Back in March, people kept reminding everyone that this year was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. As a runner for many years, I found this metaphor kind of strange. After all, a marathon is a race too; it’s a longer one, sure; you have to pace yourself; but you still leave everything out on the course. As the year ground on, though, I came to realize something... It wasn’t a sprint, it wasn’t a marathon; it was as though the world’s supplies of gasoline had disappeared, and we all just had to walk everywhere for eighteen months.

Today we gather once again to obey the command: “Do this in remembrance of me,” but scattered, separated from one another, missing and grieving what life once was. But the Eucharist has always been this way. Every Sunday of the past when we gathered for worship in our various churches, we were only ever a fraction of a church. Every single one of Dom Dix’s “hundred thousand successive Sundays” has been marked by absence and grief. From the very first time that Jesus’ disciples gathered after his death down to the present day, every Sunday’s congregation has been incomplete. Every Sunday, even in ordinary times, some of us were carrying the memories of departed spouses and parents and friends.

Jesus’ message today isn’t a riddle. It’s not an obscure historical reference. It doesn’t need to be unwrapped, or clarified, or revealed. It’s simple: Love God with all you have. Love your neighbor as yourself. But “simple,” I’m sorry to say, isn’t the same as “easy.”

Right now we’re experiencing one of those brief windows that rolls around in our national political life everyone once in a while in ordinary times, when religion and politics collide, and politicians and pundits try to figure out how to use the Bible to best bash their opponents into giving way. I call it “Render Unto Caesar Season.”

And now, just a few days later, it’s like a ’90s teenage comedy: Father Moses goes away for the weekend and takes too long coming back, and the kids throw a house party. Uncle Aaron, Moses’ own brother, is left in charge, and he’s kind of a pushover. Moses has been gone, communing with God for forty days and forty nights, and the people are over it. “We don’t know what happened to Moses and his ‘God,’” they seem to say. “But—you can make us a god!” And Aaron, inexplicably, does.

I’m sure you all know the name Nobel, as in “Nobel Peace Prize”; you may even know that the prize is named after Alfred Nobel. But most people don’t know very much about Alfred Nobel, so forgive me if you do. Alfred Nobel of Peace-Prize fame was an arms manufacturer, an industrialist and innovator who transformed his steel company into a major producer of cannons and industrial and military explosives.