God has already shown us the signs of their presence, not only through the words of the prophets but in Jesus himself. Yet distracted by visions of what we want, we miss the God and the Savior we have. God doesn’t come with burning clouds and legions of angels. God doesn’t come with guns and swords and iron rods. God doesn’t come to destroy the “sinners” but to tend the sick and bring comfort to the poor. God arrives unobserved in stillness, where “waters…break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.”

…most of those things that come to mind when we hear the term have very little to do with repentance itself. Repentance doesn’t always start with fear or terror. Nor does it require any type of mental or physical breakdown. It doesn’t demand condemnation or self-loathing or emotional displays. Things like guilt and confession might precede repentance, but they aren’t central to actual repentance.

Our new Church year opens with a deep dive straight into the most apocalyptic section of Matthew’s Gospel. This reading is a short portion of Jesus’ final sermon before he heads into Holy Week. The rest of it contains frequent warnings to “watch out” or “keep awake” and includes such famous stories as the Parable of the Fig Tree, the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and the Parable of the Talents. His message is clear throughout this entire chapter: “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father….Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Today, the final Sunday of our Church Calendar year, is the Feast of Christ the King. This is one of the Church’s newest formal celebrations, having been instituted only 98 years ago by Pope Pius XI as a response to increasing secularization and growing nationalism throughout Europe between the World Wars. As more and more countries followed the United States and divested themselves of government-sponsored churches, many religious leaders feared that faith traditions—or at least Christianity—would become a thing of the past.

…we can look to ancient history and point to the rough time and details of when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth healing and teaching and mourning and celebrating and revealing the fulness of God. It was a pivotal moment in history, and we do well to remember it. The problem is that we like to contain the Christ, restraining their presence to the 1st Century AD—something we can look back at and admire but something that can only affect our so-called “spiritual” being so many millennia later. But Christ is—very physically—present even today.

Our society imagines God’s Kingdom as a place of indulgence and excess, a dream world where everyone can do anything they want and can have everything they want at any moment that they want. But that looks far more like the American Dream than God’s Reign, where it appears that everyone will have “enough”—not too much, and not too little. For those used to nothing, having sufficient resources is paradise, while for those of us used to excess, having “only” what we actually need might just feel like Hell.

It’s easy to read Zacchaeus and Jesus’ exchange as transactional: Jesus says, “I’m going to your house.” Zacchaeus repents on the spot, breaking the tax-collectors’ stereotype by promising to pay back all the people he cheated. And then Jesus essentially rewards him, saying, “Today salvation has come to this house.” We read it as a simple ABC. A: Person meets Jesus. B: Person turns life around. C: Person “gets saved.” But that isn’t necessarily what the text itself says.

Clearly there’s a lesson here in humility and following the God’s paths—Jesus points it out himself: “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” However, that isn’t the only point Jesus is making; there’s still something here to learn about prayer here as well.

Historically, the Church has tended to read “justice” and “justification” as argumentative or legal terms. Is an action in accordance with the law? Then it’s technically “just.” Is your explanation of what happened adequate to excuse why you acted outside the rules? If so, we say you’ve “justified” yourself….But there’s another usage of the word “just” that we need to apply here.

As Christians, we presume we’ve based our ideas about God on the Bible, but when we finally take a look at what that same Bible actually says, we discover someone unexpected—a God we simply can’t predict. God is very much God’s own person. God can be both unpredictable and consistent. God creates and destroys, loves and hates, mourns over disaster and dances with joy. God’s simple presence melts the greatest mountains yet refuses to burn a small bush.

Sometimes Jesus’ words are indeed hard for us to take, but sometimes that’s because we need to make hard decisions and implement hard changes. Jesus is indeed calling us to carry our own crosses, but he’s hoping for much more than simply giving away things we don’t really want or use in the first place. He wants us to spend not only our money but our influence, power, and authority on others, serving them to the point that people think we’re acting against our own interests, because God’s Kingdom of love is worth the sacrifice of self.

“Sabbath” isn’t something we talk about much in church anymore. Even though the Bible references it frequently, most of us probably think of it as a weekly rest day for our Jewish neighbors. It officially falls on Saturdays. From very early in the life of the Church, Christians appropriated some of its practices to our Sunday observances. But if you try to get much deeper than that, a lot of us are quickly lost.

A quick glace around the celestial board room reveals this meeting involves all of upper management. Calamity is chatting with Fear over by the nebula dispenser. Fertility and Wealth keep checking notes and scribbling together on a page full of numbers. Ocean and Earth stand toward the corner locked in a quiet yet heated conversation about who has final word on an area of overlapping interest.

Transfiguration Sunday marks the end of Epiphany each year, providing us with a glimpse of a transformative Jesus shortly before joining his march to Jerusalem that following Ash Wednesday. However, the formal observance of the Feast of the Transfiguration was actually yesterday, hence our texts this morning.

We pressure ourselves and other to choose between two realities that, like oil and water, simply cannot mix. But the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the incarnation of God the Son, upends our common way of thinking. It reveals the inadequacy of our concepts of division and exclusion, of separation and distinction, of earthly and heavenly or even sacred versus secular. Baptism displays our divided understanding of human life as utterly misguided.

…what we think of as clarity from the inside often reveals itself to be stagnation or self-satisfaction when viewed from the outside. The moral certitude of our philosophy, along with our continuing internal focus, makes us unable to adapt to the changing realities around us. Or sometimes, and certainly worse, it can lead us to actions that prevent those around us from making progress in discerning or exploring more loving and merciful ways of being.

The Church has a long history of pitting these two sisters against one another, accusing Martha of demonstrating the “inferior” way of works while Mary embodied the more enlightened path of “faith.” We mistakenly deride the first while lifting up a false image of the second, and, in the process, end up placing impossible demands on Christian women in general.

Most people are familiar with at least some part of Jesus’ story about the Good Samaritan. It’s had some level of influence in nearly all of society, from personal interactions all the way up to legislation known as “Good Samaritan laws.” It isn’t particularly hard to figure out the parable’s broad point: help other people. But simple as that sounds, it isn’t always easy for us to follow through on Jesus’ instruction to “Go and do likewise.” It’s surprising how frequently we suddenly discover ourselves standing in place of the legal expert, not even realizing it as we too ask, “And who is my neighbor?”

…the Bible never even mentions abortion. Not once. That means, in no uncertain terms, abortion is NOT a biblical issue. “God is love” is biblical, as the Epistles directly tell us that. “You shall not kill” is biblical, as it appears clearly within Moses’ Ten Commandments. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is biblical, appearing not only in Jesus’ teachings but in today’s text from Galatians. Abortion, however, is not among the topics the Bible ever addresses, meaning there is no truly “biblical” statement or position regarding it.

There’s a joke among clergy that rectors always give the Trinity Sunday sermon to some other speaker, and that’s certainly rung true in my own experience: although we’re approaching the third anniversary of my priestly ordination and we’re still well within my first year as rector here at St. Andrew’s, this is at least my fourth time preaching this particular day of the Church calendar!