Lord God, today is the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, of self-examination, of silence and waiting for the leading of your Holy Spirit. Through your Spirit you lead us into the temptations of Jesus, forty days in the wilderness, where our lives are laid bare, and we come face to face with our desires for power—power over our lives and the lives of our friends and enemies and maybe even power over you.

Open us to your grace and mercy, your love and provision, as we confront the devil’s temptations, the demons that try to run our world and our lives. Give us the power of your Son that we may also throw off the insidious powers of sin—the forces of selfishness and pride, the forces that keep us from confronting the truth about our lives and the world.

During this season of Lent, shatter our illusions, save us from ourselves, and open us to the new life of your Holy Spirit—a life of faith, hope, and love. As we let your Spirit lead us into repentance, may we discover the goodness and fullness of life in your kingdom of peace. In the words of Psalmist, may we find in your presence a refuge, a dwelling place, a place of rest (Ps. 91).

May we also resist the temptation to find our rest in places that muffle the cries of injustice—the desperation of the needy, the anger of the wronged, and the despair of the hopeless. May those voices echo in our Lenten silence, for the call of your Spirit also speaks through those voices. As the apostle Paul says, your word is near us, on our lips and in our hearts (Romans 8). May we use this season of Lent to empty ourselves of all that makes us deaf to that word, the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is already on our lips and in our hearts.

(below’s a recent sermon I preached.  for those interested the podcast & video are on my church’s website)

When my wife and I got married eight years ago we of course thought about using this passage as our text for the service.  And why not?  It’s all about love (though it doesn’t mention marriage, and actually Paul doesn’t seem so interested in marriage a few chapters back…), but marriage is about love so it should be perfect.  But as popular as this passage is for Hallmark cards and wedding ceremonies, it has much more to do with what we’re doing here as church, what we do when we take communion, or the meals we eat together during the week as c-groups.  That’s because this chapter actually comes up just as Paul is trying to figure out what on earth could possibly bring this dysfunctional family, also known as the church in Corinth, back together.

Paul was writing to a church that was a mess.  If you look back at the previous chapters you find a string of problems in the Corinthian church.  There’s incest, there’s people suing each other, there’s some folks who have become Paul-followers and others who are tried and true Cephas-followers.  Folks are trying to one-up each other and see who is the better Christian based on the quantity and quality of their spiritual gifts.  Even something as good as having a meal together during communion has become a place where the well-to-do form cliques and exclusive eating clubs and the poor go home hungry.  Dr. Phil could have set up shop here for quite some time.

So, it’s no surprise that by the time Paul gets to chapter 12 he wants to talk about the problem of unity.  Paul’s already emphasized the fact that they are a family by repeatedly addressing them as brothers and sisters.   Now Paul hits on a new metaphor for the church by reminding them that they are Jesus’ body.  And what they are doing with their lack of regard for one another is pulling apart that body.  They are disfiguring and dismembering Jesus’ body.

Paul reminds them that they are not just a big, gelatinous eyeball, or a foot with a tiny head sprouting out.  No, they are a whole body, Christ’s body.  And as such they should not only should honor and care for one another, they need one another.  In fact, the weak, the unlearned, the slow of speech are as needed and as valuable to this body as the apostles, preachers, and worship leaders.  This is the context out of which the “love chapter” arises.

I can imagine the hearers of this letter thinking, “great, Paul, we may be family, but how are we going to survive intact?  What’s going to actually compel us stay together?”  1 Corinthians 13 is Paul’s answer to those questions.  It is both about the nitty gritty of how we do life together as a Christian community as well as what inspires us to keep at it.

Before diving into chapter 13, let me pause for a moment to point out something from this quick overview of the Corinthian church that we can easily miss because it’s so obvious: community is difficult.  The very fact that Paul had to write this great chapter on love is evidence of the fact that community is messy.  If it was hard for a church started by none other than Paul just a few decades after Jesus had walked the earth, you can bet it will be hard for us as well.

Now, granted, if when we think of church, we primarily think it’s about going to church, about being an attender at a performance then it won’t be so hard.   But that’s not being church, it’s not being a family, and it’s not being the body of Christ.  It’s more like being a bucket of marbles.  A bucket of marbles has lots of self-sufficient, haphazardly piled, balls of glass, but the only thing that keeps them together are the bucket’s walls.  If we’re going to be church, and not just an entertaining production, if we’re going to be a body and not just a bucket of marbles, then it will mean investing ourselves in becoming rooted and connected with one another—and we can be sure it will be difficult at times.  The more you put into community, the more you get out of it, and the more you’re going to get your toes stepped on.

I remember when I was fresh out of college, I wanted the church and the people in it, to be everything, and to be it now!  I wanted our church to bring down the walls of racism, share our food with the poor, minister to the sick and dying, incarnate the good news of Jesus, and for everyone get on famously as BFFs while doing it.  I had grand visions about the idea of church, but little experience with being church with real flesh-and-blood people.  C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, where a senior devil writes to his underling, Wormwood, on how to derail Christians sums it up quite well:

You probably know that pastor Eugene recently tore his achillees.  I’ve been intrigued by the fact that a torn tendon like his can heal itself.  Somehow the cells at both ends know that they aren’t meant to be separated and so they go into overdrive producing collagen so that eventually the two parts of the muscle are fused back together.  However, the process takes time, at least 6 to 8 weeks for an achilles rupture.  Becoming the body of Christ takes time as well; it takes patience.  We could go all over the map with everything in chapter 13, but I want to camp a little while on just the first part of verse 4.  Love is patient.  Patience doesn’t sound like a very exciting aspect of love.  Love is all fire and emotion, and patience seems tame, so laid-back, so unexciting.  I think of patience and I think of letting others go first in line.  Or raising my hand to speak as a first grader.

Yet Paul lists patience first in his description of love.  Further, patience is echoed in many of his other descriptions of love: “Love is not easily angered,” “Love always perseveres,” “Love is not self-seeking.”  All are different angles on the practice of patience.  Why would Paul spend so much time on an such a mundane aspect of love as patience?

This summer I learned a little something about patience from a mountain.  I had a chance to climb Mt. Rainier with some friends from Quest.  I didn’t really have a clue what climbing the mountain would involve, but I had made it a New Year’s resolution and was determined to give it a go.  At the parking lot I somehow got saddled with the 25 pound rope, but it wasn’t until we got half way up that I learned why we were carrying it all the way up there.  To ensure that one of us didn’t end up falling into a crevasse we all attached ourselves to the rope.  Now if someone started falling all we needed to do was throw ourselves to the ground and dig our ice axe into the snow and we’d all be fine.  Or so the guide assured us.  We never ended up falling, but I did quickly learn what it meant to be bound together.  It meant that we all got to the top or none of us got to the top.  It meant that even when I was starting to freak out because it was getting late in the day which makes the climb more dangerous, we went only as fast as the slowest person in the group.  In short, I learned that day that patience can be aggravating. It can also be risk to throw your lot in with other people.  But also that patience is absolutely essential when you’re bound up with others.

So why is patience so inextricably linked to love?  Because Christian community can’t happen without it.  For one, it takes patience to get to know those who aren’t like us.  It takes time for the hand to notice and appreciate the foot, for the heart to realize it needs the stomach.  How is this fleshed out?  Well, it’s part of the reason simply eating together is an important aspect of our c-groups and church life.  Meals help us linger and they help us make space where we can start to hear each others stories.

Perhaps, though, patience is made most concrete in the way we talk to each other.  Our culture and our self-centeredness have made it easy to speak at or over those who disagree with us.  Even when we aren’t speaking, patient listening is no easier with the constant distractions of cell phones and our propensity to spend the time when someone is speaking thinking about what we want to say in reply.

I’ve found c-group to be no exception to this.  If I don’t take time to slow down, to ask God to help me to be present to the others, I won’t hear them or God.  Patience is love’s bulldozer.  Patience makes space for friendships to build, for sinews to grow.  By training us to stop, listen, and then ask if we heard correctly we learn to love with our ears.  By pushing us into time-consuming dialogue rather than angry diatribe we learn to love with our mouths.  And by asking us to take time to invest in real people and a real church rather than only facebook friends or church shopping we learn to love with our bodies.

As we continue through the passage there’s much we could observe, such as how quickly pride and a lack of love can turn even good things like giving away our money into something worthless.  Or we could talk about the importance of trust and hope as the soil in which love grows best.  But I actually want to skip down to the last section of the passage because it hints at an explanation of why community, love, and God are so intertwined.

In verse 8 Paul shifts gears from practical details about how to love one another to trying to express something that he can’t quite capture with words.  Paul ventures to the edge of the cliff and looks towards the future, towards the consummation of history, the coming Kingdom of God, to try and capture just what it is that makes what we experience now so pale in comparison to what we hope for.

Why is it that love is so compelling, so attractive, worth so many of our songs, but at the same time so fragile, as likely to be a source of pain as joy?  Even in a community of brothers and sisters in the body of Jesus, we know that disunity is easier than unity, that impatience and pride can easily triumph over the way of love.  Paul’s answer: we are incomplete, and in some mysterious sense the whole cosmos is incomplete and yearning for completeness to come.  Paul strings together a series of different images as he reaches to the limits of knowledge to express just what is that we hope and yearn for.  It will be like when you grow up, says Paul, and the world takes on new depth and meaning.  Or, it will be like turning the focus on your camera and the world goes from blobs of color to vivid detail.  The coming of the Kingdom of God will mean the coming of completeness, of wholeness.  What we yearn for and where God is bringing us is to know in full, and to be fully known.

It’s that final metaphor, of knowing and being known, that weaves together love, community, and the Triune God.  When I started preparing this sermon, my first inclination was to come up with some bulletproof Biblical justification for being a part of church and community groups.  And then I realized that not only am I likely to come up with something that’s forced, it also wouldn’t be that compelling or interesting.  Because being a part of Jesus’ body, and by extension being part of that body in small groups, isn’t something you or I have to do, it’s something we get to do.  It’s something to which we are invited and for which we yearn for because it is the place where we get to know and be known by the family of God.

To know and be known is at the heart of where community and love meet.  We have been made with an innate desire to know and connect with others, and with God.  One way of defining love is that to love is to venture out towards someone we don’t know and say “I want to hear your story.  I want to know what makes you tick.  I want to know your joys and sorrows simply because you are made in God’s image and to know you is to know something about God.”  Another way of describing love is that it is to allow ourselves to be known, to trust that as we confess our sins to one another, share our sorrows, delight in our joys, and take off the masks we will find God’s grace sufficient to heal and sustain us when our toes get stepped on.

Not surprisingly, the idea of knowing and being known are ways in which we can understand the salvation of God.  God wants to be known by us.  God wants us to know more than just ideas or words about him.  So much so that God became flesh and blood and then sent the Spirit to set up camp in our midst permanently.  Still more, the God who knows all still wants to take the time to know us, to hear our prayers, and even to wrestle with us, like he did with Jacob, in our doubts.  We can be known by a God who comes to us.  That ought to stop us in our tracks.  God initiates.  The God who holds our cosmos together reaches out.  God looks at humanity, at Seattle, at Quest, at you and I with the patience and kindness described in this passage and then asks us to be known by his gaze.

God is the one who has given us this desire to know and be known.  God has begun the work of knowing us.  But remember that God loves bodies, not just ideas or ephemeral spirits.  He loves this body of Christ and so gives us the opportunity to start upon the journey of being that body that’s learning to travel love’s road.  When we answer the invitation to be a part of the body we can be sure it will be hard at times, but we can also be sure that it is the best place to begin learning love’s patient ways of reaching out to know and being known in turn.

To bring in ol’ C.S. Lewis again, my favorite line at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia series is where evil has been defeated, the animals and people healed, and they start running after Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in the stories.  But they realize that being saved from evil is only the beginning of what Aslan has in store for them, because Aslan keeps calling for them to run “further up and further in!”  There is no “having arrived” at community, it is always the patient practice of learning to better love and be loved by our brothers and sisters.  Similarly, there is no end to an infinite God, no place where we have finally arrived at knowing the love of God completely or being reflections of that love—we are always called further up and further in.

On how Eckblad envisions himself as a midwife in Bible studies:

In my preaching and teaching I envision my role as that of a facilitator and midwife….  As midwife I assist during the birthing process recognizing that the work is done by the Spirit in intimate communion with people in the depths of their beings. I seek to be present as appropriately as possible—getting out of the way or intervening when necessary. I set up the birthing room as it were, making sure that the interpreting process gets off to the best start with a given group and text…

My objective is that people would find themselves inside the text as met or addressed by YHWH, Jesus, one of the apostles—or whoever mediates the message or saving action in the Biblical story. I see myself as one who pulls people together for a potential encounter: a life-giving meeting between individuals and God that may result in comfort, healing, a change of heart, call. I am an unknowing midwife at best—not knowing what the encounter will birth…

His critique of the pedagogical method of many churches and Bible studies:

Paulo Freire critiques what he calls the “banking method” of communication—which corresponds in many ways with the religious system embodied by the Pharisees in John’s Gospel. According to the banking method, knowledge or information is disseminated to passive recipients in ways that reinforce comfortable and oppressive patters of dependency.

Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.

They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.

For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, people cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry people pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other

In contrast to the banking method, a truly liberating pedagogy happens best using a dialogical approach. The pedagogue must deliberately subvert the system of dependency. This is done by creating an environment of trust whereby the voices of the “voiceless” are sought after and elevated—a first step in education for a critical consciousness and empowerment…

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the later strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Though sinners do evil a hundred times and prolong their lives, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they stand in fear before him, but it will not be well with the wicked, neither will they prolong their days like a shadow, because they do not stand in fear before God. (Ecc. 8:12-13)

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone.  (Ecc. 12:13)

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction. (Prov. 1:7)

‘I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! (Luke 12:4-5)

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18)

Does that mean we need to get back to to hellfire and brimstone, a God under whose inscrutable power and anger we can only cower?  That may be a place to start, but hellfire and brimstone is a bad place to end because it’s not fearful enough. Josef Pieper in chapter V of his book (most of which is online; go Google Books!), Faith, Hope, Love, is helpful here in giving a little more depth and theological history to the concept of the fear of the Lord.  Pieper points out that fear is simply a part of human existence, because at the root of our fears is anxiety in the face of nothingness.  Simply by nature of having being we fear our being can be diminished or ultimately come to nothing (something Ecclesiastes talks about quite a bit).  If fear is a given, then sinful fear is when we what we fear is out of line with reality (just as sin is also disordered love).  That appears to be at least part of what Jesus is getting at in the Luke 12 verse: to fear a human more than God is to ascribe more power to the creature than the Creator.

Pieper then goes on to distinguish between “servile” and “filial” fear of the Lord.  Servile fear has at its root a fear of punishment for sin, similar to what “fire and brimstone” is meant to evoke, I suppose.  Pieper points out that this sort of fear can be of the Holy Spirit, and I can imagine if tyrants and child abusers had some of this fear the world might be a saner place.  However, the fallout of fundamentalist and other traditions that capitalize on this sort of fear with reckless abandon have also shown that it can lead many to hate or cower before God as much as it might move some people to love God.  Furthermore, Pieper points out that servile fear should decrease as one grows in the knowledge of the love for God and as one is bound closer to the ultimate Ground of Being.

“Filial” fear, however, doesn’t decrease, but rather increases as one loves God more, because it fears sin itself, rather than the consequences of sin.  Filial fear sees sin as more “evil” than the punishment that comes from sin, because sin is seen to be a turn to nothingness.  This sort of fear increases as one knows oneself and loves God for God’s sake, because a turn towards nothingness, defecting from God is both always possible and more and more undesirable.

There are also some more positive virtues that fear of the Lord may be associated with.  Pieper thinks that filial fear also guarantees that the virtue of hope does not become a false platitude, “a presumptuous anticipation of fulfillment,” by keeping before us the fact that fulfillment has “not yet” happened.  I’m less convinced of this, simply because it is the faithfulness of God that guarantees hope, not our anticipation of fulfillment.

I am more convinced in its ability to push us towards truth, however.  Alison, in writing his essay on homosexuality that I discussed in the last post, invokes this sort of fear as the impetus for seeking truth in community.  If we are motivated by a fear of God—a fear of sin because it turns away from being—it moves us to seek out voices that challenge us “lest our own irresponsibility, our own hardness of heart and defect of vision perhaps be carrying us down a route that is too easy….”  Especially when moving into new territory, such as the direction Alison wants to go in regards to homosexuality, it is important in order that “where what I say is crazy, this be rectifiable before it is too late.”

A final virtue a fear of God may incubate is Christian courage.  Here I would simply point you to the excellent documentary on Sophie Scholl, a Lutheran woman who, at 20 years old, refused to fear Hitler more than God and was killed for that refusal.  This prayer of hers (from here) captures much of what I’ve been discussing: the nothingness of sin, the reality of walking always with that nothingness at our side, and the hope, however intangible it may sometimes feel, found in the God of Jesus.

I’m still so remote from God that I don’t even sense his presence when I pray. Sometimes when I utter God’s name, in fact, I feel like sinking into a void. It isn’t a frightening or dizzying sensation, it’s nothing at all—and that’s far more terrible. But prayer is the only remedy for it, and however many devils scurry around inside me, I shall cling to the rope God has thrown me in Jesus Christ, even if my numb hands can no longer feel it.

“The Lord reigns,” says Psalm 99. “Let the nations tremble; God sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake.”

Let the nations tremble… God, why should the nations tremble? They tremble, the Psalmist says, because you love justice. In a world of injustice, in a world where peace and forgiveness are scarce, we pray for your merciful justice to reign. Across the earth there are places that desperately need your justice. I’ll lift up a few of them that are in the newspapers today: May your peace settle on the land of Afghanistan; may your peace settle on the land of Iraq; may your peace settle on the people of Palestine; and may your peace come to this country where we live.

Your peace is not of this world; your peace makes the nations tremble because they are permeated by violence—even their justice depends on violence. So God, we pray for your Spirit to come with power: to bring good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed, the year of the Lord’s favor. Come Lord Jesus, shake the foundations of worldly powers with your justice, establish your kingdom of sacrificial love on earth as it is in heaven.

God, may our lives also tremble with your righteousness. Transform us into servants of your justice. May your mercy flow through our lives. In a world of greed, may we display your generosity, your gracious giving. In a world of deception, may we be truthful people—even when it’s inconvenient. In a world of quick fixes and cheap hope, may we be people of patience. In a world where everyone is quick to point fingers, may we be people who confess our sins and ask for forgiveness.

This world of self-destruction is the same world that resounds with your grace. Give us eyes to see the mysterious movements of your grace. And give us the strength we need to join in your work of redemption. This evening, give us new life. Save us from our sins. Set us free from our selfishness. May your Holy Spirit lead us in the way of Jesus, so that we may be good news for our friends and neighbors and the strangers we meet along the way. For we are servants of your kingdom, ministers of your grace.

Here we are God: the same building, the same time of the week, with the same people. We are here because we can’t remember your promises on our own—that you promise new life, redeemed life, holy life, abundant life. God of life, breathe through us the life of your Holy Spirit—your comforting and forgiving Spirit. Surround us in your loving embrace, flowing through our sisters and brothers sitting next to us, in front of us, behind us, across the room from us. These are the people who show us that you, O God, will never leave us nor forget us.

As our passage this evening from Isaiah says, you are a mother who can’t forget her nursing child. And like hungry children, we will continue to cry out, because we hunger and thirst for your righteousness, for your justice, for your peace and mercy. God, may your reconciling grace flow throughout the earth.

This weekend we pray for your grace to move in people and places we aren’t used to praying for since we are a peace church. We aren’t used to praying for soldiers; we’re not used to remembering them. But, as it says in Isaiah, you are a God who remembers—and that means we should too, even if it’s confusing and strange.

God, tomorrow is Memorial Day. And when our country remembers the women and men who serve in the armed forces, we also remember them. We pray for all those people who have been taught to do things that no human being was ever meant to do: to kill. God heal them. They have wounds too—deep wounds, down to the soul. Wounds that make it difficult to return from war and love their spouses, and children, and friends; wounds that make it difficult to be loved, to receive love. When they kill, they also kill parts of themselves. Presidents and generals and recruiting officers don’t tell them that. In your great mercy, make a way for life to have the last word, not death; a way for grace and peace, for justice and forgiveness.

We pray that your Spirit would fall upon all flesh; and when your Holy Spirit falls, we ask that we will be moved toward repentance and forgiveness, toward the joy found in reconciled peoples, toward peace and mercy, toward your kingdom.

And that’s why we pray the prayer your Son taught us to pray, “Our Father…

You are holy, Lord, the only God,
and your deeds are wonderful.

You are strong.
You are great.
You are the Most High,
You are almighty.
You, holy Father, are
King of heaven and earth.

You are Three and One,
Lord God, all good.
You are Good, all Good, supreme Good,
Lord God, living and true.

You are love,
Youare wisdom.
You are humility,
You are endurance.
You are rest,
You are peace.
You are joy and gladness.
You are justice and moderation.
You are all our riches,
And you suffice for us.

You are beauty.
You are gentleness.
You are our protector,
You are our guardian and defender.
You are courage.
You are our haven and our hope.

You are our faith,
Our great consolation.
You are our eternal life,
Great and wonderful Lord,
God almighty,
Merciful Saviour.

Below is a prayer that I prepared and prayed for our Ash Wednesday service this past week. I was struck by the passage from Isaiah 58 and tried to pray that. So, read Isaiah 58:1-17 first before reading the prayer.
———————————————————————————————-

Praying Isaiah 58:

Holy God, God of righteousness and justice, we pray for your mercy.

The words of your prophet Isaiah strike like a double edged sword—a piercing light into our darkened lives. Our rebellion is exposed. Day after day, week after week, Sunday after Sunday, we claim to seek after God. Yet we continue to serve our own interests, and in so doing, blindly oppress our neighbors, both near and distant.

We confess that we use our acts of piety to make ourselves feel good about ourselves, to assure ourselves that we are Christians, to confidently claim that we are different from the rest of the world. But, as Isaiah says, we use our piety—our Lenten fasts and even this time of praying—to turn our heads upwards to the heights of heaven, while we crush the people around us under our feet. We walk blindly, unaware of our destruction.

As you say in Isaiah, the piety you desire, O God, happens as we contemplate the sinister ways the lives we enjoy may be wrapped up in hidden oppressions, secret violences. Thus you call us “to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke… to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our houses; and when we see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide ourselves from the needy.”

We pray that in your mercy, O Lord, you will go before us, preparing our eyes and ears to contemplate our lives during this season of Lent, so that we may discover the victims hidden from us, and repent of our sins. Then, O Lord, as your prophet declares, we may begin to see how your light shall break forth from our midst like the dawn,” and your healing hands will work through ours. We will be given the profound gift of serving in your Kingdom, participating in your work of redemption, joining our lives to yours and tasting the fruit of eternal life.

Hold us in your grace, O God, that we may practice this kind of piety, this kind of Lenten fasting that bears witness to the justice of your holy embrace with which you hold the whole world. Amen.

Father,
who hast made all men in thy likeness
and lovest all whom thou hast made
suffer not our family to separate itself from thee
by holding barriers of race and colour.
As thy Son our Saviour was born of a Hebrew mother, but
rejoiced in the faith of a Syrian woman and of a Roman
soldier, welcomed the Greeks who sought him,
and suffered a man from Affica to carry his cross,
so teach us to regard the members of all races as
fellow-heirs of the kingdom of Jesus Chris our Lord.
—Toc H

As the apostle Paul says in Philippians, “The Lord is near” (4:5). We are witnesses of the dawning of that great light come into the world—Immanuel, God with us. May we depart from this gathering with our faces set on the Sun, so that our lives may serve as a reflection of God’s light in the midst of our darkness, that our very lives may announce the advent of the Messiah. Amen.