Imagine that Jesus Christ came back to earth, Ivan Karamazov says to his brother Alyosha, in Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov. Imagine that Christ returned in 16th century Spain. He’s heard the prayers of his people for fifteen hundred years, and he’s finally come to help, and the people are amazed. Wherever he goes, joy fills their hearts. People who are sick are healed. A girl rises from the dead. “The Sun of Love burns in his heart, and warm rays of light, wisdom, and power beam forth from his eyes.” The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself comes to Jesus, and puts him under arrest.

His interrogation is really more of a rant. He accuses Jesus of placing an unbearable burden on the people, the burden of freedom.

Our preparations for Ash Wednesday really begin on Palm Sunday, when we wave green fronds and leafy branches and sing the ancient song of longing and hope for the arrival of the Messiah: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord—Hosanna in the highest!” “Hosanna,” we say on Palm Sunday, which means in Aramaic: “Save us!” and we certainly need saving. The palms symbolize the hope of salvation: the hope that maybe this year, the Messiah will set things straight. Maybe this year, we’ll see God’s kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. Maybe this year, we’ll see the dawn of a new world of justice and peace. Maybe this year, Christ will deliver us once and for all “us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”

Eleven months later, our palms are mostly forgotten. We’ve stashed them in the junk drawer, or on a sacristy shelf. They are dry, and yellow, and crackling. And in the days before Ash Wednesday, we take the last remnants of our palms, and we gather them together in a bowl. We set them on fire, and light a match, and we watch our Palm Sunday hopes for a better world burn down to ash once more.

“Attention” is a funny word. It’s an abstract noun, but we use it all the time. Philosophers and scientists struggle to define it precisely, but the youngest children are expected to know what it means. It’s a noun that’s formed from a verb (“attend”), but we hardly ever the verb “attend” in English when we’re talking about “attention.” Instead we introduce all sorts of helping verbs. In other words, you’ll never hear a teacher in a crowded room of rambunctious children say: “Attend unto me, children!” unless you’re in a bad Victorian novel. Nor do we typically use the adjectival form, as our translation of 2 Peter did this morning: “Be attentive, kids!” No; when we’re talking about where our consciousness is focused at any given moment in time, we’re most likely to ask someone else to “pay attention!”

Lent begins in just ten days. And so, it’s around this time that some people begin to think or talk about fasting: about what they’ll “give up” for Lent, or perhaps what they’ll take on instead. You might hear people planning to fast from alcohol, or chocolate; from social media, or from coffee. You might hear people planning to take on a new practice or prayer or journaling, of serving the community or giving money to a good cause. Some people see the traditional Lenten practicing of fasting, of “giving something up,” as a helpful spiritual practice, others as an outdated burden. Personally, I always try to think of Lent as an exercise in willpower and self-knowledge: the point of “giving something up” for Lent is to refrain from something you enjoy, but which is essentially harmless, in order to gain a better understanding of your own internal dynamics of temptation. You might give up chocolate, for example, not because chocolate is bad; but because learning to resist the temptation to have just one more little square helps you learn how to resist the temptations that actually matter.

This isn’t quite what fasting has always been about. The Bible is full of people covering themselves in ashes and dressing in sackcloth as a sign of repentance, in the hope of propitiating an angry God. The Puritans who once inhabited the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared numerous “days of humiliation” and fasting to try to turn away God’s wrath in times of war or sickness or particularly cold winters. (Do you think that would work, actually? I’m willing to try it.) We’re less inclined to see fasting as a way to bring God’s favor on our society, and maybe more inclined to see it as a self-improvement project: my favorite example of this being, of course, the Today Show headline that referred to Lent as if it were a new fitness program: “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-Day Challenge.”

But as we prepare for the season of Lent to begin, we might consider the same question that God asked through Isaiah almost 3000 years ago: “Is such the fast that I choose?”

“Blessed are those”— a modern adaptation of the Beatitudes might begin—“who attend the Annual Parish Meeting.”

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Coffee Hour, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the bakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who stare at budget spreadsheets for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people email you and call you and ask all kinds of financial questions of you redundantly on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven; for in the same way they persecuted the treasurers who were before you.

At the heart of Paul’s mission is the paradoxical “message about the cross”: the claim that even though the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed did not come about in any visible way, even though Jesus was subject to the most painful and humiliating death the Roman Empire could devise, he was nevertheless the Messiah, the Anointed One who would set God’s people free. The message about the cross is the claim that this man, who appeared to the world to be just another failed revolutionary, was in fact the incarnate Son of God; and the moment that looked like his ultimate defeat was in fact his greatest victory. This certainly sounds like “foolishness.” It’s the opposite of what any reasonable person would expect, including most of Jesus’ disciples. But nevertheless, “it is the power of God.”

I have to admit that four o’clock in the afternoon is not my favorite time of day.

It’s not that beautiful moment when I first wake up and get to reward myself for climbing out of bed by making a cup of coffee and then climbing back in. It’s not five o’clock, when it’s time to head home and start cooking dinner, with most of the day’s work in the rearview mirror. By four o’clock, lunch was long enough ago that I’ve started getting cranky. I’ve used up most of my mental energy for the day, but my to-do list isn’t done. Four o’clock comes every day, I suppose; I don’t think I’ve ever once looked forward to it.

But four o’clock is when Jesus comes and changes your life. Or at least—four o’clock was when Jesus came and changed their lives.

John didn’t think that he was the Messiah; he thought of himself as a prophet, preparing the way for the Messiah. And he’s often shown this way in Christian art: a typical Renaissance painting of John will show him with one finger pointing the way to Jesus.

And yet there’s an uncomfortable truth about the story we read today. While we might expect that John, the “less important” figure, would be baptized by Jesus, the “more important” one, in fact the story unfolds the other way around: it’s Jesus who comes to his older cousin John, to be baptized in the river Jordan.

they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
(Matthew 2:11)

There’s a perfect moment in the first season of the TV comedy The Office in which Michael Scott, reflects on the importance of generosity. For those who don’t know, the series is a pretend documentary about working life in a small office supply company in post-industrial Pennsylvania; Michael Scott is the loveable but completely over-the-top character played by the comedian Steve Carrell.

So in this scene, Michael has a “talking head” interview, where he’s speaking to the camera and starts reflecting on what’s really important in life. Is life about being one of the best young paper salesmen in northeastern Pennsylvania? No. Is it about his meteoric rise into middle management? No. Is it about luxury and glamor? No.

“When I retire,” Michael says, “I don't want to just move to some island somewhere. I want to be the guy who gives it all back. I want it to be like, 'Hey, who donated that hospital wing that's saving so many lives?' 'I don't know. It was anonymous.' 'Well, guess what. It was Michael Scott.' 'But how do you know? It was anonymous.' 'Because I'm him.’”

The story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of a child becoming part of a new family. But the child isn’t Jesus, and the family isn’t the Holy Family: the child is me! And, lest you think the bubble of my ego has finally burst, the child is also you, and you, and you—because the story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of the adoption of a whole host of children from all sorts of families into the one family of God.

There’s something I love about reading the most cosmic and story of Jesus’ birth at the quietest service of the church year. On Christmas Eve, we celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, with a whole crowd of people singing carols that revel in the familiar details of the scene: the shepherds keeping watch in the fields, and the angels singing in the sky, and the babe lying in a manger. And then on Christmas Day—after the shepherds have gone home, and so have the crowds—a small handful of us come here to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation, “the becoming-flesh” of the Word of God.

We all know the story of Christmas, in its ancient and its modern forms. We know about St. Mary and St. Joseph and St. Nicholas; the donkey and the journey and the sleigh. The shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night, and the children in the pageant dressed up like cows. The angels singing in the heavens as the babe lies in the manger; and the angel sitting atop the Christmas tree as the presents lie beneath its boughs.

We all know the story of Christmas, in its ancient and its modern forms.

But what’s the story of the day after Christmas?

John the Baptist is an unusual man. The story of his life couldn’t be more different from what any of us experience day to day. And yet, of all the people in the New Testament, John the Baptist has an experience of God that’s the most similar to ours.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:4–13)

I almost want to end the sermon there, with Saint Paul’s beautiful words, written to the members of the early Christian church in Rome. He had never met them, but you can feel the love and compassion in his words. What a beautiful way to mark this Advent season of hope. In fact, it hits three of the four Advent themes that I learned as a child, when we were taught that the four Advent candles symbolized hope, peace, joy, and love. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace,” Paul says. And in this dark season, who doesn’t need some of those?

But peace, hope, love, and joy are not the only Advent themes. Advent is a season of contrasts: of hope and warning, peace and chaos, joy and fear. It’s a season that’s suspended between the First Coming of Christ at Christmas and the Second Coming on Judgment Day. Advent is a season of “duality.” And for me, nothing symbolizes this better than the fact that there are actually two different sets of themes that have been assigned to the four Sundays of Advent: while many of us may have learned the four themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, there is an older, traditional set of themes for the four Sundays of Advent: those were death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Two rather different moods.

Well, the cardboard cornucopias and tin-foil turkeys have been banished from the shelves. The first snow flurries have fallen. The Christmas tree is up in the window across the street from my office—in fact, the Christmas tree’s been up in Thompson Square for about three weeks by now! It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and so I want to turn my attention to the question I know that we’ve all been pondering since last December: What’s the difference between Jesus and Santa Claus, anyway?

This isn’t how the story’s supposed to end.

At least, this isn’t how the story of a hero on the rise usually goes. At some point, in the long process that leads from his betrayal to his trial, from his arrest to his death, something is supposed to happen. Jesus is supposed to act. In the Marvel version of the Life of Christ, this should be the climax of the first issue: at the moment of greatest sorrow, when it looks like all hope is lost, that’s when the gamma radiation is supposed to kick in, and Jesus is supposed to swell into a big green Hulk and tear the Cross apart.

People come to church for various reasons. But not many people come to church because they want to suffer more. Some appreciate the chance, once a week, to sit in a beautiful place, to listen to music and poetry, and to be at peace. Some want to make the world become a better place, and know that the church is committed to peace and love. Some people who come to church because they want their families to be shaped by service and prayer, or because they want to pass on some of the comfort and joy they’ve found in their faith to their children. And there are many other reasons, as well: from a deep relationship with Jesus or a curiosity about the Bible to the simple need to be with other people. But I’ve never in my life had someone shake my hand at the door and say that they’re here for the first time because they want to be “hated by all.” (Luke 21:17) I don’t know what I would say. “I’m not sure anyone here is going to hate you, this morning, but—do you want to come to Coffee Hour? There might be leftover pie.”

We sometimes think of the saints as the superheroes of the faith, the extraordinary subset of Christians who actually manage to follow the challenging way of life Jesus just described. These are people like the soldier Saint Martin, who cut his own cloak in half on a cold winter’s night to share it with a poor a man begging on the street. People like the martyrs of the early church, who were reviled and defamed, and finally put to death when they refused to give up their faith, but prayed for those who persecuted them, all the same. People like Saint Francis of Assisi, who never hesitated to give to everyone who begged from him, even though he had already given away everything he had. Our calendar of holy days commemorates too many saints for me to name, and admittedly, some I can barely pronounce. (My apologies to St. Mechthilde of Hackeborn.) We can’t always commemorate each one individually, but on All Saints’ Day, we recognize All the Saints at once.

But the “saints” are not only these famous figures. In fact, the Bible never uses the word “saint” as a title for a single person. The Biblical authors always use the plural form, “the saints.” And this doesn’t mean a list of named saints—Mary and James and Paul and John. “The saints” means the whole body of “the holy ones of God.”

One of the advantages of track and field as a sport is that I could tell you, at any given point in time, exactly how good I was. There are numbers still etched into my brain from track meets that took place when I was a teenager. I can tell you, to the hundredth of a second, my fastest-ever mile time, or how long it took me to run the only half marathon I’ve ever run, both fifteen years ago. The same is true, I think, for golf, where your handicap tells you exactly how you measure up.

But there is no easy way to calculate a “moral handicap,” to look at your life and know exactly how close you come to being on par for the course. You can’t measure your strength of character like you can measure the strength of your limbs. It wouldn’t make sense to say that fifteen years ago, you once prayed the rosary in 4 minutes and 36 seconds flat.

In the most important parts of our lives—in the questions of ethics and character and faith that really matter in the end—there’s no easy way to measure how good we are. And if we don’t trust that we are good enough, there’s always a temptation to prove that at least we’re better than someone else.

A long time ago, in a country far away, a young man tricked his father into writing his older brother out of his will. The brother was understandably upset. He started plotting his revenge, and their parents—desperate to avoid bloodshed and maybe a little unwilling to hold the man accountable for what he’d done—warned the young man about his brother’s plans and sent him away.

Time passed. The two brothers grew up. They married, and had children, and each one prospered in his own right, acquiring the herds of animals and families of followers that made you an influential man in those nomadic days.