“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers.’”
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What do you really want? Really?
We all want lots of things, including the basics: real food, warm shelter, good music, good art. We want silence and stillness in this wild world. Maybe you want cookies with hot coffee. I surely do. We have a lot of cookies waiting for us at coffee hour.
But really, seriously, ultimately, viscerally – what do you really want?
When I talk about my career, I say that I really want reconciliation. I may say it often enough to try your patience. For a decade I ran a private therapy practice for couples, a day job that was all about relationship repair. The problem was, I didn’t like running a one-person business. It felt lonely. And working on one relationship at a time felt piecemeal, disjointed. So I changed gears and deepened my involvement in faith communities. I doubled down on being a faith leader. I’m okay with counseling couples, but I really want reconciliation in all its forms, so I want to see it happen in whole communities.
When I watch television, movies, or plays, I’m always drawn to the reconciliation stories. In the drama series called Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet, two friends are in wrenching conflict for many long months, and when they finally reconcile, they do it without words: One of them begins to weep, and the other embraces her, and they cry together in the kitchen, slowly falling to their knees, then sitting on the floor, just holding each other. “This is it,” I thought, when I saw that. “This is heaven. This is what I really want. This is what I want my whole life to be about.”
Here, in this faith community, I sometimes wonder: Is reconciliation really happening here? And if it is, am I helping make that happen? Sometimes, in the reconciliation department, I talk prettier than I achieve. But I honestly think the answer is yes, we are doing reconciling work here, at least some of the time, if not always in obvious ways. We are drawing new people into our community, week by week, and when I meet with them I try to listen not only to why they came here the first time, but why they keep coming back. And I hear stories of reconciliation in many of their answers. Reconciliation with self, with God, with the church, with one or more people in their lives. Sometimes we come here to reconcile with people who have died. We come here to talk with them.
But there are other things besides reconciliation that people really want.
Some of us come here because we really want an answer to an ultimate question, an existential question about the meaning of suffering, or our destiny beyond death. When you attend church, you are encouraged to contemplate the deeper questions. We get quiet here; we pray here. As we sing in today’s psalm, we cultivate peace in these walls, and quietness in these towers. All this peace and quiet helps us think, breathe, feel… and focus.
And then, still others come here because they want – maybe you really want – justice and peace in the world. (If I want reconciliation, it’s because repaired relationships serve that larger goal of justice and peace.) But this particular want — this desire for justice and peace — can sometimes feel frustrating and flat. What are ‘justice and peace,’ really? Do we have to overthrow the whole capitalist and militarist system to achieve them? Probably. Jesus and his first followers stood defiantly against the whole giant human machine of militant injustice.
But if we somehow manage to do that – if, by gathering in faith communities, humans manage to dismantle the whole system – how will our elders be able to afford assisted living? Younger adults can’t afford rent, let alone buy a house, in this system, but how would we empower them to do that in the new world we build? Justice and peace are what many of us really want, maybe all of us (hopefully all of us!), but we may have to work very hard just to bend the arc of history a little bit in the direction of justice and peace, one SPiN wagon at a time, one protest at a time, one visited sick person at a time, one repaired marriage at a time, one healthy divorce at a time, one forgiven wrongdoer at a time, one carbon offset at a time, one affordable house at a time.
I am going on about this – about our deepest wants – because we are not going to build a useful, healthy, and truly Christian community here if we dodge this deep discernment.
As a way to guide this spiritual work, take note: Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the first day of a new year in our life of faith. The First Sunday of Advent has a New Year’s ‘vibe.’ Gen Z might say that Advent One is “giving New Year’s.” Today’s a great day to take stock in the year gone by, and contemplate how we might work for what we really want in the year to come.
Are we hoping for the dawning of justice and peace, in this new year of grace? Of course. Again, some of you want that more than you want anything else, and if so, that desire of yours is deeply, profoundly Christian. I would like to see the gleam of that dawn right now, today. I want us all to get what we really want, the one thing we seek with the depths of our being, not just in the faraway future, but today, on Advent One.
Here is a way to get what we want, even if it takes all our lives. Here is how we do it, beginning today, even though we know we won’t accomplish everything in one lifetime. We need to climb a high hill, and as we climb, we need to sing an old song. Climb a high hill; sing an old song.
The hill we’re climbing was once a literal hill, a physical mountain, and it still is that same real hill for many people: it is the mountain of Jerusalem. For our Israelite forebears, Jerusalem was where God rested among God’s people; it was the high-altitude city of the divinely anointed king; it was a citadel of justice, a gleaming hilltop of peace.
Our ancient Israelite forebears were pilgrims, climbing the Judean hill country, up out of the desert, up and up, until they arrived at the beloved city of God. Our proto-Christian forebears gratefully received this pilgrim tradition: you may recall that Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem. But the city of Jerusalem for the first Jesus followers evolved into something deeply symbolic, mostly because Christianity got going in the decades before and after Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome. Without the actual pilgrimage city, they had to use their imaginations.
As they reeled from imperial violence that ruined their home and persecuted their faith, the first Christians imagined an apocalypse of justice and peace: war-torn Jerusalem will be visited by the risen Christ in triumphant, dreadful splendor, a return that will remind humanity of the global destruction of the flood. All of the enemies of justice and peace will be taken away, washed away, erased from the face of the earth.
In the meantime, as the first Christians waited for the second coming, with Jerusalem in ruins, ‘Jerusalem’ became, for them, the emerging Church, expanding across the map. Even now, whenever we gather as Christians, we are Jerusalem; this is Jerusalem. Christ is returning here.
But ‘Jerusalem’ also came to represent the human soul, an individual temple of God: Our mystical path of prayer and praise, of prophecy and proclamation, of love and service — our inner mystical path is yet another Jerusalem, a little city gleaming atop every Christian pilgrim heart.
And finally, ‘Jerusalem’ has become for us Christians the end-of-time city of God, descending to earth in heavenly glory. So when we sing songs about our beloved dead, we sing of their arrival in the New Jerusalem, where there is no more death, and where the trees bear fruit for the healing of the nations.
And so, therefore, we strive to get what we really want here at St. Paul’s by climbing a hill to arrive at the Jerusalem of this community, the Jerusalem of God’s Paradise, the Jerusalem that shines on the hill of your own beating heart. We pull wagons of hot soup through the Jerusalem of Uptown Seattle, reconciling with self and neighbor every time we greet someone and extend our hands in common mission. We protest along Roy Street, an asphalt Seattle street now paved in Jerusalem gold by our prayers and our prophecies. We raise our children and revere our elders in this city, the city of Seattle but also, for us, the New Jerusalem, the city where God is reconciling with humanity.
Is it reconciliation I really want? Then I can find it here, in this work. Is it the meaning of life, or the answer to an ultimate question, that you really want? You can find it here, in this mystical city, as large and public as Seattle and as small and private as your own unique soul.
As for justice and peace, well, justice and peace is what we sing about in our pilgrim song, the song we sing as we labor together in the city of God, as we climb ever higher, always together, toward a better city, a healed city, a city of gladness, a city of joy.
Our song proclaims a city of justice and peace, even if we haven’t yet reached it, even if we haven’t yet built it, even if we still pray fervently and desperately to God for it, even if the city as it is right now just breaks our poor hearts, even if we won’t see Jerusalem fully realized in our lifetimes. We already sang this song today. It is a good song for climbing hills. It is a song that expresses every pilgrim’s deepest hopes.
Psalm 122 is one of the Psalms of Ascent, sung by ancient pilgrims while clambering up to Jerusalem. Maybe someone would shout a verse, and the people right behind them would shout another verse back, and up they would go. “The tribes go up!” some of them would yell. Then others would call back, “To praise the name of the Lord!” Today, this is our song.
In our singing of it, our hopes take on flesh, in our voices and then in our hands and feet. Verse by verse, we find strength and insight. Phrase by phrase, we hear other pilgrims joining our song, and we draw inspiration from them. Note by note, we gather with them and countless others into a throng that begins to arrive even today in the city of God.
As we climb this hill together, you may hear me singing out with particular gusto when we get to my favorite part of the song. These verses express my deepest hope for a city blessed with delicious, healing, restful reconciliation. It’s the little section of the song I like to sing just before I lie down for the night, tucking in after a day of work alongside you. This is my favorite part of our pilgrim song, on my lips and in my heart in this Advent season of longing, hope, expectation, and hard climbing:
“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers.’”
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Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year A), November 30, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44