plot or character development.  There are not many words.  Each page is a wildly ornate and animated scene.  A jungle, a circus, Sydney, London, Paris… and somewhere in the cornucopia of busyness, Waldo is hiding in plain sight.  The task is to find Waldo and move on to the next scene.  I lost the find Waldo race with my children several times, but I think they studied ahead of time.  Apples do not fall far from the tree.
 
Waldo does have a particular look, with his trademark red and white sweater and matching toboggin hat, and he should be easy to find, but alas the pictures are so busy and detailed. Waldo can be obscured in a field of red tulips or among the bright lights of a Hollywood movie set.  You get the picture, or maybe not.  It depends on how long and how closely you look.
 
The book series is delightful and teaches children how to be observant, to pay attention to detail, and differentiate between patterns and shapes.  The scenes from everyday places as well as iconic or historic places reminds us that not all we see at first is all there is to see.  And as I have quoted the British rocker, Rod Stewart, before: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
 
As we embark on a new year in the Church, we move from last year’s following of Mark’s picture of Jesus, to following Luke’s illustration.  Whereas Mark is a just the facts kind of writer, Luke is a more flowery story teller.  No matter the year, we defer to Luke’s Christmas story with angels, shepherds, and all that.  Every year, I cannot help but hear Linus’s recitation of Luke’s narrative in A Charlie Brown Christmas.  It is hard to forget that image where he explains the real heart of the celebration, among the confusion of Snoopy’s high wattage dog house, and Charlie Brown’s despairingly sparse Christmas tree.  
 
This week’s reading may be familiar, especially if you are a Handel’s Messiah fan, but it is also an unusual outlier among the lexicon of Gospel stories.  Normally, a Gospel reading tells about and illustrates a particular picture of Jesus as he helps, heals, speaks in parables, and challenges the way things appear to be, over against the picture of God’s presence and action in real time.  But in this passage, where’s Jesus?  Today’s narrative does not include Jesus at all, or does it? 
 
Right of the bat, Luke provides a time stamp: a particularly and agonizingly difficult to pronounce set of names of those in notable power positions in a particular moment of history.  Luke’s audience knows that time well.  It was a time of great tribulation and oppression for their people.  And for Luke’s people, the times are even worse.  They are wondering “where is our God?”  Psalms 42, 79, and 115, bring that question to their regular worship.
 
Luke’s narrative cuts through the busyness of human machination and points to John the Baptist, saying that even in this present mess: “the Word of God comes to John.”  And here’s the tricky part: the Word does not come from John.  The Word is already there.  The Word comes through John, as he brings their well-known Isaiah prophecy right into the present.  John points to Jesus as being in the picture already and not yet.  Though Jesus is not there, Jesus is there as the Word.  Get the picture?  Yeah, sometimes I don’t get it either.  We do not sit easy with mystery.
 
This John the Baptist character as a wild man who gets it, but doesn’t get it.  John speaks the truth, but he is so odd and off putting with his rage, his hairy poncho, and fire and brimstone vocabulary.  His vision of Savior is not gentle.  It is one of retribution and fiery redemption.  At least he talks a good forgiveness game.  At least he gets that right.  Signs are not reality.  Signs point to reality.
 
On the surface, John’s drama makes for the ideal Hollywood prequel to the Jesus story, but Luke doesn’t set him in the beginning of the story.  Luke puts John the Baptist in his picture after the author’s trademark nativity story, after Jesus and his folks moved back to Nazareth, after the child Jesus appears in the Temple and astounds them with his precocious teaching.  Then, Luke looks back to the Baptizer in the Wilderness, as if to say: See! See, Jesus was there all the time.  This is not the new plan, this is THE plan, that has been here from the very beginning.  Get the picture?  With a little context, it makes more sense.
 
We are still gazing at this picture not because in falls into an interesting historical moment, but because we are part of Luke’s audience.  Through time and space, we are part of Luke’s curious community, and we wonder, along with them, “Where is our God?”
 
Now is a moment in our history, where Ralph Northam is governor of the Commonwealth, with Glenn Youngkin about to succeed him; where Michael is the Presiding Bishop, and Susan and Jennifer and Porter are our Bishops.  Perhaps, even in our convoluted wrestling with ideas, issues, and theology, we might look past the clutter and ask: “Where is Jesus?”  Are there signs pointing us toward him that we have breezed by without notice?  Where is Jesus in Greenhouse, Mudhouse, or the Harris Teeter?  Jesus is there, just like Waldo in those books.  Where is he?  Maybe Jesus is obscured in the aching bones of a package deliverer, in the tenacity of a young mom with kids in a racecar shopping cart, or even in the invisible frailties of the person sitting next to you right now.  When we look for Jesus, we are more likely to see Jesus.  We we love, we are more able to love more. 
 
The Gospel is not a quaint bedtime story or a game of hide and seek.  The Gospel is a picture of God, with a picture of us laid right over it, like one of those old overhead transparencies.  God is right here in the picture that is of us.  Can’t find God?  Keep looking, watching, or waiting.  As we look with hope, with faith, and with love, God is not hidden at all.  God is in plain sight.   Instead of asking “What would Jesus do?," ask "What is Jesus doing?"

Advent I, Year B
November 28, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…
 
Seven Sundays.  In 28 years of ordained ministry, I have never gone so long without standing in a pulpit, here, everywhere else I have served, or on the road as a guest.  To be a preacher is to live very closely with the Gospel flow, not necessarily texts of my choosing, but of rolling three-year cycle of lessons the Episcopal Church follows.  Seven Sundays.  Not with vacations, the birth and leave for two children, funerals of friends and families, and way more than a few traveling weddings and baptisms.  In these seven weeks, we have gone to Church.  My neighbor, Gary, pastors Cove Presbyterian, and Janice and I went there a few times.  He is an amazing preacher.   As well, I have been, and will be, regular at the Church of Alcoholics Anonymous which has its own prayers, liturgy of sorts, and of course, the ubiquitous coffee pot.
 
If you have followed the plot of my story recently, you know that I was granted that time to seek treatment for an illness, and that is what mental health concerns and addiction are: illness.  In spiritual terms, they are demons not to be minimized, denied, or left in solitary closets.  Given that context, you might wonder: “what is he going to say?”  If you are new or not in the Emmanuel email loop, now, you may have the same question.  To be honest, so do I.   A sermon is never done until it is preached.  I have a high doctrine of the Holy Spirit working in words, ears, and even, the tangents of our minds when something queues a memory, a reminder, or even wondering about what we might do for lunch.  I have been there and done that too.
 
For the month of October, I was a resident of Williamsville Wellness, a great place of intensive mind and body healing, and not a little rigorous honesty. I rather enjoyed myself, just remembering who JT really is, without the roles and labels we tend to embody as if we were doings and not human beings.  In that time, I came to.  I came to frame the full and complete surrender to God as one of strength and hope, rather than shame and failure. 
 
When I began the program, it was football season, pumpkin season, and the season of long shadows and crisp nights.  Save for some walks on deserted country roads, I did not travel more than five hundred yards for a whole month.  The world, however, continued to spin.  A big shock came when on the way home, boom, it was Christmas.  Forget earth toned fall accoutrements, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Advent, the world had gone red, green, and twinkly.  That was a shock of reentry I had not expected.  Fortunately, Frieda, who provisions our parish, had ordered advent wreaths, wreaths, and greens.  Deacon Karulyn has prepared a series of weekly reflections, and we planned to print Advent devotionals that are here for your taking today.
 
On this first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the Church Year, we begin again.  In a coincidence that I call a Godcidence, this resonates loudly and clearly for me.  We will get to the Christmas card birth story in time, but as I so shockingly observed, our culture likes to skip straight to the trappings of what’s next, creating a fervor of sentimental and material preparation.  I am all in favor of lights, decorations, carols, and even, Mike Robinson’s love of inflatable yard art.  Bring it on, but not without spiritual preparation.  We do well to remember the whole story, even the hard parts that can be obscured by all the visual noise.  Advent is a place of some uncomfortable labor pains that an unvarnished, non-postcard Holy Nativity entails.  The world Jesus comes to save is a mess, then and now.  This is not an old story; it is a reified and contemporary story.  If we can see around the seasonal consumer culture and find fresh newness in the season, we will have come nearer to the Holy.  The challenge here is to slow down… and be quiet… (pause) and listen, somewhere and somehow.
 
The new year story the Church engages this morning, is not one revelry and merriment.  There are no hats, horns, or sparkling beverages.  It does not come with high wattage signs of 2022, it comes with signs of redemption coming near.  Jesus observes that all of this chaos is frightening, but it is a prerequisite for clearing the lot of our soul - for something to be made new.  Jesus warns us away from maladaptive coping mechanisms like dissipation: the foolish waste of time and resources, drunkenness: the act of physical, emotional, and spiritual numbness, and worry: the ever-present angst about a future that we cannot control.  In place of those reactions, Jesus encourages responsive alertness to the signs, praying as an antidote to worry, and awareness that God is really close at hand.
 
The equivalence of a New Year with God comes each new day.  Advent means coming.  Rather than spinning off into the chances and changes of earth life, we may see them as contrast to the long game of forever life, the ultimate Way, not be found in chaos, but in the order of creation’s way of dying to live.  Head on over to Chiles’s peach and apple orchards and see their dead looking pruned branches that will sprout and bring even more fruit in time.  I could go on about that.  
 
In the world of words in images, really great companion gospels are storytelling and poetry.  The former connects our story with the story.  Poetics take thoughts, images, and/or experiences and give them an evocative economy of words, like stopping to take a long and whole-hearted look at something new, different, true, and memorable.
 
For my money, the poet T.S. Eliot nails the essence of all of this as if he had our Gospel in one hand, and a pen in his other hand.  I do Advent with him too.  He writes:
 
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
 
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
 
 
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…
 
 
(T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets:  Little Gidding)
 
With that, we begin again.  Happy New Year.
 
Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 21, Year B
September 26, 2021
 
One of the great things about the Episcopal Church is that we are bound together under a big tent.  What I mean by that is that while center tends to hold, there are spaces and places for varied expressions of worship, divergent points of view, and worship spaces ranging from large gothic cathedrals to store front start-ups.
 
For more doctrinal folks, asking what Episcopalians believe meets with a puzzling answer: it depends of the Episcopalian.  That said, we are best defined in looking at our Book of Common Prayer.  There is a lot there: the three-legged stool of faith supported by scripture, tradition, and reason.
 
On September 12, one of our particular church characters, The Rt. Rev. Jack Spong, retired Bishop of Newark, well-known author, and provocateur died peacefully and quietly.  To put it mildly, Spong was a controversial character who ministered under our tent.  He pushed for the ordination of women in the 1970s.  He pushed for full inclusion and ordination for LGBTQ folks in the 1980’s.  In 1992, he wrote a book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.   Biblical literalists went crazy and his perspective riled up the so-called moral majority that was gaining cultural and political influence.  His book was bestseller, and gained him even more notice, which he enjoyed for sure.  He was so polarizing that he received death threats – Christian death threats – someone needs to explain that oxymoron.
 
When I was in seminary, Bishop Spong came as a visiting lecturer.  Some of my fellow students refused to attend.  If you wanted to start a heated theological argument in those days, all you had to do was say “Spong.”  In person, Spong was not the fiery heretic many imagined him to be.  He was generous, welcoming, and curious.  He was human and had an ego for sure.  Yet, he applied great scholarly investigation, imagination, and creativity in exploring Biblical texts, which was, sometimes, quite a stretch for many.
 
Spong served in this diocese as rector of St. Paul’s, Richmond, from 1969-1976. St. Paul’s is a downtown parish right next to our state capitol.  When folks used to refer to Virginia Episcopalians as God’s frozen chosen, St. Paul’s would have been the headquarters.  Spong shook it up.  He started a feeding ministry for the poor and homeless.  He challenged Christian complacency.  Some fled to other parishes.  Richmond rumbled.  One might think this was a disaster.  It was not.  Spong helped folks to disagree, without being disagreeable.  Those who took the time to get to know Spong, loved him, even if they muttered “bless his heart”under their breath now and again.
 
When I read of Jesus saying “Salt is good,” and, the same day, I read Spong’s obituary in the New York Times, a light went on.  Spong was salt.  For sure he was salty.  We might not want a church full of Spongs, but if we are to have salt in ourselves, as Jesus says, we need those who push and prod us even if that is uncomfortable.  As the old adage goes: Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
 
Sometimes the lessons for Sunday are like an arrow moving toward a target.  Other times, like today, the lessons are more like a big pot of stew.  If we dip into the pot, we can draw up nuggets of nourishment, but there is a lot in there and we cannot consume it all at once. 
 
We started with the story of Esther.  What was read is chopped up (Veggies?) and if you do not know the story, it would be helpful to have a program with the cast of characters.  The legend is the stuff of pageants and feasting in the Jewish faith.  Basically, it is a salvation story.  The Israelites in exile faced a genocidal plot, and Esther saved the day currying favor with the king.  The bottom line is that God works through people to deliver us from destruction.
 
The lesson from James is a letter to a fragmented and contentious church.  He urges them claim their faith in helping the suffering, praying, confessing their sin, and forgiving others. (Broth?)  He urges them to do this to bring those wandering away from the faith back under the tent of the church.  Again, the bottom line is that God uses people, even sinners like us, to bring people together.
 
By the time we get to Mark’s gospel, the stew gets even more meaty (Protein?).  The disciples are upset that someone is out there casting out demons in Jesus’ name, and they tried to stop him because he was not following them.  Not following them?  So now they make healing and helping about some sort of credentialing, like they own the franchise on ministry?  Jesus sets them straight, setting them and all of us free from any illusion that we are not smart enough, good enough, righteous enough, or worthy enough to be the hands and feet of God’s love for the world.
 
The scriptural stew on the table today is a feast of welcome, nourishment, encouragement, and clarity. Maybe that stew needs a little salt or spice from us.  Maybe we need to hear how God has used others and will use us, not just to be nice to people like us, but to be good to people we may not know or understand. 
 
In his analysis of this stew of Holy Scripture, Bishop Spong said many provocative things.
He questioned that which many refuse to question.  He pushed the church toward authenticity and honesty – even in disagreement.  But then, he wrote:
 
“Even understanding these things, I am still attracted to this Jesus and I will pursue him both relentlessly and passionately. I will not surrender the truth I believe I find in him either to those who seek to defend the indefensible, or to those who want to be freed finally from ideas that no longer make sense… I prepare for death by living.”
 
If we are hungry for truth, the church is a good place to be.  We are here to provide food for the journey, but we gather as church to point beyond church.  We are about Jesus and the seeking, searching, and saving work of giving up our well-worn, self-centered ways and live for God.  The psalmist says: “Taste and see that God is good.”  Indeed, but sometimes, we need to add salt.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 20, Year B
September 19, 2021
 
I follow a feed called the Good News Movement on Instagram.  It is not overtly religious, rather, it features images and stories of ordinary people, going about their lives, and doing extraordinarily good things.  It a breath of fresh air from social media.  As September is National Suicide Prevention Month, I received a picture in my Good News feed that grabbed my heart and soul.
 
The photo shows a man, standing outside a bridge railing over a highway.  He is facing inward balanced on a precarious ledge.  According to the story, he intended to end his life, but when he climbed over the railing, several passersby jumped into action, reaching out and put their arms around him.  One has his chest, one his waist, and another has his legs, all of them in a hugging embrace.  There is even a small length of rope securing him to the railing.  These people were complete strangers to one another, but all of them huddled together, staying with the man, and holding him close, comforting him in his despair.  They told him he was loved.  They told they would stay with him as long as he needed them.  Wherever they needed to be on that bustling work day had to wait.  All of them remained there for two hours, holding a stranger, saving a life.  This is greatness.
 
Speaking of greatness, on the way back to Capernaum, winding up a long road trip with Jesus, the disciples had been debating amongst themselves.  They were talking about what roles they would get in the new regime, after Jesus takes out the Romans and becomes King of Israel.  James wanted to be Chief of Staff, John, Secretary of State, and Peter, Director of Communications.  Ok, that may be a stretch, but we get the idea.  They are jockeying for position, extolling their own merits, seeking fame and fortune.
 
Even though Jesus repeats himself, telling them that his being the Messiah is not what they envision, they are hard headed, and a little dense.  They are not about this business of suffering even unto death, they are into rising: rising up and taking charge.   That is what they believe makes for greatness.
 
It is hard to blame the disciples.  What they see is the powerful are the rich and well-armed Romans.  The powerful are the elite Scribes and Pharisees luxuriating in fine robes, well financed through the temple taxes and kickbacks from the sale of sacrificial animals.   In their experience, blessings of health, wealth and security come from power and power is what makes greatness.
 
It may be easy for us to think of the disciples as dupes.  Mark sets them up for criticism in just about every encounter with Jesus.  And yet, what kind of Messiah do we expect Jesus to be?  Do we bargain convenient good works for blessings?  Are we more than a little impressed with wealth and celebrity?  Might we believe the following “our” messiah makes us better than all those godless and unrepentant secular folks?  We might think that if we were in charge, we would fix them for sure.
 
There is a great song all about this by the Who, Won’t get fooled again that puts it this way:
 
We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song…
And I get on my knees and pray, we won’t get fooled again
 
And the last line is this:  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Yeah.
 
At the dinner table back in Capernaum, Jesus asks the disciples what they had been arguing about on the road.  They do not answer as they do not want another fiery lecture on dying to self in order to rise in glory.  Being Jesus, we must believe that he knows all about their conversations and their will to power, and ours too.
 
Jesus, then, takes a child onto his lap.  And as the text says, he put it among them.  It?  This tells us about what they thought of children.  Likely this child was running around with lots of other children, scruffy, snotty, and raggedy.  Child mortality was staggering.  They were the poorest of the poor, living precariously, only of value when they grew up to work and contribute.  But not for Jesus, he wraps his arms around this squirmy little girl, holding her, saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”  In that moment, Jesus shows that he will break the cycle.  His power is not material, it comes through sacrifice.  His way is not about domination, his blessings come from love, not stuff.
 
I would love to say that the disciples got it once and for all.  I would love to say that all humanity immediately followed Jesus’ way.  I would love to say the human will to power flipped over to become the will to service and self-emptying love.   The disciples did not get it, at least not until Easter happened to them.  We don’t get it until, in moments of clarity and grace, we give up on the old boss or the new boss, and follow the real boss.
 
Jesus wraps his arms around a child to change the picture of power and blessing.  At a moment of clarity and grace, a bunch of perfect strangers, on a typical work day, put their arms around a fellow child of God with saving him with power and blessing.  They were not going to let go.  Whatever despair or pain or grief or loss we know, Jesus tells us that God is there.  He is there as God in all of us too.  We are here because we need that Good News in our feed.  We need to see real pictures of greatness to lose ourselves in love and save our lives.