Each Advent, the Lectionary gives us a week or two of readings involving John the Baptist. John is considered the Forerunner of Christ, and the New Testament clearly positions him as fulfilling a prophecy from Isaiah chapter 40. Several of the Apostles were his followers before Jesus eventually called them away. Yet despite his significance among the earliest Christians, many of us today don’t really know a whole lot about him, much less his mother Elizabeth and father Zechariah, whose canticle we read today instead of our usual Psalm.

In some ways you could think of the grand scope of the Church Year similarly to how the earth orbits the sun. The sun remains in a constant position while earth swings around it. From earth, we can’t help but mark the differences between the summer and winter solstices because of changes in the weather and the amount of daylight. If we could make out the details without blinding ourselves, the sun itself would have a different face on each of those days. But a different appearance doesn’t make it a different sun.

Though far from the emphasis and purpose of the whole book, the Bible includes several end-of-the-world explorations, too. They pop up occasionally in the Hebrew Scriptures—especially among the prophets like Daniel. In the New Testament, we mostly find them in Revelation and a few of the epistles. Jesus himself references “the end of the age” on occasion. But today’s Gospel launches his longest discussion of it: the entire 13th chapter of Mark, which scholars title “the little apocalypse.”

No Christian festival is or ever has been a commemoration of Death or of the dead. All of them—be it Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, All Saints’, or any other lesser feast—are for the living—but not just for those of us sitting in the pews today. The core of these holidays is the gratitude for and joy of resurrected life.

No matter how clear we make our initial statements, how carefully we devise our structures and rules, or how thoroughly we define our terms, we immediately begin to imagine—and, if we’re honest, hope for—new exceptions, each leading us into a fresh multiverse of what-if’s. As our search for loopholes and inconsistencies keeps feeding itself, eventually our hierarchy becomes so complex that it’s hard to find our way back to the idea behind the original statement.

It’s easy to say that you have faith in something or someone. It’s much more revealing to see whether or not someone remains actively faithful in their behavior. Faith as we understand it simply involves thought, which does indeed make it impossible to judge. But faithfulness is easy to determine: we see the reality of an internal thought or belief being played out over time in the real world.

While Mark clearly has Jesus addressing the way he wants his followers to treat one another in contexts of leadership and fellowship here, I wonder if we shouldn’t reflect his statement back a bit farther—back to his warning on the road that the Lectionary skipped, back to the eye of the needle and the rich young ruler, back to the disciples preventing the children from gathering, and even back to the divorce exchange two weeks ago.

Of course, it’s easy to just read past this. After all, the rest of Jesus’ words are full of hyperbole, with camels threading their way through needles and contrasts between mortals and gods. At some point, it just feels comical, allowing us to simply laugh and brush it all away. Jesus couldn’t possibly be serious about everybody giving away everything! Clearly, he’s just making extreme statements to get his point across."

…there’s a lot more going on behind this conversation than we’re likely to hear or read with modern ears. When the Pharisees stop to ask Jesus about divorce, they aren’t simply focused on the challenges that arise between two people. They’re questioning the foundational structures of society, openly wondering whether the desire or whim of an individual should take precedent over the needs of an entire village, town, or even a country.

Faithfulness isn’t found in a single action, moment of agreement, or emotional decision. The work of being a Christian spans all our days. It’s a continual choice: the choice to walk in the path and pattern of Jesus. It’s the training of oneself, moment by moment and opportunity by opportunity, to follow the Way of Love, to offer kindness, dignity, and respect to everyone we encounter.

Although it’s central to our understanding of God, the word “trinity” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the Bible. And it’s a weird concept, to be honest. It took several hundred years—and few major heretical movements—for ancient Church leadership to really hammer out the details of what the term even meant.

The Ascension is one of those “huh” events in the Bible. Although the early Church clearly thought it was important enough to pass on to later generations, from a modern worldview, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Flying people are something from dreams and movies, not real life.

…“abide”….is a word of intention and commitment, associated more with military occupation or settling a frontier. It carries the idea of standing your ground or struggling to maintain a position, not simply dwelling somewhere in tranquility. In the context of looming betrayal and disruption of their group, it suggests something more like “stick with” than “abide in:” “You all stick with me, and I’ll stick with you.”

Even if we know it wasn’t good, the past at least looks stable from here, so it’s easy to desire a return to older times. But trying to recreate the past, itself broken in many ways, only leads to disappointment and failure.

If you were to ask most American Christians why Easter is important, you’ll probably hear an answer that mentions the resurrection but continues to place its primary emphasis on death, saying that Jesus was crucified for one of two reasons: (1) to pay the debt for our sins or (2) as the perfect sacrifice to appease God’s wrath—chances are you’ll hear a mixture of the two.

What is it with God and blood? What is it with Jesus and suffering? Blood speaks of violence. Blood speaks of pain. Blood speaks of death. Likewise, the cross speaks of the same violence, the same pain, and the same death. If God is supposed to be a God of life and love, what is this obsession with blood? How can the Apostle Paul claim that God is “pleased to reconcile” all things in heaven and on earth, “making peace through the blood of [Jesus’] cross”?

Sometimes I think that repentance as active change is hard not just because of the difficulties of unlearning old habits and implementing new ones but because on some level, we identify ourselves with the way we’ve been living. Our private and public failures come to define who we are, so in moving past them, we feel like we’re losing parts of ourselves. And some of that is true: we are choosing to leave portions of our past behind.

Unfortunately, a lot of Christians spend their entire lives in a similar state of fear—paranoia, really—one connected to two little words in today’s epistle reading: “the world.”

…what if this story isn’t necessarily about divine judgment? What if God didn’t send the flood? What if we read this as God simply giving humanity the very thing it proved itself to have most desired?

A lot of people, even within the Church, aren’t particularly fond of the Apostle Paul. Frankly, it isn’t all that hard to see why. He’s confusing. He can be harsh. And he often sounds pretty full of himself. When you add the enshrining of some Roman-era cultural norms into what eventually became a sacred text, he comes across as pretty legalistic, too.