Easter 3

The readings for this weekend, if we’re paying attention, are such a joy on a couple different levels.  The first thing we need to do to find that joy is to think about the stories as if they were playing out in a movie rather than being solemnly read in church.  It’s then that we get to see the amazing juxtaposition between what Luke tells us in his Gospel and his sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.

Let’s look at the Gospel reading.  In Luke, this is the second time Jesus has appeared after the Resurrection.  Just a day before, Jesus had walked and talked with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, finally revealing that it’s Him at dinner.  But as soon as Jesus blessed and broke the bread at the table, He vanished from their sight, leaving them startled, certainly, but probably unsure of exactly what they had experienced.  Somebody vanishing from in front of you sounds a bit more like a ghost than a flesh and blood person, right?

Luke picks up the story the next day, just as those two disciples were telling their story to the others.  This time Jesus just appears out of no where in the middle of a room that they were sure they had locked up tight.  “But they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit,” as would anyone, really.

Jesus spends some time trying to convince them that He’s not a ghost, but it’s clearly not working to the extent needed.  This is where you have to picture it like a Saturday Night Live skit: I always see the scene as Jesus getting more and more frustrated until He says something like, “Okay, okay, I’ll prove it to you.  Give me some food.  Can a ghost do this?!”  Gobble gobble gobble, “Good enough for ya?”

It’s at that point that things start to turn around for the disciples.  Up until that point they had been scared and in hiding; they disbelieved or misunderstood what had actually happened at the Resurrection, and they disbelieved each other, which was reasonable.  Last week we heard about Thomas and his doubt, but it always seemed to me that Thomas doubted not Jesus but the other disciples.  All of the disciples had not believed Mary Magdalene and the other women who had witnessed the empty tomb and relayed the message of the angel present.  This was, for that moment, not an All-Star team; they were a mess.

But then, the Resurrection.  Or the Resurrection plus Jesus opening “their minds to understand the scriptures.”  The Apostles finally understood that the Resurrection changed everything; they now knew that nothing, not even death, could halt the purposes of God. 

And so we fast-forward to Luke’s account of Peter and John being dragged before the Annas the high priest and Caiaphas and the rulers and scribes after miraculously healing a man lame from birth and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.

A few weeks before this, Peter was cowering in a locked room, but now here he is before the most powerful of his people and what does he say to them?  Essentially, “You screwed up.”  We performed this miracle by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but, well, God raised Him from the dead.  There’s nothing you can do to us, because we belong to Jesus, and Jesus already won.

The disciple’s lives were changed – they themselves were changed – by the power of the Resurrection, and as Jesus said, by being “witnesses to these things.” 

So, we had some funny stuff and some powerful stuff in today’s readings, and honestly, the funny stuff was pretty powerful too.  Between Jesus eating a Filet-O-Fish and Peter standing boldly in the midst of his persecutors, we see minds being opened to the Scriptures, the Apostles commissioned to preach the Gospel, a miracle, and most of all, lives changed in Jesus’ Name. 

I think you’ll agree when I say that I want in on all of that.  The good news is that we are; their story didn’t end way back when – we’re still living it.  We are witnesses to these things, commissioned to change lives by the spread the Gospel, our lives continually changed and sanctified in Christ.  The Lord has risen so that we may rise with Him.

Easter

Alleluia, Christ is risen!  The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!  Yes, yes, that was an appropriately jubilant response to this Easter morning.  “Welcome, happy morning!” age to age shall say.

Now compare and contrast that with how St. Mark ended his gospel: “And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.”  Way to end on a high note, Mark.

That might seem like a strange way to end a book that’s supposed to be good news, right?  Early Christian authorities sure thought so, and so they tacked on the last twelve verses to round out the story, to make it a bit more traditionally hopeful.  But all the early transcripts of Mark’s story end with “And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.”

“They” were three gutsy women, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, who went to Jesus’ tomb early in the morning expecting some resistance.  At the very least they figured they’d find the guards posted by Pilate and the religious authorities, none of whom would be helpful to them.  Then there was the issue with the stone, which would take more than the three of them to roll away.

What they found was, in the moment, so much worse.  The stone was rolled away, which was either a problem or favor, but the rest was just a bit hard to swallow.

It had already been a rough few days.  They had witnessed Jesus betrayed, arrested, and abandoned; they had seen Him scourged and torn, mocked and spat upon; they had stood at the foot of the Cross and looked into His mother’s eyes as she held His dead body.  And now this: their Lord is missing, and some guy – could it be an angel? – telling them that Jesus is risen – what does that mean? – and that we should all catch up with Him in Galilee.

St. Mark describes the Resurrection as a traumatizing event, the women physically seized up in fear until they had it in them to flee the graveyard.  Even when they first encountered the others, it seems they were verbally paralyzed; what would they say, exactly?

I, for one, am grateful to Mark for not ending his gospel on a high note.  Mark’s account is so honest; it’s so true to human experience.  After three days of violence and death and mourning, even the good news of the Resurrection was just too much to handle, too much to process.  Mark’s account reminds us that we can’t domesticate the Resurrection, we can’t paint it pastel colors.  It’s a thing of trembling and astonishment. 

And again, Mark’s account is so honest; it’s so true to human experience.  You might be in the midst of unspeakable trauma right now or know someone who is.  The news is full of war and tumult, of innocents suffering at the hands of evil men or accidental tragedy.  We can’t help but be overwhelmed.

But St. Mark reminds us today that the changes and chances of this world can never overwhelm us the way God can.  God just being who He is enough to scramble us; the works of His hands bring us joy and amazement.  And on that first Easter morning, God overwhelmed Mary and Mary and Salome with goodness and might, by turning death into life, by doing something only God could do.  On that first Easter morning, we got our first glimpse of the fact that life itself had changed; that fear and death no longer have the last word.  We can know and feel that God has not, and will not, abandon His own.

God’s overwhelming love for us is shown chiefly in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.  So as we welcome this happy morning, give thanks to St. Mark for his version of ending on a high note, and meet our Risen Lord with joy and wonder, trembling and amazement. 

Palm Sunday

The revered science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote that “Men rarely, if ever, dream up a god superior to themselves.  Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.” 

The Romans had no idea what to do with Jesus.  Their gods had the manners and morals of spoiled children, and so Pontius Pilate, a Roman if there ever was one, was baffled.  Pilate was surely not ignorant of what it meant to be crowned King of the Jews, the Messiah, the Savior of the People.  His own wife had nightmares about her husband having anything to do with Him.  This Jesus raised a guy from the dead, but He doesn’t make demands or answer questions or defend Himself against wild accusations.  The man road into town on a donkey, for crying out loud.

The Bible is chock-full of donkeys, as you might expect of a time and place that used a lot of donkeys.  Samson used the jawbone of a donkey to do his work.  Jacob sent donkeys loaded with riches to placate his brother Esau.  There’s even a talking donkey in the story of Balaam in the book of Numbers, in case you thought that was only in Shrek movies.

And so the Son of God, the King of the Jews, who rode in on a donkey and then stood before Pilate confused Pilate in every way.  Pilate perceived no threat, which was true in a military sense.  He sensed Jesus’ innocence, then went as far as to try to get Him out of the sentence set before Him.  But it would be under Pontius Pilate that Jesus would suffer and be buried.

Palm Sunday is the Sunday that produces the most whiplash in the Church year.  It used to be that the Passion was read, or often sung, on the Sunday before, which is still referred to in some places as Passion Sunday, letting Palm Sunday be for the palms and the hosannas and not the yelling and suffering.  Letting Palm Sunday be for the palms keeps to the historical time better, but that presupposes that all of you will be here on Thursday and Friday – you’ll all be here, right? – for all the yelling and suffering, to play our Lord’s Passion out in real time. 

Our Lord’s Passion.  Normally when we think about passion, we think about love affairs or the NBC soap opera Passions that ran in the early aughts.  The word passion means, literally, suffering; if you have a passion for something it means that you’re willing to suffer for it, whether that be physically, emotionally, or monetarily.  Passionate golfers suffer all three ways, for what I can see. 

Our bishop, Sally French, helpfully reminded us on Thursday that the Greeks used the same word suffering as they did for intestines.  Your passion is something you feel in your gut, it’s gut-wrenching.

This kind of passion, this kind of suffering, can be chosen or it can be thrust upon you.  Sometimes it can be both.  Jesus knew what kind of suffering was coming His way – He even asked His Father if perhaps all that could somehow be skipped – but He chose to embrace it because of His passion for, His gut-wrenching love for mankind. 

This, too, would have confused Pontius Pilate.  Men dream of gods sacrificing themselves as rarely as they dream of them riding donkeys.  As we begin today to move through this Holy Week, don’t forget the joy we began with, the joy of seeing our Savior and our King enter into His Passion in peace, palms beneath His donkey’s feet, hosannas ring out: Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord.

Lent 5

Have you ever been in a situation when you know you have to do something, but you really, really don’t want to do it?  Happens to me all the time.  I didn’t want to spend an entire day at Diocesan Convention last week, but had to do it.  I really don’t want to do my taxes (yup, that’s coming up) but I gotta do them.  It’s the privilege of the priest to be invited into the best and worst moments of people’s lives, and sometimes it’s remarkably difficult to deal with, but that’s what God has called us to do, so in we go.  Jesus knows what it’s like.

Todays’ gospel from St. John takes place at the beginning of what we now call Holy Week.  Not long before, Jesus had done something that He surely knew would be to His detriment: He had raised Lazarus from the dead.  Not only did this attract the attention of, well, most people, but it also ratcheted up the pressure on the Pharisees to do something about this Jesus guy, lest He cause even more trouble for them.  The Pharisees didn’t stop with Jesus; they put a bounty on Lazarus’ head, as if he didn’t have enough to deal with already.

And just a few days before today’s episode, Jesus and His disciples, on their way to Jerusalem, stopped in Bethany for a dinner held in His honor at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  It was His last stop before things were going to get messy.  With some others, I’m of the opinion that Lazarus was Jesus’ best friend, so to speak, the guy Jesus could just hang with.  It was at this dinner that Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfume, somehow knowing that the end was near. 

Tradition tells us that Mary and Martha (and probably Lazarus, in a hat and sunglasses) followed Jesus into Jerusalem for the Passover.  They would have witnessed His triumphal entry with the donkey and the palms and the hosannas, and then they would have witnessed Jesus make Himself a bit scarce.  See, the same crowds who witnessed Jesus raise Lazarus were also in Jerusalem, very helpfully telling everyone what happened.  Everyone wished to see this Jesus.

So it came as no surprise when a few Greek people sought out Philip to make their request: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  Of course you wish to see Jesus, so does everyone else.  But their request must have seemed genuine, and so Philip takes it to Jesus.

We don’t know if those Greeks ever actually got to see Jesus – there’s no resolution to that part of the story.  All we know is that when Philip and Andrew pass on the request, Jesus answers a question that wasn’t asked.  “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.”

The hour had come to do the thing He had to do but really didn’t want to.  This is a good time, as we approach Holy Week, to remember that Jesus was fully human and had feelings like everybody else does.  I remember dreading the time when my father would ask me to help pick up the apples from the tree in the backyard, some rotten or half eaten by the vermin; I can’t imagine dreading the time my father asked me to suffer and die for the good of mankind.  Jesus knew what was set before Him: a death so horrible they had to make up a new word for it, excruciating, the pain of the cross.  “Now is my soul troubled,” He said.  And what shall I say? `Father, save me from this hour’?  No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.”

What drives a person to do something they know they must do, but you really, really don’t want to?   Only love.  In this case, Jesus’ love for His Father and for His Father’s will.  Love for His creation, even fallen and mired in sin.  Love for His disciples, love for His friends.  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Next week is Holy Week, during which we will walk with Christ in His Passion, with the disciples in their distress.  We know the joyful resolution of the week, but that joy is only truly felt when having lived through what came before.  And what came before teaches us that no matter what it is we dread, Jesus has been there, and will be there, for us. 

Lent 4

After the first Mass on Ash Wednesday, I settled into my office with some coffee and opened up the paper to find some sad news: William Post had died the previous Saturday.  Who was William Post?  The inventor of one of my favorite things on earth: the Pop Tart. 

There’s a picture of me as a two-year old in my parent’s kitchen, gleefully holding up a box of strawberry frosted Pop Tarts.  I followed my brother Bill in his love of Pop Tarts, though I don’t think he would have had a frosted brown sugar cinnamon one before every track meet the way I did.  According to the New York Times, billions of Pop Tarts are sold every year, but as I approach 50, fewer and fewer of them are sold to me, sadly.

On the opposite side of the baked-good spectrum, we have barley loaves.  Barley, in biblical times (and today) is a grain fed to the horses, donkey, and camels, and when need be, eaten by people.  Barley loaves were the bread of the poor, hearty and deep brown, but not the stuff of Parisian cafes. 

But it was these loaves which made up most of the food present, five barley loaves and two fishes, too much for a boy’s lunch so perhaps brought to the gathering to make a quick sale. 

Jesus asked Philip the question, “How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?”  But it was Andrew who spotted the boy and his provisions, perhaps just to point out that the only food available would be a meager ration ever for a few kids.  Philip points out the enormity of the problem while Andrew points only to a poor solution.

Jesus commands the crowd to sit down and get settled in.  Then came the miracle.

We talked about miracles in last week’s Gospel and Coffee session, about how we don’t often recognize the everyday miracles as they pass us by, and about how the big miracles, things like feeding five thousand people with five loaves and a couple fish, might not happen as often because we don’t expect or believe that they will happen.  We defined miracles as God putting things back to how things are supposed to be anyway.  In this case, the God of abundance erasing the scarcity of this broken world.

Jesus took the bread, and what did He do first?  He gave thanks.  Thank you, Father, for these barley loaves, for sending us this kid with his little basket of stuff.  The Bread of Life had the fruit of the earth in His hands, and the first thing He did was give thanks.

None of the evangelists explained just how the miracle worked, but the other gospels describe Jesus breaking the bread and the fish in pieces, handing it off to the disciples, who then distributed the miracle food to the crowd.  Just like water turning into wine, the operation was less important than the outcome: food enough for everyone; too much food, as it happened.

But that’s what happened any time we give anything to God: He takes what we give and turns it into more than we can expect or imagine or even possibly need.  We gave Him loaves and fishes and He fed thousands.  We give Him our trust in the form of money and action, and through us He touches the lives of those in our community.  We give Him acts of service, and He satisfies our souls.  We give Him our faith, and He gives us hope and strength.  We give Him bread and wine and He gives us back His Body and Blood.  We gave Him the Cross, and He gave us the means of life and peace.

Our God, the God of abundance, never gives us less in return.  What will you offer to God, and how do you think He will use it?

Lent 1

So, I came down with a brutal sinus infection this week, and once I started the meds on Thursday morning, I was basically catatonic for two days. (Thank you to Fr. Snyder for filling in for me at Stations on Friday)  I tried answering messages but was messing up dates and times and eventually gave up after I found out I committed to something on an entirely different day than I thought.  The last time I was in such shape was after I had ankle surgery my junior year of college, and I ended up on my parent’s couch for several days blitzed out on pain meds.  I didn’t remember most of that time, but once I got back to school, my parents started receiving their new subscriptions to Car and Driver and Road and Track and Motor Trend, amongst others, which I had so helpfully ordered by phone when I saw a commercial on tv. 

And so, because I don’t like the idea of recycling old sermons and hadn’t written one before times, today I offer you “a few thoughts.”

St. Mark began his gospel with a few words about John the Baptist letting everyone know the Messiah was coming, and then nine verses in, here He is, coming to the Jordan to be baptized by that same John.  “And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.” 

In typical Markan fashion, stuff happened immediately; God had no time to waste in letting everyone know that this was, in fact, His Son, the Messiah, and that He was happy about it. 

Then Jesus and John the Baptist retired to a nice picnic lunch.  Nope.  “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”

God was so well pleased with Jesus that He immediately drove Him out into the Judean desert for forty days.  Well, actually, Yes.  Why was Jesus sent out into the wilderness?  To be surrounded by the two most dangerous things that the average person faced in that time and in that place, Satan and the wild beasts.  Jesus was sent out there to live peaceably with the beasts and to battle The Beast.  God was pleased with Jesus, and He sent His best to deal with the worst.

Now, this story is expanded in the other gospels, so we know that Jesus was with the wild beasts but was not harmed, which reminds us of things Daniel in the lion’s den.  And we know that He was tempted by Satan with three very tempting things: turning stones into bread to satisfy only His stomach; turning away from God in exchange for all earthly power; and jumping from the pinnacle to test God’s promises.  Jesus, tired and half-starved, won the day for Himself and for us.

Remember His first words in Mark’s gospel – we heard them not so long ago: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”

For the kingdom of God to be at hand for anyone, it needed to be at hand for everyone and in every place, even the desolate wilderness with more wild beasts than people.  The kingdom of God is at hand even when we feel like we’re in the wilderness, when everything is dark and it’s so tempting to give up and give in, to look for our ultimate satisfaction in food and power and all the stuff that fades away. 

To be clear, we can’t win the battles of temptation on our own; that war was won by Jesus alone, who fought that fight so that He can fight beside us now.  If you’re walking in the wilderness, if you’re fighting a battle of your own, call on Jesus, and He will come to you immediately.

Epiphany Last

So, this is the third week in a row that the lectionary gives us stuff we don’t talk nearly enough about, whether that be because these things make us uncomfortable or we’re afraid someone might take us to be, say, less than a modern thinker. 

To many people think that demons and miracles belong just to biblical times, but that’s because they haven’t experienced one or the other, or they don’t think they have.  The Eucharist itself is a miracle, yet one we’ve come to expect if not take for granted. 

Eucharistic miracles are always very cool; stuff like the Host turning into actual meat or the Celebrant not recognizing his own voice while saying the Canon of the Mass.  St. Thomas Aquinas, generally considered the smartest and most learned person in the world between the times of Augustine and, well, now, experienced one while at worship on 6 December 1273, saying his daily Mass.  Thomas never told anyone exactly what happened, but from that point on he insisted that he had nothing left to offer the world.  “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”

Every time I come across that statement from Aquinas, I think about how Peter and James and John must have felt after witnessing the Transfiguration.  Jesus in all His glory, Moses and Elijah, long dead but standing before them, seemingly just chatting like they’ve known each other for years, which, of course, they had.

As my friend Fr. Bret Hays reminded me, Moses and Elijah were heroes of the Hebrew Scriptures, of course, but they also came to symbolize the things that God worked through them, that being the Law and the Prophets, the core of Jewish identity.  They are dressed in white robes, washed in the Blood of the Lamb, and most notably, they are alive, reminding us that even in death, to God’s faithful people life has changed, not ended.  Even Peter’s suggestion of building three booths for the glorious among them hearkened back to Jewish tradition, the Festival of the Booths, which commemorates not just when the grapes and olives are harvested but also the Israelites forty-year journey in the wilderness, when they lived in booths (decent tents with thatched roofs).

I bet that Peter, James, and John would say that everything they had seen up to that point would have seemed like straw by comparison with what they saw and what had been revealed to them.  The Transfiguration was like several miracles wrapped up in one.

So, what is a miracle?  Dictionary.com defines it as “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”  Okay, so far, so good; that’s what miracles can look and feel like.  But a more theological look at miracles would say that a miracle is when God’s grace invades our space in order to put things back to how they were supposed to be in the first place.  God did not create us and place us in Eden to be hungry or thirsty or strangers or prisoners or sick or possessed or even to die.  God meant for us to be in perfect relationship with Him, His glory known to us, our lives abundant. 

Buuuut we screwed that up a bit, didn’t we?  Thankfully, the Transfiguration reminds us that God didn’t write humanity off and walk away.  He kept coming to us, giving us the Law and the Prophets, an identity in Him, and in the fullness of time, He sent His Son to dwell among us, to pitch up His booth with us, so that His glory could once again be revealed to mankind. 

The lectionary gives us the Transfiguration every year on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, the Sundy before Lent begins, in part to lift us up a bit before the solemnity of Lent, but also to point us in the same direction Jesus went when He descended that mountain: toward Jerusalem, toward the Cross, on which His glory was truly revealed. 

So, with Peter, James, and John, let’s follow Jesus down that hill; and like blessed Aquinas, let’s see in the Blessed Sacrament a miracle without comparison.

Epiphany 5

Knock-Knock.

Who’s there?

Interrupting Cow.

Interrupting cow who?  Moo!

That’s a terrible joke, but there’s a reason for it.  Last week, Paul taught us some important things about demons, particularly the demon that confronted Jesus in the synagogue in Capernaum.  Jesus was teaching when the possessed man interrupted, yelling “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

Jesus frees the man from the hold of the demon and commands the demon to shut up.  That demon was getting in the way of what Jesus was trying to do, which was preach and teach and proclaim the kingdom of God.  Demons are great interrupters.

And that interruption worked.  After the exorcism, the people were amazed and likely got unruly, and today Mark continues the story with “And immediately he left the synagogue, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.”

Jesus apparently didn’t get very far into the house before they told Him about Peter’s mother-in-law’s illness.  In the first recorded healing of the sick in Mark, Jesus asks no questions, give no instructions, He just takes her by hand and up she goes.  Notice that what normally happens when someone is sick is reversed: if I go in and touch a person with the flu, there’s a chance I’ll get the flu; when Jesus touches the sick, they catch wholeness and strength.

Lots of people need wholeness and strength, and so at sundown, the Sabbath being over, the whole town shows up at Peter’s door.  Jesus heals the sick and casts out demons, and before what happened in the synagogue can happen again, Jesus muzzles the demons, because they knew Him. 

He did not let them interrupt again.  That’s a clue, I think, that while healing the sick and casting out demons and feeding the hungry and raising the dead were part of Jesus’ ministry and get lots of attention, those things were only a part of His ministry. 

In the morning, Jesus goes off by Himself to pray, to commune with His Father.  He wasn’t there long before being interrupted again, this time by Peter and the crew, letting Him know that when you heal people miraculously, you’ll never be free of attention. 

Jesus’ reaction: Let’s get out of here and move on, so I can preach there too; for that is why I came out.

There’s a sense of urgency there, right?  But for what?  For preaching, teaching, and proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come near.  Just fifteen verses before, those are the first words spoken by Jesus in Mark’s gospel: “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”

Jesus knew, and so should we, that some things are just more urgent than others.  And so on He went, throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.  Did He turn away the sick and the hungry along the way?  Of course not – the next story in Mark is Jesus healing a leper – but what was mission critical?  Going from synagogue to synagogue, worshiping and preaching, proclaiming the good news of God, and doing what? Casting out demons and all their interruptions.

We’re ten days or so from Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the Lenten season, and so it’s a good time to start thinking of things like Lenten disciplines and getting back to the basics.  It would be useful to keep today’s gospel in mind and to follow Jesus’ example: to pray together and by ourselves, to rid ourselves of evil interruptions, to serve those in need, and to proclaim that the kingdom of God is near to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Epiphany 3

When I was ten years old, we didn’t have MTV on our television plan, not that my parents wanted me watching MTV to begin with.  That was no big whoop, though, since I could walk down to my sister’s house and watch music videos there – MTV still played music videos back then – and then watch the A-Team with her father-in-law.  In 1984, Twisted Sister released one the best videos of all time.  It began with a high school class just back from summer break; the tyrannical teacher accosts the class and singles out a student for drawing a Twisted Sister emblem on his textbook.  The teacher asks the kid that eternal question: What do you want to do with your life?  The answer informed a generation: I wanna rock!

So few of us went on to rock, though, as much as we wanted to.  But that question remained: What do you want to do with your life?  That’s an excruciatingly hard question to answer, and many of us either don’t ever really figure it out or have no means of following through on what we consider, at least, our dreams. 

Consider the Apostles.  What did they want to do with their lives?  We know that Peter, at least, was married, so what did Peter’s wife want with her life?  What were Peter and Andrew and James and John thinking would happen when they dropped their nets and followed Jesus?  What did Peter’s wife think about that?

St. Mark doesn’t shed any light on any of that, nor does he give as much background as the other evangelists concerning the relationships surrounding the men mentioned so far, including John the Baptist.  Reading Mark, you’d assume that Jesus was a complete stranger to Peter and Andrew and James and John, and that He had cast some kind of Jedi mind trick over them: FOLLOW ME.

But the truth is that these four had had some time to think all this over.  They were disciples of the Baptist, had met and spent time with Jesus, and thought that they knew what they were getting into.  Peter’s wife probably knew this was coming and was surely supportive of her husband abandoning his business to follow around a guy from Nazareth.

But maybe she was, because Peter and the rest had figured out what they wanted to do with their life, and that was be disciples of Jesus. 

What was that going to look like?  Jesus told them that from then on, they would become fishers of men; they would be seeking out and gathering in a people for God.  They probably had some ideas of their own: the kingdom taken back from the Romans and restored to Israel.  Jesus sitting on an earthly throne; James and John’s mother had the vision of her sons sitting to Jesus’ right and left. 

They surely didn’t expect what played out in the next three years, nor could they have possibly dreamt it.  In fact, some of them actively tried to prevent it, not knowing or understanding the mind of God.  That was okay – God understood them – and gave them more than they could possibly have dreamt of.

What do you want to do with your life?  If you wanna rock, I salute you.  Figuring out what we want to do at each stage of life is not always easy and is best figured out in conversation with God and with others.  Where our plans end up is known only to God, but the beginning of great things is always the same: leaving our proverbial nets on the shore and following Jesus wherever He leads, knowing that He has better things in store for us than we could dream for ourselves.

Epiphany 2

My brother-in-law Jon went back to L.A. this past Friday, so the 2023/24 pizza tour has officially ended.  We take this tour, sometimes driving for some time, because we have the best pizza in the world and L.A., well, doesn’t.  A couple of weeks ago, Doan posted on Facebook asking where we should go next and 78 people commented, some of you included; we’re serious about our tomato pie.  Some, from other parts of the country, tried to defend their pizzas, which gave me ample opportunity to dump on those parts of the country and their quote-unquote, pizzas.  Can any good pizza come out of Indianapolis?  (No.)

Today’s gospel lesson is one of my favorites because it contains one of the sickest burns in the Bible: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  I bet Nathaniel was pretty proud of that one. 

This skepticism was understandable; at that time Nazareth was an obscure little hill town, remote and of no consequence.  It was not sophisticated or glamorous, quite the opposite, really.  There was, at the time, new opportunities for work, as the Romans were building a city nearby called Sepphoris; the name of that city lives on as a place in the mall where you can any shade of lipstick, Sepphora.  But still, no one expected anything of any importance to emerge from the tiny village of Nazareth.

Now, “the first time we meet Nathaniel was in the story we heard today.  “Nathanael was from Cana in Galilee, and was brought to Jesus by his friend, Philip, who also became one of Jesus’ disciples. Nathanael was one of the first to express belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.  His name means “God has given” in Hebrew.  Interestingly, Nathanael is only mentioned in the Gospel of John; the other three gospels identify him as Bartholomew.”[1]

Nathaniel, despite his skepticism about Nazareth, was, like his friends, on the lookout for something great to come from somewhere.  He had likely been, along with Philip and Peter and Andrew, a disciple or something close to it to John the Baptist, and they were banking that the Messiah was on His way.  He was about to be amazed.

But while the most fantastical language in our passage today involves beholding angels in their travels, I think the most impactful exchange is actually between Philip and Nathaniel. 

Philip tells Nathaniel that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”  Nathanael gets in his burn, and then Philip said to him, “Come and see.”  And Nathaniel actually did.

Philip, in his belief, acted; he went and found someone he knew and cared about and told him about Jesus.  Nathaniel, expecting and perhaps even wanting something more, blows it off a bit.  Philip, knowing that experiencing Jesus would be more convincing than talking about Him, just invites Nathaniel to come and see for himself.  He went, saw greater things than he could have asked or imagined, and went on to become the Apostle Nathaniel, founder of the Church in Armenia.  His face on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a Michaelangelo self-portrait, which I’m sure he and Philip laugh about.

That original, extraordinary exchange is what is called, of course, evangelism.  There aren’t many of us to can talk someone into believing that Jesus is the Son of God, the King of Israel, the one of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, but talking people into it is not our job, nor has it ever been.  Our job is, in the course of living lives that reflect what we have found in Jesus, to invite others to come and see Him.  To come and see Him in this place and in each other and in what we do in His Name.  That’s as easy as saying “Come and see,” knowing that we will all see greater things than we could either ask or imagine.

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[1] https://www.gotquestions.org/Nathanael-in-the-Bible.html