Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.

He brings us back into the garden.

What will we find there?

A thousand thousand flowers: riots of color, rushes of fragrance. The intensity of goodness can be stunning. Someone forgave you, and you’re almost knocked off your feet by the relief. Or someone asked your forgiveness, and your faith in human strength and integrity is restored. Someone is born, and you can hardly breathe for the joy. Someone is found; someone is embraced; someone has come home. Or someone is baptized. Oh, the gladness I feel about our four baptisms this Sunday. I want to shout about it. I am fit to burst.

There are still other joyful flowers in the garden. There’s the thrill of infatuation, the delight of the chase, the brilliant flash and splendid fury of passionate love. And there’s another kind of thrilling love: after twenty, thirty, for some couples more than seventy years, you find that you and your beloved are family, forever, and the goodness fills you like steel-cut oatmeal and strong hot coffee in the morning. Now that I think about it, maybe that kind of lifelong love is not a flower; maybe that is a tree, in God’s garden.

He is an innocent victim.

He didn’t do it.

But he isn’t anybody’s fool, either.

We hear him pray for the forgiveness of his enemies, of his executioners, and we might mistake this prayer for weakness. It is not our way. We want our hero to triumph over the enemy. We want a satisfying fight sequence. We want a win.

But here’s the thing: forgiveness is less theatrical, but vastly more difficult than vengeance. This Lent, a few of us looked at forgiveness from the perspective of a couples therapist and author. Her name is Janis Abrahms Spring, and she works with couples on major betrayals — affairs, abuse, the hardest stories. Her take on forgiveness is that it requires the participation of the offender. So if I hurt you and then leave your life, or die, then in this view of forgiveness, you can’t forgive me, because I’m not there to earn that forgiveness. You can only do the healthy work of acceptance, on your own.

For many years after my mother’s death, the smell of lilies reminded me of a funeral home on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. We all went there in late June of 1996 to see my mother. In my memory, this Minnesota funeral home really went for it on the funeral flowers, marking coffins at head and foot with giant arrangements of lilies and gladiolus.

But lilies go further back for me. They reliably remind me of Easter morning. And the feeling associated with my childhood Easter mornings, and with all those lilies, is excitement. I caught the magic back then: my church knew how to do Easter, and those early years of following the drama of Holy Week were my earliest formation for the vocation I have now. Lilies were always there.

I honestly do not think that anyone in this room or online could do anything that would truly break our bond as human beings in relationship with one another.

There is nothing you can do that would break your bond with me.

I have thought about this a lot. I really think our bond is unbreakable, even if you don’t think so, even if you think that you or I could definitely do something to break it.

Even if you think that, and even if I did do some unspeakable, terrible thing that would cross a line for you – even then, I would hold out hope that we could reconcile. I would pray for you, and keep the bond alive that way. I would apply what I learned from our connection – and from our awful struggle – in my other relationships. I would work to remain available to you if you changed your heart and mind. I would hold out hope that even if reconciliation is not possible, some sort of guarded peace will develop between us.

There is power in a name, and there is power in giving someone a name.

Legend says that my father would take each of his newborn children in just one hand, moments after our births, and proclaim our names. And so it came to pass that on a summer day in August 1970, my father took me in his right hand and said, “This is Stephen Daniel.”

I am the namesake of Stephen Kinsella, remembered as “Big Steve,” my mother’s mother’s mother’s father. I am also the namesake of Daniel Collins, my mother’s mother’s father.

I want to introduce you to four people. I am working hard to get to know them. I think I am getting my footing with a couple of them, but all four are still a little mysterious to me. And all of them will forever elude my full understanding, as everyone does. (I’m working hard to get to know everyone here at Grace Church, but there is not one of you about whom I can say, “Yeah, I’ve got that one fully figured out.” I think this might come as a relief to you!)

But here’s what I think I know about these four particular people.

“This body is junk,” my mother said, a couple of hours before she died. It was June 21, 1996. She was surrounded by her seven children, called to her bedside for her last words. I was nearly 26 years old, half my lifetime ago.

“And Joseph kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.”

If there is a more beautiful verse in all of our scripture, I do not know it.

No toxic masculinity in this moment, no diplomatic reserve, no stiff upper lip. He kissed all his brothers, too: not just Benjamin, the only other brother lucky like Joseph to be born to Rachel, Jacob’s favorite wife. All of them. He kissed and wept with all of his brothers who quietly went along with the dreadful decision all those years before to sell Joseph into slavery; he kissed and wept with Reuben, the eldest brother who had stopped the others from killing the boy Joseph; and he kissed and wept with Judah, noble Judah, who passed all of Joseph’s tests and threw himself at Joseph’s mercy. Joseph kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.

Let’s leave the planet Earth for a while.

Imagine: the apex predator species of Earth — that’s you and me, friends — has discovered intelligent life on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, a trio of stars about 4.3 light years away, our closest stellar neighbors. We learned of this extra-terrestrial intelligence when we monitored radio transmissions of their choral music. A consortium of business and religious organizations funded the acquisition of a mineral-rich asteroid, and drilled a cylindrical hole inside it, so that they could install decks for crew quarters, navigation, food, water, surface landers, and supplies. Our engines draw power from the raw materials of the asteroid and are propelling us inside this rock at an impressive percentage of the speed of light, getting us to Alpha Centauri in about 17 years. (The effects of relativity make it seem like mere months for us.)

Click here to watch a video recording of this sermon.

How can God get your attention?

How can God lock eyes with you, literally or otherwise, and truly get you to listen?

I’ve recently told a couple of people in meetings that when I was in seventh grade, my English teacher said to my parents in a conference that “Stephen could be looking directly at me, and I can tell he isn’t listening to a word I’m saying.” This is a cute little story, and yet no one I’ve told it to expresses surprise. I want to hear you. I want to listen to you. But it’s hard sometimes. I have a lot going on. And so do you: sometimes what you’re saying doesn’t come across very well. Sometimes I look up several hours later, maybe while I’m waiting in line for the ferry, and I think, “Damn, what did she mean by that? Did she mean what I think she means?” I want to pay attention and get what I’m being told on the first hearing, but I get distracted. Or you say something distractedly, or indirectly. We’re both caught up in other things, and the connection is lost.

Or – one of us doesn’t want to hear it. Maybe I can’t get your attention because you don’t want to hear what you suspect I have to say. If so, I can relate.

The Nazarenes are mad.

Really mad.

Like, attempted-murder-in-the-second-degree mad.

Now, maybe the community of Luke’s Gospel is just being a little hyperbolic, sketching an event in a way that communicates to us something important that they want us to know. Luke likely wants us to know that Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, immediately is met with aggressive resistance, then and now. That rings true.

“The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.”

They watched. They waited.

Maybe they glanced furtively at one another.

What will he do? What will he say?

The problems of the world seem to be relentless.

It isn’t that we are grappling with a worldwide plague, but that it seems to be endless, one month rolling into the next, the infections map turning red, then orange, then briefly yellow, and back to red again.

It isn’t just that violence and insurrection are on a steady rise, or that economic injustice is tearing our cities apart, or that the alarming effects of climate change are in the news. It’s that it’s all just relentless.

It’s like a river.

And so it is that today Jesus steps not into an indoor font, or even a still pond. He steps into a muddy river, flowing endlessly, moving relentlessly, carrying life along its banks, but threatening floodwaters, too.

Have you lost Jesus?

Maybe you never had him in the first place. Maybe you’ve never thought you even needed him. Or maybe this is a painful topic for you: you want Jesus, or you want something Jesus represents, you even (when you’re honest with yourself) want him a lot, but you can’t find him.

Jesus is elusive. For many of us, Jesus seems to recede into a childhood past, into irrelevance. To the extent some people think about him at all, they think of him as a caricature of a religious figure, a gauzy, ridiculous tall white man with 1970s hair, draped in old-time robes from a corny Hollywood bible movie, smiling faintly up from funeral-home prayer cards and tacky glass candle holders. As religious figures go, the Buddha is much more hip and interesting.

In the beginning was the Big Bang. Thirteen billion years ago, the first galaxies exploded forth in the rapidly expanding, brand-new universe. Like our Milky Way galaxy now, their light wavelengths back then were mostly in the ultraviolet and visible areas of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Now, today, out here in the boonies, on the inner side of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way galaxy, that same extremely ancient light from those extremely ancient galaxies is flowing. But after billions of years of expansion, these wavelengths of light have stretched out, longer and longer, and so they are no longer visible, or ultraviolet. They are infrared.

Early this morning, the James Webb Space Telescope left Earth, tightly packed into the nose cone of an Ariane 5 rocket. Over the next 29 days, it will make its way to a point between Earth and the Sun, about a million miles from here. It will unfold itself along the way, extending an unprecedentedly large 21-foot mirror, and a sun shield the size of a tennis court. The JWST is an infrared telescope, and it will allow us to see some of the oldest light waves in the universe.

At the family service earlier this evening, there was no Joseph.

There were no sheep or shepherds or angel choir.

At the rehearsal last Sunday for our childrens’ Godly Play liturgy, all we had were three lectors, three Wise Women, a cow, a donkey, and Mary. Only these nine creatures were present to prepare for the proclamation of the birth of Christ.

Earlier this evening, a young girl named JoJo joined us as the Angel of the Lord, but the overall cast got smaller, because many of our youngest members couldn’t make it. (They are far from alone.)

We sorely missed them, but in a way, here at the end of 2021, this is perfect. This tiny cast of characters around the manger—this is our Good News on this night. Our younger members are telling us something.

May we have ears to hear.

“What, then, should we do?”

This is an excellent question.

But notice who’s asking it. That’s excellent too: not just the general crowd, but specifically the tax collectors and soldiers, the people who prop up the unjust economy of the empire. They’re all asking John the Baptizer, “What, then, should we do?”

And John’s answers — they’re also excellent, if ordinary-sounding and straightforward: share food; be ethical with money; build a just society. A just society: not only you and I being just, but all of us joining with countless others to lift up everyone, and remake the whole land as a peaceable dominion, with God’s help.

This is all to the good.

It feels like God is present in cozy places, lovely locations, sweet forest glades of serenity and contentment. I have old photos of our dogs napping on the sumptuous couch, rolled into perfect, tidy cinnamon rolls, tails tucked, eyes fast shut. Surely God is there. I sometimes rest beautifully myself, snug under heavy blankets in a room that is just a little too cold, and I feel delicious sleep returning for an extra hour and a half of rest in the still, solemn hours around a winter sunrise. Surely God is there. We ask God for moments like these. We plead to God for healing, peace, comfort, support.

I am planning a staff retreat for mid-January, but it was originally going to be in Advent, and in my first notions about what we would do, I thought maybe we would talk about what we long for most deeply, Advent being (among other things) a season of longing. So I then asked myself, “What do you really long for?” And the answer came: I long for six straight weeks of normal, even boring, church life and personal life, everyone doing fine, everyone coming and going without event or trouble, everyone yawning a little more than usual, and basically nothing happening. A little bird hops by my office window. And then we enjoy six more weeks of the same thing, after that. Surely God would be there!

(God would be everywhere in that loveliness, but especially in the bird.)

The normal state of the world is catastrophic.

Everything is falling apart: this is the way it is, and the way it so often is. This is how it was in the beginning when the Spirit of God hovered over the roiling chaos and God began speaking creation into existence. This is how it was in the time of Jesus of Nazareth. This is how it is now.

In times gone by, our destructive species shattered temples and flattened cities. Some eras of human history, like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, seem to be times when everything comes back together. But even then, suffering and injustice persisted. And now, humanity is bitterly divided, and we seem to be at real risk of bringing about the destruction of the entire biosphere.

Everything is going to work out in the End.

Everyone is going to come together at the End.

Lazarus greets his stunned and overjoyed sisters, but the skeptical and cynical onlookers will eventually be brought back into the circle, too.

Jesus is raised from the dead, and he soon greets not only his friends, but his adversaries too, even those who condemned and killed him. He will bring them all back by the End.

The Communion of Saints will gather on God’s mountain. We will all be together. If you like, you can let the theologians—the doctors of the church, as they’ve been called—work out things like “paraeschatological opportunity for baptism,” the idea that before all is said and done, every human soul will be invited to stream through the gates of pearl, as today’s opening hymn sings it. If you’re worried about the finer points of that, you are welcome to join the conversation! But for now, know this:

Everything is going to work out in the End.