…the Peace is…an important part of our worship. It might feel like a time to greet friends and visitors, but it has a structural purpose: it’s our time of collective reconciliation as a congregation. Having just confessed our personal and corporate sin and before approaching the altar to present our lives to God, we, like the person making the offering in Jesus’ parable, turn to one another and choose love over animosity. We choose forgiveness and reconciliation over division. We choose the children of God in front of us—all of them—over the labels and divisions Empire imposes to separate us.

Shannon and I frequently find ourselves rewatching The Good Place, an NBC comedy from a few years ago that follows the adventures of four humans in the afterlife. The show provides a not-so-subtle introduction to moral philosophy, with the characters applying various ethical teachings to the situations they find themselves tossed into—or sometimes experiencing the consequences of those philosophies firsthand. At its core, the show asks the question, “What is it to live a moral life?” or, more simply, “What is it to be good?”

Epiphany might feel like we’re just waiting for the next big thing, but it’s an important portion of the Church Year that allows us to turn our attention to revelation, bringing to light the incarnate reality of Christ and the Gospel. As such, that’s a good place to start as we begin looking at each of our Bible readings throughout this season. Isaiah shines that light directly in our faces this morning, announcing “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; | those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”

We all have different ideas about Jesus—what he looked like, his overall demeanor, how he behaved, etc. We all have different expectations about the role we think he ought to play in our lives. A lot of those come from the way people have presented Bible stories to us or different artistic impressions we’ve seen of events from our Savior’s life.

The real problem, however, doesn’t have anything to do with which of the interpretations of the prophecy is the right one. The issue is how we understand prophecy to function. From fairytales to movies to Bible studies, we put a certain mystical weight on prophecy, expecting dim predictions to mysteriously—even magically—fulfill themselves in future events. But that isn’t how prophecy actually works.

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.