There are many wonderful symbols we carry around, exchange, and decorate our homes with as we joyously celebrate the Easter Season.  Pastels, clean bright whites, silver and gold all shout out their colorful sensibilities.  Chocolate, jelly beans, marshmallow peeps, and other candy of all varieties remind us of the precious sweetness of this life, a life given back and restored.  A celebratory brunch and/or dinner to break the long fast of preparation that is now behind us helps us to mark as well the joyous new life that has leapt forth from the tomb.

But no other symbol seems quite as interesting as the humble egg.  In real form the egg holds within its fragile walls the boundless potential of new life.  From the humble chicken that can break through this shell to spring forth in fluffy newness, to the great egg of the giant birds, to even the eggs of the sea turtle that incubate so close and yet just so far from shore, eggs ponderously sit awaiting their precious cargo’s birth.   What better harbinger of Spring and the returning hope of creation than the egg.

And for that more modern invention, the plastic egg provides us  endlessly creative possibilities.  We can lock away all sorts of treasures and then meditate on their meaning.  The candy we pack in their and then let our children hide and find echoes back to all Easter candy, whose sweetness on the lips and tongue helps us to remember that the sweetness of creation is being renewed.  Symbols of our faith we lock away, storing up our heart’s essential needs.   A coin (or even a folded up bill!) to remember the treasures and gifts that God has given us.  A palm frond to remind us of the Lord, the King of Kings, who enters Jerusalem.  A piece of bread to remember the gift of the Eucharist.  A thorn to remember the pain of Good Friday.  All can be locked up inside the egg, a precious safekeeping for us to hold as we make our daily journeys.

And the humble plastic egg holds one more gift for us.  For it can hold so much, but it can also reveal so much more than lip tingling sweets or symbolic treasures.  For as much as we want to contain our faith in bits of memories and symbols, God again and again tells us that his life, his creation, his joy, cannot be contained.  No human container exists to hold it all.  And even though his Son dies for us, redeeming all of creation, and suffers death itself to express his solidarity with the rest of his creation that likewise has or will experience death, yet still God’s joy cannot be contained.  We will need to go searching again for Jesus, because the tomb is empty, his is risen, and he goes before us.  After you have finished enjoying your Easter candy, you still hold in your hands the most incredible gift of all, a symbol of God’s boundless love and joy in this his creation: an empty tomb.  A place where the sorrow of death is no more, a place from which our hearts learn again to sing and dance for joy.  He is risen indeed! Rejoice my friends!

As good, productive citizens of our world and culture we value success.  We also ruthlessly examine any area of failure to find ways of improvement.  Our desire to succeed motivates us to become harsh critics and to sometimes set unreachable goals in our private and communal lives.  Holy Week presents us with the grim end coming this Friday. Holy Week sends us not to the top of the high mountain to taste the glory of God in all success, but instead we are sent to the horrible cross, upon which our sins and the sins of the world earn the result of conviction.  In any human formula of production, dying on a cross is the opposite of success.  We should then find a way to make Holy Week more successful, more productive for our spiritual lives.  Yet there is no other more successful journey for us as God’s creatures than to journey along with Jesus to this failure of the Cross.

As we watch the scene unfold during Holy Week journey, we come to ever more deeply realize that  our leader, our spiritual friend and teacher, our incredible link to the God that loved us and the whole world into being, is headed to his end.  And more than that, we are invited to share in the same fate! We are invited to die to the drive for human success just like Jesus.  Jesus could have at any time claimed his power and used it for human success: power was his, yet he denied it and instead emptied himself (hear Paul’s words again!), denied all his personal potential, to instead let his life be purely for God, his and our Father.  We, his disciples, are invited into the same life, to no longer live for ourselves and our human goals.  This is the same death and failure we are invited into.

As the story of our lives with God our creator often does, the end of the story is often an echo of the beginning.  Our lives as creatures begin in the blessed hope of joyous newborn life and end in the joyous mansion of the heavenly home.  Our spiritual lives begin and end in a similar pattern, but with our spirits their boundaries are a death.  A death to self, the death on our cross, where Jesus leads us, is the echo of a first death.  That first death of a disciple: the death to our sinful lives in the waters of baptism. Successful life as a Christian is in part to continually live into this dying, so that we may live the blessed life of the baptized.

As we have walked through this Lenten journey this year we have been subtly reminding ourselves of the promises we make in baptism.  Those promises are the offerings of a disciple desiring like Peter and the rest to follow Christ with our best efforts.  Three weeks ago I invited you to look at the first three promises made in the baptismal liturgy and how they are linked to our gospel readings this Lententide.  Let’s examine the final three today.  Pick up those red books called BCPs again with me and turn to page 302.

As the first three Sunday’s of Lent echoed the first three questions of the baptismal promises made by candidates and their sponsors and families (and I invite you to examine them further this Holy Week), look now at the fourth question on page 302, “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as our Savior?”  Two Sundays ago we heard that incredible and often alluded to story of the Prodigal Son, who chooses to turn and return to the home where all things are provided for him, yet now no longer under appreciative of the gifts of the father made to him in the providing.  Accepting the Savior is no greater achievement for the spirit in us all.  Returning to God through Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life for us, and promising to do this as we enter the baptismal water is a teaching we work through often in our lives.  And so like the Prodigal Son we can answer this question with the words, “I do”.

The fifth question seems much like the last, “Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?”  Last week’s Gospel that most of us shared concerned a dinner meal held at Lazarus’s house, after his revivification.  Martha serves dinner, and Mary chooses to take a bottle of costly perfume and spill it all over Jesus’ feet.  Mary then even takes her beautiful hair and wipes his feet with the fragrant ointment.  The scent fills the home, and the scene fills the heart.  For Mary’s choice is one of pure adoration, placing every ounce of her spiritual heart in the hands of Jesus.  This practice of Mary, to find ways to practice spiritually placing all of herself in Christ’s hands, is what we promise to do here in our baptisms.  And like Mary we say, “I do”.

The last question asks the same fateful question that we ask of ourselves and our community today on Palm Sunday.  In Baptism we ask of ourselves, “Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?”  Peter tries to live up to this promise, as do all the disciples who ultimately face their dismay that Good day.  Jesus invites all to follow him.  The life of discipleship, the life of a called Christian, is one of following.  Following the one who walked the pilgrim way to the cross on Golgotha.  And so today, answer the question with your heart and soul.  Will you follow?  “I do”.

It is a remarkable thing for us to take this Lenten journey as an opportunity to find ways to live into our baptismal promises. We hold up these baptismal questions and their promises so that we can live into them, finding ways to practice them as we continue to grow in the knowledge and love of God.  Our baptism may be a once in a lifetime affair, but the promises we make are to be grown into continually from the earliest moment we share in the stories of God to the last breaths we take on this beautiful Earth of God’s creating.  The death we suffer in these mortal bodies is prepared for by the spiritual death we enter into in baptism.  And so too the incredible new life we are invited into, a life in God as the incredible Body of Christ, is lived into through examining, praying, and growing in the knowledge of our baptismal promises.  Lent prepares us for these final steps.  Now Holy Week opens, and we are invited to keep walking, finding success in walking this road of failure.

So come, join hands and arms together and walk Holy Week, a body of Christ united and renewed by this yearly journey.  Come to the evening services Monday, and come walk the Labyrinth afterwards, letting that spiritual journey in that ancient pattern be a practice for you to live.  Come Tuesday and Wednesday evening and hear the story unfold.  Come to church Thursday night and celebrate the institution of the sacrament of his body and blood that feed us as we walk these steps.  Come Friday and share in the Goodness of Jesus’ cross.  Come Saturday morning and dwell there, next to the tomb, holding on to the dim small candle of hope that flickers against the blowing winds of doubt.  We form our lives in this foundry of faith that is Holy Week, where heat, pressure, and anxiety purify our lives and prepare us for the life we live into next Sunday and every Sunday.  Come, accept Christ’s invitation to follow, and find your lives reformed and renewed, succeeding not in human terms, but instead find your lives successfully grounded in God.

You may recall the book and movie from which these words and characters come from.  The Shawshank Redemption, by Steven King, and in movie form featuring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, is an inspirational yet quite terrifying movie.  It lacks Steven King’s usual source of supernatural evil and instead captures the very ugly human condition of a prison.  In the midst of those horrors, Andy Dufresne tries to keep not only his own hope alive, but also tries to inspire his friend and the prisoners around him to hope as well.  When the novella was published, it was put in a section called “Hope Springs Eternal”.  A good message for all of us.

It may sound strange to pair this image of hope in the midst of prison pain against the gospel passage we just heard.  Jesus is confronted with the news that Pilate had killed Galilean pilgrims at the temple in Jerusalem and poured their blood on the altar sacrifice in Jerusalem.  A horrible image, and one loaded with the imagery of curses and eternal damnation amongst the Jews.  Jesus hears their words and sees through to their fears.  The ones who raised this horrible event were trying to ease their own fears of death by blaming those who were killed.  The dead must have committed some awful sin and earned such a terrible fate, they imply by bringing this up to Jesus.  It is this notion that Jesus clearly denounces.  No I tell you, Jesus says.  Their sins are no worse than yours.  They did not earn their horrible demise any more than you have earned the chance to continue breathing.  Neither were the sins of those who tragically died in Jerusalem when a guard tower collapsed upon them.

Stop condemning folks because they have died horrible or tragic deaths.  They did not earn that any more than you have earned your wealth and good fortune and continued life.

Jesus does not seem very hopefilled and inspiring, but he is not done teaching. “But unless you repent, you will die just as they did”.  At first glance perhaps Jesus is saying that by practicing repentance we can earn protection.  So there is something we can do!  Here’s one action that can earn us something.  We can protect ourselves in God’s eyes, by repenting.

Repentance, though, has nothing to do with earning our lives back from God’s judgment.  The repentance that was taught by John in the wilderness and now by Jesus is not about earning our lives back through our own acts.  Repentance is about turning our lives over to God and not living for ourselves at all.  A life of repentance is what Jesus invites us into, that we no longer live for ourselves but now live for God.  We turn from ourselves.  This is the root meaning of repentance.  If you repent to earn something for yourself, then it is not repentance.  We call that bargaining.

We learn of the repentant life through the waters of baptism, the waters that John and now Jesus’ disciples offered to all those who heard the call.  Descend into the waters, and emerge on the other sides wholly new.  Offer your life to the waters of baptism, descend and drown your sorrowful, sinful lives into the holy water and ascend no longer alive to yourself, but alive now in God.  The sinful human life, full of selfishness, greed, envy, and anger, is left behind in the water, and rising up we live no longer for ourselves.  We become the body of Christ, the living the ministry of Christ, following the one who leads us.  This is our hope.  This is the life we are to get busy living.

And this is why Jesus tells the crowd to repent.  For the death at the hands of Pilate or under the clay walls of Siloam, or any of the millions of other deaths these mortal bodies die is coming, no matter what.  But we have an opportunity to not live only for that death.  We have an opportunity to not just get busy dying.  Yes these mortal bodies will die, but we can repent of our sinfulness and live instead for and in God.  You will die no matter what, but you have the opportunity through repentance to live.  Get busy living.

Our tradition is full of the life of repentance.  Each Sunday we make part of our time together in worship an opportunity to share in the disciple’s work of repentance.  We confess our sings, either at the beginning of a service to highlight the penitential tones of Lent or just before we share in God’s Peace.  Confession, the liturgical act of repentance marks our time together each week.  And each day our daily prayers in the morning, evening, and just before bed are opened with the call to repent!  The season of Lent itself is an opportunity to examine our lives through mediation, conversation, and learning.  We may find it uncomfortable to focus time and energy on repentance(and considering our sinfulness weprobably should be uncomfortable), but our lives as disciples are rich with it.

The baptismal understanding of repentance is even woven into our Lenten journey this year.  The gospel selections for Lent follow a pattern that evokes a portion of our Baptismal liturgy.  Take a BCP and turn to page 302.  The first question asks “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”  The first Sunday of Lent we shared the gospel passage of Jesus being confronted by Satan in the wilderness, and Jesus rejects Satan’s offer.  “I renounce them” we answer.  The second question asks us “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?” What better response to that is there than Jesus’ response last week (Second Sunday of Lent) to the threat of Herod when he says “you tell that fox that I am going to keep on ministering!”.  “I renounce them” we respond.  The third question asks us “Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?”  And this week we hear Jesus teach us, his disciples, that our lives are to be filled recognizing our sinful scars and casting them aside in the baptismal water. “I renounce them” we answer.

Our lives as disciples, instructed and taught to us through our baptismal promises and formed by our Lenten journey, are offered forth to God through our work of repentance.  We can ignore Jesus’ calling to a life of repentance and choose to get busy dying, following our sinfilled mortal life to their all too mortal ends.  Or we can chose to get busy living, living the life of one who accepts the charge to cast aside our sinfilled lives in the waters of baptism and find our lives remade and renewed in the life filled body of Christ.  Yes, our mortal bodies will die a mortal death, due to our nature woefully tied to our sinfulness.  But we get to choose to live our mortal time alive in Christ, a life turned over and gracefully accepted by God.

Jesus knows, though, that this life of discipleship, full of the hard and miserable work of repentance, is not easy.  After responding to the crowd and telling them that their lives are in just as bad a place as those who died at Pilate’s hands and under the tower of Siloam, Jesus offers some hope that only he can provide.  The short parable about the fig tree, the owner, and the gardener goes by in just a few sentences.  Jesus offers no interpretation, and many modern commentators shy away from it.  The fig tree has gone three years since is was planted as is not bearing fruit.  In gardening terms, it’s time for the tree to go.  If we see ourselves as the withered fig tree, who by all gardening rights has wasted its chance,  then hearing the owner (God) tell the gardener (Jesus) to cut us down sounds pretty terrifying.  And the practice of repentance is in part to constantly remind ourselves that we are unable to bear fruit by our own efforts.

So to these withered trees that cannot bear fruit Jesus chooses the one way to bring fruit forth.  He lays himself down, holy food for God’s creation.  We come to this table not deserving this incredible service; that’s one thing we learn as we practice repentance.  And from this place, from these crooked, fruitless trees, fruit comes forth.  When we accept the life we are offered in Christ we get the chance to witness Christ’s fruit being born forth into the world on our limbs.  Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ fruit is born into the world, and when we turn our lives over to him in repentance and faith, we are blessed to witness his work.

Jesus makes the greatest sacrifice, knowing that only through his offering can our crooked branches bear fruit and be worthy of a place in God’s creation.  By his grace we are offered a life to live, a life lived through his grace.  Jesus is our great hope that springs eternal, and we accept that grace by living a repentant life.  So go on, Get Busy Living.  Repent, turn to him, and find your limbs bearing his fruit.

Jesus chooses to deny the use of the many powers he has as the Son of God, choosing instead the path of the righteous human.  Jesus chooses to walk the path of one who knows the right way, the way God wants us to walk.  Jesus is an example for us.  Our journeys and his are fraught with the trials of Satan that press upon in, attempting to distort the relationship between us and God.  Jesus demonstrates through his self-denial that he is fully committed not to himself but to his relationship with God.  All the power in the world is not worth abandoning that most sacred of bonds.  And through Jesus we too are invited into that most special relationship with God.

Like Jesus then, we practice self-denial as part of our faith journeys.  Several options are open to us for practicing self-denial.  Giving up chocolate has been used countless times, as well as the more far reaching “no desserts” abstention.  Some give up certain ingredients of our foods, like extra sugar or cream.  And that reminds me that some crazy folks actually give up coffee for Lent.  My prayers for their spouses and colleagues.

Coffee may lift us in the morning, and other things help us unwind at night.  Here too are possibilities for our Lenten practice.  A popular tradition in parts of my family is to give up alcohol for Lent.  That makes the after Easter brunch all that much more exciting.  Less obvious but in the same direction is the giving up of the television, that scourge of our  free time.  Nothing takes our minds off the stresses of the day more than a gripping Law and Order drama, hysterical Jersey Shore episode, or tantalizing battle on Iron Chef, let alone the voyeurism of peering into other people’s lives on Oprah. Yes, giving up the TV may sound extreme, but it can be done!

Others may take on more ancient disciplines of self-denial.  Complete fasts are becoming a less rare topic amongst the spiritual seekers in the world.  Whether it be a daytime fast like the Muslim practice of Ramadan, where food is avoided while the sun is up, or a more strenuous 24 hour or 36 hour fast, the encounter with hunger can be a profound experience.  And next Sunday, be sure to ask our youth about how 30 hours of hunger has changed their lives.

All of these (and so many more) choices for a Lenten discipline can be fruitful for your spiritual journey.  Not because of the strenuousness or challenge, nor because they address particularly notorious sins and illnesses in life, although any one of them could!  The Lenten discipline of self-denial is meant to provide a space in our lives for us to become more aware of God’s providing.  By denying ourselves those things that we can provide ourselves, we have the opportunity to witness more directly how God provides for us.   If but once during the 40 days of Lent the yearning for the TV or chocolate and the subsequent denial of that want opens your heart and mind to consider just what that supposed ‘need’ really is in life, then the discipline has reaped a reward.  If one afternoon you encounter hunger and find your heart not closed and irritable but instead profoundly opened and aware of other’s struggles with finding food and being nourished, then your discipline has made its positive mark in your life.

Yes our spiritual disciplines can be positive experiences, but they also can be markers of illness.  Sadly a person suffering from anorexia can find in a Lenten discipline just the excuse needed to pursue an ever more damaging course of abusive self-denial.  Maybe less tragic are the countless others, whose body image problems to use their Lenten fast as a way to save a few calories in the hopes of improving on their all important body.  Lent as diet plan, I like to call this.  Sounds harmless, and even a way to achieve two things at once (a remarkable justification), but when our Lenten discipline is serving us and not God then we have missed the point entirely.  A diet plan is not a spiritual discipline, it is a self-serving program aimed at our own ends.

We serve ourselves through our pursuit of Lenten disciplines in other ways, too.  Nothing feels better than accomplishing some mighty feat, like going 47 days without something.  You can lift your arms and cheer as you cross the finish line Easter morning, just like the triumphant skiers and skaters and snowboarders and yes curlers that we see on the wonderful Olympic stage.  And yes you can feel dismayed or even distraught if you wake one morning and realize that you did not quite make it to the finish line, feeling the crushing pain of failure even.

But these feelings of success and failure are losses for us.  When Jesus reminds Satan of God’s instruction  “Do not put God to the test”, he put success on the hot seat.   Whether God will give us the power or strength to succeed in our endeavor is not the point of our Lenten disciplines, and if it becomes the focus then we lose even if we succeed.  Our Lenten disciplines are about serving God, not serving ourselves.  It does us no good for God to give us the power to avoid chocolate for 47 days just for us to celebrate that ‘amazing’ miracle.  Lenten disciplines are not about us.

The goal of any spiritual discipline is not success or failure but to be brought  to places where you find yourselves closer to God, where you are drawn near to God as he walks toward his and your cross.  The steps of your journey take on less and less personal importance as they instead become footsteps for God’s love and life.  The discipline are about letting go of ourselves and finding ourselves more in God.

Self-denial is not an easy and simple part of your spiritual journey.  It, like all others, can be as ego centered and as personally damaging as any other pursuit taken without consideration for the intention.  Our intention is to draw nearer to God, to find ourselves, our hearts our souls our bodies, being led and being welcomed into the journey of Jesus Christ.  Your hungry stomachs and yearning spirits are not Olympic challenges but doorways.  Have courage and walk through the portals to a life lived no longer for yourselves but for the God who created you and blessed you.  To walk that journey, God’s journey and not our own, is our desire and aim, and our disciplines can open the way.

We can however catch glimpses of what a greater love is like.  This past Friday morning I joined with a large throng of people to witness and celebrate the installation of Bishop Shannon Sherwood Johnston as the 13^th bishop of the diocese of Virginia.  The service was fittingly full of pomp and heraldry, with extra choral pieces and solos, ringing of bells, a grand procession in and out of the bishops and large altar party, and a gospel read in two languages, and a sermon from our Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Shori.   St. Paul’s, Richmond was appropriately packed full of people for the service.  Some faces I recognized, but by in large the faces held no special memory or even recognition for me.  I was surrounded mostly by strangers.

Like most, I think, I felt a bit anxious surrounded by so many unknown folk.  To combat this discomfort and the tinge of fear in my chest I sometimes remember to try an interesting mental and spiritual exercise.  I let my eyes wander around the gathered throng.  Into the eyes and faces I glance, trying to stretch my imagination in order to add more to the story of these gathered friendly strangers.  Nothing fanciful or salacious, just letting my mind consider that each of these people has the same amount and variety of life story that I and those I know well have, lives full of twists and turns, wisdom learned from successes and failures, stresses and worries about loved ones and security, all just like me.  Instead of trying to ignore them and the anxiety caused by their strangeness I tried to see them and imagine if only for a brief glimpse the importance and love that the common thread of all creation sees in them.  I am told that this is a wonderful exercise of prayer and praise, to not focus on our human relationships, but to instead imagine in our minds eye the faint glimpse of how God sees each beloved child in his beautiful creation.

As in the past it was a warm fuzzy moment for me.  How lovely they must be to the one who truly, deeply knows and loves them!  And what a demonstration of my limitations, that if only because I will never get to meet them and dedicate the precious mental circuits in my brain to learning about them and remembering them, I cannot even come close to beholding these precious creatures the way God does.  A love unlike any other pours out of God’s heart to each and every one of his beloved children, and we can barely see it, let alone understand it.

That love, the love God has for each of us, is an undergirding theme in today’s lessons.  Surely Paul’s words to the Corinthians, that often used wedding text, is all about love.  And with a  little stretch God’s call to Jeremiah is about Love, with its stirring reminder that in creating him, Jeremiah was built for his mission.  God is with him (and us) every moment, a loving presence if only evident in the fact of our existence.

This love of God for each of his creatures, a love ever present in the mind of God, may sound out of place when describing today’s gospel passage, though.  God is able, with scathing words, to incite an angry mob with his witness.  This does not seem to be the act of one who loves the gathered group.

Jesus enters the synagogue and as we heard last week plainly tells the gathered attendees that their hopes and prayers, hopes and prayers that they have held for centuries, are now fulfilled in him.  But because they know Jesus so well, they have trouble believing Jesus, expressing their confusion by suggesting that Jesus is not being the good son of Joseph that they expect him to be. The crowd thinks they know Jesus, know him deep enough to doubt that he could be what he says he is. So Jesus rubs it in their face that two of their most beloved prophets had at times not favored them, but instead had favored foreigners.  Incensed by this insult to their long held hopes, hopes held by parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, hopes held for generations, the gathered folk become incensed.  They drag Jesus out to a cliff, and if it wasn’t for Jesus’ divine power, we would be celebrating a rocky gulch and cliff face instead of a wooden Cross.  These days a congregation would probably just get up and leave, not drag the good preacher out in the street and try to kill him (at least I hope!).

Jesus’ words and actions are not petty or puerile, they are not some attempt to insult his family and friends.  Jesus’ words are urgent words for his beloved community.  Wake up, Jesus says!  Even your so called beloved prophets abandoned you at times.  I am with you now!  This is God’s love poured out for you.  Even the great prophets were not able to display God’s love like this.  And yet, unable to accept this love, the crowd, insulted and afraid, turns on Jesus.  This rejection mirrors the greater rejection coming at the other end of the Gospel story.  The same rejection of the greater love of God, played out on a larger stage than Jesus’ hometown.

Our reaction to God’s love is why loving is so hard for us.  This is why the lovely words of Paul in his letter to Corinthians makes a not so good reading for a wedding!  The love Paul writes about, full of patience and kindness and generosity, is not so evident in God’s children.  Paul is describing the love that only God can have.  Paul, like Jesus, has had his share of beatings and death sentences passed on him.  Paul knows the shallowness of human hearts as he writes his letter to the struggling church in Corinth, whose factions based on custom and social standing were tearing apart the fragile community. Get over it, Paul yells at his distant flock, there is a greater love for us to worship.  A love willing to tell you the truth and love you all the way to his own death.

It is precisely this love that we are sent forth to testify to.  That Jesus is willing to enter in and if necessary tell us that all of our hopes, based on story or human relationship or tradition, is worthless.  The only love that brings justice and peace is the love held in the heart of God, a love so evident in the life of Jesus his Son.

For us, telling the truth in love to this world means telling the truth about what love really means.  That we are woefully inadequate at loving each other, but we are not without a love that rescues us from our own shortsightedness.  The best voice to hear that from is from a friend, a neighbor, a relative, just like Jesus speaking in his home town. We may have to risk some, probably not a trip to a local cliff, but perhaps incredulous looks, uncomfortable moments in conversations, and maybe even someone being angry that we would bring up this love, that we place our faith in a love that outshines our own.

And it is from this greater love that we minister.  If we open our hearts and wallets to help in the world, yet do it because we love, then we fall short.  We have ample evidence of how we are unable to love, how our hearts are riven with faults.  Our actions as Christians are based not on our petty human love but on the greater, more substantial love of the one who is willing to tell us the truth.  We help in Haiti, in Mississippi and New Orleans, in Fairfax, in Washington, D.C., even amongst ourselves not out of our own woefully selfish love, but out of the love of Jesus Christ.  It is his love that leads us, his love that directs us, his love that welcomes us when we stretch our minds and hearts to consider, even for one instant, what love really means.

In his name, we find that love active and vibrant in the world.  This is the love that our friends and neighbors are missing when they do not join us here at God’s table and as we extend God’s hands into the world.  This is the love missing when in anger and fear we protect ourselves.  This is the love that we catch pale glimpses of when we dare to imagine seeing the world not through our own eyes, but through God’s.  Loving is hard, in large part because we need to turn ourselves over to the only one who can truly love.  Letting our hearts beat not for ourselves but for God is the hard work of loving we are called and led to through Jesus Christ.

Jesus declares that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.  If the eyes of those in the synagogue began that day blind to this truth, then upon hearing Jesus’ proclamation those who believed were opened to this new light, this good news now in the world.  Those unable to have their eyes opened to this news remained blind, left in the dark to the truth that stood before them.  God no longer would live separated from his creation.  His favor, once only a prophecy and a prayer, was now made real.  God embodied, enfleshed, incarnate stood before them then and now us.

This incredible light and truth is something we as faith-followers meditate on as part of our spiritual journeys.  We never fully can grasp this truth, that God, the creator and lover of all creation, became a part of creation.  It would be like the potter becoming part of the pot, the weaver part of the tapestry, the carpenter a part of the house.  It does not make sense to us.  Theologically though it is essential, and even more as part of the Israelite prophecy God becoming human is the proof.  No matter what happens to us in this mortal life, God is with us.  God is willing to be human.

In response to God’s willingness to be human, we place this God in the center of our world. Into the milieu of human life we try our best to center ourselves and our communities on God.  The phrase “Christ Centered” tries to capture this desire of ours.  Christ Centered means that we know that God’s calling to us is primary, that God’s mission for us is first for us, and that where we end up is ultimately in God’s hands as well.  Our entire lives, both individually and corporately, are entirely found in God, who creates us, sends us forth, and through the grace of God in Christ ultimately receives us back, no matter our faults and failings. Our whole existence is fully grounded in God.

Hence Jesus’ title “The Christ”, the anointed, the Messiah.  Yes the term Messiah has changed meaning over time.  The Israelites first believed that the Messiah would be an ‘ultimate warrior’, who would restore the Israelite people through Earthly victory.  We have since learned that God’s plan for his Messiah leads to a remarkably different victory, for to God earthly victory is worth little.  Victory for God is over death itself, over the sin that leads to death itself.  Victory for God is redemption from human failings and faults, and this is the victory that Christ leads us to.  Not a victory on human terms in human time frames, but it is to victory on God’s terms in God’s time frame that The Christ leads us.  Being Christ Centered means being centered on the one who leads us through to God’s understanding, even if we never fully understand God’s mind.

Yet as we try to live into a Christ Centered life, we are challenged to make the mystery of God’s victory a reality for our day to day lives, and here is where we run into difficulty.  As much as meditating on the incredible nature of Christ’s actions for us in God’s eyes is difficult (who ever fully understands salvation anyway), so too is living a life that honors Jesus’ work, a life with the Christ at its center.

Over the past several years a research project has been studying Episcopal Identity.  This project has recently begun releasing some data, and several folks have begun drawing out some conclusions and reflections from this wealth of conversations, surveys, and analysis.  If you want to see one such reflection, the Episcopal Church’s website has downloadable copies of a document called “Around One Table”, written by VTS professor David Gortner.  In it the Rev. Dr. Gortner pulls out some of the core identity phrases of Episcopalians and wouldn’t you know but the top choice is that we are “Christ Centered”.  Not that other church’s are not Christ Centered, but that we recognize this is one of the central concepts to our understanding of what the life of the Episcopal church.  Other central concepts include of course our beloved BCP, Scripture, Sacraments, and another fuzzy theological term “Incarnational”.  But again, number one on our list is Christ Centered.  Yet the data and analysis from the Identity Project indicated that there is wide disagreement over just what this phrase “Christ Centered” means.  Three general understandings emerged.  One, that Christ Centered means that we place the Eucharist, the sharing of Christ’s body and blood, at the center of our worship lives.  Another understanding of Christ centered is that of Christ drawing all to himself, no matter what might separate humans.  Radical inclusiveness then becomes the act of a Christ Centered community.  And the third understanding that emerged from the analysis is that of living a holy life, in that if Christ is the center of our lives, then we should live Christ life lives.

In summary, we have three branches of understanding Christ Centeredness.  Communion, Inclusion, and Holiness.   Seems simple then to pursue these three avenues of centering our lives on Christ!  Yet what happens when we try to decide what a holy life consists of?  Do we not find ourselves deciding who is and is not being holy, thus being a little less inclusive?  And what of pursuing Communion as central, do we then find ourselves disregarding how we live out the rest of our days when we are apart from the table?  In fact, pursuing any of these avenues for living into a Christ Centered life lead to conflict with others!

The desire to live Christ centered lives, instead of providing security and contentment, drives us to tear ourselves apart, for in trying to run the race completely in any one direction we end up tearing away part of what it means to be Christ centered.

And yet, this very tearing apart is Christ centered in itself.  Christ announcing the truth of what he is in that synagogue was every bit as important to the story as Jesus’ choice to hang on the Cross.  The life of one called into Christ Centeredness is every bit as dicey as the life that Jesus led himself.  Boldly proclaiming the truth of God’s light in the world even as that light is being torn apart by that very mission.  If not for the blessing of Christ’s action in God’s eyes and in the precious food he provides us day to day living a Christ Centered life would be impossible.  The Good News of Christ is not a comfort or a blanket, but a calling to a life torn apart and remade, not in human terms of safety and peace but in God’s eternal plan for salvation and peace.  This is the peace we share, that passes our understanding.  This is the joy we celebrate as God announces his light to the world, this is the Christ Centered life we share.

John picks up on Isaiah’s words and announces to all of creation a specific calling.  To baptism, John cries, calling forth all to pass through the waters.  John’s faith is firmly grounded in Isaiah’s words.  John recognizes that God is present in this baptism, for John knows that the baptism he offers only calls people to the water; it is God who goes with the willing into the water, and more than that it is God whose fire and flame try and temper those who pass through to the other side.

Today we celebrate baptism, both in the retelling of the story of Jesus entering the Jordan’s holy flow and in the beautiful children we baptize today, precious William and Luke who will come to the waters with us and accept God’s hand as they pass through.  The water of baptism is more than a personal adventure for the faithful follower of Christ that each of us baptized have become.  Baptism recalls and defines the gracious act of Jesus, who chooses to join with us in earthly life, with all of existence’s dirt and grime gathering upon him as he walks in God’s fallen creation.  God himself in perfection and wholeness chooses the path of one who collects the soil and dis-ease of earthly life, and so to the waters Jesus goes, a swim in the Jordan that for no heavenly reason he plunges into.  Jesus, as God, whole and perfect, does not need to be made clean!  Yet into the water he goes, accepting the fullness of human life, and taking the lead in where that life must go.  Jesus diving into the water is part of the sacred act of God’s redemption, a redemption God wishes to give to all, for out of love God has chosen us.

Hear part of Isaiah’s prophecy again.  Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.  Even though we collect the dirt of sin and brokenness in our existence, God loves us. Each one of us.  We are precious.  And why not?  We are his creation, his creatures.  God could no more dislike us as we could dislike something we have made.

(skip at 10 AM) You might have heard that wonderful acerbic description of certain folks, “Someone only a mother could love”.   Someone only a mother could love is a backhanded compliment if you think about it.  Sure they are unlovable by those around them (hence the backhand), but they are loved, and that is a gift of precious strength.  We have plenty of examples of those who find hard to love.  More than those who frustrate us or who unnerve us there are more extreme examples.  Criminals come to mind, those who are tried and convicted and those who have collected so much power they seem to exist above human law.  No matter.  Their actions and personalities make it almost impossible for our hearts to open up and love.  More poignantly than these unsavory characters are those whose mental or physical challenges make us too uncomfortable, whose situation and challenges remind us too much of our weaknesses and make us squeamish and unsettled.  Recently there have been advertisements from groups looking for financial help in finding medical care for third world children born with congenital issues.  The pictures they use are startling and upsetting.  I have found myself, quite sadly, having to turn the page quickly, the photo too unnerving for me to look at.  We find ourselves unable to open our hearts and love these precious children of God, if only because of our limited ability to see.  Our own fear blocks us from loving.  Pity perhaps, but for many the challenge to love is too great.  At least there is a mother somewhere for this precious child, for weak human hearts sometimes meet barriers they cannot scale or break through.

(Pick up at 10) For God, there is no barrier to love.  God acts without fear.  God’s eyes are as open and willing as the mother, whose child cannot stray far enough to ever leave the protective warmth of their mother’s heart.  God’s heart is open and filled with passion for each and every piece of his creation, and God’s love pours out freely for all.

God’s love leads him to accept the dirtiness of our existence and choose to fearlessly plunge into the Jordan.  God’s love, greater than our imagining, accepts the unacceptable brokenness of human existence and chooses the baptism of release.  And as Jesus descends, the invitation is offered back to the rest of God’s broken and beloved creation.  Jesus’ footsteps become the invitation for us to follow, for us to become fearless and fling ourselves not into the death that deep water can bring, but to a death that leads to the life that living in God’s embrace promises.

And the calling does not end at the surface of the water as our newly cleaned bodies break the surface.  The calling leads on. John knows that baptism is more than a cleaning ritual; baptism calls the faithful through the water to the test of life lived on the other side. A trial of fire, John says.

That life may be dangerous and hard, yet hear where the call is coming from. The call to baptism that John gives voice to is sent from our creator, but the invitation is made not in anger or in a desire for justice.  God’s call to us is made in love, a love beyond all others, a love that has no equal.  For God invites us to the waters and into a relationship through and beyond them to remind us of his love in creating us and to prove his love in redeeming us and blessing us.  The blessing is to be joined with Christ on the other side, called to be with Jesus, to follow Jesus, to learn from Jesus.

This calling, to follow and truly to be Christ like in our lives, means confronting the very problems that Jesus did.  Immediately after his baptism Jesus’ life has him in the desert confronting his demons, the demons of selfishness and fear that could keep Jesus from completing his mission. Past this confrontation Jesus is sent into the world, casting out demons, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, providing for those with nothing, making peace where there is anger, cleaning the disease from the holy places, and finally announcing the Good News of what Jesus’ arrival holds for all.

Joined with Jesus on the other side of the waters of baptism we can overcome our demons, and his mission becomes ours.   If hearing about it here in the scriptures, sermons, and the baptismal creed we will soon recite is not enough, as you leave this place you will be charged to go forth.  If nothing else our worship together is meant to remind you of and reinforce your baptismal calling, to go forth and be God’s hands, feet, and voice in the world.  All because you passed through the water, a passage you remember, celebrate, and reaffirm today.  All because a community of faith and a family full of love brought you to the water’s edge, knowing that the only life available for you is the life lived on the other side, bonded forever to Jesus in God’s mission.  All of us, from eldest leader to youngest newborn child, have a place on the other side of the water, ever growing in the knowledge and love of God and of our savior, redeemer, and co-worker, Jesus Christ.

(skip at 10 ) As part of God, working in the world, barriers to love cease.  Criminals can be loved and cherished, even if safely placed where they cannot hurt us.  Those beyond the law can be ignored, for our lives are tied not to their unwanted success but to a mission that leaves their exploits as miniscule and worthless.  And God’s love pouring  into and through us empowers us to overcome pity and fear and reach out our loving hearts to those with challenges in life.  This is but a small window in to the world of the baptized, for Jesus’ ministry extends to every corner of existence that needs reclaiming.

(pick up at 10) Our lives, securely on the other side of the waters, joined with Christ in the work of redeeming creation, is ready to be sent forth.  Lives called through the waters into new life, lives called and sent.  Lives grounded in God’s love that is made known in baptism.

Mary’s song, the Magnificat, is often called a song of praise.  Mary, the young teenage woman, is told she is going to have a child, and then she goes to see her cousin, who confirms the news that this child is not just any child.  Mary is pregnant with the Son of Man, God with Us.  It is her first pregnancy, her first child, and she is encountering all the thoughts and feelings that go along with that blessed passage of womanhood. And so her song bursts forth.

Excitement may not be the only emotion Mary felt in her heart and soul, however.  Pregnancies do not always lead to happy endings.  Mary had certainly by now in her life experienced relatives, friends and neighbors whose pregnancies did not turn out well, she would have known others who did not even survive the journey herself.  Pregnancy two thousand years ago was not quite as safe a 9 month process as it is today.

To us, being 9 months pregnant means that the journey is almost over and the celebration of new life is about to begin.  Infant and maternal mortality is dramatically more rare, and in its way the loss of a pregnancy or a child at birth is infinitely more tragic to us because of its rarity. The joy of pregnancy reaching its full term is an more accepted standard to us, with all the advantages of modern medicine, prenatal screening and tests, nutritional advice, and labor preparation.  The ninth month is the exciting time.  Our fears are centered on enduring the trial of labor and the first days and weeks of parenthood (and I’ll have to ask my spouse which one was harder).  The fear of not surviving is not one most grapple with as they progress through the trimesters.

For Mary, pregnancy and its terminus in arduous labor may not have been such a joy inducing concept.  The waiting may not have been so much about eyes, ears, and ten fingers and toes so much as anxious waiting, perhaps even terrified dread, for the result of this pregnancy.  A healthy baby and healthy mommy would be something worth worrying about, something for which seeking out consolation and support would be a necessity.  Pregnancy is rarely a time for confronting one’s mortality now, but for Mary and Elizabeth, this inner struggle might have been much more urgent.

Mary’s choice to go and see Elizabeth speaks of these mixed emotions.  Yes Mary’s older cousin, who is six month’s pregnant, would be someone to celebrate with.  But also Elizabeth provides other elements through her reception of Mary.  She is much older, a more maternal figure to Mary, and like Mary her pregnancy seems out of place.  Elizabeth was supposed to be past the age for pregnancy.  Elizabeth’s situation is as strange as Mary.  Solace and assurance are exchanged between the two miraculous bearers of life.  Solace for the fears each feels as they progress through pregnancy and as they confront the disbelieving neighbors and family.  Assurance that there is at least one person who will believe the miraculous nature of their situation.  In each other’s company Mary and Elizabeth find companions for an anxious and unsure journey.  A journey that is full of hope, yes, but also full of bad outcomes and less than joyous events.   Elizabeth provides Mary with encouragement as she enters the beginning of her journey; Mary provides Elizabeth with validation that this miraculous pregnancy so late in life is but a part of a greater miracle that she is blessed to participate in.

From this place of shared solace, support, and celebration, Mary breaks forth into song.  Her first words, “My soul magnifies the Lord”, leap forth, describing a heart that longs to hear its music echoed and resonated in the heart of God.  God’s heart hears Mary’s anxiety, fear, and jubilation and answers.  Her soul itself, that seed of fire implanted in God’s creation, leaps as it finds its essence accepted and loved by its creator.  Yes, your fears are heard, your anxieties understood, and your excitement enjoyed.  For you, Mary, are bearing God, and you and all of creation are saved.  God accepts your fear and anxiety, and so your soul is filled with rejoicing.  Yet another gift from God.

The Magnificat is not just a song of celebration.  It is a song that provides strength and courage.  Mary’s Magnificat echoes Isaiah’s prophecy of God calling out “Comfort ye my people”.  Mary’s litany is the extension of love that we hold onto as we pray the 23^rd psalm, the Lord’s prayer, and our best loved collects.  Please God, give us the courage to magnify the Lord as we face the daunting tasks ahead.  Help us to hold onto hope through the darkness, help remind us that you not only have the power to save, but that you choose to do so.  Your power has, is, and will overcome the darkness.  Your Son does reign, your creation is made complete, your precious people are redeemed.  Help us to know this as we am confronted by dark fear and anxious waiting.  For it is in waiting in the darkness that we find your light beaming into our lives, leading us as the your answer to her fears leads Mary.  Lead us to find our souls magnifying the Lord.

There is a difference between a challenge encourages us to give our best efforts, and a challenge that is meant to coerce us into a certain way of acting.  The danger of scripture is that it is very easy to use the sacred text to do either, to coerce or encourage.  Our Holy Scripture, the source of all things necessary for salvation, has a great level of gravity in our discourse.  There is nothing like the power of quoting from the scriptures when trying to win a moral or ethical argument.

And so when we hear the Bible challenging us, we must be very careful how we hear the Bible’s intent.  We hear today the familiar story (and I do not mean to overtly challenge you if you did not think it familiar!) of the widow’s mite.  We hear of an old widow giving all that she had, way beyond a tithe, way beyond a generous offering, to the temple treasury.  The lasting image of the passage is Jesus commenting on how great her sacrifice is, that in giving all that she had she has done better than those who have given great amounts out of their abundance.

The story has been used often to propel a stewardship campaign. We lift up the widow who lived out the duty to support the temple with her incredible gift.  Thus shouldn’t we?  You can already feel the coercion in that line of rhetoric.  The recipe has all the right ingredients:  a paragon of virtue for an example, a little dash of guilt, and that most important Bible quote.  I can sense the wallets being reluctantly opened already.

But wait, we should consider how the Bible is being used to challenge.  Perhaps the Bible should not be used to coerce ourselves through guilt. It may be a surprise to consider that Jesus might not have been trying to coerce folks to give money through his recognition and praise of the widow.  Some clues open this alternate understanding of the story.  It is odd that Jesus does not point to a reward for this woman, either heavenly or otherwise.  His listeners would be familiar with the story from 1 Kings of Elijah and the poor mother, who is reassured that after giving her last bit of food to the prophet Elijah that God would take care of her until the next rains came.  Yet here, this poor widow is given no such promise. Certainly if the point is to coerce folks into faithful giving for the upkeep of the temple this poor widow would be promised a reward like the old woman was promised by Elijah!  And yet Jesus does not offer some reward or remark on this poor widow’s future.

What is clear is that even in her need (the Greek that lies under the translators choice of ‘poverty’) this poor woman is being taught to give it to the temple treasury, the receptacle of all free-will offerings to the temple.  Jesus praises the woman for her willingness to act on the commandments of her faith, and her sacrifice mirrors Jesus’ own offering of all of himself, an offering very soon to come in Mark’s gospel. Jesus’ praise does not, however, suggest an acceptance of a social system that would leave a widow so destitute that two small copper coins would be her entire living.  Instead we have Jesus’ castigation of the scribes who would eat up this widow’s house.  Beware the scribes who eat up widow’s houses, Jesus warns just before this passage. Here Jesus, while praising the woman herself, condemns the culture that would not first help to support the poor out of their wealth before teaching of sacrifice and giving.

It would be easy to quote only Jesus’ praise of the old widow and then gently or not so gently coerce the faithful to do likewise.  But underneath this text, as in all the Bible, is God, God who first loves the world into being, who desires not sacrifice but love. Love God with all our hearts and souls and minds and beings, and love our neighbors as ourselves.  When we forget that lens then the temptation to see the Bible as a set of rules to follow and a set of lessons to be used for coercion becomes our corruption.  Without the foundation of love we can fall into the trap of pulling single lines from the Bible and turn them into guilt inducing weapons. But with the firm foundation of God’s all abiding love, the Bible instead becomes an invitation to relationship, where a poor woman is not a symbol of sacrifice but a symbol of injustice. For in the Bible it is not the woman’s action that is as important so much as the call to action that it stirs up in us as God presents us with those who are in such need.  Here is a poor woman, God says.  And our first response, out of a love, should be “Why is she poor?”

Jesus wants us to adopt his sense of love for all of creation, and here he presents his disciples and us with an opportunity for relationship.  Who is more worthy to be in relationship with, the soulless scribes who would bankrupt the widows of the world, or the poor widow herself, who in her faith is willing to sacrifice all for God?

And once we enter into relationship with this poor widow, we cannot leave her alone.  As our connection to her grows, her poverty pulls at us.  We see ourselves and our gracious, gifted lives, and then see her and her need.  This where relationship leads, for through relationship, we discover ourselves more deeply.  We discover our gifts, we find what God has given us so graciously.  With that discovery, God’s love is poured out through us as we extend our loving hearts.  You felt it when you stopped to consider why the poor widow was poor.  And if this poor widow draws that reaction from us, what of the poor in the world today?  Relationship is the driving force of God’s message to us.  Relationship leads us to our mission and our aim.  Through relationship we discover more deeply our own identity and God’s calling to us, calling us into the fields to work for his mission.

But we must be willing to be in relationship.  Those we meet, those God chooses to bring into our lives, those that we discern God calling us into relationship with us, each of these relationships draws from us the same discovery: not a lesson in how we should live, not a guilt laden coercive act of atonement, but a striving to be even more deeply entwined in relationship.  Once there, entwined in relationship, the love that God inspires in us does all the work of mission.

Today you are given the opportunity to witness and celebrate the many ways that Good Shepherd is in relationship to those around us, both in our local community and in the greater world, as we explore the Outreach ministries of our parish.  The first part of our journey is to discover that you are in relationship already.

You are already in relationship with the needs of the world.  God has brought us into these relationships not as a task and burden to overwhelm us, but as our path to discovering ourselves and the mission he has given us.  For in our discovery of the world’s needs we then pick up the banner of God and act.  We live more deeply into our calling as Christ’s Body and that body breaks open in love.  This is God’s response to the world.  No matter what the tragedy we encounter, God’s response is the invitation to relationship that leads to mission.  We are not being guilted into action! We are being offered a yet more perfect way of living as God creatures, a way discovered and fulfilled by relationship.  A relationship whose guidelines and purpose are ultimately demonstrated for us by Jesus Christ himself.  A life offered as a relationship with God, a life poured out in love.

Lamenting is not one of our strong suits.  We find it easy to rejoice in the telling of a Gospel that lifts our spirits with joy.  We sing songs that lift our hearts, bringing joy to us individually and communally.  We even hold celebrations in our community as often as we can.  Like they say, we do not need much of an excuse to hold a party!  But we find it hard to testify to our faith in the midst of suffering.  We find it hard to share our pain and grief with God, feeling somehow like we are damaged and broken because of our grief and pain and thus somehow unworthy of sharing all of ourselves with God.  We find our pain is somehow not worthy of sharing with God.  But a lament is precisely the communication with God that a faithful person gives when confronted with pain and loss.

Job is our archetype for such a person.  Job’s words are full of the conflicted and troubled emotions and reasoning of one who is forced to confront the apparent injustice and suffering of their situation.  Job’s experience, and the his faithful exploration of lament itself, teaches us profound things about our faith.  We place our faith in the one who has created us, redeemed us, and even sanctifies our lives, yet we often find ourselves aflicted with anger, sadness, frustration, grief, and loss.  Here, in the place of such confusion, a lament is our proper offering to God.

Job’s words have been turned to by those in the midst of such pain and suffering.  Funerals are good examples.  One of the readings we can choose are from Job: “I know that my redeemer lives”. Beyond that instance we often site Job as an example of one who demonstrates patient suffering, the cliche phrase ‘the patience of Job’. And yet Job’s story does not solve our problem with suffering, a problem of a God who creates out of love and our circumstance so often full of pain a grief.  Job instead is a companion and an example for us of where a faith journey can take us.  Job’s journey is ours whenever we find our lives descending into places where we would rather not go.

Poor Job!  Today we hear Job lament his need for God, his need to find God and complain to him. Job’s story is a good one, maybe a bit long due to the length and artistry of some of the conversations captured in it’s verses, but the arc of the story, with Job starting out prosperous, then descending through suffering, and then rising again through God’s beneficent action is both pleasing and satisfying for us.

Job’s story begins with him, prosperous and respected, with 7 children, flocks and bountiful fields, wealthy and respected in his community.  And the Satan approaches God and says, “Job is only faithful because he is wealthy! Take that away and his will turn from his faith.  Like all humans their faith is weak.”.  God allows Satan to take away Job’s wealth and family to prove to Satan that Job is faithful, and sure enough, Job’s words ring out, lamenting his situation but placing his faith in God, the one who created him and blessed him with that fleeting wealth.  Satan is not done, though.  He challenges God and says that Job is only faithful because he is healthy.  Let me take that away from Job and he will turn from you.  God says, just do not kill him, and Job will remain faithful.  And so Satan inflicts Job with painful boils, so horrible that Job sits in ashes and scrapes his skin with a piece of broken pottery, the scraping actually feeling better than the festering sores.  And yet Job remains faithful.  Oh I suffer God.  I do not know why, but I hope you will deliver me from this someday.  Job laments, his faith never wavering, even as he confronts his awful situation.  Job does not know why God has let this happen to him, but that does not change the fact that God has created Job, and that God loves him even in his pitiful state.

It is at this point that three friends arrive and argue with Job.  How nice that they would come and argue with their suffering friend!  Their argument is this: Job, you must have done something wrong to earn this misfortune.  Before, you were righteous and God rewarded you, but now you are suffering.  You must have erred; search your life and confess what you have done wrong and then God will restore you.

How often do we fall for this way of thinking.  An economy built on our actions.  In other faith traditions they call this Karma, where ones actions earn one a result.  Good acts earn good results, bad actions earn punishments and suffering.  We fall into this trap as well, and here we have three of Job’s friends insisting that Job has done something wrong.

Job, though, will have none of this.  The words we heard today are Job’s lament after his friends have made their arguments.  Job accepts God’s placement of him in his predicament not because it is the result of some earthly judgment. Job knows he has done nothing wrong.  If only he could make his argument, submit his appeal to the great Judge.  But so deep is Job’s suffering that he is having trouble finding God.  He turns left and right, forward and backward, yet the God he so longingly wants to make his complaint to is just beyond his sight.

Job’s health and wealth are restored to him at the end of the story.  God redeems his servant.  Yet more importantly is that Job does not believe he has earned this as a reward for his faithfulness.  After getting to speak with God, Job admits that he has no right to ask for his wealth and happiness.  If anything, Job is humbled again before his Creator, the one who loved him into being itself.

The end of Job’s story is one of redemption in his earthly time, and this is why it is such a satisfying story for us.  But Job’s lesson is not fully heard.   Instead, some of the language of God’s coming redemption, of God, in his time, making he world right, gets picked up by other writers and is found in other stories. One part of the story of Job has another friend come, and speak to just this point, that God in his time, in the fullness of time, will restore the world.  These words get echoed in the words of the prophets, and a strong contingent in the Jewish faith begin to look with hope for a Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed, who will lead the Israelites to their greater future. A Messiah who will lead an human army, to human victory in human time for human power and success.

But the Messiah that comes fails these hopeful people, much as he fails Job’s friends who are looking for a transaction to satisfy their needs. Job does not win back his wealth from God.  Job’s faith leads him deeper into his loss and suffering, not out of it, and in the end Job accepts God’s love for him not as a return on Job’s investment in argument or persistence, but instead Job accepts God’s restoring his life and wealth as further proof that his redemption is out of Job’s hands and completely in God’s hands.  Whether or not Job is restored is not important; that Job is loved by God no matter his station or situation is paramount.  And like Job those who accept the Messiah into their lives learn the same lesson.  It is not our hands, our thoughts and actions, that earn us salvation, either from earthly disaster or from everlasting damnation.  The power to set the world right is solely in God’s hands, and what’s more God chooses to act, sending his son to set the world right.  Accepting the Messiah means accepting the truth that God has already done the work of making the world right, and we are in the midst of seeing it happen.  The Christ did not come to set the world right 2000 years ago.  He came to set the world right not at that one time, but for all time, in the fullness of time, in God’s time. Whether we experience a more just world and existence in our time is a not the point; we have little control over that.  But the promise of righteousness has been made and sealed by the only one who can provide it.  The one who restores Job, the one who hears us even when we cannot find him, the one who sends his Son to redeem the world.

Would that none of us should experience suffering!  If only we should never encounter loss!  For us, even when lost in the midst of our pain, Job’s example, echoed through the other laments of our biblical text, carries us through the darkness.  Job’s words are a candle we can carry, a companion on the journey into the depths.  When the hand of God is heavy upon you, Job’s lament is there with you. And we carry our faith in Job’s very words: “I know that my redeemer lives”.  With that as our foundation, our lament is valid, our place in God’s hands secure.