don't eat alone

Recent church tradition names this Sunday—the last Sunday of Epiphany before Lent begins—as Transfiguration Sunday, which means the Gospel reading for the day in most mainline churches is the story of Jesus transformation in front of Peter, James, and John, which we just read together. The story shows up In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, each offering a few different details, and all of them telling of events that are hard to fathom. Transfiguration is an old word, and not one we use much, which makes the account even stranger. Let’s look again at what happened.

Jesus took the three disciples to the top of a hill or a mountain and, while they were up there, Jesus’ appearance became excessively brilliant–almost overbearingly bright–and Peter, James, and John saw Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus in the midst of the brilliance.

Peter’s first response was to build shelters to capture the moment, or perhaps to stretch the moment into something longer; if the story were contemporary, Peter would have been posting to his Instagram account. But he was interrupted by a cloudy presence that overshadowed everyone and a voice said the same thing Jesus heard at his baptism: “This is my beloved son in whom I delight.”

Matthew says the disciples were frightened. Luke and Mark say the disciples were awe-struck; the Greek word can be translated either way. Jesus told them not to be afraid, and when they looked up, it was just the four of them again, on the top of a hill in Galilee.

As many times as I have read this story, I am never sure what to do with it. This past week, a question kept coming to mind: What do we do with things we can’t explain?

When it comes to comedy, we are told a joke isn’t funny if you have to explain it. Perhaps that is also true of experiences of awe and wonder.

Many years ago, I was listening to A Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keillor told a joke that has remained one of my favorites.

Two penguins are standing on an iceberg.
One penguin says to the other, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.”
The other penguin replies, “Who says I’m not?”

I can’t explain why it’s so funny to me, and, if it is not funny to you, my explanation wouldn’t help.

Late in the afternoon Monday I was running errands when I realized it was almost sunset. I called Ginger at home and told her to meet me in the driveway and we went down to the marina in Guilford in time to see the sky melt into pinks and purples and oranges as the sun dropped below the horizon. We did little else but sit there and talk to a couple of others who had stopped for the same reason.

Again, I can’t explain why we were moved by the way the fading light hit the clouds, and again, my explanation wouldn’t help convey how it felt to be there. Instead of breaking the sunset down into its component parts, the power of the moment was in the way our hearts expanded as the day drew to a close, and the sense of appropriate insignificance–the awe–we felt alongside of the shoreline and the sunset.

As people of faith, we are called again and again to trust what we can’t explain–that’s what faith is: trust, even when we don’t completely understand. That is not to say we are to accept things without question, or that the stories shouldn’t be examined. Sometimes we come to these stories from a more analytical perspective, just as a scientist might approach a sunset as a way of understanding the properties of light; those moments matter.

And sometimes we are given the gift of living with moments we can’t explain—the chance to engage life without the comfort of an explanation or a definition. The two are not mutually exclusive or necessarily opposites. They can both be avenues to deeper understanding. The latter, however, carries the reminder that life is not easily explained.

Our passage today begins with the words “six days later,” which lets us know we’re in the middle of the story. What happened earlier in the week was Jesus said, “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me will find them. Why would people gain the whole world but lose their lives? What will people give in exchange for their lives?”

After thinking about Jesus glowing on the mountain and the sunset on the marina, I heard something I had not before in his words, “All who lose their lives because of me will find them.” That reminded me to the closing line of one of my favorite hymns, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” which says, “Lost in wonder, love, and praise.”

We often connect Jesus’ words about losing our lives to find them with ideas of calling and compassion–and those are good connections–and six days after he said that, he and three of his disciples were lost in a transcendent moment on a mountain. It was not an experience that reached a multitude like the feeding of the five thousand, or a healing that restored health to someone who was in despair over their physical condition. We don’t really know the point of the whole thing–why Moses and Elijah showed up, or why only Peter, James, and John were there–because, well, Jesus doesn’t explain it. All we hear is the voice from the cloud expressing love and delight.

We can’t explain what happened on that mountain with Jesus and the disciples. Peter, James, and John got to be there because they trusted Jesus and followed him up the hillside where they stumbled into a moment where they lost themselves in wonder, love, and praise. We may not see Moses or Elijah, but we live in a world–in a universe–that offers us opportunities to find ourselves by getting lost in wonder.

Dacher Keltner is a scientist who studies awe. In a recent interview, he talked about the role awe played in the grief that followed his brother’s death from colon cancer. He realized, he said, that he need more new in his life, more reminders of the transcendence and connection. He said,

For me, the awe practice in the grief was . . . to go out and do a walk and look for things that amazed [me], big and small. And you can do that. I gathered up a lot of sacred texts to stay close to. I went to “awe spots.” I don’t know much about music, but I intentionally went into music to find what is awe-inspiring about it. So, I made it a practice in life like a lot of people do, . . . like religion or spirituality. And it changed my life.

At the end of the Prairie Home Companion skit where Garrison Keillor told the penguin joke, he said, “Such a small joke, but a haiku is small, too. Or a piano etude. The Mona Lisa isn’t that big. There can be grandeur in a small thing. I myself am capable of grandeur. Who says I’m not?”

We may not end up on a mountain with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, but we see wonders most every day that we cannot explain; we are offered the chance to be awed regularly. Perhaps Jesus’ words to us, rather than “do not be afraid” would be, “Pay attention—let the world surprise you.” It is in the songs we sing:

O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands hath made
I see the stars I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power through out the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee,
How great thou art, how great thou art
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee
How great thou art, how great thou art

We are God’s beloved children in whom God delights; may we also be those who are open to being delighted by all we cannot explain. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. I write a free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors that comes out every Tuesday. I would love for you to subscribe. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or buy me a cup of coffee.

I waited until this morning to post my sermon in hopes that it would not get quite as buried under the Super Bowl hype. The text is 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, a passage that offers a less-than-flattering look at the people in the Corinthian church, but also offers a connection with them because they acted in ways we too often find familiar. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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Last year I was asked to conduct a memorial service for a man I didn’t know. He had connections to the church where I was serving as interim, and the family wanted the service there. I met with family members beforehand to learn a bit about him, and they told me a few family stories and talked about the company he had founded and built, but I was caught by surprise when I walked into the church and a red MAGA hat was in the middle of the spray of memorial flowers.

I could feel my guard go up, in part because I have encountered intense views from some wearing those hats. I realized as I sat in my place that the hat brought up stereotypes I learned from the way we talk about each other and the way we have been taught to define one another.

After several family members and friends had eulogized the man, I asked if anyone else wanted to comment. Four people got up from a pew in the back and came forward. They identified themselves as long-time employees of his company. There were two men and two women: one Black man, two Latinas, and one white man. They wept as they told stories of how he had created opportunity for them, loaned them money to get through crises, and helped take care of their families.

After the service, several people came up to say how meaningful the service was and to tell other stories. What I learned from listening is the man was more than his hat.

I thought a long time about using that story to open the sermon because just the mention of the MAGA hat would make some folks wary of the direction the sermon might take, or that others might decide they know where I stand politically and then make further assumptions. My choice to include it was bolstered by the words we read from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. They were a congregation that argued a lot, it seems, particularly around who they thought was the best teacher: Paul or Apollos, who was another missionary traveling between churches across the region.

The people in the church had taken to choosing sides rather than listening to each other–and that’s what took me back to the story. My impression of the man who died was changed by listening to those who knew him and loved him. A lot can change by listening.

I have a friend name Hugh who lives in Mississippi. He is a minister, a writer, and a community organizer. He wrote this week about sharing a meal with someone who shared very few of his political ideas and yet they found they had much in common. Hugh wrote:

We seem to have lost the capacity to listen. I’m not trying to sound nostalgic there as if I am mourning for an idealized past where everything was rainbows and kittens. Rather, it is harder to listen to other people now than it once was – largely because we have so many alternatives. Our hyper-connected world has made it easier and easier for us to find like-minded people, but also easier to shut out those who differ from us.

And because we do not listen to each other, we don’t truly know each other, and thus it is easier than ever for people in power to divide us. . . . Years of listening have taught me one critical thing: We are not nearly as divided as we think we are. Or, more accurately, we are not as divided as those who profit from our separation want us to believe we are.

We are divided, perhaps as much as we think we are; the issue is what we do with the divide. Hugh’s last sentence is powerful: We are not as divided as those who profit from our separation want us to believe—which is another way of saying it matters who we listen to.

If we listen to much of both public and social media, we are an irreconcilable nation, broken in two, divided into red and blue. Pick any issue, and we are poles apart. There is no nuance, no discussion of ideas, no sense of a continuum of thought. It’s either our side or their side, so we better take what is ours. The perspective prioritizes issues over relationships and individualizes systemic problems that we need to work on together. Over and over we are told we are not capable of learning how to live together–yet is what we are called to do.

Ginger, my wife, often speaks of the UCC as a place where we choose relationship over doctrine. I like that. But notice that it doesn’t say we choose not to talk about tough issues, just that when it comes down to it, we will choose each other over whatever the issue might be. In an interfaith workshop recently in Guilford to deal with increasing physical and verbal anti-Jewish violence, the trainers talked about choosing “counsel culture” over “cancel culture”—to find a way to move beyond just writing each other off.

Though it didn’t happen in church, the choice of relationship played out in public as LeBron James broke Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s all-time NBA scoring record–a record that had stood for thirty-eight years. There was a lot of talk about how Kareem would feel about LeBron’s achievement, and most of it assumed the record was what mattered most to Kareem. But he wrote an open letter to James on his blog to say he celebrated the achievement largely because the record didn’t define who he was–or who he had become as a person. Since he retired from the NBA, Jabbar has been an activist and writer–he has invested his life in relationships. He was happy to pass the torch without feeling as though his accomplishment had been negated.

As she reflected on Jabbar’s words, writer Rebecca Solnit said,

“Or maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.”

In other words, Kareem–or anyone else for that matter–could celebrate LeBron and still see Jabbar’s achievement as worthy of recognition. There is more to life than being in first place, or always being right, or making sure you are the one with the power because we have enough to go around if we are committed to choosing relationships over, well, pretty much anything.

In the last few minutes, we’ve gone from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians to a funeral to coffee in Mississippi to basketball to scarcity economics as a metaphor for how not to live. The thread I have been trying to follow–and I hope you have been able to see–is we have to keep reminding ourselves that what matters most is each other. Listening well is an act of love. Trusting one another is an act of love. Being trustworthy is an act of love. Being open to growing and changing is an act of love.

Rev. Susan did good work with us last week in her presentation after church, asking us to think about who our neighbors are. The implicit question was what kind of neighbor do we want to be? Our UCC motto says, “Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here,” but welcome just gets you in the door. Belonging takes work: attention, listening, vulnerability. It happens in small, significant gestures, not grand statements.

Let me give you a specific example. When Ginger and I decided to get married, it created big problems within my family. It’s too much to go into now, but the rifts and the fact that we moved to Boston four months after the wedding enabled the distance to grow. The divide seemed too expansive.

After a couple of years of living that way, Ginger said, “We are never going to get to have the conversation that clears the air, so maybe we should try another approach. Why don’t you pick a day of the week and call your parents and say these things: How are you? What did you do this week? Here’s what we did this week. I love you. And hang up.

I did just that, Saturday after Saturday. It became a part of our lives, and it grew in significance. After a time, I began to call on days other than Saturday, or my parents would call me. We still had serious disagreements about how we looked at life, but they died knowing I loved them, and I knew they loved me.

If we want to feel like we belong here and help others belong as well, we have to listen, to move beyond our assumptions, and trust that we have enough love to go around. May we be people who make those choices every day. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I started a new interim today–actually a bridge interim, which means I am there to bridge between two stages of life for the congregation. The passage today was the Beatitudes. As I say in the sermon, a book, a conversation, and a movie gave me a new way to look at these familiar words.

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I have been thinking this week about how to describe our passage for this morning and it strikes me that we might say it is “familiarly unfamiliar.” What I mean by that is we think we know what it means, but we would be hard pressed to actually describe it–sort of like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I remember learning about it, so it is familiar, but ask me to nail it down and I couldn’t tell you if it is every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, or things in motion stay in motion, or look both ways before you cross the street.

When we say we are going to talk about the Beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we could probably say that those are the verses that start with “blessed are,” and maybe even remember those who mourn, or the meek, or the peacemakers, but we might struggle after that. In addition, when we do read them, we let that word blessed go by like we understand it. Listen as we read them again this morning and see what you think that word means.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God.” (Matthew 5:1-16 NRSVUE)

Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who are mourning, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers; how can that word go in all those different directions and mean the same thing? What are we to make of what it means to be blessed?

Some translators use the word happy instead, but “happy are those who mourn” makes Jesus sound like he’s rattling off oxymorons–at least in the way we understand the word happy today. Some read the word blessing to mean a sign of God’s favor, sort of like the t-shirt I saw once that said, “Jesus loves you but I’m his favorite.” I’ve heard people talk about “the paradox of blessing,” meaning that being chosen by God is not always an easy thing. They use Mary, Jesus’ mother, as an example because she had the blessing of being his mother but that also meant she had to watch him be executed by the Romans.

But isn’t that the paradox of being human? Don’t most all of us lose those we love?

We have to be cautious as we talk about blessing because we bump up against the idea that suffering has a purpose, that we are supposed to learn something, which too easily becomes that God is trying to teach us something, and then we end up at everything happens for a reason, which means if we can’t figure out the reason then something is wrong with us.

To say those who mourn are blessed does not mean God won’t give us more than we can handle, or there is an explanation or a reason for our hardship. When we look back–when we remember what we have been through–we find meaning that might not have been apparent in the moment things were happening, but I’m not sure that is what Jesus was saying.

A book, a conversation and a movie helped me find a new understanding of our passage. The book is called Life is Hard by Kieran Setiya. It is full of good things, but I want to highlight one sentence and then ask you to keep it in your mind: ““Hardship is routinely hidden.”

Let me say it again. “Hardship is routinely hidden.”

In one of our conversations this week, Ginger, my wife, said she had finally realized I was always going to be depressed and she was able to stop feeling guilty about not being able to fix it.

I have lived with depression for most of my life, but I didn’t begin to figure that out until the fall of 2001 when a combination of choices and circumstance sent me into a free fall. I had no idea what was happening to me. I had never talked to anyone who had gone through what I was feeling. The way that Ginger loved me through those days is the main reason I am even standing here this morning. I didn’t expect her to fix it; I just needed her to be there.

As we were getting ready for church one Sunday–when things felt unbearably heavy to me–she said, “I have to ask you to do a hard thing this morning. I think you need to ask for prayer for yourself; I can’t do it for you.” When it came time for prayer requests, I stood up and said much what I just said to you and asked for prayers. At coffee hour, five people came up to me and said, “I had no idea we could talk about this out loud.” Hardship is routinely hidden.

Their words gave me a toehold: if I would tell people what was happening, I would be able to remember I was not alone.

And now–twenty-two years later–and we are still coming to new understandings of what my depression has meant in our lives. We have learned to love each other more deeply not because of the depression but because of our commitment to each other in the presence of my depression and all the rest that has made up our lives.

This weekend marks thirty-four years since the day we met. We went to the movie to celebrate–I mean, in the theater with popcorn and M&Ms. The movie we saw was A Man Called Otto. All I knew about it was Tom Hanks played what appeared to be a grumpy old man. What we learned early in the movie (without giving too much away) was part of his grumpiness came from grief: his wife, whom he loved dearly, had died six months earlier.

As the story unfolded, we got to know Otto and the folks who lived around him. In a way, they were a live action Beatitudes–they were mourners, meek ones, persecuted ones, people with pure hearts, peacemakers, merciful ones, along with a couple of other categories Jesus didn’t mention. And what they reminded each other was that the way we get through this life is to take care of each other.

Perhaps, then, one way we can read Jesus’ words is that he is saying,

This is how life is:
you are going to live with a wounded spirit;
you are going to mourn;
you are going to be humbled;
you are going to yearn for justice when it isn’t there;
you are going to be kind;
you are going to feel a singleness of purpose;
you are going to make peace around you;
you are going to be ridiculed for taking a stand.
And so is everyone else.
When you do these things together–when you share your stories and your burdens and whatever you have–you flavor the world; you make life worth living. You become a blessing.

From time to time, I hear people talking about “living their best lives,” and that usually means some sort of carefree existence. Jesus said that’s not our best life, in fact, life is not about comparisons; it’s just life, and we flourish–we find blessing, we live into the image of God that created us–when we engage whatever is happening, when we see our circumstances and experiences as means to offer help and to ask for it, as ways to connect, to flavor each other’s lives and the world around us.

Our verses this morning are part of a larger sermon that goes on for a total of three chapters in Matthew, and most of it has to do with how to treat one another, focusing on relationships rather than rules or doctrine. Jesus gives tangible examples of what it looks like to love our neighbor as ourselves, as well as how we learn to trust God that we ourselves are worth loving. We will look at parts of it over the next couple of weeks. For now, may we be people committed to speaking the truth in love, to not keepint the hard parts hidden, to listening with open hearts, offering help to one another, and asking for help even when we don’t feel like we are worth it. And if you don’t feel like you are worth it today, hear these words: you are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved, no matter the circumstances you face or the weight you carry. We are blessed because we are breathing. Amen.

The sermon below is one I preached for a church on the other side of New Haven to candidate to be their Bridge Pastor for the next five or six months. I started not to post it because it is kind of “teachy” (as I described it to Ginger) and, therefore, felt like it might not have much reach beyond those in the room Sunday, or on their Facebook feed. I came across an article—“Here Be Sermons”—written by a non-church person who saw a sermon as saw the audience as a community. He contrasted them this way:

Suppose you and I are listening to a physics lecture. Although we share the same goal — learning physics — we’re pursuing it more or less independently from one another (and from all other students in the lecture). If you happen to fail the class, it’s no real skin off my nose, and vice versa.

In contrast, suppose we’re listening to a sermon — on the virtue of kindness, say. In this case, I do have a stake in whether you learn the lesson, because unlike physics, if you fail at kindness, I’m going to suffer. Put differently, there are positive externalities to the act of listening to a sermon. When you internalize a sermon’s message, I stand to benefit, and vice versa.

The other reason I started not to post it is I’ve said pretty much all of it before. Then I read a Billy Collins interview where he said the most important thing about teaching is repetition. Even though a sermon and a lecture are different, I think what he is saying still applies. I know you’ve heard this before, but it’s good to hear it again: we are wonderfully and uniquely made in the image of God and worthy to be loved—and we’re all in this together.

Shoot, now you don’t need to read the sermon.

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We don’t know how long John had been baptizing people when Jesus showed up. All we are told is that John was at a part of the Jordan River that felt like it was out in the middle of nowhere–some twenty miles from Jerusalem–telling people it was time for a change. A big change. If they wanted to be a part of that change, they could demonstrate it by being baptized. “Repent” is the word he used: turn around, go in a new direction. He was a person literally and figuratively on the fringe of society telling people that business as usual was not the way God wanted them to live their lives.

In Matthew’s description, John comes across as rather righteously indignant. He goes hard after those who supported the political and religious establishments. John was talking not only about personal change but also, and perhaps more importantly, systemic change. When we think of what it means to repent–to go in a new direction–we think first about personal changes and decisions we can make individually, but we are also called to explore the choices we make together.

We can infer that John had been out there for a good while when Jesus showed up wanting to be baptized. We can also infer that this is not the first time they had met. John recognized Jesus and his understanding of Jesus made him hesitant to baptize, but Jesus said, “We need to do this to bring about God’s justice in the world.” So, John walked with Jesus into the river and baptized him. It was an act of consecration and an act of solidarity. It mattered to Jesus that he was baptized. He was making a public statement about who he was in the world.

Many years ago, I got to visit Israel and Palestine. I stood on the bank of the Jordan River with a group of UCC folks from a church in Massachusetts. We knelt at the water’s edge to “remember our baptism” as the ministers sprinkled water from the river on our foreheads. In the middle of our quiet, reflective moment a bus pulled up and from it flowed a group of Pentecostal folks in white robes who came running down the hill led by their pastor who was shouting, “Gloria a Dios!” over and over at the top of his lungs. When he reached the small landing at the water’s edge, he didn’t stop. He took a flying leap and belly flopped into the water, robe and all, closely followed by pretty much everyone else behind him. They splashed in the water as they sang and laughed and cried. I think I can speak for many in our group when I say we looked over and wished that was the way it felt to remember our baptism.

Jesus didn’t jump into the river shouting, but he was making a bold public statement. Alongside of that, his baptism was also a personal affirmation. Matthew says Jesus experienced the Holy Spirit like a dove landing on him and he heard a voice say, “This is my dearly loved son in whom I delight.” It does not appear that anyone else heard the voice or saw the dove. John went on baptizing, people kept coming, and Jesus went further out into the wilderness to fast for forty days.

We mark Jesus’ baptism as the beginning of his public ministry. The event is so significant that it has become one of the two sacraments of our denomination, along with Communion, which grows out of the last meal Jesus had with his disciples before his execution. The two sacraments are bookends to his time on earth, in a way. Today, thanks to New Year’s Day falling on a Sunday and pushing our monthly observance of Communion back a week, we get to look at the two of them together.

Baptism, for us, has taken on a different look than what Jesus experienced. John didn’t sprinkle water on Jesus; he dunked him. Over the centuries, the sense of blessing and affirmation that Jesus received has been translated to baptizing infants as a way of affirming that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Likewise, our Communion table is open to anyone who wants to share in the meal as another way of affirming that God’s love does not require prerequisites.

Both sacraments are communal acts—things we do together as tangible reminders of something we need to hear again and again: nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Over the centuries, our sense of the magnitude of both things has led us to make them formal and solemn, when neither of them were, in their inception. Jesus waded out into a river in the desert and was baptized by a guy who wore animal skins and ate bugs. He shared the bread and the cup from the meal he was eating with his disciples that last night. It was more improvised than instituted.

When we come to the table together in a few minutes you will hear me talk about re-membering, as in putting ourselves back together in Jesus’ name, following Jesus’ words, “As often as you do this, remember me.” One way to hear the words “as often as you do this” is that he was talking about any time we sit down to eat. Similarly, I read one person this week who said they take the daily act of washing their face as a chance to remember their baptism and to remember they are God’s beloved child. I thought about that as I walked in the rain on Friday and the water hit my face.

We don’t observe the sacraments as a way of being more holy or more worthy of God’s presence. We don’t follow these rites because the form has some sort of magical power that protects us, or because they are some kind of initiation ritual. We reenact these scenes as tangible reminders to us that we are God’s beloved ones and as tangible promises to God that our lives will reflect God’s presence.

It’s a bit puzzling to think that Jesus somehow needed to go into the water and then hear that God delighted in him. He wasn’t just going through the motions of joining the club, he was aligning himself with John’s call to live into God’s justice and inclusion. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, just before the meal, Jesus talked about how those who followed him would be recognizable: “I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was imprisoned and you visited me.” Another set of bookends, this time with words. At the end of his ministry, he was saying the same things he heard John say at the beginning.

The sacraments of baptism and Communion pull us into the middle of each other’s lives and the lives of those around us to find any way we can to remind each other that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and oh, so worthy to be loved.

We may not be jumping in the river this morning, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come to the table full of joy as we re-member Christ in the waters of our baptism and in the meal that is before us. Jesus said the bread represented his body; the apostle Paul used the Body of Christ as his favorite metaphor for who we are together. In the middle of a world that feels torn apart, let us move to the table to re-member ourselves in Jesus’ name—to put the Body of Christ back together again. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. I write a free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors that comes out every Tuesday. I would love for you to subscribe. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or buy me a cup of coffee.