I want to begin with a poem by Robert Frost.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

“So Eden sank to grief.” Today we step into Eden and watch as God walks at the time of the evening breeze, and confronts the human ones. God asks them God’s eternal question for all human beings: “Where are you?” Now, surely God knows where we are. But God knows that we do not know where we are. Like Eve, the mother of all human beings, we know we want wisdom. We know we want enlightenment. We know we want answers. Adam wants these things too, though he cowers in silence while the serpent shows Eve one path to wisdom. A problematic path — a terrible path! — but a path to wisdom nonetheless.

It’s a bad news / good news thing.

The bad news: times are not just hard; they’re terrible. Whole nations face existential catastrophe in the face of climate change. Countless millions of people are being caught up in global patterns of migration, and political resistance and violence confront them on nearly every shore. The U.S. is undergoing a long-delayed and much-needed, but searingly painful, reckoning with racism and systems of oppression. We are enduring a long era of partisan rancor that threatens democracy at a time when we need it the most, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. India is experiencing what can most accurately be called a holocaust as the coronavirus rages through the subcontinent, and there is a long list of nations that may not get adequately vaccinated before 2023. Life expectancy is leveling off, and for the first time in generations, younger citizens in this country do not expect to enjoy standards of living as good as—let alone better than—their parents.

I’d like to share three short illustrations of friendship, for our reflection.

I will begin by reciting a poem from the nineteen-eighties. It is actually a verse of lyrics from a song. If you recognize this song, well, that might say something about your age, but please know that I am also old enough to be deeply familiar with this shard of folk wisdom. Here’s the poem:

Thank you for being a friend,
traveled down a road and back again.
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a confidante.
And if you threw a party,
and invited everyone you knew,
you would see the biggest gift would be from me,
and the card attached would say,
“Thank you for being a friend.”

Andrew and I have made the dubious choice these past seventeen years to be the caretakers of dogs who belong to the noble but challenging dog breed of Shiba Inu. One optimistic website calls them “small, fox-like, happy dogs!” In their sunny description of the breed, that website under-reports the vexing dimensions of the Shiba personality.

One fine day in 2005, we took our first Shiba, Stella, to our friends’ house for a few hours. They had a fenced yard and Stella explored her new green paradise. But the gate was open. We spent nearly an hour running through that whole neighborhood, chasing Stella and strategizing in real time about how best to corner and catch her.

Easter is a season of great celebration, not just one day, but fifty days to sing and say alleluia at the news that God has brought life from death; that the powers of Sin and Death have been routed; that human history and even the destiny of the whole earth will culminate in the triumph of God.

But we are right to wonder with our brother Thomas at these things. We are right to feel fiercely a true desire to see these good things for ourselves, especially now in a time of plague, when the power of Death appears to be ascendant, and not routed at all; and when the forces of systemic racism and oppression seem to be strengthening, even spiraling; and when even the living planet itself is under existential threat.

They say there are five different kinds of love languages. What are they? Well —

There are Words of Affirmation: a verbal expression of love, from the simple “I love you” to something more complex, like, “I am sorry, and I want to make it right.” (My honest apology affirms your dignity as one who deserves my respect.)

Then there is Gift-Giving: that thoughtful present you weren’t expecting, wrapped tightly with a sprig of rosemary knotted into the ribbon.

If you visit Jerusalem, you will find many corners of the city where Franciscan caretakers say certain things happened: Jesus prayed in this olive grove here; he wept over the city there; he carried his cross along this covered, ancient, urban alleyway, now lined with shops for tourists.

There are two locations where tradition says Jesus was raised from the dead. One of them, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is probably the actual place. When you enter that church, you quickly come upon a stone slab where — or perhaps near the place where — the body of Jesus was prepared for burial. But if you turn to the right, you can climb a narrow, darkened, winding staircase that takes you up to a level of the church that encloses a hill, the hill, the hill of Golgotha. There, surrounded by a sea of flickering lanterns, you can glimpse — and even touch — some of the rock of the original hill, and say your prayers before an enormous, gilded icon of the crucified Christ.

If God were a superhero, all of this would be so much easier. Our enemies would be routed. Just when we think all is lost, God would soar back through the sky and destroy all evil.

If God were a sorceress, all of this would be so much easier. Drawing a sparkling flask from her robes, God would have just the right potion at hand to defeat the virus, and the magical skill to conjure enough vaccine for everyone.

Even if God were an efficient government agency — well, that is less colorful but even that kind of god would be reassuringly predictable. The temple staff in Jerusalem, whose tables Jesus dramatically overthrows: they seem quite comfortable with the vision of God as Bureaucrat.

If God were any of these things, all of this would be so much easier.

That God is not only not these things, but not a thing at all — that God does not exist in a finite way as we do, but rather is the essence of existence itself — well, this can often feel quite disappointing.

Jesus, like Noah, is in the wilderness, for 40 days, surrounded by wild beasts.

(40 days away from everyone and everything in your usual life: as we all probably know all too well by now, this is what the word quarantine means.)

Noah’s quarantine is a 40-day rainstorm on a fathomless, borderless ocean, locked in the belly of a boat with beasts of every kind. The quarantine of Jesus takes place in the arid moonscape of the Negev Desert, crawling with wild beasts. (Water can drown us, but its utter absence can also kill us.) Wilderness, then, is a deathly landscape of extremes. And in that dangerous place, we are surrounded by wild beasts. Not evil beasts, necessarily, but wild. They are not tame. They are not safe. They can be our companions, and even our teachers. But the wild beasts are not neutral. They are not fuzzy kittens or cute puppies.

Andrew and I have a friend named Virginia, and last month, Virginia’s mother, Janice, died just nine days after her 94th birthday.

It was a holy death. Janice was crowned with wisdom and full of years, a faithful matriarch, a masterful musician, a dauntless traveler, an avid Francophile, a delightful baker and artisan, a prophetic environmentalist, and an inspiring and skillful faith leader.

Janice’s life story inspires all who knew her to engage the world and all people as she did: with an open and bright mind, a creative and adventurous spirit, a full and faithful heart.

Even in death, Janice inspires ever more life.

Jonah!

I have spent a lot of time with Jonah. I invite you to join me as I take yet another look at this remarkable, absurd, and deeply human prophet.

We walk on the beach today alongside our brother Jonah. We catch up to him on a fresh new morning in his life, a second chance, a new day. He has just been through a rough period, to put it extremely mildly. He jumped on a boat bound for the end of the world — or western Spain, whichever came first — because he thought he could outrun the reach of God’s arm. But the sea stirred itself up at God’s command; and then Jonah’s ship seemed to come alive in roiling distress, threatening to break itself apart; and finally an enormous fish obeyed God and swallowed Jonah up, gulping him into the tomb — and also the womb — of her guts. (Unlike Jonah, the great fish dutifully does what God says.)

As the sun sets on Saturday evening, Sabbath draws to a close. The Jewish people celebrate this pivotal moment with the Havdalah, a ceremony with candlelight that recalls God’s separation, or division, of light from darkness, and waters from waters, in the creation. Sabbath gives way to the first day of the week, which is for Christians our Lord’s day, but for the Jewish people, an ordinary workday. On both ends of the Sabbath, at both its beginning and its end, there are rituals to mark this important reality: the reality that this day, the Sabbath day, is different. It is not a usual day. And so the Jewish people hail its arrival, and mark its passing.

One thing is not like another.

I love nightlights.

When we moved back to Seattle this spring, I quickly ordered new ones for our stairways and landings and bathrooms. If I walk down to the kitchen at 2:00 am for a glass of water, the lights will sense my motion and flicker to life.

I love footlights.

I love walking up the aisles in movie theaters, guided by the tiny dots of blue or red along the edges. I love the sci-fi feel of these lights on airplanes, and I nurture my inner boy who wants to ride in gleaming spaceships.

I love the first Mission: Impossible film for many reasons. It stars the wonderful Vanessa Redgrave. It offers a fun sequence of thrilling scenes in the Chunnel, aboard the speed train linking London and Paris. It has a massive tropical fish aquarium, and I love those. (Of course that aquarium explodes, but … this is a Mission: Impossible film, what do you expect the end game will be for a giant aquarium?) But my very favorite reason to love this film is the line Ethan Hunt says when he’s telling his rogue crew what their mission is. It’s just a line from a movie, but it’s a line that informs my spiritual life, a line that communicates neatly what I think the Bible is always trying to teach us, a line that just preaches.

I am having a hard time with the amaryllis bulbs we’ve started at home.

My dad taught me the old saying, “Don’t dawdle, amaryllis,” and now I know that feeling well. One bulb has only yesterday shown slight, ever so slight, growth. It’s actually our second bulb, a replacement for one that sat inert for weeks before we banished it to the yard waste, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. This new bulb is green, I’ll give it that. It shows promise. On Friday Andrew bought one more bulb, complete with a new blade of green shooting up from the center. I run the gas fireplace and turn the heat up to the high sixties, hoping for the best.

The trees are dropping their leaves.

There is a day in the spring when the tiny buds on trees become so numerous that it is obvious, in a moment of glad realization, that the countryside is green, and winter is over. And there is a day in the fall when the bare branches of trees become so numerous that it is obvious, in a moment of sober resignation, that the trees are sleeping, and winter is here.

Sometime in the early 1990s, I made a deeply embarrassing mistake in church. It may have also been amusing, but I fear it might have been upsetting for some in the congregation I was serving.

I was in suburban Minneapolis, working as a part-time musician for a Lutheran church. It was All Saints Sunday, and their practice was to read out loud the names of parishioners who had died since the previous All Saints Sunday, similar to what we will be doing a bit later in this service. They had a set of large chimes, the kind you see in full orchestras, long chimes that give off dramatic, bell-like gongs. My job was to ring one of them each time a name was read. We were going along, and I rang the chime dutifully each time. “John Smith.” *gong* “Jane Doe.” *gong* And then I got distracted by something, because I was a foolish young man, and when one of the names was read, I hit a lower chime, *goonng*, which jolted everyone out of their reverie, and led someone to ask me later, “So, the guy who got the lower note… did he go to hell?”

Politics and religion do mix. This is true whether we like it or not. And it’s true for two reasons:

Reason one: the mixture of politics and religion is inevitable. They will always be intertwined. Religion deals with ultimate human questions, the big ones, questions like “what does suffering mean?” or “what does death mean?” or “what is our relationship with money?” or “should we choose mercy or justice?” or better: “can we have both mercy and justice?” or even better: “can we even have justice without mercy?” … and so on. All of these questions will carry us into the political sphere. Polis: a root word that means people. Politics is about people; religion is about God and God’s people. Politics and religion: to speak of one is to speak of the other.

Jesus has his back against the wall.

We call Jesus our Savior, and that is good, for surely he is our Savior, saving us, often enough, from our own smaller selves. We call him our Lord, and while some of us may bump up against the masculine word “lord,” Jesus is in a position of, well, lordship over us: he is human like us, but he also joins divine and human in one Person, rising above us in glory. But Jesus also draws alongside us, throughout the course of our lives, from our baptismal fonts to our deathbeds, and so Jesus our Friend brings God close to us, right here, right now.

I do not like how God is handling a lot of things.

I want God to speak. God is not extraverted enough for my taste. I want God to just talk to me, the way God talked to Abraham and Moses and the prophets, and Jesus.

I want God to defeat my enemies. I am deeply troubled by bullies, and I admit I feel enraged when they get away with their abuse. I admit I sometimes want to put my foot on the neck of the guy who puts his foot on necks. Yes, I hear the irony in that. But why doesn’t God make it right?