Historically, the Church has tended to read “justice” and “justification” as argumentative or legal terms. Is an action in accordance with the law? Then it’s technically “just.” Is your explanation of what happened adequate to excuse why you acted outside the rules? If so, we say you’ve “justified” yourself….But there’s another usage of the word “just” that we need to apply here.

As Christians, we presume we’ve based our ideas about God on the Bible, but when we finally take a look at what that same Bible actually says, we discover someone unexpected—a God we simply can’t predict. God is very much God’s own person. God can be both unpredictable and consistent. God creates and destroys, loves and hates, mourns over disaster and dances with joy. God’s simple presence melts the greatest mountains yet refuses to burn a small bush.

Sometimes Jesus’ words are indeed hard for us to take, but sometimes that’s because we need to make hard decisions and implement hard changes. Jesus is indeed calling us to carry our own crosses, but he’s hoping for much more than simply giving away things we don’t really want or use in the first place. He wants us to spend not only our money but our influence, power, and authority on others, serving them to the point that people think we’re acting against our own interests, because God’s Kingdom of love is worth the sacrifice of self.

“Sabbath” isn’t something we talk about much in church anymore. Even though the Bible references it frequently, most of us probably think of it as a weekly rest day for our Jewish neighbors. It officially falls on Saturdays. From very early in the life of the Church, Christians appropriated some of its practices to our Sunday observances. But if you try to get much deeper than that, a lot of us are quickly lost.

A quick glace around the celestial board room reveals this meeting involves all of upper management. Calamity is chatting with Fear over by the nebula dispenser. Fertility and Wealth keep checking notes and scribbling together on a page full of numbers. Ocean and Earth stand toward the corner locked in a quiet yet heated conversation about who has final word on an area of overlapping interest.

Transfiguration Sunday marks the end of Epiphany each year, providing us with a glimpse of a transformative Jesus shortly before joining his march to Jerusalem that following Ash Wednesday. However, the formal observance of the Feast of the Transfiguration was actually yesterday, hence our texts this morning.

We pressure ourselves and other to choose between two realities that, like oil and water, simply cannot mix. But the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the incarnation of God the Son, upends our common way of thinking. It reveals the inadequacy of our concepts of division and exclusion, of separation and distinction, of earthly and heavenly or even sacred versus secular. Baptism displays our divided understanding of human life as utterly misguided.

…what we think of as clarity from the inside often reveals itself to be stagnation or self-satisfaction when viewed from the outside. The moral certitude of our philosophy, along with our continuing internal focus, makes us unable to adapt to the changing realities around us. Or sometimes, and certainly worse, it can lead us to actions that prevent those around us from making progress in discerning or exploring more loving and merciful ways of being.

The Church has a long history of pitting these two sisters against one another, accusing Martha of demonstrating the “inferior” way of works while Mary embodied the more enlightened path of “faith.” We mistakenly deride the first while lifting up a false image of the second, and, in the process, end up placing impossible demands on Christian women in general.

Most people are familiar with at least some part of Jesus’ story about the Good Samaritan. It’s had some level of influence in nearly all of society, from personal interactions all the way up to legislation known as “Good Samaritan laws.” It isn’t particularly hard to figure out the parable’s broad point: help other people. But simple as that sounds, it isn’t always easy for us to follow through on Jesus’ instruction to “Go and do likewise.” It’s surprising how frequently we suddenly discover ourselves standing in place of the legal expert, not even realizing it as we too ask, “And who is my neighbor?”

…the Bible never even mentions abortion. Not once. That means, in no uncertain terms, abortion is NOT a biblical issue. “God is love” is biblical, as the Epistles directly tell us that. “You shall not kill” is biblical, as it appears clearly within Moses’ Ten Commandments. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is biblical, appearing not only in Jesus’ teachings but in today’s text from Galatians. Abortion, however, is not among the topics the Bible ever addresses, meaning there is no truly “biblical” statement or position regarding it.

There’s a joke among clergy that rectors always give the Trinity Sunday sermon to some other speaker, and that’s certainly rung true in my own experience: although we’re approaching the third anniversary of my priestly ordination and we’re still well within my first year as rector here at St. Andrew’s, this is at least my fourth time preaching this particular day of the Church calendar!

…the main Christian emphasis of the day is the promised coming of the Advocate, or Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has always been the most confusing and elusive person of the Trinity. It certainly is for me, and it appears to have been just as puzzling to the leaders of the Early Church. If you look at the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, for example, you’ll see multiple lines or sentences dedicated to defining the Father and Son, but the Holy Spirit receives little more than a comment in each.

Christian tradition is always about preservation of life—at its most basic level, the entire concept of “salvation” is about restoring people from death to life or delivering them from danger to safety and security! From the birth of the Church—the Day of Pentecost that we celebrate next Sunday—Christians have been people of Life….So how is it that so many of us today have become thralls of Death?

Our reading from Revelation reveals a bit of how John at least interpreted the vision of peace Jesus had been casting. There we catch a glimpse of what it can look like when, as we heard last week, “the home of God is among mortals,” where God “will dwell with them as their God; they will be [God’s] peoples, and God [themself] will be with them.” And what John presents us with isn’t dissimilar to what we saw when we talked about Revelation two weeks ago…

At this point in the story, we’re nearly halfway through the book of Acts….Christianity is still a largely ethnic religious movement—and happily so. Jesus’ death and resurrection were in the process of revamping culture among Israel’s descendants, but like many good things, people within its original community probably didn’t expect it to have much application outside their standard social boundaries—boundaries honed and reinforced across centuries to help an exiled or oppressed population survive with a common identity.

In the modern world, what most of us think about when we hear the word prophecy involves prediction—something like prognostication or the mutterings of an oracle. It’s the sort of fantasy movie thing where a “chosen one” follows a fated and forewarned pathway either to their own destruction or to the liberation of the world. But the Bible doesn’t often use prophecy in that way. “Prophecy” in the way the Bible presents it is frequently little more than preaching or proclamation. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the future—far more frequently it’s focused on the present.

Prior to this point in John, we’ve seen Jesus as an authority in the heavens: the Word that was with God, and the Word that was God. The evangelist records Jesus talking at length about how he’s come down from heaven and is the bread from heaven. His miraculous signs such as changing water into wine, feeding the 5,000, and healing the congenitally blind man demonstrated his power in the terrestrial realm. We’ve also seen one incident—walking on water—where he has authority over the sea. But walking on the water doesn’t show us any sort of power within the water.

Where is God? That question—along with its siblings: “What is the meaning of life?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?”—is one of the constant themes of human existence. “Where is God?” is why we’re all here today—why any religion exists in the first place. Independent as we imagine ourselves to be, in all the uncertainties of life the human heart wants to know how to find God, however we might define that.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Having spent my whole life in the Church, it just feels overused to me. Here we have yet another illustration of how God loves us no matter what we might do. While that’s true, the sentiment isn’t remotely surprising and, after who knows how many times hearing it, not necessarily even all that inspiring.