The Church has gazed far too longingly and for far too long on empire, authority, modernization, and marketing. And after focusing on the faces of those gods for generations, we’ve forgotten they aren’t the One we ought to reflect. It’s time that we once again turn from our own images of power and once again follow Christ into the world—and not just to foreign countries but to our own neighborhood playgrounds and stores and restaurants and salons and houses.

…what if we start looking at Lent less as preparing ourselves for death and more about readying ourselves for the coming world? What if we substitute our idea of “giving up” with something more like “giving away?” It’s like moving to a new home. As we get ready for what’s to come, we discover that by clearing out the attic and our closets we aren’t sacrificing as much as disencumbering ourselves. A new world is dawning; a new life awaits. So why bring along the same things that were dragging us down in the old one?

When we read in the Bible about “unclean spirits,” like in today’s Gospel, the most straightforward translation of those words—and the translation you would find in nearly any other context apart from the “spiritualization” of a religious text—is “foul” or “impure air.” The same goes for the Holy Spirit, which is essentially “sanctifying air” or “purifying breath.” The presence of the Sanctifying Air forces out the corruption of every type of foul air, thus resulting in the healing, restoration, and sanctification of an individual or community.

But Jesus has also chosen his words quite carefully. He isn’t telling anyone to make friends with their very real enemies or show them “unconditional love”—those are different terms than what he uses here. This is agape, “love as action,” love that you do. He’s saying to “act lovingly—even to your enemies. Behave yourselves among those who hate you. Speak respectfully to whoever curses you. Pray about those harming you.”

A month or two ago I offered a warning about our journey through the Book of Luke this year. Luke is a very physical Gospel, and it has similarly physical, practical expectations of Jesus’ disciples, including us. In Luke’s account, Jesus is far less concerned with otherworldly matters than he is with everyday interactions and how people treat one another. He doesn’t pull punches or soften his statements to make anyone feel more comfortable, no matter who they happen to be. He’s come to turn the world upside down—to reverse not only our standard expectations but also our practices. Luke’s is very much what we would term a social justice Jesus, and what Jesus has to tell us today might—and probably should—give all of us pause.

Today we’re celebrating the Feast of the Presentation, when Mary and Joseph brought the 40-day-old Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem for his dedication to the Lord. Mystical birth announcements and angel choirs aside, sleepless nights and the constant responsibilities of rearing an infant would have been wearing on them. How long exactly would it take before God would give this only begotten son the throne of David? Mired in the struggles of real life, the dream of deliverance may have no longer felt worth the effort. So God sends them a little boost of encouragement.

We can have emotional love. We can have fondness and affection. We can have loyalty and comradery. Those are all good things and important aspects of our lives. But God isn’t found in any of them. They may point us toward God, but they’re not where God exists—where God becomes real.

A body is one. We can look at it from the outside and see how different sections operate or support each other, but from the inside, every single part is simply doing what it knows how to do. A finger doesn’t understand that it’s unique in its ability to touch or grasp. White blood cells have no clue that they specialize in fighting off infection. Each simply does what they do to the best of their ability.

It can be easy to get caught up in the worry of exact details regarding when or how things in the Bible happened, but honestly, I’m not too concerned about precisely representing this scene. Frankly, our imagination of the kings often has more to do with centuries of theological speculation and accrued mythology than with what the Gospel tells us in the first place. None of those ideas are necessarily bad or wrong—most of those kinds of developments begin with the intention of helping people become more faithful by better connecting with the Bible—but sometimes it’s helpful to strip off the layers of embellishment solidified by generations of story and song and briefly reestablish the basics behind our modern traditions.

God doesn’t hide from Creation. God hasn’t given up on humanity in our constant chaos, our violence, greed, and corruption. No, God comes down, descending right into the midst of it all: the pain, the poverty, and the sorrow; the love, the hopefulness, and the joy. God isn’t like a judge closed up in her chambers, reviewing the laws and striving to remain impartial. Nor does God wander the edge of the Cosmos, disinterested in what already is and dreaming only of new adventures or things to come. No, God comes down.

A few weeks ago we started talking about John’s call to repair the Royal Road and how easy it is to assume this thoroughfare only exists for the King and his nobles to easily pass by. But Baruch reminded us that God has a different intention for this highway. These lanes are not being built for the King’s convenience but for commoners—an open route for all to reach the Royal Hall in safety. It doesn’t matter where their paths have previously led them: all are invited to feast with this King.

If someone asked you to pick one of our readings this morning as good news, you might have trouble choosing. Zephaniah’s prophecy, our canticle from Isaiah, and the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians each practically jump off the page with positivity. But I doubt our Gospel lesson would be anyone’s first choice. It’s hard to hear any good news when someone starts their message with, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

Each Advent, the Lectionary gives us a week or two of readings involving John the Baptist. John is considered the Forerunner of Christ, and the New Testament clearly positions him as fulfilling a prophecy from Isaiah chapter 40. Several of the Apostles were his followers before Jesus eventually called them away. Yet despite his significance among the earliest Christians, many of us today don’t really know a whole lot about him, much less his mother Elizabeth and father Zechariah, whose canticle we read today instead of our usual Psalm.

In some ways you could think of the grand scope of the Church Year similarly to how the earth orbits the sun. The sun remains in a constant position while earth swings around it. From earth, we can’t help but mark the differences between the summer and winter solstices because of changes in the weather and the amount of daylight. If we could make out the details without blinding ourselves, the sun itself would have a different face on each of those days. But a different appearance doesn’t make it a different sun.

Though far from the emphasis and purpose of the whole book, the Bible includes several end-of-the-world explorations, too. They pop up occasionally in the Hebrew Scriptures—especially among the prophets like Daniel. In the New Testament, we mostly find them in Revelation and a few of the epistles. Jesus himself references “the end of the age” on occasion. But today’s Gospel launches his longest discussion of it: the entire 13th chapter of Mark, which scholars title “the little apocalypse.”

No Christian festival is or ever has been a commemoration of Death or of the dead. All of them—be it Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, All Saints’, or any other lesser feast—are for the living—but not just for those of us sitting in the pews today. The core of these holidays is the gratitude for and joy of resurrected life.

No matter how clear we make our initial statements, how carefully we devise our structures and rules, or how thoroughly we define our terms, we immediately begin to imagine—and, if we’re honest, hope for—new exceptions, each leading us into a fresh multiverse of what-if’s. As our search for loopholes and inconsistencies keeps feeding itself, eventually our hierarchy becomes so complex that it’s hard to find our way back to the idea behind the original statement.

It’s easy to say that you have faith in something or someone. It’s much more revealing to see whether or not someone remains actively faithful in their behavior. Faith as we understand it simply involves thought, which does indeed make it impossible to judge. But faithfulness is easy to determine: we see the reality of an internal thought or belief being played out over time in the real world.

While Mark clearly has Jesus addressing the way he wants his followers to treat one another in contexts of leadership and fellowship here, I wonder if we shouldn’t reflect his statement back a bit farther—back to his warning on the road that the Lectionary skipped, back to the eye of the needle and the rich young ruler, back to the disciples preventing the children from gathering, and even back to the divorce exchange two weeks ago.

Of course, it’s easy to just read past this. After all, the rest of Jesus’ words are full of hyperbole, with camels threading their way through needles and contrasts between mortals and gods. At some point, it just feels comical, allowing us to simply laugh and brush it all away. Jesus couldn’t possibly be serious about everybody giving away everything! Clearly, he’s just making extreme statements to get his point across."